Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (34 page)

I dressed all wrong for it, of course. The game that Stoneham and I had fixed upon was a midweek afternoon meeting between the Giants and the San Diego Padres in late June—a brilliant, sunshiny day at Candlestick Park, it turned out, and almost the perfect temperature for a curling match. I had flown out from New York that morning, and I reported to Stoneham’s office a few minutes before game time. He shook my hand and examined my airy East Coast midsummer getup and said, “Oh, no, this won’t do.” He went to a closet and produced a voluminous, ancient camel’s-hair polo coat and helped me into it. He is a round, pink-faced man with close-cropped white hair, round horn-rimmed spectacles, and a hospitable Irish smile, and he looked much younger than I had expected. (He is seventy-two.) He was wearing tweeds, with an expensive-looking silk tie—a gambler’s tie—but he, too, put on a topcoat and buttoned it up before we went out into the sunshine. Stoneham’s box, on the press level, was capacious but utilitarian, with none of the Augustan appointments and Late Hefner upholsteries I have seen in some sports-owners’ piazzas. There was a perfect view of the ballplayers arrayed below us on the AstroTurf, a few hundred scattered fans—most of whom seemed to be kids in variously emblazoned windbreakers—and thousands of empty orange-colored seats. The game matched up two good young right-handed fast-ballers—the Giants’ John Montefusco and the Padres’ Joe McIntosh. I kept track of things for a few minutes, but then I quickly gave it up, because an afternoon of Horace Stoneham’s baseball cannot be fitted into a scorecard.

“I think the first Giants game I ever saw was the first half of a doubleheader on the Fourth of July in 1912,” he told me. “The Giants’ battery was Christy Mathewson and Chief Meyers. They opened with their stars in the first game, you see, because they charged separate admissions for the morning and afternoon games, and that way they got out the crowds early. I’ve forgotten who the other team was. I was nine years old. My father grew up in New Jersey, and his boyhood idol, his particular hero, was the great Giant left fielder Mike Tiernan, who came from Jersey City. Later, when my pop bought the club, he liked to say that he’d followed Tiernan over to the Giants.

“My father bought the team in 1919, and in 1921, as you may know, we played the first of three consecutive World Series against the Yankees, who shared the Polo Grounds with us in those days. That Series in ’21 had a funny kind of ending. We were ahead by one run—I think it was 1–0—in the ninth, and Aaron Ward got on base for the Yanks. Frank Baker—Home Run Baker—came up and knocked a ball to right that looked like a sure hit, but our second baseman, Rawlings, made a great play on it, running it down almost in right field, and threw to Kelly to get him. Ward must have thought the ball had gone through, because he passed second and just kept on running. George Kelly—oh, he had the best arm in baseball—saw him, and he fired the ball across to Frisch at third, and Frisch took the throw and tagged Ward just as he slid in. I can still see that, with Ward in the dirt and Frank Frisch making the tag and then landing on his fanny, with the ball still in his glove. It was a double play and it ended it all, but it happened so fast that everybody in the stands just sat there for a minute. They couldn’t believe the Series was over.”

Stoneham talked in an energetic, good-humored way. He reminded me of a good standup, middle-of-the-night bar conversationalist. “I was in the stands that day. I was still in school, at Loyola School. I was a mediocre second baseman on the team there. I went to a lot of Giants games, of course. Jimmy Walker was a state assemblyman then, and he used to come to the game every day. I got to know him very well—Hey, look at
this!”

Von Joshua, the Giant center fielder—the 1975 Giant center fielder—had singled, and a run was coming across the plate. Within another minute or two, the Giants were ahead by 3–0, still in the first inning, and McIntosh had been knocked out of the game.

Stoneham resumed, but we were in 1939 now, at a famous Polo Grounds disaster that I had seen. “You were there?” Stoneham said. “Then, of course, you remember what happened. It was early in the summer, but that game cost us the pennant. We were playing the Cincinnati Reds head and head, and if we win we have a good shot at first place. Then somebody hit that ball for them—maybe it was Harry Craft—that hooked foul into the left-field upper deck, and the umpire called it fair and waved the runners around. Everybody could see it was foul, so there was a big squabble, and Billy Jurges, our shortstop, he spit right in George Magerkurth’s face, and Magerkurth swung on him. Well, they were both suspended, of course—the player and the umpire both together. We called up Frank Scalzi to take Jurges’s place, but a few days later Lou Chiozza and Joe Moore had a collision going after a fly ball and Chiozza got a broken leg, and we never did get going again.”

I asked Stoneham about his first job with the Giants, and he told me that he had gone to work in the ticket department when he was in his early twenties. “We had a lady, Miss Wilson, who ran it all then,” he said. “None of this computer business. Well, bit by bit I got into the running of the ball park, and then my father put me in charge of operations there. In those days, in the twenties, the Polo Grounds was open for events maybe two hundred days out of the year. The Coogan family owned the real estate, but the park belonged to the club. We had football—pro games and college games—we had the circus there, we had tennis and the midget automobiles. We had a skating rink in the outfield once, and even a week of outdoor opera. We had soccer—the Hakoah team came in after they won some international title, I think it was, and drew fifty-two thousand, so we knew it was a popular sport even then. We had visiting British soccer teams, and a team, I remember, that represented the Indiana Flooring Company. I think we had every sport at the Polo Grounds except polo. I did my best to arrange that, but we never could work it out.

“I came to know the ballplayers then, of course. I used to see them in the mornings. I got to be friends with some of them, like Ross Youngs, the great outfielder who died so young. Ross Youngs, from Shiner, Texas. When he first came along—before I knew him—he was signed by the Giants at a time when the team was on the road. Ross was in town and the Giants were away, and he went right over and got into a pickup baseball game over by the docks on Seventy-ninth Street, next to the railroad yards there. It’s where they have the marina now. He had that intense desire to play ball.

“I was about twenty years old when Mr. McGraw asked my father to let me go to spring training. We trained in Sarasota back then. I remember that Mr. McGraw called me up to his room there and showed me a letter he had just written to my father about a young prospect named Hack Wilson, who’d been on a Class B team in Portsmouth, Virginia. He wore a red undershirt under his uniform. Mr. McGraw had written, ‘If hustle counts, he’s sure to make it.’ Everybody called him ‘Mr. McGraw’—everybody but my father, of course. Mr. McGraw, he called my father ‘Charlie’ or ‘C.A.’—C.A. for Charles Abraham Stoneham, named after Abraham Lincoln.”

We were in the third inning, and the Padres had a base runner on second. The next Padre batter, shortstop Enzo Hernandez, is an indifferent hitter, but now he singled to left and drove in the first San Diego run. “Oh, you sucker,” Stoneham said, shaking his head sadly. “That’s the history of the game. The pitcher lets up on the out man, and he hurts you.”

The rally died, and Stoneham cheered up quickly. “We were talking about John McGraw,” he said. “Well, another time in spring training he wrote a letter back to my father that said, ‘There’s a young fellow down here named Ott who is the best hitter on the farm level I’ve ever seen.’ As you know, Mr. McGraw never did let Mel Ott go out to the minors. He brought him up to the Giants when he was just seventeen years old. He didn’t want anybody spoiling that funny batting style—some manager telling him, ‘You can’t hit that way. You’ve got to put that front foot down.’ When Ott started out, he was a switch-hitter. He never hit righty in a game, as far as I know. Ott didn’t get to play much the first couple of years, and McGraw would sometimes let him go over to New Jersey on the weekends and pick up some extra cash by playing with a semipro team. He played with the Paterson Silk Sox. Later on, Ottie and Carl Hubbell were roommates. Oh, my, there were so many games that Carl won by 2–0, 1–0—something like that—where Ott knocked in the winning run. You couldn’t count them all.”

In the fourth inning, Stoneham took a telephone call at his seat, and I overheard him say, “We’ve sent flowers, and I wrote Mrs. Gordon this morning.” I had read in the newspaper that morning that Sid Gordon, a Giant infielder-outfielder in the nineteen forties, had dropped dead while playing softball. Strangely enough, I had read a story about him and Horace Stoneham in a sports column only a few days earlier. Gordon had been a holdout in the spring of 1949, but he finally came to terms for twenty-five hundred dollars less than he had demanded. Horace Stoneham was always made uneasy by prolonged salary disputes with his players, and in December of 1949 he mailed Gordon a check for the twenty-five hundred dollars—a considerable gesture, since Gordon had been traded in the autumn and was by then a member of the Boston Braves.

Now Stoneham hung up the telephone, and I asked him about the business of trades. “Well,” he said, “you always hate to see your players leave. Maybe I’m too much of a sentimentalist. You can make mistakes trading, of course, but if you never make a mistake, you’re not really trying. We made that big trade with the Braves involving Sid Gordon and the others because Leo Durocher wanted his own kind of team. He always had great success with players that could maneuver the bat. With younger players he was—well, he could be a little impatient. Everything with Leo was …
spontaneous.

“One of the times that really hurt was when it came time to trade Freddie Fitzsimmons, who went over to the Dodgers in the middle thirties there, after more than ten years with us. He was really upset when he left us. He cried. What a competitor he was! He had no friends when he was out there on the mound. He’d show the batter his back when he pitched—he had that big rotation—and he was a remarkable fielder, with great agility for somebody with such a bulky build. Sometimes there’d be a hard grounder or a line drive hit through the box there, and he’d stick out his
foot
at it to stop it going through. Anything to win. I can still see him sticking out that foot and knocking the ball down or maybe deflecting it to some infielder.

“All those games in the Polo Grounds—well, most of the time I watched them from a window in the clubhouse, way out beyond center field. You remember what it was like there?” I did indeed. I always used to wonder about the distant figures that one could sometimes see peering out of the little screened windows set into that green, faraway wall. “There was just a table and chairs there—the same place where my pop used to sit and watch. I was out there when Bobby Thomson hit the home run in 1951 that beat the Dodgers in the last playoff game. We were down three runs in the ninth, and I was commiserating with Sal Maglie, who’d been taken out of the game, and trying to tell him what a great year it had been. We saw Lockman’s hit that brought in the first run, but the side of the bleachers blocked our view so we couldn’t see if Bobby’s hit was going to go in, but I knew it was up the wall, so I said to Sal, ‘Well, at least we’ve tied it up.’ Some tie! The same thing with Willie’s catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 Series. I watched him come all the way out after it, and then he went out of sight behind that big black screen we had there that formed a background for the hitters. But I heard the crowd, and I knew he’d made the catch. I knew it anyway, I think, because I’d seen him make all those other impossible catches. I liked that view of things in the Polo Grounds. The last day we played there, I couldn’t go to the game. I just didn’t want to see it come to an end.”

We were in the fourth inning and the Giants had a couple of runners on, and now the Giants’ second baseman, Derrel Thomas, delivered them both with a sharp single up the middle. A thin scattering of cheers reached us, and Stoneham beamed. I ventured to ask him if he had a favorite among all the Giant clubs he watched down the years.

“Ah, I’ve seen so many of them,” he said. “You’d have to break them down into periods. People are always asking me how the ballplayers compare now with the old-timers, and all you can say is they’re at least the equal. The equipment is much better now, of course, but the competition for athletes [he gave it the old New York sound: “athaletes”] is greater, with the other sports getting so big. The best of them can play all sports, you know. We’ve lost some of our top draft choices to football. When I was a young fellow, all the colleges had good baseball programs, but now a lot of them have given up the game.

“You know, we have a good team right here, but we’ve had injuries. Gary Matthews and Von Joshua got hurt on the same day. Matthews is going to miss about a month, they say, with the broken knuckle on his left hand. But I think we’re going to pick up and pull ourselves together. This is a young team, and I do like that. We have a lot of young arms.”

He looked up at the scoreboard. “Those Cubbies are beating the Phils again, I see,” he said. “They must have some kind of wind there—look at all those home runs. Yes, so many things can happen to a team in a year, you know. We had a lot of strange events in ’33, when we ended up winning the Series. Johnny Vergez had an appendectomy, and Charlie Dressen came up and filled in—he’d been managing in the Southern Association. He told Adolfo Luque how to pitch to the final Washington batter in the Series—it was somebody he’d seen down there. Lefty O’Doul came back with us that year, too, and he got a big pinch hit in the Series, off of Alvin Crowder. I remember that Luque was limping around at the party after we’d won the last game, and when we asked him about it, it turned out he’d split his big toenail throwing those curves during the game. He bore down that hard, he broke his toe.

“When Sal Maglie was first with us, he was just an average pitcher. [Stoneham had moved along about fifteen years.] But when he jumped down to the Mexican League, in 1946, the team he played for there was managed by Dolf Luque, and when we got him back he’d mastered all those great curveballs, and nobody could touch him.”