Background
He was born on a farm outside Wawaka, Indiana, the son of Jacob Frick and Emma Prickett.
He was born on a farm outside Wawaka, Indiana, the son of Jacob Frick and Emma Prickett.
At the age of five his family moved to Brimfield, where Ford attended grade school.
Upon graduation from Consolidated High School in nearby Rome City in 1910, Ford worked on the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Gazette. He entered DePauw University in 1911, where he combined his interest in sports, as a member of both baseball and track teams, with journalism, as a correspondent for several Terre Haute, Chicago, and Indianapolis newspapers. Frick received his B. A. from DePauw in 1915 and briefly played semi-professional baseball as a first baseman for the Walsenburg, Colorado, team. Frick then taught English in the Walsenburg high school before becoming an assistant professor of English at Colorado College.
The next year he left teaching to expand his part-time reporting for the Colorado Springs Telegraph into a full-time position.
In 1918, Frick joined the War Department's rehabilitation division as supervisor of training in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
In early 1919 he joined the staff of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver as a sports reporter. Later that year he returned to Colorado Springs to open an advertising agency and write an editorial column for the Colorado Springs Telegraph.
Word of Frick's success as an editorial writer reached Arthur Brisbane, editor of the New York Evening Journal, and in 1922 Frick joined the sports staff of the New York American (both New York newspapers were part of the Hearst chain).
In August 1923 he moved to the Evening Journal, where for eleven years he wrote a sports-page column covering the New York Yankees in the Grantland Rice tradition, often writing news in verse form. He became a ghost writer for Babe Ruth and Yankee manager Miller Huggins.
In May 1930, Frick was asked to fill in for the news editor of the Evening Journal, who had to miss his regular radio news broadcast due to illness. Frick's broadcast was so impressive that he was quickly signed to do a twice-daily sports broadcast on radio station WOR while still writing his newspaper column. In February 1934, Frick was named the first director of the National League Service Bureau, the publicity outlet for baseball's National League.
On November 8, 1934, Frick was elected president of the National League, replacing John A. Heydler, who had resigned because of poor health. Among the immediate difficulties Frick faced was the poor financial state of three National League clubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Boston Braves, and the Philadelphia Phillies.
Frick was credited with putting all of the clubs back on firm financial footing by working out ways in which the clubs could pay their league obligations while avoiding bankruptcy. Frick also became a guiding force in the creation of the National Baseball Museum at Cooperstown, New York, which opened in July 1938, and he was instrumental in introducing night baseball into the major leagues.
Perhaps the most demanding and difficult moment of his presidency occurred with the racial integration of major league baseball in 1947.
The players did not strike. After serving for seventeen years as president of the National League, Frick was elected commissioner of baseball in September 1951. His election, however, did not come easily.
The baseball owners had just removed A. B. ("Happy") Chandler as commissioner, and they were deadlocked between Frick and Warren Giles, the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds. Finally, Giles withdrew from the race "in the best interests of baseball" and was named National League president when Frick became commissioner. As commissioner, Frick presided over baseball's greatest period of expansion, transition, and progress.
The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore, and the Philadelphia Athletics went to Kansas City. Perhaps the most memorable and controversial franchise shifts, however, were the movements of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively.
Frick also saw the creation of new clubs: the New York Mets, the Houston Colt . 45's, the Washington Senators, and the California Angels. Under Frick's stewardship, baseball became big business with lucrative new television contracts that provided for World Series, All-Star Game, and game of the week coverage.
New procedures under his tenure included the free-agent draft and the college scholarship plan for students who signed professional baseball contracts while still in school. While maintaining a quiet dignity as commissioner and as one known to eschew conflict and controversy wherever possible, Frick did have his moments in the spotlight of unwelcomed notoriety. Perhaps the most famous of these came during the controversy over the breaking of Babe Ruth's home run record by Roger Maris in 1961.
During the season, when Maris appeared to bear down on Ruth's record, many media sources reported an alleged Frick remark that if Maris broke Ruth's season record of sixty home runs, it would have to be marked with an asterisk in the record book. Maris, he reasoned, played a 162-game schedule while Ruth's record was accomplished in just 154 games.
There never was an asterisk placed in the record book when Maris, indeed, broke Ruth's home run mark, hitting sixty-one that season. Frick denied ever promoting the idea.
As Frick related it, his ruling on the matter was quite simple and straightforward.
If the record was broken in 154 games, the Maris mark would be recognized and the Ruth record dropped. If the Ruth mark still stood at the end of 154 games but was subsequently broken in the eight additional games of the season, then both records would be recognized as official and given equal billing in the record book. That is, in fact, the notation in the official record book.
Frick retired in November 1965 at the age of seventy-one after serving two seven-year terms as commissioner.
In 1970 he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He died in Bronxville, New York.
Quotations: The St. Louis Cardinals threatened to strike rather than face the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had Jackie Robinson, the first black major league ballplayer, on their team roster. Frick's response was forthright: "If you do this you are through and I don't care if it wrecks the league for ten years--you cannot do this because this is America!"
He had been a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.
On September 15, 1916, Frick married Eleanor Cowing. They had one child.