The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (72 page)

Von Joshua, the Giant center fielder—the 1975 Giant center fielder—had singled, and a run was coming across the plate. Within another minute or two, the Giants were ahead by 3–0, still in the first inning, and McIntosh had been knocked out of the game.

Stoneham resumed, but we were in 1939 now, at a famous Polo Grounds disaster that I had seen. “You were there?” Stoneham said. “Then, of course, you remember what happened. It was early in the summer, but that game cost us the pennant. We were playing the Cincinnati Reds head and head, and if we win we have a good shot at first place. Then somebody hit that ball for them—maybe it was Harry Craft—that hooked foul into the left-field upper deck, and the umpire called it fair and waved the runners around. Everybody could see it was foul, so there was a big squabble, and Billy Jurges, our shortstop, he spit right in George Magerkurth’s face, and Magerkurth swung on him. Well, they were both suspended, of course—the player and the umpire both together. We called up Frank Scalzi to take Jurges’s place, but a few days later Lou Chiozza and Joe Moore had a collision going after a fly ball and Chiozza got a broken leg, and we never did get going again.”

I asked Stoneham about his first job with the Giants, and he told me that he had gone to work in the ticket department when he was in his early twenties. “We had a lady, Miss Wilson, who ran it all then,” he said. “None of this computer business. Well, bit by bit I got into the running of the ball park, and then my father put me in charge of operations there. In those days, in the twenties, the Polo Grounds was open for events maybe two hundred days out of the year. The Coogan family owned the real estate, but the park belonged to the club. We had football—pro games and college games—we had the circus there, we had tennis and the midget automobiles. We had a skating rink in the outfield once, and even a week of outdoor opera. We had soccer—the Hakoah team came in after they won some international title, I think it was, and drew fifty-two thousand, so we knew it was a popular sport even then. We had visiting British soccer teams, and a team, I remember, that represented the Indiana Flooring Company. I think we had every sport at the Polo Grounds except polo. I did my best to arrange that, but we never could work it out.

“I came to know the ballplayers then, of course. I used to see them in the mornings. I got to be friends with some of them, like Ross Youngs, the great outfielder who died so young. Ross Youngs, from Shiner, Texas. When he first came along—before I knew him—he was signed by the Giants at a time when the team was on the road. Ross was in town and the Giants were away, and he went right over and got into a pickup baseball game over by the docks on Seventy-ninth Street, next to the railroad yards there. It’s where they have the marina now. He had that intense desire to play ball.

“I was about twenty years old when Mr. McGraw asked my father to let me go to spring training. We trained in Sarasota back then. I remember that Mr. McGraw called me up to his room there and showed me a letter he had just written to my father about a young prospect named Hack Wilson, who’d been on a Class B team in Portsmouth, Virginia. He wore a red undershirt under his uniform. Mr. McGraw had written, ‘If hustle counts, he’s sure to make it.’ Everybody called him ‘Mr. McGraw’—everybody but my father, of course. Mr. McGraw, he called my father ‘Charlie’ or ‘C.A.’—C.A. for Charles Abraham Stoneham, named after Abraham Lincoln.”

We were in the third inning, and the Padres had a base runner on second. The next Padre batter, shortstop Enzo Hernandez, is an indifferent hitter, but now he singled to left and drove in the first San Diego run. “Oh, you sucker,” Stoneham said, shaking his head sadly. “That’s the history of the game. The pitcher lets up on the out man, and he hurts you.”

The rally died, and Stoneham cheered up quickly. “We were talking about John McGraw,” he said. “Well, another time in spring training he wrote a letter back to my father that said, ‘There’s a young fellow down here named Ott who is the best hitter on the farm level I’ve ever seen.’ As you know, Mr. McGraw never did let Mel Ott go out to the minors. He brought him up to the Giants when he was just seventeen years old. He didn’t want anybody spoiling that funny batting style—some manager telling him, ‘You can’t hit that way. You’ve got to put that front foot down.’ When Ott started out, he was a switch-hitter. He never hit righty in a game, as far as I know. Ott didn’t get to play much the first couple of years, and McGraw would sometimes let him go over to New Jersey on the weekends and pick up some extra cash by playing with a semipro team. He played with the Paterson Silk Sox. Later on, Ottie and Carl Hubbell were roommates. Oh, my, there were so many games that Carl won by 2–0, 1–0—something like that—where Ott knocked in the winning run. You couldn’t count them all.”

In the fourth inning, Stoneham took a telephone call at his seat, and I overheard him say, “We’ve sent flowers, and I wrote Mrs. Gordon this morning.” I had read in the newspaper that morning that Sid Gordon, a Giant infielder-outfielder in the nineteen forties, had dropped dead while playing softball. Strangely enough, I had read a story about him and Horace Stoneham in a sports column only a few days earlier. Gordon had been a holdout in the spring of 1949, but he finally came to terms for twenty-five hundred dollars less than he had demanded. Horace Stoneham was always made uneasy by prolonged salary disputes with his players, and in December of 1949 he mailed Gordon a check for the twenty-five hundred dollars—a considerable gesture, since Gordon had been traded in the autumn and was by then a member of the Boston Braves.

Now Stoneham hung up the telephone, and I asked him about the business of trades. “Well,” he said, “you always hate to see your players leave. Maybe I’m too much of a sentimentalist. You can make mistakes trading, of course, but if you never make a mistake, you’re not really trying. We made that big trade with the Braves involving Sid Gordon and the others because Leo Durocher wanted his own kind of team. He always had great success with players that could maneuver the bat. With younger players he was—well, he could be a little impatient. Everything with Leo was …
spontaneous.

“One of the times that really hurt was when it came time to trade Freddie Fitzsimmons, who went over to the Dodgers in the middle thirties there, after more than ten years with us. He was really upset when he left us. He cried. What a competitor he was! He had no friends when he was out there on the mound. He’d show the batter his back when he pitched—he had that big rotation—and he was a remarkable fielder, with great agility for somebody with such a bulky build. Sometimes there’d be a hard grounder or a line drive hit through the box there, and he’d stick out his
foot
at it to stop it going through. Anything to win. I can still see him sticking out that foot and knocking the ball down or maybe deflecting it to some infielder.

“All those games in the Polo Grounds—well, most of the time I watched them from a window in the clubhouse, way out beyond center field. You remember what it was like there?” I did indeed. I always used to wonder about the distant figures that one could sometimes see peering out of the little screened windows set into that green, faraway wall. “There was just a table and chairs there—the same place where my pop used to sit and watch. I was out there when Bobby Thomson hit the home run in 1951 that beat the Dodgers in the last playoff game. We were down three runs in the ninth, and I was commiserating with Sal Maglie, who’d been taken out of the game, and trying to tell him what a great year it had been. We saw Lockman’s hit that brought in the first run, but the side of the bleachers blocked our view so we couldn’t see if Bobby’s hit was going to go in, but I knew it was up the wall, so I said to Sal, ‘Well, at least we’ve tied it up.’ Some tie! The same thing with Willie’s catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 Series. I watched him come all the way out after it, and then he went out of sight behind that big black screen we had there that formed a background for the hitters. But I heard the crowd, and I knew he’d made the catch. I knew it anyway, I think, because I’d seen him make all those other impossible catches. I liked that view of things in the Polo Grounds. The last day we played there, I couldn’t go to the game. I just didn’t want to see it come to an end.”

We were in the fourth inning and the Giants had a couple of runners on, and now the Giants’ second baseman, Derrel Thomas, delivered them both with a sharp single up the middle. A thin scattering of cheers reached us, and Stoneham beamed. I ventured to ask him if he had a favorite among all the Giant clubs he watched down the years.

“Ah, I’ve seen so many of them,” he said. “You’d have to break them down into periods. People are always asking me how the ballplayers compare now with the old-timers, and all you can say is they’re at least the equal. The equipment is much better now, of course, but the competition for athletes [he gave it the old New York sound: “athaletes”] is greater, with the other sports getting so big. The best of them can play all sports, you know. We’ve lost some of our top draft choices to football. When I was a young fellow, all the colleges had good baseball programs, but now a lot of them have given up the game.

“You know, we have a good team right here, but we’ve had injuries. Gary Matthews and Von Joshua got hurt on the same day. Matthews is going to miss about a month, they say, with the broken knuckle on his left hand. But I think we’re going to pick up and pull ourselves together. This is a young team, and I do like that. We have a lot of young arms.”

He looked up at the scoreboard. “Those Cubbies are beating the Phils again, I see,” he said. “They must have some kind of wind there—look at all those home runs. Yes, so many things can happen to a team in a year, you know. We had a lot of strange events in ’33, when we ended up winning the Series. Johnny Vergez had an appendectomy, and Charlie Dressen came up and filled in—he’d been managing in the Southern Association. He told Adolfo Luque how to pitch to the final Washington batter in the Series—it was somebody he’d seen down there. Lefty O’Doul came back with us that year, too, and he got a big pinch hit in the Series, off of Alvin Crowder. I remember that Luque was limping around at the party after we’d won the last game, and when we asked him about it, it turned out he’d split his big toenail throwing those curves during the game. He bore down that hard, he broke his toe.

“When Sal Maglie was first with us, he was just an average pitcher. [Stoneham had moved along about fifteen years.] But when he jumped down to the Mexican League, in 1946, the team he played for there was managed by Dolf Luque, and when we got him back he’d mastered all those great curveballs, and nobody could touch him.”

We were joined now by Garry Schumacher, the retired press director for the Giants, who was for many years a redoubtable Polo Grounds press-box sage.

“Garry, we’ve been talking about Luque and Sal and some of the other old-timers,” Stoneham said.

“Hey, do you remember how Maglie used to have fun with Roy Campanella?” Schumacher said. “Every now and then, in a game when it didn’t mean anything, he’d plunk Roy right in the belly with one of those curveballs. You know how Roy used to look when he stood up there and crowded the plate.”

Stoneham laughed. “Sure, I remember now,” he said. “Oh, Campy was a good man. He was a friend of ours.”

“Did you get to the time Marichal and Spahn hooked up against each other for sixteen innings?” Schumacher asked.

Stoneham nodded several times, thinking about it, and it suddenly came to me that he and Garry Schumacher and his other friends had probably talked together hundreds of times about each of these famous games and vanished companions. Old afternoons were fresh and past players stayed young, and it was the talking that kept them that way.

Now, however, the Padres had two base runners aboard, and Stoneham leaned forward in his seat. “They’ve been getting some strange-looking hits here,” he said. “It looks like they’re slapping at the ball.” He called to his pitcher. “Bear down, John!”

Montefusco struck out the next batter, and Stoneham said, “Boy, that fastball is the answer.”

“Did you tell about that doubleheader against the Cards in ’33?” Schumacher said. “The one where Hubbell won the first, 1–0, in eighteen, and Parmelee beat Dean, 1–0, in the nightcap, and we held on to first place?”

“That was a day,” Stoneham said. “Hubbell sure won a lot of big ones in his time. You know, he first belonged to the Tiger organization, but he never played in the majors with them, because they thought that screwball of his would only ruin his arm. Then it happened that our scout, Dick Kinsella, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1928, down in Texas, and one day when he was there he went to a game and saw Hubbell, who was pitching for the Beaumont club. He signed him up. He saw what that pitch would do for him.”

Schumacher, who was not wearing a coat, had been blowing on his hands, and now he said goodbye and went inside to warm up.

“In any list of our teams, you’d have to mention the ’54 club,” Stoneham went on. (The Giants met the Cleveland Indians in the World Series of 1954, and beat them in four straight games, although the Indians had been prohibitive favorites. It was the only Stoneham team to win a World Series.) “Willie and Don Mueller and Dusty Rhodes. It’s funny, but the thing I remember about that club is all the double plays they got that year that ended up with a base runner caught out of position—being put out by a throw behind him, or something like that. A great heads-up team. Dusty Rhodes got all the publicity for those pinch-hit homers, but I think Henry Thompson was the key man for us in that Series. Dusty’s first home run was nothing—real Chinese—but the one he hit the next day went nine miles. You know, Dusty Rhodes works on a tugboat in New York Harbor now. He belongs to the seafarers’ union, or whatever they call it. I still hear from him. And Davey Williams is a deputy sheriff down in Dallas. I try to keep in touch. I got a letter from Burgess Whitehead just this week, from—let me see. From Windsor, North Carolina.”

I asked Stoneham when he had first seen Willie Mays.