A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (38 page)

Shea knew sports, having played football and lacrosse
in college. He cultivated the press, but had an obstacle to
overcome. Commissioner of Baseball Ford Frick did not want another
team in New York. The Yankees’ ownership influenced him on this
issue. But the powerful New York media, led by Red Smith, Dan
Parker, Dick Young, Barney Kremenko and Jack Lang, created a steady
drumbeat of interest in getting a team.

There were eight teams in the National League. It was
not considered plausible that an American League franchise could
shift. Only three clubs, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh,
were doing poorly enough to consider New York, but each remained
out of loyalty to their traditions. But the expansion of pro
football and basketball was already happening. The focus went to
this avenue.

Then Shea came up with the idea of a whole new
baseball organization, called the Continental League, to be run by
none other than Branch Rickey. This gambit was probably just a
ploy, a form of “blackmail” to force the issue in his favor. Also,
being a lawyer by trade, Shea went with his best pitch: the law. He
brought up Constitutional issues and court cases; anti-trust laws
that previously exempted baseball from standards others had to
uphold; a 1922 court Supreme Case he said could be overturned; and
the question of the game’s business monopoly.

“Bill Shea looked to Senators and Congressmen from
states that didn’t have teams,” said his law associate, Kevin
McGrath. “He became allies with the most powerful people at that
time in Congress, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Sam Rayburn, who were
from Texas. No baseball team there. He made allies with men from
Washington, D.C. . . . From Florida, no
baseball team.”

Minneapolis. Dallas/Ft. Worth. Houston. Atlanta.

“Shea knew if they put teams in those towns, they
would get the politicians to back him,” said McGrath.

Between Shea and the highly respected Rickey, an
attorney in his own right, they were well received in Washington.
Shea is obviously credited with creation of the New York Mets. In
so doing he also deserves some credit for creating the Houston
Astros, the second Washington Senators, the Minnesota Twins, the
Texas Rangers, and the Atlanta Braves.

Shea put together a consortium of rich, powerful
people that included Edward Bennett Williams, and Jack Kent Cooke
from the ownership standpoint; then such baseball men as Bob
Howsam. The Continental League had financing and was planning to
open for business in 1959 or 1960 with proposed franchises in
Denver, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Buffalo, and
Houston; with more to follow in New Orleans, Miami, Indianapolis,
San Diego, Portland, Seattle, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

At the heart of all this maneuvering was one primary
motivation: a team in New York. It was the “jewel in the crown.”
Pete Davis, one of the creators of the Davis Cup tennis
competition, was approached. He in turn recommended the wildly
wealthy heiress, Mrs. Joan Whitney Payson. Mrs. Payson did not need
to invest in a second rate baseball league. She and Rickey already
understood that the Continental League would be just that. They
were doing it all to force Major League Baseball’s hand. Rickey
explained this to Mrs., Payson, who admired the art of the deal.
She consequently brought her wealthy circle into the game: Dorothy
Killiam, William Simpson, and Senator Prescott Bush’s nephew, G.
Herbert Walker. Mrs. Payson and Davis then bought Dorothy Killiam’s
shares. At $4 million she owned 80 percent of the stock in a “New
York baseball franchise,” which is like a movie producer who buys
an unproduced screenplay, paying $4 million for “120 pieces of
paper.” M. Donald Grant and Herb Walker owned the remaining 20
percent.

There was virtually no chance that the CBL would be a
competitive league that could dilute the two established leagues.
The Shea/Rickey group, however, had created momentum, particularly
in the form of two of the most powerful political figures in
American history, LBJ and “Mr. Sam” Rayburn. Both lined up with
them. Major League Baseball decided “if you can’t beat ‘em, let ‘em
join you.” On August 17, 1960 the owners met with Branch Rickey at
the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, agreeing to add Denver and Minneapolis
to the American League in 1961; New York and Houston to the
National League in 1962.

None of this pleased Walter O’Malley, but it was
nothing compared to the eventual decision to switch the American
League franchise awards; the Senators to Minnesota, an expansion
team to replace them in D.C., and to his consternation, Gene
Autry’s awarding of the Los Angeles Angels.

Shea got several other balls rolling. Naturally a new
team would need a new stadium. Robert Moses’s plan for a state of
the art facility next to the airport in Queens was fast tracked.
With that, Harry Wismer came on board to bring an AFL franchise to
New York. They would share the stadium with the baseball operation.
Many pro football teams had previously played in New York,
including teams called the Yankees and Bulldogs. None had survived
in the wake of New York Giant dominance. The Jets would
succeed.

The football team proved to be a major part of the
baseball investor group, working hand in hand. Eventually, this led
to the New York Nets of the American Basketball Association (now an
NBA team) and the New York Islanders’ ice hockey team on Long
Island.

Tom Deegan, the public relations head of the
Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, began a campaign to name
the stadium after Bill Shea. Shea did not agree. No stadium had
ever been named after a living person. Stadiums were named after
teams, after cities, or they were memorials to war dead. With
America having won two world wars in the previous four and a half
decades, there were more than enough monumental figures to choose
from outside of Bill Shea.

Robert Moses tried to get it named after him, which
might have paved the way for a million canned lines about the
“Promised Land” and the “parting of the Red Sea” after beating
Cincinnati, but thankfully it did not “come to pass.” Most felt
that Shea Stadium was properly named. Bill Shea brought the team to
New York and made it possible to erect it. Moses unquestionably was
the one who actually built the structure.

With the benefit of 45 years hindsight, this
accomplishment is viewed for what it was and is. At the time, it
was a feat of engineering, a trendsetter in that it was built
outside the downtown inner city (although the same could be said of
Yankee Stadium). San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, completed in
1960, was also outside the downtown corridor, but it was most
definitely not in the suburbs. Shea Stadium was in Flushing
Meadows, Queens, obviously a part of New York City proper, but
especially back then considered safe; a suburban enclave absent the
kinds of problems that plague urban cores.

This hopeful view of the neighborhood did take a
major body blow in 1964, the year of Shea Stadium’s opening. A
woman named Kitty Genovese was brutally, repeatedly attacked
outside a Queens housing complex. Despite her anguished pleas for
help, nobody came to her rescue or even called the police in a
timely manner. People they said they “didn’t want to get involved.”
That became a catchphrase for detached big city life; a portent for
things to come. Despite this, Queens did have a neighborhood
quality. It was a place firemen and cops raised their families, the
home of the mythical Archie Bunker of
All In the Family
fame
.

Moses “made over his city as dramatically as Caesar
transformed Rome,” wrote Peter Golenbock in
Amazin’: The
Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team
.
Moses in fact fancied himself a modern Caesar, calling his West
Side commerce center The Coliseum, and designing Shea to be an
up-dated version of the ancient edifice. Ambitious as this was,
Moses failed to achieve what builders of the Los Angeles Memorial
Coliseum and the Forum
were
able to do. At a cost of $20
million, financed through the issuance of city bonds, Shea did draw
raves in the beginning. As recently as the early 1970s it held up
as one of baseball’s better facilities. The building of “cookie
cutter” monstrosities in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia
did not make it look bad. Busch Stadium in St. Louis,
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, and the Oakland-Alameda County
Coliseum, all built at roughly the same period, were not
substantially better. Candlestick was worse. But the stadium by
which all baseball parks were judged and to a large extent still
is, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, was head and shoulders
better.

Over time, Shea was referred to as a “dump,” a place
of many conspicuous faults. Baseball palaces in Baltimore,
Cleveland, San Francisco and many other cities just made it worse,
while Dodger Stadium continues to hold up, eliciting no complaints.
Shea’s original plusses became minuses. Being next to the airport
seemed a good idea, in that teams could get to and fro easily; fans
could fly in; hotels were close by. But the roar of jets during
games became a bad joke.

It had what seemingly all new stadiums of the 1960s
seemingly
had
to have: lots of parking; 20,000 spaces worth.
This was the new frontier; the car and the freeway were gods to be
worshipped. Horace Stoneham chose an abominable location for
Candlestick for this reason alone. Lack of parking was cited as the
reason for the Dodgers’ exit. But Fenway Park has thrived without
it. Many modern stadiums in downtown centers have limited parking
and do just fine, partly because the game has changed.

In 1964 it was a family affair, affordable for a
husband, wife and two kids. Today, prices are so high that big
league crowds are often as not corporate types. They come one or
two at a time, a client outing. Many come to the stadium from a
nearby, accessible office instead of from a home, children in tow,
which is a sad statement.

Shea was also right on the subway lines, but they
targeted an audience that drove in from Long Island, Westchester
County and Connecticut. It was the same upscale constituency of
people from Manhattan Beach, Pasadena and Sherman Oaks that Walter
O’Malley had in L.A.

Its building in conjunction with the 1964 World’s
Fair made it a place of great celebration. Few stadiums have ever
opened in a timelier manner. Its first five to six years, Shea
Stadium was conspicuously modern and preferred over Yankee Stadium,
located in the increasingly unlivable Bronx. By the end of the
1960s, the Bronx was becoming a war zone. A movie called
Fort
Apache, The Bronx
, depicted the situation in stark detail. But
Yankee Stadium renovated in time for the 1976 season. With the
Yankees returning to glory, against all odds the Stadium, as they
call it, stood tall and proud until its final sold-out game.

The Mets were trendsetters in a number of ways, not
the least of which was majority ownership by a woman. Joan Whitney
Payson’s father, Payne Whitney, was the third richest man in
America during the era of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. A
minority shareholder in the New York Giants, she loved baseball
dearly. Hers was the lone dissenting vote cast to keep the team in
New York in 1957. She then offered to buy the team from Horace
Stoneham before selling her interest.

Her sister married legendary CBS chairman William
Paley. Her circles included the famed Harriman clan, the Astors,
the Bush’s of Greenwich, Connecticut; and others who made up a
modern version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of Hamptons society.
She bought her way into an 80 percent ownership share and agreed
with the writers who said the team should be called the “Mets.”

“Okay, let’s go, Mets,” someone responded Mrs. Payson
said she liked the name.

Mets seemed to make sense. It was shortened from
Metropolitans, which symbolized what New York City and the
tri-state area of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey truly was.
Of course, it was what the civic opera house was called, the
Metropolitan, known far and wide as “The Met” (old and new). The
team’s color scheme, orange and blue, was a combination of both the
Dodgers and Giants. Its pinstripes resembled the Yankees. The “NY”
insignia was similar to both the Giants and Yankees.

Branch Rickey’s involvement in the team changed when
it became an expansion club in the National League instead of a
linchpin of the Continental League. Rickey had been the “selling
point,” the imprimatur of respectability convincing owners to avoid
a “war” with the CBL like the one the NFL was embarking on with the
AFL. They simply accepted expansion instead.

Mrs. Payson wanted Branch Rickey to be the general
manager. At 80 years of age Rickey was very old and asked for an
enormous amount of money and control. It was his way of begging out
of a job beyond his years, since he correctly assumed the terms
would not be met. He was involved in the early Mets before
returning to the St. Louis Cardinals, the team he built more than
30 years earlier. Rickey set up his nephew, Charles Hurth, to be
the GM. Then the Yankees fired George Weiss. It was irresistible
and he was brought on instead of Hurth.

Weiss developed a first class organization. While
mistakes were made, and the team floundered with veterans instead
of youth in the early years, it is important to note in light of
later success that it was not all such an accident as it has been
portrayed. Branch Rickey, George Weiss, Johnny Murphy, then Casey
Stengel; scouts like Rogers Hornsby, Red Ruffing, Cookie Lavagetto,
minor league managers like Solly Hemus; brilliant baseball men
built the New York Mets!

Weiss was, like all the Bushies, a Yale graduate who
came from money, which he used to buy his way into a minor league
ownership position. From there his business acumen, flair for
promotion, and baseball eye elevated him from being an “owner” into
being a “baseball man,” a distinct difference. Weiss joined the
Yankees. His name and reputation grew. It was the Yankees. Anybody
associated with them was gold. But Weiss earned his reputation not
by riding on the success of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio,
but by building the team into the most efficiently run organization
in the game.