Love and Hate - Inning Four

Top of the Fourth – Front Office and Ownership

For a kid, baseball is all about the players in uniform. There are no trading cards depicting up-and-coming general managers, no Hot Stove rumors regarding an owner’s cranky tennis elbow. All a child knows is what he or she sees and the relationships with other beings in their view develop without the complications so easily conjured in jaded adult minds. Time runs slowly in youth, people seem fixed permanently in their places and devotion is easier to extend. The players and coaches in uniform for one’s favorite team appear cast in metal form, unmoving and unalterable until the day comes when they disappear temporarily, only to reappear in another skin. That is when the realization dawns that there are higher powers at work among the dust clouds rising above the field. I knew that George Weiss held the title of president for the team, but I didn’t pay any real attention to the workings of major league baseball as a business until I began to read and comprehend the words in the sports pages of the Post, Daily News and Journal-American.

I soon learned that the new stadium took its name from a New York lawyer, Bill Shea, and that he was a close friend of the team’s owner, Joan Whitney Payson, she of the doughy, grandmotherly visage in the box seats beside the home team dugout, dressed as if sidetracked while on her way to afternoon tea. This is where my knowledge, and my desire to know back then, ended. However it may happen, we grow and learn and we lose our innocence and our ability to receive images through a neutral filter. This is a quick review of the facts as they tumbled across my path through the years.

It begins with a Dickensian abandonment of a region by two teams, loved by their fans and, by nature of close physical proximity, bitter on-field rivals. The National League teams of Brooklyn and Manhattan were baseball enemies long before their nicknames of Dodgers and Giants ever took hold. Their fan bases expanded on that feeling and enjoyed over a half-century of bloodlust directed towards one another. As the years passed and the feud roiled, those buildings where the actual battles took place wore down from use, further compromised by the rising tide of the new commuter fan, the suburban automobile owner. On top of that, business for both teams was, in general, bad. They were working the same side of the street, so to speak, while the Yankees represented the American League in exclusive fashion. New York was a National League town, but the people who could pay for tickets were fleeing the inner city and those were the days before local television contracts and national broadcasts generated working revenue for the teams. Survival hinged on ticket sales.

Both Ebbets Field in Flatbush, Brooklyn and the Polo Grounds on Coogan’s Bluff in Harlem lacked modern amenities, including sufficient space for parked cars. The owners of the teams looked for help from New York City and State. Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham wanted the city to finance a new building and retreated from a City Hall meeting on the subject with the abusive laughter of the City Council ringing in his ears. Walter O’Malley, owner of the Dodgers, was willing to pay for the land and new stadium for his team, provided the state condemned the land above the Atlantic Avenue Long Island Railroad Terminal. Robert Moses, then-czar of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and king of New York highways, contested O’Malley’s plan as counter to the urban planning in place, which declared the auto as the de facto king of transportation. The idea that O’Malley’s new stadium might encourage commuter use of rail was a threat to Moses’ concrete ribbon empire and he used all of his political capital to quash the idea.

Stoneham decided that he needed to move his team and put the question to a vote of the team’s board of directors, made up of individuals who owned minority shares in the New York Giants baseball club. The initial proposal to accept an invitation from the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul found overwhelming favor from the board, the lone dissenting vote that of one Joan Whitney Payson, heir to the Whitney fortune and half-owner of Greentree Farm, a renowned thoroughbred horse breeding operation started by her father, Payne Whitney. Mrs. Payson attempted to buy the Giants outright from Stoneham in order to prevent the move, enlisting Wall Street banker M. Donald Grant and corporate lawyer William A. Shea to help her with financial and legal complexities. Stoneham turned down her offer.

Meanwhile, O’Malley found himself taking meetings with a group representing the city of Los Angeles, who had just struck out with Stoneham. O’Malley hesitated, for the same reason as the Giants’ demurral. Just before the start of the Second World War, the owner of the St. Louis Browns, Bill Veeck, had attempted to move his franchise west. The American League and the Baseball Commissioner’s office eventually barred the move, citing the recent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but implying that having only one team on the West Coast created road-trip scheduling nightmares for the rest of the league. Unencumbered of the wartime excuse, the Dodger owner still faced the reality of competing in a league whose every member resided no farther west than the Mississippi River. The Los Angelinos understood and contacted their friends in San Francisco who, in turn, contacted Stoneham, who placed a new offer and its surrounding circumstances before the New York Giants board of directors who, as in the previous vote, were almost unanimous in their approval. Shortly thereafter, Joan Whitney Payson sold her share in the team back to Stoneham. The unrequited Minnesotans settled for Calvin Griffith’s Washington Senators.

The start of the 1958 baseball season found the Dodgers playing in the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum, jerry-rigged for baseball with a high leftfield net. The Giants conducted business from Seals Stadium in San Francisco, where Joe DiMaggio had once ruled the Pacific Coast League. Their rivalry intact, New York City was left to ponder the presence of two empty, decaying ballparks and a Yankee franchise operating exclusively within its borders. A portion of Brooklyn Dodger fans retained their allegiance, relying on late night radio and afternoon newspaper editions to stay informed. New York Giants fans, with less recent history regarding head-to-head World Series battles with the Yankees, were more prone to throw over to the pinstriped team in the Bronx. Many fans for both teams simply took a hiatus from rooting interest in baseball.

In 1959, the American League announced a planned expansion to ten teams, adding a franchise in Los Angeles and replacing the one lost by Washington. The National League followed suit in 1960, awarding franchises to Houston and New York. The American League expansion became official in the 1961 season and the National League’s one year later. Robert Moses announced that the new stadium planned originally for the Dodgers on the World’s Fairgrounds in Flushing, Queens would eventually be occupied by the Mets, whose principal owner was Joan Whitney Payson, with the team’s board of directors chaired by M. Donald Grant. The cherry on top saw the proposed stadium named for the Simon Bolivar of New York National League baseball, William A. Shea.

Bottom of the Fourth – I believe there’s an historical error regarding exactly who gets credit for bringing National League baseball back to New York. Look at the facts and decide for yourself.

Fact one: New York City Mayor Robert Wagner purportedly asked Bill Shea to undertake the task soon after the Dodgers and Giants left town. However, there is no record of it being an official request from the city. Shea inquired with National League officials regarding near-term expansion, which might include a New York franchise. The league offered no promises. He approached the then-owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds for the purposes of relocation or sale and received lukewarm responses. All of this was done undercover and not under any official flag.

Fact two: Branch Rickey, one-time co-owner of the Dodgers who was exiled by O’Malley, toyed with the idea of a new major baseball league of international scope, referring to it as the Continental League. It was more a flight of fancy than a potentiality. Rickey understood the difficulty in creating a competing league; he helped to destroy the Mexican League during the players’ first attempt at labor organization. Still, the old man envisioned franchises in cities where minor league baseball existed amid a concentrated population: Denver, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Toronto and Buffalo. He came up with this plan BEFORE the Dodgers and Giants left town. Any statement that places Bill Shea as the originator of this idea as a pretext for forcing New York back into the National League is patently false – absurd, even. He was a lawyer, for crissakes. He had no background in the business of baseball.

Fact three: In order to short-circuit formation of a third league, the American and National Leagues orchestrated a series of franchise moves and league expansions, including the awarding of a National League franchise to New York. The accepted history in all this is that William S. Shea stood apart as the man who made it possible and that he alone accomplished this great feat. If so, why wasn’t he awarded the New York franchise? There is no evidence anywhere that he owned even a minor share of the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club. The whole Shea legend appears to be apocryphal. My conclusion is that Bill Shea was a front man for Joan Payson all along and Branch Rickey, paraded around by Shea as president of a new competing league, played the unwitting stooge.  At best, William A. Shea should be looked upon as an unpassionate gun for hire in a real-life melodrama.


Next up - Tom Seaver and Cleon Jones