Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Read online

  So this is not a woman who came to be a nice happy loser. At the same time, she’s not about to cry. This one knows the game. She is not somebody who merely sits off with her cash and looks at life from the window of a private Pullman car. She has been around. A little bit.

  In 1944 her firstborn son, Daniel Carroll Payson, eighteen, entered the Army as a private and was put into an infantry line company. He asked for no help. Nobody in the family forced any on him. He was still eighteen and a private when he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

  The mother just says, “He did things that way.”

  And there was one recent night when Ruth Arcaro, whose husband was the greatest rider of race horses in history, sat in the den of her house in Garden City, Long Island, and talked about the lady.

  “When Eddie was set down that time for a whole year, we had to try and make it on his salary for exercising Greentree Stable horses. Well, every once in a while I’d get a nice little note from Mrs. Payson asking how the baby was doing. And she’d send a nice little check with the note. She knew.”

  On another afternoon, a huge ex-heavyweight fighter named Abe Simon spoke of her. In 1936 Simon was signed to a contract by an outfit called White Hope, Inc. This was a group including Jock Whitney, Pete Bostwick, Tommy Hitchcock, and Bernard Gimbel. Their object was to find a heavyweight who could lick Joe Louis. In 1936 only the Lord could handle Joe Louis. But White Hope, Inc., selected Simon, 6 foot 5 and 265 pounds, as their standard-bearer. Presently, here was Abe, banging the light bag in the gymnasium of the Whitney Estate at Manhasset.

  “I went there for heat treatments for my left arm and for calisthenics and some bag-punching,” Simon recalls. “Every day, just as I was finishing, somebody would come and ask me to stop by at the main house and see Mrs. Whitney. That was Mrs. Payne Whitney. Mrs. Payson is her daughter. So I’d come up and sit down with them and all they wanted to do was talk with a prizefighter for an hour or so. Those were probably the nicest people I ever met in boxing. Hell, I love them. Later on, the White Hope thing broke up. Things happened good for me, and I wound up boxing Louis twice for the title. But sitting with those people is something I’ll always remember. I’ll tell you. Baseball got some break when Mrs. Payson decided to get into the business.”

  When you look at it, the only surprising thing about Joan Payson’s being in baseball is that she didn’t own a team long before this. She was brought up on the game. Her mother once had a breakfast cereal called Wheaties brought in by the caseloads, and the boxtops were ripped off as quickly as possible and sent in so that Joe DiMaggio would be named the most popular player in the cereal company’s contest.

  Her team always the Giants. Her heroes were Mel Ott and Bill Terry, and her thrill was something that began on a Sunday in September of 1951.

  The Giants were in Boston and they had just won their last game of the season, the one that clinched a tie for the National League pennant. Down in Philadelphia, the Dodgers were playing their last game. If they won, it would mean a playoff with the Giants. A loss would give the Giants the pennant. Don Newcombe, in the finest day of his career, was pitching relief for Brooklyn, even though he had shut out the Phillies the night before. The game was in extra innings because Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers had made plays baseball people still talk of.

  Joan Payson sat in a loge seat at Madison Square Garden with her husband. Out on the sawdust floor, the opening acts of the rodeo were coming on, but her only interest was in the portable radio she kept jammed against her ear. She was listening to the Dodger game in Philadelphia and hoping for all she was worth that somebody on the Phillies would hit a home run. The portable radio conked out as the game went into the tenth inning. That was the end of the rodeo for her. She tapped her husband on the shoulder, said good-by, then left him to calf-roping and hustled upstairs to the bar of the Madison Square Garden Club, where she could hear the end of the game.

  The Dodgers won it, 9-8, when Robinson hit a home run in the fourteenth inning. In the eleventh, he had knocked himself unconscious in a dive for a low line drive hit by Del Ennis. If he had not made the catch, the game would have been over. It was one of the matchless individual performances baseball has seen.

  Three days after this, it was a dark, miserable day at the Polo Grounds, and Mrs. Payson, in her box seat behind first, was ill. Out on the field a player named Billy Cox of the Dodgers had done things with a glove that baseball players, even the best ones, simply cannot do. Because of him, the Dodgers had the deciding game of the playoffs won. Then, all of a sudden, it was the ninth inning and runners were on base and here was a Brooklyn relief pitcher, Ralph Branca, throwing a pitch a little high and a little inside to Bobby Thomson. He, of course, hit it into the lower left-field seats for a home run nobody in New York will ever forget.

  Joan Payson figures it was probably the happiest day of her life. She closed her eyes as she sat in this railroad car and talked of it.

  “I was brought up on the Giants,” she was saying. “But nothing ever was as magnificent as this. Frankly, I still can’t get over the Giants. Last year when they had that playoff with the Dodgers on the Coast we all were at Idlewild Airport and we leaned on the counter and listened to the final game, waiting to see whether we would fly to Los Angeles or San Francisco for the World Series. We were all dying. I found myself rooting for the Giants as if they were back here in New York.”

  Then she clasped her hands behind her neck and leaned back. This is the way Jack White and all those people sunned themselves during a game. And at night, if the Giants lost, they put up a big sign, ‘No Game Today,’ in front of the bandstand at the 18 Club.”

  She was talking about the late Jack White, a comedian who subsisted on brandy and ran a saloon called the 18 Club. White was considered the town’s Number 1 Giant fan. It was natural that he considered Joan Payson a pal. The 18 Club is no more, and the only reminders of it left are Pat Harrington, the great old comic, and Jackie Gleason, who was a third-stringer in the 18 Club lineup. When the 18 was operating, waiters would spit ice cubes at customers and White either was loaded or was out on the floor telling unprintable stories. A line score of the day’s Giant game always hung in front of the bandstand. But only if they won. The “No Game” sign went out after a loss. It was Mrs. Payson’s idea of a helluva night joint.

  Every afternoon when the Giants were at home, the mob from the 18 Club, White, Harrington, bartenders, waiters, a big singer named Hazel McNulty, and the inevitable group of loan sharks, would sit in the upper tier in left field, open shirt collars, lean back, and get the sun. About the eighth inning, they would walk around to home plate, say hello to the likes of George M. Cohan and Joan Payson, watch the finish, and then head for the exit.

  White was a particularly voluble fan. One afternoon in 1939, with the Giants trailing the Cubs 4-1 in the ninth, he was in agony as Mel Ott stepped in with two on. Ottie lifted his foot and hit the first pitch into the right field stands to tie the game. White jumped, then started running. He raced down the ramp to the lower tier, skipped down the steps, then broke through a gate and tore onto the field, arms out, to hug Ott at home plate.

  White then turned around and trotted through the lower tier, up the ramp, and back to his seat in the upper tier. He got there just in time to see Hank Lieber, the next Giant hitter, hit one six miles to win the game. The ball was just about to reach the seats when White, in ecstasy, took off again. Down the ramp, through the lower tier, and onto the field he came. This time he was staggering as he reached home plate. White went three steps up the line to greet Lieber, then fell on his face. The ballplayer stopped, picked him up, and crossed home plate with White in his arms. Then he turned and, still carrying White, he went to the center-field dressing room.

  “It took two bottles of brandy to straighten White out,” Harrington recalls. “One for Jack and one for his personal Shy-lock. I think the Shylock looked the worst when Jack collapsed.”

  “Mrs. Payson,” Harringto
n says, “was always around in those days. We liked her so much we insulted her worse than anybody in the joint. That was the mark of somebody who made it big in our joint.”

  With this kind of background, Joan Payson was one of the first names anybody thought of when the Continental League was about to be founded. Dwight Davis, a New York financier, had been speaking to Bill Shea about ownership of the New York team. Davis went to Florida and spoke to Mrs. Payson. At first she said no. Then Branch Rickey went down to see her, and she changed her mind.

  “I wasn’t too enthused about a team in the third league,” she says. “But later when I found we could have a New York team in the National League I became excited.”

  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. U
nder 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.