For He's A Jolly Good Fellow

At last we got him up the stairs and dumped him into his seat. The stewardesses strapped him in, and immediately Horace dropped off to sleep. I should have been as lucky. I was dead tired, but I couldn't get any sleep at all because Horace was snorting and snoring.

The moment the plane hit the runway at Midway he awoke—fresh and raring to go. "Hey, Bill," he said, straining against the straps, "let's get a drink."

What have I been trying to prove here with these tales of man's inhumanity to man? That Horace Stoneham is a little lamb who somehow always comes up covered with roses? Not at all. I have not the slightest doubt that Stoneham was perfectly aware that Rickey was disenchanted with Durocher, especially when you remember that Shotton was never Stoneham's type of manager at all. When you consider how Rickey likes to operate, it becomes quite evident that anyone who was trying to encourage Rickey to release Durocher would have used precisely that approach, confident that Rickey would pull the old sleight-of-hand for which he is so famous and maneuver Horace into taking the man whom Horace really wanted all along.

All Horace got in Durocher was the best manager of the day—given the proper tools and the proper setting. All Durocher did for Horace was to win two pennants and one World Series.

As for the move to San Francisco, Horace was ready to get out of New York anyway. The Polo Grounds was falling down around his ears, and the newspapermen, while fond of him in many ways, were fed up with his operation and his total unavailability. The real crusher was that Horace was in hock to his concessionaire, Frank Stevens. O'Malley wasn't in any trouble at all; Stoneham was the man in trouble. So much trouble that the city fathers in Minneapolis had just finished building a stadium, confident that the Giants would soon be coming in to fill it. O'Malley not only got him a better territory, he did all the preliminary work for him in San Francisco, thereby permitting Horace to slip out of New York without even a bad press. With everybody so anxious to get in their blows at O'Malley, Horace even emerged with a modest amount of sympathy. As always, it pleased everybody to make Horace out as a poor, muddled but essentially decent fellow who had been fast-talked into leaving by that wily devil, O'Malley.

Poor, muddled Horace was fast-talked into moving into the fastest-growing area in the whole country, something—and you had better believe it—Horace had very carefully checked into. Since life's course always runs smoothly for Stoneham, there wasn't even the usual problem about territorial rights. Tom Yawkey of the Red Sox, his old pal, owned the, San Francisco franchise. Yawkey is always so willing to help out a friend that he swapped the San Francisco territorial rights for the Minneapolis territorial rights, even up.

As for the Arizona deal, Horace undoubtedly considered my proposition, found that it suited his own purposes very nicely—since he was about to go into the Negro market, too—and was quite content for me to go ahead and do most of the legwork for him.

When the crystal ball clears you always seem to find that everybody sets out to take advantage of Horace, and by dint of great effort manages to trick him into doing what he has already decided to do. Horace slays home and drinks, the other guy is sure he has gotten the better of the deal and it is hard to say which one is happier.

Stoneham and Cal Griffith of the Twins are the last of that dying breed, the owner who has inherited the property, personally operates it and has nothing else going for him. Although the Giants would seem to be badly outgunned when it comes to money, organization and corporate backing, Stoneham manages to win a pennant every few years, while other owners, having expended sums into the millions, are wondering why they can't get out of the second division. The Giants do start with Willie Mays, which is better than starting with a 10-day suspension. They also have their own country, the Dominican Republic, a small and recently troubled island populated almost entirely by people named Alou, plus an occasional 20-game winner named Marichal.

Where Horace really finesses the field, though, is in his remarkable ability to simultaneously outdrink and outtrade the opposition. The Giants won the pennant in 1951 after Horace got Alvin Dark and Eddie Stanky from the Boston Braves for Sid Gordon, Willard Marshall, Buddy Kerr and Sam Webb, one of the best trades in history. As difficult as it may be to believe today, there was virtually unanimous agreement at the time that the Braves had got so much the better of that deal that they had put themselves right back into pennant contention. It turned out to be a trade that wrecked the Braves so completely that it eventually led to their evacuation of Boston.