Authors: David Halberstam
The era of the Cooper brothers, Whitey Kurowski, Terry Moore, and Howie Pollet was over. Soon only Musial and Red Schoendienst remained from the glory years. After the 1949 season Breadon sold the team to new owners, headed by a man named Fred Saigh. Saigh’s role as a principal Cardinal owner was a cameo, as he was soon sentenced to a federal penitentiary for income-tax evasion. He was ordered to wind up his affairs before May 1953, which meant, among other things, getting rid of the Cardinals. Saigh wanted to sell the team locally, but, surprisingly, not a lot of buyers were interested. Saigh’s main act of civic duty came when he sold it to The Brewery for $3.75 million, or an estimated half a million dollars less than he could have gotten from buyers in Milwaukee. That did not mean that Saigh came out of the deal badly, for as part of the transaction, according to Bob Broeg, he got an estimated $600,000 worth of Anheuser-Busch stock, which some forty years later, Broeg estimated, was worth about $60 million. But Gussie Busch, it turned out, had bought a name, a logo, and little else. The Cardinals did not even have their own ball park, playing in rickety old Sportsman’s Park, which belonged to the lowly Browns.
The first lesson Gussie Busch learned was a painful one: he could not buy success overnight in baseball. What worked in the world of beer—hiring, if need be, the best men available—did not work in baseball. Great players were not for sale, no matter what the price. In his first season Busch asked Eddie Stanky, his manager, what it would take to create a championship team. Stanky answered that if he got a first baseman and a third baseman he would have a contending team. “Which would you rather have,” Busch asked, “a first baseman or a third baseman?” Stanky thought about it for a bit. “A first baseman,” he answered. Did Stanky have anyone in mind? Busch asked. “Sure,” he answered, “and I think he’ll play for me, Gil Hodges.” Hodges, he explained, had just come off a bad World Series in Brooklyn and might want a change of venue. “No problem,” said Busch. “Let’s go and get Hodges.” So, quite excited, Gussie Busch went the next day to visit with Walter O’Malley, in order to buy Gil Hodges. He came back in shock. What happened, Gussie? aides asked him. “O’Malley wanted six hundred thousand dollars for Hodges, and then he said even if I had the money he wouldn’t sell him anyway because he was one of the most popular players on the Dodgers and he’d be run out of Brooklyn if he sold him. What kind of business is this anyway,” he asked rather plaintively, “where they want six hundred thousand dollars for one player and even if you have the money they won’t sell him?” A few years later he made another try at buying a player, this time Ernie Banks, the talented shortstop of the Cubs. Busch authorized Frank Lane, then his general manager, to go as high as $500,000 for him. But Lane returned empty-handed. “How high did you go?” Busch asked. “Five hundred thousand,” answered Lane. “And you couldn’t buy him?” asked an incredulous Busch. “Mr. Busch, I was politely reminded that Mr. Wrigley needs half a million just about as much as you do,” Lane said. That was one trouble with being a sportsman: there were all those other sportsmen to deal with, and they were every bit as rich. Clearly, building a team was going to take time and cost a great deal of money. Neither spending nor waiting came easily for Busch, and one of his favorite retorts to the St. Louis writers when they told him what he ought to do, which trades he might make, or which deals he could pull off to strengthen the farm system was to say, “Pal, you’re really good at spending other people’s money.”
A decade after Busch purchased the team, Bing Devine still had his job as general manager cut out for him: to rebuild the farm system on a smaller scale in a new and more expensive era while trying to jump-start the existing club. Busch was still looking for his first pennant. He had bought the franchise in part because he was a good citizen of St. Louis, and there was talk until the last minute when he entered the bidding that the team might leave St. Louis and relocate in Milwaukee, a rival midwestern city and, worse, a rival center of beer brewing. If Gussie Busch did not entirely understand baseball, he did understand that baseball could help sell beer. He presided over Budweiser at the precise moment of dramatic change in the industry brought about by modern communications, most notably televised advertising. Local breweries were on the way out, not because their beer was not as good as that of the giants but because they could not compete with them in terms of advertising dollars spent on national television. As with many aspects of American life during that postwar era, the big companies became bigger and richer, with new, handsome regional satellite plants, and the smaller ones withered away. Beer, more than most products, lent itself to national advertising, and it was part of Busch’s genius that as his company expanded relentlessly in the fifties, he knew enough to increase the percentage of the corporate budget reserved for advertising—this was the means with which he could crush the competition. Busch realized that baseball was an effective and relatively inexpensive advertising vehicle for beer, and it was not entirely by accident that Bud’s resurgence as the nation’s best-selling beer coincided with The Brewery’s purchase of the Cardinals in 1953. (From 1949 to 1955, Schlitz was the best-selling beer in the nation, but in 1955 Budweiser soared past Schlitz.)
Indeed, when Busch bought the Cardinals, he also bought Sportsman’s Park, dilapidated though it was, and refurbished it. Ever the beer salesman, he tried to call his new ball park Budweiser Park, but was talked out of it by aides who said that you could not name a park after a beer. Phil Wrigley, they pointed out, had not named his stadium Spearmint Park after his chewing gum. Forced to choose between ego and advertising, Busch conceded: in Chicago it was Wrigley Field, and in St. Louis it would be Busch Stadium, not
Budweiser
Park.
Baseball turned out to have an added, unexpected advantage for Gussie Busch: owning a baseball team made him a celebrity. Before, as a beer magnate, his face might have been known to a fair number of people in St. Louis and to avid readers of
Fortune
magazine. When he called a press conference to announce the opening of a new regional multimillion-dollar brewery, though, there was little media interest. But now, as the owner of a major sports franchise, everything that Busch said was news. People coveted his friendship, and he loved it.
He seemed to have little patience for watching his own team play, and his interest quickly waned during the games. In fact, his closest friends doubted that he had followed baseball at all before he bought the Cardinals. To manage his team he tended to hire small, feisty overachievers, men who were considered strict disciplinarians. Two of his first three managers, Eddie Stanky, whom he liked, and Solly Hemus were cut from that cloth. Their very manner seemed to promise the owner that they would keep his young athletes in line; after all, the players were being paid to
play a game,
and might therefore easily relax and exploit the essentially benign nature of the owner-sportsman.
Stanky, Hemus, and Fred Hutchinson, who served a tour as manager in the fifties, had either grown up in a tougher, harsher America or had apprenticed under men who had. They were not always supple in dealing with younger men who often had greater natural gifts than those once possessed by their managers. The Depression was a thing of the past, the country was dramatically more affluent man it had been, and such gifted athletes as Ray Sadecki, Tim McCarver, and Mel Stottlemyre often had other options in life, whether it was college or jobs in other fields. The nature of authority was slowly beginning to change. As for the black players, treating them with a harsh authoritarian hand had even more ominous implications and was likely to produce even less positive results, as Solly Hemus’s handling of Bob Gibson and other players would soon show. Young baseball players, white or black, could no longer be treated as if they were recruits at a marine drill camp.
In the past, a manager intimidated his players. Stanky was the prototype of that breed, a tough little man whose nickname was “The Brat.” As a player and a manager, he was always engaged in some kind of confrontation. Stanky knew a great deal about baseball and later turned out to be an exceptional scout and a valuable instructor within the Cardinal organization, but he was having trouble adjusting to a changing America. The time had come when he began to look at altogether too many young men and was unable to see a reflection of himself. During one game he told a young player named Tom Burgess who had hit .346 in the International League the year before, “Get out of here and go down to the bullpen. I’m sick of looking at you.” Stanley’s technique had worked with limited success when he first began to manage the club. But the more talented and sophisticated his ballplayers became the less effective the technique. Perhaps the moment that signaled the
end
of his effectiveness came one day at a team meeting when the manager was chewing out his players. There was nothing new in that, but while the tirade was going on, Stu Miller, one of the Cardinal pitchers, sat in the back reading
The Sporting News.
Stanky continued to lecture all the while, becoming angrier and angrier. Finally he yelled at his pitcher, “Miller, that’ll cost you a hundred dollars!” Miller never looked up. He simply turned to Butch Yatkeman, the clubhouse attendant, and said, “Butch, can you go down to my locker and get a hundred dollars out of my wallet and give it to him?”
Hemus, the third of Busch’s managers, saw himself as a Stanky disciple. Perhaps nothing reflected Hemus’s attitude better than his way of rewarding a player who had had an unusually good day. He would reach into his pocket and give the player one hundred dollars in cash and tell him to take another player to dinner. That was what Hemus had seen managers do when he was coming up; it was the way big-timers operated. Hemus had got the job in part, the Cardinal players believed, by writing Busch a fawning letter when he himself had been traded from the Cardinals in 1956; the letter, many of the players felt, went far beyond the call of duty, particularly as it was addressed to an owner whose team had just sent him to another team. The contrast between his reverence for his superiors and the roughness with which he treated the players who worked for him did not increase his popularity with the players. Like Stanky, he was a prisoner of his own baseball experience, and he seemed to lack the capacity to treat different players in different ways. His blunt manner and words especially bothered some of the black players, who considered him racist.
In 1956, after some twenty years in the Cardinal organization and six years as general manager of its Triple A team in Rochester, Bing Devine was brought back to St. Louis, having been told that he was now going to be named general manager of the big-league club. But a man named Taylor Spink, editor of
The Sporting News,
a baseball weekly published in St. Louis, suggested to the owner that he hire Frank Lane, a professional baseball man known for his propensity to trade players. Egocentric, profane, and voluble, Lane was far better known than Devine at the time, and Busch hired him. Unfortunately, Lane was a man who traded not so much to build a better team, but almost out of psychological need, an irresistible impulse driving him to move players around. There was no particular grand scheme to Lane’s trades, and it appeared likely that given the chance, he would continue to trade as an end in itself, thereby inevitably destabilizing his own team. The very act of trading seemed to feed his ego; a general manager who traded all the time became better known than all but the most famous of his players. Frank Lane’s incessant trading in the end made Frank Lane the center of media attention rather than his players. In that sense he was not unlike George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees who went about furiously hiring and firing managers some thirty years later—thereby guaranteeing himself endless coverage on the back pages of New York’s tabloid press.
Lane became known as “Trader Lane.” It was also true that the more important a ballplayer was to the team, the more seemingly inviolable his position within the Cardinals, the more irresistible was Frank Lane’s urge to trade him. Thus Red Schoendienst, the great Cardinal second baseman, and a cherished link to the glory years of the forties, was dispatched for Alvin Dark, and the only reason that Lane did not trade Stan Musial, who was to most Cardinals fans the living embodiment of the team, was because Musial’s restaurant partner learned of a proposed trade and managed to go public with it just in time, thereby stopping Lane. Had Musial not been a restaurateur as well as a great baseball player, he would have ended his career with the Philadelphia Phillies. From then on all major trades had to be cleared with Gussie Busch. In a way the attempt to trade Musial (for the great Robin Roberts) marked the high-water mark of the Lane era, and the beginning of his decline.
That became clear in the spring of 1957, when Gussie Busch went to a preseason sporting dinner in St. Louis under the impression that he did not have to make a speech. He was relaxed and in a good mood and he enjoyed several bottles of beer and several Scotches. Just as he was beginning to really enjoy the evening he was called to the rostrum to speak. He was not pleased by the request, and his mood quickly darkened. He got up and gave a brief speech saying that Frank Lane had better bring back a championship this coming year or he was going to be out on his ass. Lane happened to be in the audience, and instead of letting the remarks go—in the eyes of the St. Louis sporting establishment this was simply Gussie being Gussie—he got up and jokingly explained to the audience that they had just witnessed the perfect illustration of why baseball executives did not dare send their laundry out—because they were not sure they would be there when it came back. An expert on dealing with Busch when he was in his cups would have let the matter go right then and there. But Lane, perhaps knowing he was on his way out anyway, drove out of town on his way to Florida the next day and sent Busch a three-page telegram detailing a considerable list of demands—principal among them, his insistence on a three-year contract. Nothing that Lane had achieved so far in any way seemed to warrant such a demand, and Busch’s response was typical. He ordered a telegram sent to Lane saying,
KISS MY ASS.
It was not long after that that Bing Devine became the general manager of the Cardinals. Lane was soon gone to Cleveland, where, among other things, he was noted for trading away the young talented Roger Maris to Kansas City before Maris could reach his full potential.