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

1, 1961, Mrs. Payson had her general manager. George Weiss is a heavy man, and he has been in sports all his life, but he talks so softly it is almost a whisper, and he seems shy. For results, there is not a baseball executive within ten miles of him. Weiss is never going to win any awards for most whisky consumed while being a good fellow with baseball writers. But at the same time he is not going to be associated with a loser for any longer than is humanly necessary. This is an autocratic old guy who works eighteen hours a day at the job of operating a baseball team, and until last year he never was associated with a team that finished out of the first division.
    â€œOnce, when I ran the New Haven team in the Eastern League, we tied for fourth place,” George recalls. ‘That was the lowest I ever went with a team. This, this is a strange feeling.”
    It is hard to put a finger on any single thing Weiss does and say this is why he is so good at running a baseball team. There are so many things attached to the business in this age that no one thing is paramount. But if you had to tell somebody what it is like when Weiss is in charge of a team, you would have to go to the afternoon a few years back when Yogi Berra sat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium before a game and fooled around with some new catching equipment that had just been brought in.
    â€œLook at this,” Berra said. He held out the chest protector. The reversible side of it was a shocking orange. The front side was black. Berra put on the protector with the orange side out.
    â€œI’ll work the game like this,” he said. He pointed to the field, where the Cleveland Indians were taking batting practice. “I’ll have them guys so crazy trying to think up things to say to me that we’ll have a no-hitter.”
    When he began to buckle everything on to start the game, Berra had the black side of the protector showing. “Are you kiddin’?” he said. “If I ever went out that other way, Weiss up there would be on the phone to the dugout in thirty seconds and there’d be hell to pay.”
    â€œYou’re afraid.”
    â€œI ain’t afraid. I just know Weiss. Listen, a ticket-seller don’t look good, Weiss sees him and raises hell.”
    At this time Berra was the most valuable player in the American League, and he was billed as a bit of a character, so you would think he could do about as he pleased as long as the batting average held up. But the threat of one telephone call from Weiss was the biggest thing on his mind.
    Which is Weiss, start to finish. He is a finicky perfectionist. Through the 1961 season, Weiss operated out of an office in New York, while Rogers Hornsby, Cookie Lavagetto, and Wid Matthews looked at ballplayers for him. The first big job was, of course, to get a manager. Mrs. Payson wanted only one man. So did Weiss.
    So, just before the World Series, the Stengel residence in Glendale, California, was hit with many phone calls from New York. Casey told Weiss at first that he didn’t feel like coming back. Then Mrs. Payson made a call. She did not talk to Casey. She spoke to Edna Stengel, and when she was through she was certain she was going to get a little inside help with the project.
    Finally one morning Stengel was around his bank in Glendale, and he was telling everybody he was going to manage this new team in New York. “The Knickerbockers,” he called them.
    Now from this point on there is available an exceptional look at the business of baseball and what type of men, and thinking, go into the running of it.
    In order to stock the two new teams, Houston and the Mets, a special player draft was set up by the National League. They had a precedent to guide them. The year before, the American League had expanded. That league did it in a simple manner. In October all team rosters were frozen at forty men. No changes were allowed until the special draft of players was