by Roger Angell
TWO STRIKES ON THE IMAGE
— October 1964
AS WE ALL KNOW, when the typical American business executive turns out his bedside light he devotes his next-to-last thought of the day to his corporate image—that elusive and essential ideal vision of his company which shimmers, or should shimmer, in the minds of consumers. Do they like us, he wonders. Do we look respectable? Honest? Lovable? Hmm. He sighs, stretches out, and tries to find sleep by once again striking out the entire batting order of the New York Yankees. As he works the count to three and two on Tom Tresh, it may suddenly occur to this well-paid insomniac that baseball itself has the most enviable corporate image in the world. Its evocations, overtones, and loyalties, firmly planted in the mind of every American male during childhood and nurtured thereafter by millions of words of free newspaper publicity, appear to be unassailable. It is the national pastime. It is youth, springtime, a trip to the country, part of our past. It is the roaring excitement of huge urban crowds and the sleepy green afternoon silences of midsummer. Without effort, it engenders and thrives on heroes, legends, self-identification, and home-town pride. For six months of the year, it intrudes cheerfully into every American home, then frequently rises to a point of nearly insupportable tension and absorption, and concludes in the happy explosion of the country’s favorite sporting spectacle, the World Series. Given these ancient and self-sustaining attributes, it would seem impossible that the executives of such a business could injure it to any profound degree through their own carelessness and greed, yet this is exactly what has happened to baseball in the past ten years. The season that just ended in two improbably close pennant races and in the victory of the Cardinals over the Yankees in a memorable seven-game World Series was also the most shameful and destructive year the game has experienced since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
The fervent loyalties of baseball are almost, but not quite, indestructible. I know a New York lady, now in her seventies, whose heart slowly bleeds through the summer over the misadventures of the Boston Red Sox, a team representing the home town she left in 1915. With immense difficulty, I have sustained something of that affection for the San Francisco Giants, once my New York team, but I know that my attachment will not survive the eventual departure of Willie Mays. Since 1953, six teams have changed their names and four entirely new teams have been born, so exactly half of the twenty major-league teams must count on a loyalty that is less than a dozen years old. Further expansion of both leagues is already being discussed, and at this writing it seems entirely possible that faltering attendance will cause three more franchises—Cleveland, Kansas City, and Milwaukee—to shift to new cities within the next two seasons. Another team, the Angels, will conclude its brief tenancy in Los Angeles at the end of next year; starting in 1966, it will represent Anaheim, California, which is the home of Disneyland.
The irritation and dismay that I share with most baseball fans over this queasy state of affairs is not caused entirely by the appearance in our ballparks of so many semi-anonymous ballplayers with unfamiliar insignia on their shirtfronts, or by the inept play of so many of the new teams, or even by the ridiculously expanded new schedules, which now require the majors to play 1620 games, as against the old 1232, before they can determine two winners. Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark. He was followed at once by Horace Stoneham, who took his Giants to San Francisco while piously denying that he had any understanding with O’Malley, although every schoolboy knew that National League schedules required the presence of two teams on the West Coast. Within a few days, the largest and most vociferously involved baseball audience in the country was deprived of its two oldest franchises and left with the new knowledge that baseball’s executives cared only for the profits inherent in novelty and new audiences, and sensed no obligation whatever—not even the obligation of candor—to the fans who had built their business.
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 p
ress 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, B
usch 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.”
