The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (13 page)

The subsequent operations of Mr. O’Malley, the other owners of big-league teams, the league presidents, and Commissioner Ford Frick have been watched by fans with growing cynicism. In 1961, O’Malley, supported by Frick, permitted the establishment of a rival team in Los Angeles only after imposing such punitive conditions and rental fees that the Angels could not possibly succeed. The result, of course, is Anaheim. In the 1962 draft creating two new teams, the National League owners, ignoring the much fairer system inaugurated by the American League the previous year, protected their player investment so carefully that the squads were manned entirely by a miserable collection of culls and aging castoffs, and the two teams—the Houston Colt .45s and the Mets—have been a disgrace to baseball. The perverse loyalty of the Met fans—the New Breed—is at least partly engendered by a hatred for the kind of cold-blooded success typified by Mr. O’Malley and by the owners of the New York Yankees.

In the past few years, baseball has staged such unedifying spectacles as the loud public wrangle carried on by Charles O. Finley, the owner of the Athletics, in his attempt to secure more favorable stadium-rental terms from the municipal government of Kansas City. At various times, since he purchased the club in 1960, Mr. Finley has threatened to move to Oakland, to Atlanta, or to almost any other city or hamlet that promised him a ballfield and the kind of profits he considers his due. Last winter, his negotiations with Louisville reached the point where the American League had to threaten him with expulsion before he accepted terms and signed a new lease for the Kansas City park. Mr. Finley, it should be added, is the man who had to be restrained by the baseball Rules Committee from enlivening the national pastime with orange baseballs and green-and-gold bats. His notion that baseball owes him a free, or almost free, municipal ballpark and the right to move wherever and whenever he chooses is neither eccentric nor atypical. Consider, for example, the fact that the Braves, who have been established in Milwaukee only since 1953, are now casting hungry eyes on Atlanta. This team—pennant winners in 1957 and 1958, and formidable contenders from 1952 through 1960—enjoyed four consecutive years in which their attendance topped two million, and in 1957 they established a league gate record of 2,215,404, so there can be no doubt about Milwaukee’s enthusiasm for the sport. But now that the team is old and attendance is down, the chance to move on to new audiences, in the pattern established by O’Malley, may prove to be more tempting than the hard work involved in staying put and rebuilding the club. There is a powerful rumor that Milwaukee will move to Atlanta next year,
*
and other shifts, involving cities such as Cleveland, Kansas City,† Seattle,‡ Oakland,** and Dallas,
††
are in the wind. If these shuttlings ever do take place, several million more fans will understand at last that baseball’s executives view them as dimwitted louts who will automatically attach their attention and loyalty to the most recent second-rate team that happens to wear the home uniform.

The most significant event of the 1964 baseball season was the news on August 13 that the Columbia Broadcasting Company had bought control (80 percent) of the New York Yankees for the sum of $11,200,000. The shabby and by now typical manner of the maneuver was as dismaying as its import. Charles Finley, of Kansas City, and Arthur Allyn, president of the Chicago White Sox, were both informed of the deal in telephone calls from the American League president, Joe Cronin, who in one breath told them that league rules required them to vote on the transaction and in the next that their votes were meaningless, since he already had the three-quarters majority necessary for it to pass. This call came only two days after the annual major-league executive meetings in Chicago, during which the deal was never mentioned to Finley, Allyn, or the public. Finley’s and Allyn’s subsequent shouts of rage and the astonished editorial protests of the press were so piercing that Cronin convened a league meeting in Boston to consider the possible antitrust violations implicit in the sale. The meeting turned into a whitewash, in which various proposals for reconsideration were ruled out of order or brushed aside and a tentative change of heart by the Baltimore owners (which could have killed the sale) was ruthlessly muscled down. A few facts about the inner councils of baseball may explain how this was possible. Dan Topping and Del Webb, the former owners and continuing managing executives of the Yankees, are as powerful in their league as Walter O’Malley is in his. Topping and O’Malley are both members of the majors’ Executive Council, along with the two league presidents and Commissioner Frick. American League President Cronin is a brother-in-law of Calvin R. Griffith, the president of the Minnesota Twins. The Cleveland Indians are anxious to move their franchise, and would need the approval of the Yankees and other clubs in order to make the shift. Lee MacPhail, the president of the Baltimore Orioles, is the brother of Bill MacPhail, director of sports for CBS. Several American League executives own blocks of CBS stock; the owners of the Los Angeles Angels, who also needed league approval for
their
franchise move, operate CBS affiliates in California, and John Fetzer, president of the Detroit Tigers, operates CBS-affiliated stations in the Middle West.

Television now exerts the most intense pressure on all aspects of baseball. Since the war, its total exposure of major-league games has destroyed most of the minor leagues. The widely varying amounts of TV revenue enjoyed by the big-league clubs have made the rich teams richer and do much to explain why so many poorer clubs want to shift franchises. The potentialities of pay television, first attempted in California this year, are as yet unknown, but this new device may vastly increase the revenue of baseball, while causing further financial disruption in less-populated baseball territories. The Yankees, of course, already derive considerable money from their own telecasts and broadcasts—$1,200,000 from local stations, plus an additional $600,000 from CBS itself for their part in the nationwide
Game of the Week
telecasts. To drop CBS into the middle of this rich, untidy gumbo as the
owner
of baseball’s No. 1 attraction may look like an engraved invitation for Congressional antitrust investigations, but it is an entirely appropriate symbol of television’s enormous interest in the game.

The sports television business has never been happy with baseball, which so far includes only two big-revenue packages—the All Star Games and Series—each year.
**
Moreover, the old pastime does not produce tidy two-hour segments of marketable time; a nationally televised Saturday game may creep along into the early evening, and it cannot be puffed by much advance billing, since the meaning of its outcome may not be known until late September. This is almost intolerable to the young men in blazers who run sports TV; their dream is fifty weekends of world championships—in football, in baseball, in surfing, in Senior Women’s Marbles—that are
not to be missed
by the weekend watcher. Yet these sportsmen cannot be dismissed so easily, for they command an audience of millions and revenues that are almost immeasurable. It must be assumed that baseball executives will do almost anything to climb aboard this gaudy bandwagon, and that the ultimate shape of baseball in the next ten years or so—its size, its franchise locations, and even its rules—will be largely determined not by tradition or regard for the fans or regard for the delicate balances of the game, but by the demands of the little box.

These objections, I am certain, will cut no ice with most baseball magnates, whose instant response to criticism of this nature is to smile and say, “Well, I’m in this for the money, of course.” Of course. Baseball is a commercial venture, but it is one of such perfect equipoise that millions of us every year can still unembarrassedly surrender ourselves to its unique and absorbing joys. The ability to find beauty and involvement in artificial commercial constructions is essential to most of us in the modern world; it is the life-giving naïveté. But naïveté is not gullibility, and those who persistently alter baseball for their quick and selfish purposes will find, I believe, that they are the owners of teams without a following and of a sport devoid of passion.

It is a breath of fresh air to emerge from those noisome back rooms and to report, if far too briefly, on the World Series just past. That Series and the two or three weeks of the season that preceded it constituted the happiest kind of surprise, for they demonstrated the vitality, unpredictability, and accomplishments of the game itself. This was the year in which a few dozen baseball players barely retrieved their sport from the indoor thinkers. As everyone but the most obdurate recluse must know by now, the Yankees, after stumbling futilely for most of the season, came on to win thirty out of their last forty games, making up a six-and-a-half-game deficit and climbing past the White Sox and the Orioles to win the American League pennant on the next-to-the-last day of the season. (This race, breathtaking as it was, would have been even more dramatic if the league had not drawn up a ridiculous schedule that left no games whatever between the Yankees and the two other contenders after the middle of August.) Meanwhile, in the other league, the Phillies, a young, underprivileged team of have-nots, had painstakingly compiled a six-and-a-half-game lead of their own that looked absolutely unassailable with two weeks of the season remaining. They then fell apart like a dropped tray of dishes, losing ten straight, and first the Cincinnati Reds and then the St. Louis Cardinals drew even, with the Giants hanging on by their fingernails just behind. On the last Saturday of the season, the first four-way tie in the history of baseball was entirely possible. That afternoon, though, the Giants lost and dropped out of it, leaving the Phillies-Reds and Cardinals-Mets games to settle matters on the last day. The Phils, loose and angry now, took the Reds apart, 10–0, leaving it all for the Cards, who had only to beat the most popular losers in history. For a few innings, a magnificent comic-opera ending seemed possible, for the Mets, who had won the two previous games from the Cards by scores of 1–0 and 15–5, were leading, 3–2, as late as the fifth inning, thus sustaining baseball’s tradition of autumn embarrassments inflicted by last-place clubs upon their betters. Class finally told, however, when three three-run outbursts won the game, 11–5, and brought the Cards their first pennant since 1946. The deep “Whew!” emitted by the nation’s fans sounded familiar; since 1946 the National League has staged four pennant races that ended in a dead tie, four that were determined on the final day, and six more that were settled only in the final week of the season.

That last afternoon, I discovered that I was being torn in three. Part of me wanted the Phillies to win, because of their long, teeth-gritting stand against superior forces. Part of me was pulling for the Reds, if only because their admirable manager, Freddie Hutchinson, is suffering from lung cancer and deserved the present of another pennant. In the end, however, I was delighted about the Cardinals, because St. Louis is perhaps the most dedicated baseball town in the country, and eighteen years is too long for such worthy fans to wait for their reward. I must confess, too, to another, less noble feeling of joy: the Cardinals’ pennant—and now their championship—is solid puck in the eye for contemporary baseball ownership and management. Over the years, the Cardinal organization has been a model of modest, intelligent planning and direction. Before the league expansion, theirs was the westernmost and southernmost franchise, and they drew swarms of players and fans from the vast stretches of baseball’s heartland. Even in lean summers, their home attendance rarely fell below the million mark, although their park seats only thirty-odd thousand. Three or four years ago, Vaughn P. (Bing) Devine, the club’s vice-president and general manager, began the moves that resulted in this year’s flag. He installed Johnny Keane, a veteran member of the Cardinal chain, as manager; he put in Eddie Stanky as director of player development; and he negotiated a number of trades of such astuteness that he was named 1963’s Major League Executive of the Year. Meanwhile, however, August A. Busch, Jr., the St. Louis brewer who purchased the Cards in 1953, was growing impatient. Two years ago, irritated by the club’s sixth-place finish, Busch hired Branch Rickey, the octogenarian Grand Panjandrum of baseball, as “special consultant” to the club—a famously disruptive title in any business organization. Rickey arrived, heavily retinued, and began rumbling forebodings. He opposed Devine’s pending Gotay-for-Groat trade with Pittsburgh—a deal, ultimately clinched, that nailed the Cardinals’ infield together once and for all. The Mahatma was unappeased. As one Cardinal later said, “He sat in that damned box watching us and never smiled once. He didn’t even smile when we won.”

Last August, some weeks after Devine traded off an eighteen-game-winning pitcher, Ernie Broglio, for a .251-hitting Cub outfielder, Lou Brock, he was summarily fired by Busch and Rickey, neither of whom noticed that the trade had transformed the Cardinals into the hottest team in the league. Eddie Stanky then resigned, and both Devine and Stanky were instantly hired by the New York Mets, who are unaccustomed to such strokes of fortune. It was also leaked to the press that Manager Keane, who had been a member of the Cardinal organization for thirty-five years, would be dropped at the end of the season and replaced by Leo Durocher. Thanks to his team’s rush toward the pennant, Mr. Keane, a reflective, gentle-voiced Texan, received a public handclasp from Branch Rickey just before the end of the season, and the offer of a new one-year contract from August Busch. Keane looked Busch straight in the eye and said he’d think about it after the season was over—an act of character that may have taught Mr. Busch more about baseball than all of Branch Rickey’s counselings.
***

On the first two days of the Series, Busch Stadium—a seamed, rustly, steep-sided box that will be replaced within two years by a new ballpark on St. Louis’s riverfront—reminded me of an old down-on-her-luck dowager who has been given a surprise party by the local settlement house; she was startled by the occasion but still able to accept it as no less than her due. The Cardinal fans around me were plainly and noisily delighted, but I detected none of the unbelieving hysteria with which San Francisco greeted its first pennant, in 1962. These were veteran city and country loyalists. The parked cars around the stadium bore license plates from Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and their occupants, approaching the gates, had to wade through a moat of trash, broken glass, and old beer cans left by the urbanites who had camped outside the park for two cold nights while waiting for the bleachers to open. Inside, I noticed many spectators (and two young ushers) keeping score in their programs. Clearly, that new pennant would be at home here.