The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (71 page)

As a lifetime Giants fan whose passionate boyhood attachment had been slowly cooled by the departure of my heroes from the Polo Grounds in 1958, by the decline and eventual retirement of Willie Mays, and by the pale neutrality of middle age, I tried to summon up a semblance of outraged xenophobia at the news of the possible Toyotafication of my old team and my old pastime, but it became clear to me in the same instant that I simply didn’t give a damn. Big-league baseball is a commercial enterprise, and the business of Japan, as Calvin Coolidge probably meant to tell us, is business. There was a time when the ownership of a ball team by a hometown brewer or chewing-gum family did not seem an especially important part of its public identity, but in the past twenty years eight of the original sixteen big-league clubs have been sold (and in some cases resold and re-resold) to new business interests, while eight new clubs have been born, four of which have later changed hands. As a result, the financial adventures of some teams are almost better publicized (and often a good deal more interesting) than their achievements in the pennant race. A typical modern ball team is operated coldly and from a distance, just like any other conglomerate subentity with interesting tax-depletion build-ins and excellent PR overtones. Their owners and operators are men whose money derives from, and whose deepest loyalties adhere to, insurance companies, broadcasting chains, oil wells, whiskey manufacture, real-estate sales, trucking and shipping lines, quick-lunch chains, and the like, and it doesn’t seem to make much difference if one of the teams should now land in the portfolio of some enterprising visitors whose hero is Sadaharu Oh instead of Babe Ruth, and whose cash comes from the marketing of
sake
or electronic calculators or sushiburgers.

For all that, there is one aspect of the sale of the Giants that seems worth attention, worth caring about, and that is the departure of Horace Stoneham from baseball. The Stoneham family has owned the Giants ever since Horace’s father, Charles A. Stoneham, purchased the club, in 1919, in partnership with a New York City magistrate named Francis X. McQuade and the team’s famous manager, John J. McGraw. Charles Stoneham, who held the majority interest in the team, died in 1936, and Horace Stoneham, then thirty-two years old, succeeded him, thus becoming the youngest club president in baseball history. The Stoneham family has
been
the Giants for more than half a century, for it has had no other business in that time. Along with Calvin Griffith, of the Minnesota Twins (formerly the Washington Senators), Stoneham is the last of the pure baseball men, the owners who owned nothing but their team and cared for nothing but the game. (Tom Yawkey, the longtime Red Sox owner, is of the same breed, but he is also the possessor of a sizable fortune.)

In recent years, it has been the custom for men at baseball gatherings to talk about Horace Stoneham with affectionate and patronizing sadness. “I
like
Horace,” the conversation always begins. “Hell, everybody likes him, but …” The sentence trails off, and the speaker shakes his head in the manner of a young lawyer who has undertaken to bring order out of his mother’s checkbook. Nothing has gone right for Stoneham in recent years, but there was a time when he had his share of success. His Giants have won five pennants, a world championship, and one divisional title. He has hired winning managers. In his father’s time, he recommended the selection of McGraw’s successor, Bill Terry, who captured a world championship in his first year at the helm, and in 1948 he snatched Leo Durocher from the despised Brooklyn Dodgers. Stoneham was capable of risky and decisive moves, such as the house-cleaning in 1949, when he traded away the stars of a popular but nonwinning Giants club—Johnny Mize, Walker Cooper, Sid Gordon, Willard Marshall, and Buddy Kerr—to make room for Eddie Stanky and Alvin Dark and the others who would, under Durocher, fashion the marvelous winning summers of 1951 and 1954. The Giants’ scouts and farms delivered up some true stars—Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and Orlando Cepeda—and estimable front-liners like Sal Maglie, Whitey Lockman, Bobby Thomson, Larry Jansen, the Alou brothers, Gaylord Perry, and Bobby Bonds. Until quite recently, in fact, the Stoneham record has been one of the better ones in baseball, a high-risk business in which true dynasties are extremely rare.

The Dodgers, to be sure, were far more successful than Stoneham’s club in the last decade of their co-tenancy of New York, and when the two clubs moved west, in 1958, the disparity widened. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won five pennants and three World Series since their relocation, and the extraordinary season-long outpouring of fans to Dodger Stadium, which regularly tops the home-attendance figures of all other clubs, has made the team the most profitable franchise in baseball. For the San Francisco Giants, it has been quite the other way. The team was idolized in its first few summers, drawing one million eight hundred thousand customers in its first season in Candlestick Park, and there was a famous pennant (and very nearly a world championship) in 1962. From the day Candlestick opened, however, it was plain that its site and its design were disastrous. Its summer-long icy winds and swirling bayside fogs, which often made the act of watching a ball game into something like an Eskimo manhood ritual, have become an old, bad local joke. These discouragements, coupled with five straight second-place finishes between 1965 and 1969, cut attendance in half by 1970, a particularly heavy falloff coming in 1968, when the A’s established residency across the Bay. Since then, the proximity of the two clubs has clearly strained the limited audience and the dim baseball fealty of the area, but the A’s, now three-time world champions, have had much the better of it. Last year, the A’s drew 845,693, while the Giants, who finished fifth in their division, drew 519,991—the worst in either league.
**

The most riveting difference between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants is not, however, in their comparative records or attendance figures but in their owners. Indeed, the temperament and reputation of the two men are at such utter removes that they almost seem to represent polarities of human behavior, and their presence in the same business and the same metropolis suggests nothing so much as fictional irony flung off by Ayn Rand. Charles O. Finley, the owner of the A’s, is a relative newcomer to baseball, who has in a short time achieved an extraordinary success, and perhaps even greater notoriety. He is a self-made man, a millionaire insurance salesman, who has built a formidable championship club by relying almost exclusively on his own intelligence, quickness, hunches, and energetic dealing. He is a great promoter, with a perfect inner instrument attuned to the heat of the crowd, the glare of the event, and he is an instinctive and embarrassing self-aggrandizer. He is an innovator who has disturbed the quiet, dim halls of baseball and altered the game irrevocably. As an executive, he takes a personal hand in all the daily details of his club, including the most minute decisions on the field, and he swiftly disposes of managers and subalterns who cannot abide his meddling. The A’s headquarters, in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, consists mainly of empty offices. Most of the time, Finley follows his team by telephone from an office in Chicago, either plugging into a local radio broadcast or being provided with a running play-by-play account of the action by someone on the scene. Baseball as occasion—the enjoyment and company of the game—apparently means nothing to him. Finley is generally reputed to be without friends, and his treatment of his players has been characterized by habitual suspicion, truculence, inconsistency, public abasement, impatience, flattery, parsimony, and ingratitude. He also wins.

Horace Stoneham is—well, most of all he is not Charlie Finley. He inherited his team and his position, and he does not want baseball quickly or wildly altered. Indeed, it may well be that he wishes the game to be more as it was when he first came to it as a youth. He is shy, self-effacing, and apparently incapable of public attitudinizing. He attends every home game but is seldom recognized, even by the hoariest Giants fans. His decisions are arrived at after due consideration, and the most common criticism leveled at him is that he often sticks with a losing manager or an elder player long after his usefulness to the club has been exhausted. He relies on old friends for baseball counsel and for company; most of his advisers and colleagues—men like Tom Sheehan; Garry Schumacher; Rosy Ryan; Carl Hubbell, director of player development; and Jack Schwarz, farm director—have been with the Giants for thirty or forty years. Perhaps because Stoneham grew up in a time when baseball was the only game in town and thus seemed to succeed on its own merits, he has a limited interest in vivid public relations, commercial tie-ins, and other hypes. His relations with the press have been cordial (in the words of Wells Twombly, of the San Francisco
Examiner,
he treats reporters like “beloved guests”), and his dealings with his players are marked by generosity and mutual admiration. In 1972, when his dwindling financial resources forced him at last to trade away Willie Mays, perhaps the greatest Giant of them all, he arranged a deal that permitted Mays to move along to the Mets with a salary and a subsequent retirement plan that would guarantee his comfort for the rest of his life. Horace Stoneham is convivial with his friends but instinctively private, and it is possible to guess that the only quality he may share with Charlie Finley is loneliness. He has been losing, and now he has lost, and he is thus fair game for the glum attention of writers and the secret scorn of men who understand nothing but success.

Early this summer, I began compiling information and talking to West Coast ballplayers and baseball writers with the idea of trying to interview Charlie Finley, perhaps while watching a game with him. For some reason (for
several
reasons), I kept holding off on the story, however, and then, when I read that the San Francisco Giants were up for sale, it suddenly came to me that the baseball magnate I really wanted to spend an afternoon with was Horace Stoneham. I got on the telephone to some friends of mine and his (I had never met him), and explained that I did not want to discuss attendance figures or sales prices with him but just wanted to talk baseball. Stoneham called me back in less than an hour. “Come on out,” he said in a cheerful, gravelly, Polo Grounds sort of voice. “Come out, and we’ll go to the game together.”

I dressed all wrong for it, of course. The game that Stoneham and I had fixed upon was a midweek afternoon meeting between the Giants and the San Diego Padres in late June—a brilliant, sunshiny day at Candlestick Park, it turned out, and almost the perfect temperature for a curling match. I had flown out from New York that morning, and I reported to Stoneham’s office a few minutes before game time. He shook my hand and examined my airy East Coast midsummer getup and said, “Oh, no, this won’t do.” He went to a closet and produced a voluminous, ancient camel’s-hair polo coat and helped me into it. He is a round, pink-faced man with close-cropped white hair, round horn-rimmed spectacles, and a hospitable Irish smile, and he looked much younger than I had expected. (He is seventy-two.) He was wearing tweeds, with an expensive-looking silk tie—a gambler’s tie—but he, too, put on a topcoat and buttoned it up before we went out into the sunshine. Stoneham’s box, on the press level, was capacious but utilitarian, with none of the Augustan appointments and Late Hefner upholsteries I have seen in some sports-owners’ piazzas. There was a perfect view of the ballplayers arrayed below us on the AstroTurf, a few hundred scattered fans—most of whom seemed to be kids in variously emblazoned windbreakers—and thousands of empty orange-colored seats. The game matched up two good young right-handed fast-ballers—the Giants’ John Montefusco and the Padres’ Joe McIntosh. I kept track of things for a few minutes, but then I quickly gave it up, because an afternoon of Horace Stoneham’s baseball cannot be fitted into a scorecard.

“I think the first Giants game I ever saw was the first half of a doubleheader on the Fourth of July in 1912,” he told me. “The Giants’ battery was Christy Mathewson and Chief Meyers. They opened with their stars in the first game, you see, because they charged separate admissions for the morning and afternoon games, and that way they got out the crowds early. I’ve forgotten who the other team was. I was nine years old. My father grew up in New Jersey, and his boyhood idol, his particular hero, was the great Giant left fielder Mike Tiernan, who came from Jersey City. Later, when my pop bought the club, he liked to say that he’d followed Tiernan over to the Giants.

“My father bought the team in 1919, and in 1921, as you may know, we played the first of three consecutive World Series against the Yankees, who shared the Polo Grounds with us in those days. That Series in ’21 had a funny kind of ending. We were ahead by one run—I think it was 1–0—in the ninth, and Aaron Ward got on base for the Yanks. Frank Baker—Home Run Baker—came up and knocked a ball to right that looked like a sure hit, but our second baseman, Rawlings, made a great play on it, running it down almost in right field, and threw to Kelly to get him. Ward must have thought the ball had gone through, because he passed second and just kept on running. George Kelly—oh, he had the best arm in baseball—saw him, and he fired the ball across to Frisch at third, and Frisch took the throw and tagged Ward just as he slid in. I can still see that, with Ward in the dirt and Frank Frisch making the tag and then landing on his fanny, with the ball still in his glove. It was a double play and it ended it all, but it happened so fast that everybody in the stands just sat there for a minute. They couldn’t believe the Series was over.”

Stoneham talked in an energetic, good-humored way. He reminded me of a good standup, middle-of-the-night bar conversationalist. “I was in the stands that day. I was still in school, at Loyola School. I was a mediocre second baseman on the team there. I went to a lot of Giants games, of course. Jimmy Walker was a state assemblyman then, and he used to come to the game every day. I got to know him very well—Hey, look at
this!”