When it comes to baseball and the current fiasco called the Giants, there was really no one to turn to except Crazy Marty. The Peter Magowan administration is over and the Giants are looking to different minds to bring the club to...well, we don't exactly know where. Crazy Marty looks at a bit of team history in an attempt to explain the team's future. Impossible, you say? Crazy Marty laughs in the face of impossible.
I came west from New York City with the Giants. Well, not exactly with them. They arrived here in 1958 and I arrived in 1966. And yes, they came voluntarily and it was impressment into the Army that brought me here. But saying we came out here at the same time is good enough for journalistic accuracy, right?
And if the Army did bring me, so what...I would have come anyway, just to see Willie Mays play baseball. Watching Willie catch a simple pop fly is closer to art than watching Jackson Pollock splash paint. (and in deference to the delicate sensibilities I detect in Critical Cloud's readership, I refuse to even discuss public urination and defecation as performance art). If an aficionado of ballet can traipse around to see a Nureyev dance, or a Galli-Curci sing, why should I feel guilty about moving to see Willie Mays play baseball? And though they never actually said so, I think my family was happy to see me go. I do know they never asked me back.
Horace Stoneham owned the Giants back then, and I'm going to try to sneak in a line a friend of mine, Pete Cornyn used (S.F. born and bred, Pete spent a life-time of work with our fire department...in fact his son is now a policeman in the city. Pete and I went to grad school together, but mostly to look at the undergrad women, none of whom would say more than one word to me, always “no,” and to get some of the cheap weed going around at the time) when the Giants acquired Sudden Sam McDowell, His Suddenness, from Cleveland. “Great idea,” Pete said of the move to bring the diminishingly talented oldster, “to bring a ball player with a drinking problem to S.F.” The same could easily have been said about Stoneham, who was not a bon vivant, but rather an old boys club drinker of Scotch and other intoxicants, I suppose.
What the Giants had in those days was a lock on the Dominican Republic and such ball players as Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, the Alou brothers, Jose Pagan and about another half dozen I am forgetting in my dotage. With any kind of intelligent ownership, such as the despicable Dodgers almost always seem to possess, the Giants could have set up shop and owned the hearts and gloves of that baseball prolific population into the 22nd century. The Dodgers would have set up a baseball school, peopled the Dominican half of the island with Bird Dogs and never allowed their opponents a chance to sign a promising prospect. Ever hear of Dodgertown? Sure you did. Ever hear of Giantstown. No? Neither have I. Hell, a smart administration might have started developing ball players on the other half of the island. It's not as though the Haitians are doing anything much better with their time.
But, Stoneham was making money with his team in their new digs, so there was no particular need for sobriety. And please allow room for another digeression. I've long had this fantasy that if the person driving Stoneham around S.F. before he committed to Candlestick Point had been Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, the Giants would have been properly forewarned about building that monstrosity
Here's the scene, as I imagine it being played out: Stoneham, sitting in the back seat of a limo, still anesthetized from the libations swallowed during the long flight from N.Y., as they drive up from S.F.O. “Boss, boss,” says Rochester in that unmistakable gravelly voice with which he would address Jack Benny, “you're not going to build a ball park out here, are you?” “Well, yes, Rochester, why do you ask.” “Well, boss, take a look at the trees...they're all bent in one direction from the wind.” Yup, with an astute man like Rochester at the wheel, that strip of land might still be in the Christopher family, and not a penny more valuable today than it was in 1957.
Mays got older, Marichal couldn't continue to swing a bat as he had earlier and McCovey's knees started barking as loud as his dogs. Stoneham faded and the wind never died down. Candlestick in the mid-70's was a lonely place, where a young fan could smoke a large Partagas in rhythm to the games and have nary a soul within 16 rows, thus diminishing any chance of complaints about 2nd hand smoke (not that the term had yet been invented). It wasn't a bad time at all, if you didn't mind having Spec Richardson as your general manager and Herman Franks or Charlie Fox heading the daily managerial duties.
Then, things got bad, and things got worse. Failed initiatives, on a seemingly annual schedule, to procure land for a new stadium created the serious threat of a team move. To Florida, to Toronto, even to San Jose (which insisted it was, and is, a bush league town by voting down the chance to be recognized as the equal of Tampa Bay and Cincinnati. As we would have said in New York, “what bums!”
Bob Lurie was rushed in to keep the team from moving, and then his crew acceded to Peter Magowan, who understood the value of a buck, and of spending a buck, and almost pulled the Giants into a World Series. A little bad luck, perhaps a little bad managing, and that never happened. The Barry Bonds fiasco has probably exhausted him and now we move into a new era with a guy I've heard called 'charismatic.'
We don't need a charismatic owner, we need some goddamned charismatic ball players, and I don't mean Rich Aurilia. What was it, 3 years ago, when the opening day starting line-up averaged something like 37 years old? I swear, I thought I was going to hear the P.A. announcer introduce the team on opening day by saying, “And now...Welcome your 2005 Geriatric Giants!”
Will things get better? Will I be able to hold my head up high when traveling to other cities with my beautiful black and orange S.F. cap with my “Fuck the Dodgers” button on it? Nobody knows, of course, but I am constantly reminded of an article on our team that I read as a teenager when still living in The Big Apple and as devoted to baseball and the N.Y. Giants as had been John “Muggsy” McGraw: “My Heart is a Yo-Yo...A Giant Fan's Lament.” The more some things change, the more they stay the same.
See you at the Old Ball Yard,
Crazy Marty
Crazy Marty is a Bay Area raconteur and writer who, years ago, walked away from his family's successful New York fish mongering business only to end up as a merchant of death in the tobacco trade. He enjoys counting his filthy lucre at his home in Mountain View while his lovely wife, Joy, hopes for a big fat life insurance check in the not too distant future.
Labels: sports
