Horace Stoneham and the Breaking of Baseball’s Second Color Barrier
Baseball history has not been kind to Horace Stoneham.(1) The owner of one of the most storied major-league franchises during a time when New York dominated the baseball world, who shocked that world when he moved his team to California in 1958, he has become nonetheless almost a forgotten man by those who chronicle the game. On those rare occasions when he is mentioned, it is usually to underscore his reputation as a hard-drinking, friendly yet plodding owner whose shortcomings prevail over his strengths, rather than to comment on his achievements or contributions to the game.(2) The course of this reception runs in large part because of Stoneham's personality A shy and reticent type, he never sought the public stage as did his fellow owners at the time; Jacob Ruppert, Larry MacPhail, Branch Rickey, and Walter O'Malley were outgoing men at ease with writers and journalists. For most baseball historians, Stoneham was affable but uninteresting, someone playing second or third fiddle in the music of New York City baseball, behind the Yankees and the Dodgers. Once he came to San Francisco, his Giants always seemed to finish second best, usually to the Dodgers, who, along with Walter O'Malley, became the darlings of the West Coast media.(3) The last thorough discussion of Stoneham as a baseball man was written over thirty-five years ago by Roger Angell, when he paid a visit to Candlestick Park in 1975, Stoneham's last year as the owner of the San Francisco Giants. Aware that after fifty-seven years of family ownership Stoneham was selling the team (indeed, the chief reason for the writer's visit), Angell views him rather nostalgically, as if granted a fleeting glimpse of a vanishing species, "the last of the pure baseball men, the owners who owned nothing but their team and cared for nothing but the game.'(4) Angell's account is largely an affectionate one, stressing Stoneham's congenial company, his shy somewhat reclusive nature, his well-known kindness and generosity, his sentimentality and loyalty toward his players and those who work in the franchise's organization, and above all else, his deep love for baseball history, especially the Giants' history, evident in his extraordinary recall of past games and previous greats, such as John McGraw, Frank Frisch, Mel Ott, and Carl Hubbell. Once the regular season started, Stoneham rarely missed a Giants home game but never ventured onto the field or into the clubhouse, preferring instead the isolation of his centerfield office in the Polo Grounds or his solitary perch in Candlestick Park's owner's box, high above the action, which is where he sat on the day of Angell's visit, reminiscing about the game he was leaving.(5) In his focus on Stoneham's character and personality, Angell follows the lead of Bill Veeck, a former baseball owner who dealt with Stoneham on many schemes and transactions. Veeck's portrait of Stoneham, different from Angell's in its sarcastic and irreverent slant, appeared almost ten years earlier in 1966 and portrays the Giants owner as one of the shrewdest operators in the game. Veeck was characteristically blunt in his assessment of Stoneham. "The two men I least cared to match myself against during my days of free wheeling hustling were Branch Rickey and Horace Stoneham."(6) Veeck catalogues Stoneham's many victims, himself included, who have wandered into negotiations with Stoneham, hoping to take advantage of his reputation as a notorious drinker and strip him of a player or two, only to end up drunk themselves, giving old Horace exactly what he wanted all along.(7) In 1958, according to Veeck, Phillies general manager Roy Hamey talked Stoneham into trading Ruben Gomez for the journeyman Jack Sanford, not knowing that Stoneham had lost faith in Gomez as a starter and had secretly yearned for a stalwart right-handed pitcher like Sanford. Sanford went on to great things for San Francisco, including winning twenty-four games in their pennant year of 1962; Gomez, on the other hand, won only three games and lost eight between 1959 and 1962. …
A Legacy of What-Ifs: Horace Stoneham and the Integration of the Giants
Bobby Thomson's home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants is quite possibly the most celebrated single play in the history of baseball. It holds this status primarily, of course, because it was such a suddenly dramatic and heroic act, climaxing an incredible pennant race story with an even more incredible exclamation point. But "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" is also so widely known and so gleefully (or achingly, by Dodger fans) remembered because of the spectacular radio call it brought forth from Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges, whose manic "The Giants win the pennant!" and "I do not believe it!" repetitions were a magnificent explosion of flabbergasted joy. But the careful listener to Hodges's exultations will also hear him proclaim, once he has finally regained the capacity to report on more than his own level of astonishment, these words: "Horace Stoneham has finally got a winner!" It's interesting that the broadcaster would choose, at this of all moments, to invoke the name of the team's owner. Somehow one doubts that Walter O'Malley's achievement would have been interjected had the Dodgers won. It's revealing of the warm regard in which Horace Stoneham was held by those around him that among all else being celebrated at that frantic moment, the end of the owner's fourteen-year wait between Giants pennants was a prominent note. In this age of billionaire owners, and sports franchises filling the role of provinces within vast corporate empires, it may seem hard to hard to believe that the Giants baseball team was the only business that Horace C. Stoneham ever pursued. The Giants were a family business--the family business--in the purest sense of the term. Horace's father, Charles A. Stoneham, had been raised in New Jersey, and, according to Roger Angell, "his boyhood idol, his particular hero, was the great Giant left fielder Mike Tiernan, who came from Jersey City." (1) Charles Stoneham grew up to be a successful Wall Street broker and financier but always remained a passionate Giants fan. He developed a friendship with the legendary Giants manager John McGraw, who was an avid stock market player. When McGraw was informed, in 1919, that the Giants ownership was looking to sell the team, he sought out Stoneham, "and the deal for the transfer of the Giant stock was quickly effected." (2) Stoneham jumped at the chance to devote himself full-time to operating his beloved ball club. Stoneham's son, Horace, was sixteen at the time. The boy had seen his first Giants game at age nine, at the Polo Grounds on the Fourth of July, 1912. Christy Mathewson pitched, and young Stoneham, like his father, was irretrievably engaged in a lifelong devotion to the game. He would go on to play for his high school team as a self-described "mediocre second baseman," and by the time he was in his early twenties, he was working in the family business. (3) He started out in the ticket department, and in his own description, "bit by bit I got into the running of the ball park, and then my father put me in charge of operations there." (4) When the senior Stoneham died in early 1936, his son inherited ownership; at age thirty-three, Horace Stoneham became the youngest man ever to own a Major League team. (5) He would make the Giants his life's work until being forced by financial necessity to sell the club, and retire, in 1975. TEMPERAMENT Horace Stoneham, in temperament, could hardly have been more different from such flamboyant moguls as Bill Veeck, Charlie Finley, Ted Turner, and George Steinbrenner. He was "shy, self-effacing, and apparently incapable of public attitudinizing." (6) He was a hands-on owner in the sense that all significant player personnel decisions rested on his authority--in his forty-year tenure, he never employed a true general manager--but he was always heavily reliant upon the counsel of an inner circle of advisers and executives. …
The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
When Bill James published his original "Historical Baseball Abstract" in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the "Chicago Tribune" as the holy book of baseball. Now, baseball's beloved Sultan of Stats "(The Boston Globe)" is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called Win Shares, a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself."