Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
Page 4
“Too much spit on it,” he explained later.
New York City found, however, that memories of this sort were anything but what the town needed. When the Giants and Dodgers left, many smart people began to realize that the city was hurting. Here was New York, with a daily population of something like fourteen million, and with a need for every valid entertainment attraction there is, and it had only one baseball team. This was all right for places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It was bad for New York. Merchants like Bernard Gimbel pointed this out. So did politicians. The whole town seemed to be affected. The best way to show what was happening, and why another team was inevitable for New York, is to go to the fall afternoon in 1958 when Kenneth Keating, Republican Congressman from Rochester who was running for United States Senator, rolled across the Brooklyn Bridge and brought his political campaign to the heart of the great area the voting-tally sheets call Kings County.
Keating brought with him all the attributes of the great campaigner. An excellent right hand, for one thing. This is a man who can shake hands with a polar bear and the bear is going to let out the first yelp. His eating ability, for another. If votes are involved, this is the world’s champion eater. He is particularly rough on Polish food. Put 75 Poles who are registered voters in the same dining hall with Keating, and he touches bottom five minutes ahead of the field.
But all this priceless ability was going to waste on this day in Brooklyn. The town was dead. Nothing Keating could do, talking or mingling or grabbing hands, was enough to get a reaction, any sort of a reaction, from people. Keating shook his head. He was not going to get anything done here, he told his staff. Furthermore, he knew the reason.
“Baseball,” he said. “All these people seem to be interested in is the fact the Dodgers have gone to Los Angeles. They have no civic enthusiasm. This is our problem. There is only one team in New York City now. Well, I know New York. It is not used to having a single loyalty to a single team. This is a city which must have divided interests. All this apathy we are seeing is because of the baseball situation.”
Keating was elected Senator by a wide margin. But he lost Brooklyn by over two hundred thousand votes, and a great campaigner like this one does not like to lose anything, much less lose by that much. He tied it all to baseball. A year later, as a United States Senator, and an effective Senator at that, Keating sat on a committee which did much to make certain that New York would have another team in town.
In any analysis of the Mets and how they came about, however, you must always start with one man, an attorney named William A. Shea, who has offices on East 42nd Street.
Shea has dark hair, blue eyes, and the square jaw of a guy who would know how to punch back. Which he certainly does. He was an end and a basketball player at Georgetown in the late twenties and today, at 6 feet and 195 pounds, he is still in shape.
His business is law, and his business is not small. The firm of Manning, Hollinger, and Shea takes up the entire twenty-first floor of their building on 42nd Street, and as you sit in his carpeted office and wait to talk to him, he is taking calls from City Hall, then from a Florida fruit-juice company he represents, then from a man in Nashville, Tennessee. On this one he brings up the mysteries of high financing. He is all big business. But Shea is anything but one of those stuffy, pipe-smoking corporation attorneys. This is a guy who knows. He is married to the former Maynora Shaw, whose father, Tom Shaw, was the biggest bookmaker on the New York race tracks back in the twenties. Bookmaking was legal then. Shea himself operated a minor-league football team for a couple of years in the forties and was associated with Ted Collins in a National Football League franchise in Boston.
Shea is one of those people you find, but not too often, who is willing to do something for his own and knows how to do it. His own in this case is people who live and work in New York. It is Shea’s town, and nobody fits into the town better than he does.
So, one afternoon in November of 1957, his secretary buzzed him and said the Mayor of New York, Mr. Robert Wagner, was calling. Shea picked up the phone and, whether anybody knew it or not, the New York Mets were now on their way.
“I want to get a National League team into the city as quickly as possible,” Wagner told him. “I want to start by getting a New York sports committee formed, and I’d like you to take it over.”
Shea said of course he would. There would be no problem to it at all, he said. “We’ll just have to steal a team from another city, the same way Los Angeles and San Francisco moved in on us,” he said. “Either that, or get some sort of expansion in which we would figure. I don’t think it will be hard.”
He certainly did not. If Shea had had any idea of what he was getting into, he might have thought twice. For before he was through it would mean three and a half years of traveling, phoning, working, and selling, and all of it at his own personal expense. None of this is very important to Shea now. The big thing, as far as he is concerned, is that he got the job done.
“I’d feel a lot better about the whole thing if the Mets can get a decent relief pitcher,” he was saying one day last December. “People claim the club is my responsibility. They’re getting nasty about it, too.”
Shea was wearing the kind of snap-brim brown hat that is quite popular with older New York City detectives, and a big camel’s-hair coat. He was sitting with his wife in a box seat at Yankee Stadium, watching a football game. As the game went on, he talked about how the Mets began.
“I started out to get a team,” he was saying, “and it looked easy. We made up a presentation for Powel Crosley at Cincinnati, and it looked like we were going to have the Reds in here. We could offer him rental on the new stadium which we were going to build at Flushing Meadows. We showed him that tax-wise it would be an advantageous move for him. But, in the end, he turned us down.
“Then we went to John Galbreath in Pittsburgh, but he said he was going to stay where he was. Finally I sat down with Bob Carpenter in Philadelphia. He is stuck in an old stadium with no parking. We had the perfect offer for him. But in talking to Carpenter, I began to realize one thing. This fellow is just like me. He doesn’t want to move. Philadelphia is his town and he is going to stay there. He’s not going to pick up and leave the place just for money. There are other things which are more important to him. Civic pride? Sure, you can call it that. And when I’m talking to him, I begin to see that I am placing myself in the position of asking him to do the very thing I would never do. Pull out of your own town. That cured me. From then on, I stopped bothering other teams. I was not going to be a party to moving any club, so long as that city had people willing to support it.
“We then decided to concentrate on the National League. To expand, they needed ten teams. We would be number nine. Fine. But who was going to be the tenth? I thought that could be handled. So I’m going ahead with these baseball people and dealing in good faith on expansion. At this stage, my problem is that I am silly enough to think that the National League owed New York something. Here we supported two teams for all those years. Well, the National League didn’t feel that way at all. They didn’t feel anything. They couldn’t have cared less.
“Now I know I’m in trouble. I have to go to work.” He went to work in big-league fashion. In the fall of 1958 Shea walked into Toots Shor’s restaurant and announced that he was going to start a third major league. It was going to be called the Continental League and for help he was bringing in old Branch Rickey. The Continental League was a 100-1 shot, and most people in baseball laughed. They regarded it as a wedge to force them to bring a team into New York, and nothing more. Besides, baseball had something going for it which could keep out the Continental League, or any other league or any other team that would be in New York. It was an item known in Washington as HR10378 and S4070. It was a bill which, if passed by the House and Senate, would exempt baseball from the anti-trust laws and would, in the bill’s terms, give absolute authority to the major-league teams to do whatever they wanted. The main p
oint in this was, of course, to proceed with their grand plan of having only one team in a city.
Now this is about the business side of baseball, and there is no place for business when you are dealing mainly with the fact that Marvin Throneberry’s teammates would have given him a cake for his birthday except they were afraid he would drop it. But it is necessary to explain some of the moves baseball made. Because when you examine them you find that the people who run the sport have no regard for the Marvin Throneberrys and the part of American life they represent.
When Bill Shea and Branch Rickey began maneuvering for their Continental League, they found wealthy people in eight cities who would back teams. They also found that the antitrust exemptions baseball was asking for would knock them out.
So, in the fall of 1959, into the Senate Office Building in Washington came old Branch Rickey. He was eighty, and his bow tie flopped over, and age showed in his walk and in his face. But under those bushy eyebrows was a determined look. And with him was Shea. And Shea had a briefcase full of documents to prove the case against baseball’s legal move. In three weeks the two of them spoke to every member of the Senate committees conducting anti-monopoly hearings. They did so well that Senator Estes Kefauver, chairman of the subcommittee holding hearings, introduced a bill that would nullify the bill baseball owners were rooting for.
In the end, both bills wound up dead. But Shea had done his work. The field was wide open for a Continental League, and now baseball had to take action. It did. In meetings in Chicago in 1960, New York and Houston were added to the National League, Los Angeles and Minneapolis were opened up in the American League.
Shea’s third league promptly was forgotten. But he had what he wanted anyway: a team for New York. He also had the person to put up the money for it. From out of Shea’s old Continental League lineup came the owner of the New York National League team. Her name: Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. She is Bill Shea’s style. A lot of other people’s, too, because this is one helluva lady.
3
119 or Bust
SOME YEARS AGO, AT a night club in New York called the Versailles, Mr. Joe E. Lewis came onto the floor under the strangest of conditions to give his first show of the evening. To begin with, Mr. Lewis had been drinking coffee in the dressing room. That was news. Furthermore, his routine consisted of a series of remarkably clean gags and stories. There was a reason for all this. In the audience was a close friend from Chicago, George Levy, who was throwing a birthday dinner party for his son, Alan, sixteen. In deference to Alan, Mr. Lewis racked his brain for every nice story he had ever heard. He then told them for the first—and last—time. The Levys loved the show.
As did a fine society matron in the audience named Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. She is from Manhasset, Long Island; Hobe Sound, Florida; Bar Harbor, Maine; and wherever else she feels like living this month. Mrs. Payson thought Joe E. was terribly funny. She also thought his fine, wholesome routine would be splendid fare for her two nephews, aged fourteen and fifteen.
Two nights later she returned to the Versailles with the nephews in tow. They settled at a table and awaited Mr. Lewis’s entrance. Mr. Lewis was back to normal on this night. He was in his dressing room in the company of a bottle of Scotch, and when it was time to go on, he brought the bottle out with him. Then, with a little sophisticated smirk on his lips, and with no Alan Levy birthday party out front, he launched his normal routine:
“Show me a Hungarian with good penmanship and I’ll show you a bum check.”
Then:
“Show me a man with a cool head and I’ll show you a chilly bathroom.”
Mrs. Payson stirred a little. This was a somewhat different beginning to Mr. Lewis’s show from what she recalled.
Which it was. For Mr. Lewis now announced, as he has always announced, and as he always will announce:
“Show me a broad …”
So it went. While Mrs. Payson tried to hide behind a glass and figure out a way to get the nephews out of this place alive, Joe E. was telling the audience about life in general and young broads in particular.
“That was the last time I brought any children to see Joe E. Lewis,” she was saying one afternoon. “But it most certainly wasn’t my last time at a show of his. He’s my favorite entertainer. If I only could keep him from playing those terrible long shots he likes so much. I doubt he ever cashes a bet.”
Recently Mrs. Payson was talking about this while sitting on a couch in the parlor portion of her personal Pullman car, Adios II. It was hooked to the rear end of the Florida East Coast Champion, which was swaying through the icy weed stalks of the Jersey marshes as it came out of New York en route to Florida. Mrs. Payson was heading for her annual two-month stay at Hobe Sound. Two dachshunds slept on the couch next to her. A brass spittoon was off to one side on the carpeted floor. It is for decorative purposes; the lady does not chew tobacco. She rested her feet on a huge felt turtle which bore a New York Mets’ insignia.
“I just received him today as a present,” she said. “So I had them sew a Mets’ insignia on him right away. The tortoise and the hare. That’s the Mets. I’ve given him a name. Marvelous Marv, of course.”
She had a glass of No-Cal ginger ale in her hand, but she saw to it that a Scotch and water, a stiff one, too, was produced for her visitor.
She is a large, pleasant woman with light hair. She had on a green blouse and gray skirt and only one bit of jewelry. Which was enough. It was a ring big enough to shake up the Van Cleefs. Her first name is Joan and she is a Whitney. She is of the world of the Social Register and charity drives and art museums and chauffeured Rolls-Royces. Her husband, Charles Payson, is Wall Street. International Wall Street. But this soft-talking fifty-nine-year-old dowager sat and talked of heavyweights and horses and night clubs and first basemen. She could be the best person to come into baseball in our time. This is one who does not come to get contracts to build a ballpark or to maneuver for capital gains. This is a lady who comes for the sport of it. And it says here that she knows more about how to lose with a laugh than anybody working for her except Mr. Stengel.
“Just before last season opened,” she was saying, “this wonderful writer from the Daily News, Dick Young, told me not to expect anything good at all. I said, oh, couldn’t we beat out the Cubs and Phillies? They weren’t particularly good clubs, you know. He said absolutely not. So I said to him, ‘Well, can’t we please expect to finish ahead of the other new team, Houston?’ He said, ‘No, I told you to expect nothing.’ So I said, ‘All right then, I’ll settle for tenth place.’ I certainly was not disappointed.”
“If you had to do it all over again, would you go in with all that money to buy the team again?”
“Oh, of course,” she said. “How else in the world could we have gotten Marvelous Marv into New York? I think the whole thing was just wonderful.”
Then she talked about how things went in Greece last summer. A few days after the Mets opened the season, Mrs. Payson and her daughter and son-in-law left for the Greek islands. She asked to be informed of the Mets’ doings by telegraph. The telegrams came as requested, one right after the other, with the score always spelled out so there would be no error, and finally the lady couldn’t take any more of them. She wired back:
PLEASE TELL US ONLY WHEN METS WIN.
“That was about the last word I heard from America,” she recalled.
Mrs. Payson and her party finally established a pool on what day a wire would arrive saying the Mets had won a game. After some time, the fun went out of that.
“The pot became too enormous,” she said.
“You know,” she said, “you can’t tell when this thing will end. It should be better this year. Dear, let’s hope so. But you have no idea when there will be success. I felt so badly for some of those players. Charley Neal with that bad hand. And Gil Hodges having such bad luck. It must have bothered them terribly. It’s a shame about Ashburn leaving us, isn’t it? He was our only .300 hitter.”
“Oh, I don’t think he would have been on the bench,” Mrs. Payson said.
“They would have had to put him there. The problem here is to break in players for the future.”
“Well, perhaps. But he wouldn’t have been on the bench for the whole season.”
“Yes, only the guy said he sat on the bench for a while with another team once and it bothered him badly. And he said that if he ever had to be a benchwarmer for the New York Mets he’d commit suicide.”
She broke up. The lady, you see, understands.
Now all of this is not to say that the lady is going to be sitting down and laughing about the Mets for the next fifteen years. No, the Whitneys do not come that way. The first thing they lost at hasn’t been discovered yet. Just for openers, her brother Jock—John Hay Whitney—once decided to go into producing movies as a sideline. In 1938 he boarded a plane in New York that was taking him to California. Under his arm were the galley proofs of a book by a woman named Margaret Mitchell. It was about the South in the Civil War. It already had been turned down by Samuel Goldwyn, who sniffed, “Who needs a movie about the Civil War? And the losers in it already?” Jock Whitney read the galleys. When the plane stopped for fueling at St. Louis, he was out on the telephone telling somebody in his office to send this Mitchell girl $50,000 to hold the rights to this book of hers. Gone With the Wind was the most successful American movie ever made. They started showing it in 1940, and they’ll still be reissuing the thing, and making a bundle with it, thirty years from now.
Mrs. Payson and her brother also are in racing. They own the Greentree Stable, and under those colors they have trotted out a few things like Tom Fool, who was about as big a runner as anybody ever threw a saddle on. It is the same with art. When Mrs. Payson starts swinging with a museum she wants the place to wind up with the finest collection this side of an easel, and it always comes out that way.