Part 12 (2/2)
Rose fouled it into the dirt.
”Well, now we come back with another slider, and I'll try to throw it inside. That's just to set up another slider outside.”
Rose fouled that one as well.
”We're ahead one and two now-right?” Bla.s.s said. ”Well, this early in the game I wouldn't try to throw him that slow curve-that big slop off-speed pitch. I'd like to work on that a couple of times first, because it's early and he swings so well. So as long as I'm ahead of him, I'll keep on throwing him sliders-keep going that way.”
Rose took another ball, and then grounded out on a medium-speed curveball.
Joe Morgan stood in, and Bla.s.s puffed on his cigar and looked at the ceiling.
”Joe Morgan is strictly a fastball hitter, so I want to throw him a bad fastball to start him off,” he said. ”I'll throw it in the dirt to show it to him-get him geared to that kind of speed. Now, after ball one, I'll give him a medium-to-slow curveball and try to get it over the plate-just throw it for a strike.”
Morgan took: one and one.
”Now I throw him a real slow curveball-a regular rainbow. I've had good luck against him with that sort of stuff.”
And so it went. Morgan, I decided, eventually singled to right on a curve in on the handle-a lucky hit-but then Bla.s.s retired his next Cincinnati hitter, Dan Driessen, who popped out on a slider. Bla.s.s laid off slow pitches here, so Sanguillen would have a chance to throw out Morgan if he was stealing.
Johnny Bench stood in, with two out.
”Morgan won't be stealing, probably,” Bla.s.s said. ”He won't want to take the bat out of Bench's hands.” He released another cloud of cigar smoke, thinking hard. ”Well, I'll start him out with a good, tough fastball outside. I've got to work very carefully to him, because when he's hot he's capable of hitting it out anytime.”
Ball one.
”Well, the slider's only been fair today.... I'll give him a slider, but away-off the outside.”
Swinging strike. Bla.s.s threw another slider, and Bench hit a line single to left, moving Morgan to second. Tony Perez was the next batter.
”Perez is not a good high, hard fastball hitter,” Bla.s.s said. ”I'll begin him with that pitch, because I don't want to get into any more trouble with the slider and have him dunk one in. A letter-high fastball, with good mustard on it.”
Perez took a strike.
”Now I'll do it again, until I miss-bust him up and in. He has a tendency to go after that kind of pitch. He's an exceptional offspeed hitter, and will give himself up with men on base-give up a little power to get that run in.”
Perez took, for a ball, and then Bla.s.s threw him an intentional ball-a very bad slider inside. Perez had shortened up on the bat a little, but he took the pitch. He then fouled off a fastball, and Bla.s.s threw him another good fastball, high and inside, and Perez struck out, swinging, to end the inning.
”Pretty good inning,” I said. ”Way to go.” We both laughed.
”Yes, you know that exact sequence has happened to Perez many times,” Bla.s.s said. ”He shortens up and then chases the pitch up here.”
He was animated. ”You know, I can almost see that fastball to Perez, and I can see his bat going through it, swinging through the pitch and missing,” he said. ”That's a good feeling. That's one of the concepts of Dr. Harrison's program, you know-visualization. When I was pitching well, I was doing that very thing. You get so locked in, you see yourself doing things before they happen. That's what people mean when they say you're in the groove. That's what happened in that World Series game, when I kept throwing that big slop curveball to Boog Powell, and it really ruined him. I must have thrown it three out of four pitches to him, and I just knew it was going to be there. There's no doubt about it-no information needed. The crowd is there, this is the World Series, and all of a sudden you're locked into something. It's like being plugged into a computer. It's 'Gimme the ball, boom! Click, click, click ... shoom!' It's that good feeling. You're just flowing easy.”
The Companions of the Game
- September 1975 THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS, it seems, are about to be sold to some j.a.panese businessmen. The news, which appeared in the Times late last month, was somehow both startling and boring-instant antipodal emotions that only stories about quintuplets or the business side of sports arouse in me. The Times' account was a blurry, hedging affair, beginning with a denial by the Giants' front office of the reported deal, followed by several paragraphs explaining why it probably would go through. It was generally known, of course, that the club has been in financial difficulties for several years, and earlier this summer its president, Horace C. Stoneham, announced that his controlling share of the National Exhibition Company (which is the team's florid, nineteenth-century corporate handle) was up for sale. A San Francis...o...b..sed group, headed by a real-estate man named Robert A. Lurie and including the National League president, Chub Feeney, who is a nephew of Stoneham's, and Bill Rigney, a former Giant manager, had been talking with Stoneham, but the j.a.panese offer of seventeen million dollars-for the club, its minor-league affiliates, and some baseball and hotel properties at the Giants' spring-training headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona-is apparently a good deal higher than any other bids so far.* The sale, in any case, will require the approval of the other National League owners, who will vote on the matter sometime after the World Series.
As a lifetime Giants fan whose pa.s.sionate boyhood attachment had been slowly cooled by the departure of my heroes from the Polo Grounds in 1958, by the decline and eventual retirement of Willie Mays, and by the pale neutrality of middle age, I tried to summon up a semblance of outraged xenophobia at the news of the possible Toyotafication of my old team and my old pastime, but it became clear to me in the same instant that I simply didn't give a d.a.m.n. Big-league baseball is a commercial enterprise, and the business of j.a.pan, as Calvin Coolidge probably meant to tell us, is business. There was a time when the owners.h.i.+p of a ball team by a hometown brewer or chewing-gum family did not seem an especially important part of its public ident.i.ty, but in the past twenty years eight of the original sixteen big-league clubs have been sold (and in some cases resold and re-resold) to new business interests, while eight new clubs have been born, four of which have later changed hands. As a result, the financial adventures of some teams are almost better publicized (and often a good deal more interesting) than their achievements in the pennant race. A typical modern ball team is operated coldly and from a distance, just like any other conglomerate subent.i.ty with interesting tax-depletion build-ins and excellent PR overtones. Their owners and operators are men whose money derives from, and whose deepest loyalties adhere to, insurance companies, broadcasting chains, oil wells, whiskey manufacture, real-estate sales, trucking and s.h.i.+pping lines, quick-lunch chains, and the like, and it doesn't seem to make much difference if one of the teams should now land in the portfolio of some enterprising visitors whose hero is Sadaharu Oh instead of Babe Ruth, and whose cash comes from the marketing of sake or electronic calculators or sus.h.i.+burgers.
For all that, there is one aspect of the sale of the Giants that seems worth attention, worth caring about, and that is the departure of Horace Stoneham from baseball. The Stoneham family has owned the Giants ever since Horace's father, Charles A. Stoneham, purchased the club, in 1919, in partners.h.i.+p with a New York City magistrate named Francis X. McQuade and the team's famous manager, John J. McGraw. Charles Stoneham, who held the majority interest in the team, died in 1936, and Horace Stoneham, then thirty-two years old, succeeded him, thus becoming the youngest club president in baseball history. The Stoneham family has been the Giants for more than half a century, for it has had no other business in that time. Along with Calvin Griffith, of the Minnesota Twins (formerly the Was.h.i.+ngton Senators), Stoneham is the last of the pure baseball men, the owners who owned nothing but their team and cared for nothing but the game. (Tom Yawkey, the longtime Red Sox owner, is of the same breed, but he is also the possessor of a sizable fortune.) In recent years, it has been the custom for men at baseball gatherings to talk about Horace Stoneham with affectionate and patronizing sadness. ”I like Horace,” the conversation always begins. ”h.e.l.l, everybody likes him, but ...” The sentence trails off, and the speaker shakes his head in the manner of a young lawyer who has undertaken to bring order out of his mother's checkbook. Nothing has gone right for Stoneham in recent years, but there was a time when he had his share of success. His Giants have won five pennants, a world champions.h.i.+p, and one divisional t.i.tle. He has hired winning managers. In his father's time, he recommended the selection of McGraw's successor, Bill Terry, who captured a world champions.h.i.+p in his first year at the helm, and in 1948 he s.n.a.t.c.hed Leo Durocher from the despised Brooklyn Dodgers. Stoneham was capable of risky and decisive moves, such as the house-cleaning in 1949, when he traded away the stars of a popular but nonwinning Giants club-Johnny Mize, Walker Cooper, Sid Gordon, Willard Marshall, and Buddy Kerr-to make room for Eddie Stanky and Alvin Dark and the others who would, under Durocher, fas.h.i.+on the marvelous winning summers of 1951 and 1954. The Giants' scouts and farms delivered up some true stars-Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and Orlando Cepeda-and estimable front-liners like Sal Maglie, Whitey Lockman, Bobby Thomson, Larry Jansen, the Alou brothers, g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, and Bobby Bonds. Until quite recently, in fact, the Stoneham record has been one of the better ones in baseball, a high-risk business in which true dynasties are extremely rare.
The Dodgers, to be sure, were far more successful than Stoneham's club in the last decade of their co-tenancy of New York, and when the two clubs moved west, in 1958, the disparity widened. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won five pennants and three World Series since their relocation, and the extraordinary season-long outpouring of fans to Dodger Stadium, which regularly tops the home-attendance figures of all other clubs, has made the team the most profitable franchise in baseball. For the San Francisco Giants, it has been quite the other way. The team was idolized in its first few summers, drawing one million eight hundred thousand customers in its first season in Candlestick Park, and there was a famous pennant (and very nearly a world champions.h.i.+p) in 1962. From the day Candlestick opened, however, it was plain that its site and its design were disastrous. Its summer-long icy winds and swirling bayside fogs, which often made the act of watching a ball game into something like an Eskimo manhood ritual, have become an old, bad local joke. These discouragements, coupled with five straight second-place finishes between 1965 and 1969, cut attendance in half by 1970, a particularly heavy falloff coming in 1968, when the A's established residency across the Bay. Since then, the proximity of the two clubs has clearly strained the limited audience and the dim baseball fealty of the area, but the A's, now three-time world champions, have had much the better of it. Last year, the A's drew 845,693, while the Giants, who finished fifth in their division, drew 519,991-the worst in either league.**
The most riveting difference between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants is not, however, in their comparative records or attendance figures but in their owners. Indeed, the temperament and reputation of the two men are at such utter removes that they almost seem to represent polarities of human behavior, and their presence in the same business and the same metropolis suggests nothing so much as fictional irony flung off by Ayn Rand. Charles O. Finley, the owner of the A's, is a relative newcomer to baseball, who has in a short time achieved an extraordinary success, and perhaps even greater notoriety. He is a self-made man, a millionaire insurance salesman, who has built a formidable champions.h.i.+p club by relying almost exclusively on his own intelligence, quickness, hunches, and energetic dealing. He is a great promoter, with a perfect inner instrument attuned to the heat of the crowd, the glare of the event, and he is an instinctive and embarra.s.sing self-aggrandizer. He is an innovator who has disturbed the quiet, dim halls of baseball and altered the game irrevocably. As an executive, he takes a personal hand in all the daily details of his club, including the most minute decisions on the field, and he swiftly disposes of managers and subalterns who cannot abide his meddling. The A's headquarters, in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, consists mainly of empty offices. Most of the time, Finley follows his team by telephone from an office in Chicago, either plugging into a local radio broadcast or being provided with a running play-by-play account of the action by someone on the scene. Baseball as occasion-the enjoyment and company of the game-apparently means nothing to him. Finley is generally reputed to be without friends, and his treatment of his players has been characterized by habitual suspicion, truculence, inconsistency, public abas.e.m.e.nt, impatience, flattery, parsimony, and ingrat.i.tude. He also wins.
Horace Stoneham is-well, most of all he is not Charlie Finley. He inherited his team and his position, and he does not want baseball quickly or wildly altered. Indeed, it may well be that he wishes the game to be more as it was when he first came to it as a youth. He is shy, self-effacing, and apparently incapable of public att.i.tudinizing. He attends every home game but is seldom recognized, even by the h.o.a.riest Giants fans. His decisions are arrived at after due consideration, and the most common criticism leveled at him is that he often sticks with a losing manager or an elder player long after his usefulness to the club has been exhausted. He relies on old friends for baseball counsel and for company; most of his advisers and colleagues-men like Tom Sheehan; Garry Schumacher; Rosy Ryan; Carl Hubbell, director of player development; and Jack Schwarz, farm director-have been with the Giants for thirty or forty years. Perhaps because Stoneham grew up in a time when baseball was the only game in town and thus seemed to succeed on its own merits, he has a limited interest in vivid public relations, commercial tie-ins, and other hypes. His relations with the press have been cordial (in the words of Wells Twombly, of the San Francisco Examiner, he treats reporters like ”beloved guests”), and his dealings with his players are marked by generosity and mutual admiration. In 1972, when his dwindling financial resources forced him at last to trade away Willie Mays, perhaps the greatest Giant of them all, he arranged a deal that permitted Mays to move along to the Mets with a salary and a subsequent retirement plan that would guarantee his comfort for the rest of his life. Horace Stoneham is convivial with his friends but instinctively private, and it is possible to guess that the only quality he may share with Charlie Finley is loneliness. He has been losing, and now he has lost, and he is thus fair game for the glum attention of writers and the secret scorn of men who understand nothing but success.
Early this summer, I began compiling information and talking to West Coast ballplayers and baseball writers with the idea of trying to interview Charlie Finley, perhaps while watching a game with him. For some reason (for several reasons), I kept holding off on the story, however, and then, when I read that the San Francisco Giants were up for sale, it suddenly came to me that the baseball magnate I really wanted to spend an afternoon with was Horace Stoneham. I got on the telephone to some friends of mine and his (I had never met him), and explained that I did not want to discuss attendance figures or sales prices with him but just wanted to talk baseball. Stoneham called me back in less than an hour. ”Come on out,” he said in a cheerful, gravelly, Polo Grounds sort of voice. ”Come out, and we'll go to the game together.”
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, suns.h.i.+ny 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 b.u.t.toned it up before we went out into the suns.h.i.+ne. 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 10-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 pa.s.sed 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 f.a.n.n.y, 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 a.s.semblyman 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 30, 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 t.i.tle, 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 s.h.i.+ner, 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 Cla.s.s B team in Portsmouth, Virginia. He wore a red unders.h.i.+rt 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 20, 10-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 compet.i.tor 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. .h.i.t that brought in the first run, but the side of the bleachers blocked our view so we couldn't see if Bobby's. .h.i.t 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 compet.i.tion 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.
<script>