Baseball by George Vecsey
Author:George Vecsey [Vecsey, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49406-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-08-17T04:00:00+00:00
XIII
BASEBALL HITS THE INTERSTATE
Whenever I visit Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn, my head jerks eastward like a compass, toward the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field once stood. In the tranquil Botanic Garden, I feel sick to my stomach, knowing that my team is long gone. I am not alone in this. I have compared notes with Fred Wilpon, the builder and owner of the Mets, who grew up in Brooklyn. The site of Ebbets Field is like the magnetic North Pole, constantly making us quiver in that direction. In the same way, Giant fans of a certain age feel visceral pain when they drive along the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, past Coogan's Bluff, the hill that towered over the now vanished Polo Grounds.
Aging fans are the witnesses to the sudden departure of hallowed franchises in the first generation after World War Two. We suffered in the name of continental destiny. In the surge of prosperity after the war, people began to think about going somewhere. Families came back from their first vacation to Florida or California, raving about the weather, the new houses, the beaches, the date-nut shakes. In the frozen Midwest, people woke up on New Year's Day and turned on their brand-new television set to the Rose Bowl parade and football game from Pasadena, California, and pretty soon a family down the block packed up and moved out west. This happened every January.
America had been settled by pioneers twitching toward the west. In 1919, a young Army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower had taken a two-month trip over rudimentary roads not much better than the rutted paths left by Lewis and Clark and the covered wagons. He never forgot the slow, torturous journey. In 1952, as the leading American general in the victory in Europe, Ike was elected president of the United States. One of his first priorities was to encourage two federal acts that would create over 41,000 miles of interstate highways, a system now named after him.
Baseball owners were not immune from thoughts of relocating. In St. Louis, curly-haired, beer-drinking Bill Veeck began to entertain dreams of turning a profit with the Browns. As the son of the former owner of the Chicago Cubs, also named Bill, Veeck was a baseball man through and through, even if his fellow owners would never accept him because they found him too brash, too imaginative. Having had a leg amputated at the knee following service in the Pacific, Veeck tended to store his pipe ashes in the hollow of his artificial limb. That little routine would come off as amusing in a bar full of war vets or a pressroom full of reporters but was lost on the owners, as were most of Veeck's schemes and dreams. He would become one of the great showmen of postwar baseball, even if the other owners despised him and tried to break him.
After coming back from the service, Veeck had tried to buy the Phillies, until Judge Landis learned of his plan to hire black players.
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