Commissioner Fels Napier's Plan To Save Baseball

"He didn't say," Casey called back.

The baseball men finally remembered to cheer and then to dance and cry in one great release of pent-up emotions.

A cub reporter from one of the tabloid papers called out:

"Who'll be commissioner now, Mr. Stengel?"

Stengel looked at the boy and said, "Son, speaking as one who begun his career in Kankakee, Ill. 48 years ago, taking my uniform with me when I left without being paid the salary coming to me, I suggest they go and ask the other fella to come back on the job."

He waved off all further questions, explaining he was flying back to his rookie camp in St. Petersburg immediately.

Stengel's suggestion was not lost on the assembled baseball men. They rushed to their rented Cadillacs waiting on Park Avenue and roared off to the St. Andrews Club in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. There they found Ford Frick wielding a broom in a hard-fought curling game. When the game was over (Frick's rink won), a committee of eight (designated on the ride up to Yonkers) humbly explained their predicament and asked Frick to resume his office as commissioner as a patriotic duty to the nation and to Organized Baseball. Appealed to in that way, Frick said he could not do anything but agree.

The return to office of Commissioner Ford Frick and the disappearance of Fels Napier, naturally, was a sensation that burst out of the sports sections and onto the front pages. The press could find no trace of Napier. His administrative assistant, Rensselaer O'Brien—who had been slated to take over the Warren Giles post with the new title of managing director of the National League—protested he did not know what had happened to his former superior. In Cincinnati, executives of Big Soap said they were as mystified as everyone else. At the boarding school attended by the Napier children it was finally admitted that Napier had sent a large check and said in a brief note that the children would be contacted later. At last, as new crises took over the front pages and news from the spring-training camps filled the sports pages, the sensation gradually died away. This writer obtained an interview with Casey Stengel late in March, but he said that all he knew was that Napier had left the Waldorf-Astoria by the kitchen entrance.

Finally, on April 10, 1959, the break came that made possible this exclusive report on the Napier case. The writer received the following telegram:

REMEMBERING FINE PERSONALITY FEATURE YOU WROTE ABOUT ME DESIRE TO GIVE YOU EXCLUSIVE STORY. IF INTERESTED PLEASE CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY AT HOTEL MUEHLEBACH KANSAS CITY MO.