Rickey’s Law
Luck is the residue of design.
This was the title of a lecture delivered by Branch Ricky in about 1950 when he was president of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey himself did not leave a great deal to chance. Best remembered today for integrating professional baseball by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 to a Dodger contract, he had already revolutionised baseball once before: while running the St. Louis Cardinals, he had established starting in 1919 the farm system for developing players. The products of his system brought St. Louis six pennants and four world championships during his tenure and made that team the most profitable in baseball. (In the process he also popularised the phrase ‘Addition by subtraction’, referring to the way a team sometimes can be improved by trading away a player.) As for luck, other great minds have come to similar conclusions. For example:
Cervantes’s Saying. Diligence is the mother of good fortune (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Part IV 1615).
Dickinson’s Extrapolation. Luck is not chance / It’s toil / Fortune’s expensive smile is earned (Emily Dickinson poem no. 1350 ca. 1876).
Leacock’s Tenet. I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it (Stephen Leacock in Robert W. Kent, Money Talks 1985).
Carville’s Distillation of Leacock’s Tenet. The harder you work, the luckier you are (James Carville in the film documentary of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, The War Room 1993).
Stengel’s Summation. You make your own luck. Some people have bad luck all their lives (Casey Stengel in Geoffrey C. Ward Baseball 1994, based on the television series of the same name by Ward and Ken Burns).
Kowalski’s Dissent. You know what luck is? Luck is believing you’re lucky. Take at Salerno. I believed I was lucky. I figured that four out of five would not come through but I would . . . and I did. I put that down as a rule. To hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you are lucky. (Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 1947).
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