Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (7 page)

She put up the money. Her checks, needless to report, stood up.

Donald Grant, a New York stockbroker, then took over active work on the project for Mrs. Payson. In 1942 he had purchased one share of stock in the New York Giants for Mrs. Payson, and eventually the lady owned 10 per cent of the team and was represented on the board of directors by Grant.

Now Mrs. Payson had three things in mind about her new team. She wanted to call it the Meadowlarks—and she still doesn't think it's a bad name—and she wanted George Weiss and Casey Stengel to run it for her.

So, in February of 1961, Weiss answered the phone in his house at Greenwich, Connecticut, and heard the caller identify himself as Grant. Weiss and Grant knew each other only vaguely. Grant wasted no time.

“I could talk to you all day and it still would come down to one simple question,” Grant said. “If we wanted somebody to run our organization, would you be available and would you be interested?”

That night the two men were having dinner at New York's Savoy-Hilton Hotel. By March 1 Weiss was sitting in Mrs. Payson's mansion in Florida and terms were being ironed out. When it was over, he was happy. Almost as happy as his wife, Hazel.

Since the preceding October, when Weiss was let go by the New York Yankees because of his age (sixty-six), this pale-eyed, stumpy man had thrashed around the house in Greenwich until his wife was about to pack it in.

“I married George for richer or poorer, for better or for worse,” Hazel Weiss said. “But for heaven's sakes, I didn't marry him for lunch.”

So on March 1, 1961, Mrs. Payson had her general manager. George Weiss is a heavy man, and he has been in sports all his life, but he talks so softly it is almost a whisper, and he seems shy. For results, there is not a baseball executive within ten miles of him. Weiss is never going to win any awards for most whisky consumed while being a good fellow with baseball writers. But at the same time he is not going to be associated with a loser for any longer than is humanly necessary. This is an autocratic old guy who works eighteen hours a day at the job of operating a baseball team, and until last year he never was associated with a team that finished out of the first division.

“Once, when I ran the New Haven team in the Eastern League, we tied for fourth place,” George recalls. ‘That was the lowest I ever went with a team. This, this is a strange feeling.”

It is hard to put a finger on any single thing Weiss does and say
this
is why he is so good at running a baseball team. There are so many things attached to the business in this age that no one thing is paramount. But if you had to tell somebody what it is like when Weiss is in charge of a team, you would have to go to the afternoon a few years back when Yogi Berra sat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium before a game and fooled around with some new catching equipment that had just been brought in.

“Look at this,” Berra said. He held out the chest protector. The reversible side of it was a shocking orange. The front side was black. Berra put on the protector with the orange side out.

“I'll work the game like this,” he said. He pointed to the field, where the Cleveland Indians were taking batting practice. “I'll have them guys so crazy trying to think up things to say to me that we'll have a no-hitter.”

When he began to buckle everything on to start the game, Berra had the black side of the protector showing. “Are you kiddin'?” he said. “If I ever went out that other way, Weiss up there would be on the phone to the dugout in thirty seconds and there'd be hell to pay.”

“You're afraid.”

“I ain't afraid. I just know Weiss. Listen, a ticket-seller don't look good, Weiss sees him and raises hell.”

At this time Berra was the most valuable player in the American League, and he was billed as a bit of a character, so you would think he could do about as he pleased as long as the batting average held up. But the threat of one telephone call from Weiss was the biggest thing on his mind.

Which is Weiss, start to finish. He is a finicky perfectionist. Through the 1961 season, Weiss operated out of an office in New York, while Rogers Hornsby, Cookie Lavagetto, and Wid Matthews looked at ballplayers for him. The first big job was, of course, to get a manager. Mrs. Payson wanted only one man. So did Weiss.

So, just before the World Series, the Stengel residence in Glendale, California, was hit with many phone calls from New York. Casey told Weiss at first that he didn't feel like coming back. Then Mrs. Payson made a call. She did not talk to Casey. She spoke to Edna Stengel, and when she was through she was certain she was going to get a little inside help with the project.

Finally one morning Stengel was around his bank in Glendale, and he was telling everybody he was going to manage this new team in New York. “The Knickerbockers,” he called them.

Now from this point on there is available an exceptional look at the business of baseball and what type of men, and thinking, go into the running of it.

In order to stock the two new teams, Houston and the Mets, a special player draft was set up by the National League. They had a precedent to guide them. The year before, the American League had expanded. That league did it in a simple manner. In October all team rosters were frozen at forty men. No changes were allowed until the special draft of players was held for the new teams. There is an annual regular draft of players in baseball. This one takes in minor-league players. The parent team, to protect valued minor-leaguers from this draft, transfers the minor-leaguer to the major-league roster. This special American League expansion draft was conducted after the minor-leaguers had been brought up. Because of this, when each team was asked to supply a list of players eligible for the special draft, the managers writhed. They couldn't let go of their top veteran players. So they had to assign the young players, some of them with tremendous promise, to the list.

As a result, Fred Haney, general manager of the new Los Angeles Angels, sat down and picked a team which consisted of Deane Chance, a young pitcher you would give an arm for, Bob Rodgers, a catcher you can make a living with, and Jim Fregosi, now one of the best shortstops in the business. Last year, in their second year of existence, the Angels held the league lead for a time, were in the race until the last three weeks, and finished a fine third.

“It was no freak,” Haney tells you. “This is a club which is going to be causing trouble for a long time.”

The National League expanded a year after the American. This gave the general managers and owners of National League teams time to think. Their brain waves set off burglar alarms all over the nation.

These businessmen in baseball devised a scheme which ruled out all chances of the new teams getting anything but bad baseball players. National League President Warren Giles showed what was to happen when he announced that the special draft of players for the two new teams would be held a day after the 1961 World Series ended. Or before October 16. The latter date was, of course, the day on which all minor-league prospects who were draftable had to be brought up to the roster. On paper, it read like any other league announcement. But it really was robbery in the daytime. It meant that every National League club could look over the roster, select players they were going to release for nothing or send back to the minors anyway, and place them on the list of players available to the two new teams. For exorbitant prices, of course. Under the rules, the Mets and Houston each had to take sixteen players, at $75,000 apiece, and four premium players at $125,000 each. Almost none of the players on the list were young. They were mostly old guys who, in a week or so, would be around with free agents' papers in hand, looking to catch on with some club in a utility role. But here, under this great scheme, was a way to get money for them. Big money. And at the same time it could be made certain that Houston and the Mets would be in the second division for years to come.

It was Stengel who summed it up best.

“I want to thank all those generous owners for giving us those great players they did not want,” he says. “Those lovely, generous owners.”

It was an outright disgrace. On October 10, at a cost of $1,800,000, the Mets stocked their roster. The first player picked was Catcher Hobie Landrith. He was thirty-one, a lifetime .260 hitter, and had a record of being able to catch only two-thirds of a season at the most. For the small sum of $125,000 each, the Mets got Pitcher Bob Miller from the Cards, Pitcher Jay Hook from the Reds, Infielder Don Zimmer from the Cubs' bench, and Infielder Lee Walls from the Phillies' bench. Subsequently Walls was sent to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Charley Neal. It took Walls, plus a certified check for $125,000, to get Neal. This makes Neal a quarter-of-a-million-dollar baseball player. Charley showed up with a right hand that made it nearly impossible for him to pull a ball. Charley, everybody says, is the guy who caused the stock crash in May.

It was the kind of a scheme only some sneak businessman could come up with. Baseball has plenty of these. What makes it worse is that the scheme was obviously designed to harpoon money away from Joan Payson. She was coming in with millions, and everybody thought it would be smart to grab some of it. Here was a lady coming into baseball for sport. More important, she was coming to stay. She would be an important addition to the game. So what do they do? Why, rob her.

The excuse offered is, of course, the fact that in this country you've got to make it on your own. We don't have socialism, so in business, expect help from nobody.

“The league held meetings on the matter, and this was the plan which was voted on,” Warren Giles, an insufferable book man who is National League president, said one day.

“You and all your people ought to feel proud,” he was told.

He looked askance. In the lordly sport of baseball one is not supposed to say that owners could be shady or that league presidents or commissioners, such as Ford Frick, are gray-haired jellyfish. But if you have been around other sports, this is the only way you can think. Take, for openers, the afternoon in the living room of the late Bert Bell's summer home at Margate Beach, New Jersey, when Bert was talking about the shape of his National Football League.

“I think we have Philadelphia, so it is going to be all right now,” he said. “The problem is Green Bay. Hell, they haven't won a thing in so long it's pathetic. Their management is in a mess out there. I got to do something about it. Am I going to interfere in their business? You're damn right I am. Look, this is sports. It's a business of people. We're dead without people. So do you think I'm going to let people sit in the stands and year after year have to watch a bad team like Green Bay? We'll lose those people if we do that. No, I don't believe in letting things take their course. I do something about it.”

Then he dragged on a cigarette the doctor said he wasn't supposed to have. “And I know just what to do with Green Bay.” He smiled. “The Giants got a guy working for them. He's just what Green Bay needs.”

“Who?”

“Lombardi.”

He took Vincent Lombardi and shipped him to Green Bay, and the first year the Packers were at .500. The next season they just did lose the championship game. Since then they have been called the greatest football team ever assembled. Bert Bell died before he could see it happen. He dropped dead in the stands at Franklin Field in Philadelphia in 1960. But I remember enough about the guy to tell you what he would have done if anybody ever brought a Joan Payson around to him. Bert would have had the lady walking on a red carpet the likes of which even the Whitneys don't often see. The guy, unlike baseball people, had brains.

Finally, with all the business, good and bad, out of the way, here was February 24, at Miller Huggins Field, St. Petersburg, Florida, and here were the New York Mets standing in their locker room—no spikes on because of the new carpet, Stengel decreed—and they listen as their manager made his first speech of the season.

Out on the field, Joan Payson strolled. She held a parasol to protect her from the sun, and she was happy because Gil Hodges was on the team. As the dowager walked, Stengel's pep talk echoed through the dressing room.

“We got rich owners,” he yelled. “They got plenty of money. If anybody does any good around here, I'll see to it that we get money off the owners. There's a lot of money around here. You got to go and get it.”

Thus started the greatest season in the history of baseball.

The Mets never even got their signals straight for her. Back from Greece on July 5, she made plans to go to the Polo Grounds the next day. There was, on the newsstands this day, a disturbing column by Dick Young.

The Mets, too many of them, have grown accustomed to losing,” he wrote. “They have given sickening evidence of taking it for granted. The present philosophy seems to be that this is no time to get hurt. Most of the boys are playing as if their Blue Cross has lapsed. Those of the Mets who still hustle resent the quitting attitude of others, but they are helpless to do anything about it.”

Many people, however, took violent issue with Young on the matter. They said the trouble was not that the Mets were not hustling. The trouble was that the Mets were just a lousy team.

With all this, Mrs. Payson walked into the Polo Grounds on July 6 to see the Mets play the St. Louis Cardinals.

“What is all this nasty talk about?” she was saying for the rest of the day.

The Mets, on a grand slam home run by Rod Kanehl, were on their way to a 10-3 victory over the Cardinals. Not an error, not a missed base, not a man in sight asleep. Roger Craig went all the way.

A day later she again sat in her box seat. This time she saw Throneberry for the first time. He came up as a pinch-hitter in the ninth inning. The Mets were trailing, 4-3. Throneberry hit one a mile, and the Mets won the game, 5-4.

“Isn't that marvelous?” Mrs. Payson cheered as Throneberry trotted around the bases.