Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online

Sure, you can call it that. And when I’m talking to him, I begin to see that I am placing myself in the position of asking him to do the very thing I would never do. Pull out of your own town. That cured me. From then on, I stopped bothering other teams. I was not going to be a party to moving any club, so long as that city had people willing to support it.
    â€œWe then decided to concentrate on the National League. To expand, they needed ten teams. We would be number nine. Fine. But who was going to be the tenth? I thought that could be handled. So I’m going ahead with these baseball people and dealing in good faith on expansion. At this stage, my problem is that I am silly enough to think that the National League owed New York something. Here we supported two teams for all those years. Well, the National League didn’t feel that way at all. They didn’t feel anything. They couldn’t have cared less.
    â€œNow I know I’m in trouble. I have to go to work.” He went to work in big-league fashion. In the fall of 1958 Shea walked into Toots Shor’s restaurant and announced that he was going to start a third major league. It was going to be called the Continental League and for help he was bringing in old Branch Rickey. The Continental League was a 100-1 shot, and most people in baseball laughed. They regarded it as a wedge to force them to bring a team into New York, and nothing more. Besides, baseball had something going for it which could keep out the Continental League, or any other league or any other team that would be in New York. It was an item known in Washington as HR10378 and S4070. It was a bill which, if passed by the House and Senate, would exempt baseball from the anti-trust laws and would, in the bill’s terms, give absolute authority to the major-league teams to do whatever they wanted. The main point in this was, of course, to proceed with their grand plan of having only one team in a city.
    Now this is about the business side of baseball, and there is no place for business when you are dealing mainly with the fact that Marvin Throneberry’s teammates would have given him a cake for his birthday except they were afraid he would drop it. But it is necessary to explain some of the moves baseball made. Because when you examine them you find that the people who run the sport have no regard for the Marvin Throneberrys and the part of American life they represent.
    When Bill Shea and Branch Rickey began maneuvering for their Continental League, they found wealthy people in eight cities who would back teams. They also found that the antitrust exemptions baseball was asking for would knock them out.
    So, in the fall of 1959, into the Senate Office Building in Washington came old Branch Rickey. He was eighty, and his bow tie flopped over, and age showed in his walk and in his face. But under those bushy eyebrows was a determined look. And with him was Shea. And Shea had a briefcase full of documents to prove the case against baseball’s legal move. In three weeks the two of them spoke to every member of the Senate committees conducting anti-monopoly hearings. They did so well that Senator Estes Kefauver, chairman of the subcommittee holding hearings, introduced a bill that would nullify the bill baseball owners were rooting for.
    In the end, both bills wound up dead. But Shea had done his work. The field was wide open for a Continental League, and now baseball had to take action. It did. In meetings in Chicago in 1960, New York and Houston were added to the National League, Los Angeles and Minneapolis were opened up in the American League.
    Shea’s third league promptly was forgotten. But he had what he wanted anyway: a team for New York. He also had the person to put up the money for it. From out of Shea’s old Continental League lineup came the owner of the New York National League team. Her name: Mrs. Charles Shipman Payson. She is Bill Shea’s style. A lot