The 34-Ton Bat Read online

  By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, nearly half the bats in the big leagues were maple. Thirty companies were manufacturing them, including Hillerich & Bradsby, whose founder—125 years earlier—had done precisely what Sam Holman did, and turned his stairs into baseball bats.

  On a summer day in 1999, while on assignment for Sports Illustrated, I pulled my rental car into a driveway in Hertford, North Carolina, and was greeted by the homeowner, Jim (Catfish) Hunter. I reached to shake his hand, but Hunter’s famous right arm, with which he’d won 224 games, remained limp at his side, stilled by ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after its most famous victim, the Hall of Fame player for the New York Yankees).

  Inside, Hunter pointed me toward an upstairs room, a kind of attic in which he kept the memorabilia of fifteen seasons in the big leagues. As I climbed the stairs, I couldn’t help notice that each of the seventy-eight balusters was made from a Louisville Slugger. Each Slugger, Hunter said, had been game-used by a Hall of Famer, some of whom—Harmon Killebrew, Carl Yastrzemski—had taken him deep.

  When he could still climb those stairs, the winner of the 1974 Cy Young Award leaned on the bats for support, much as his fellow Yankee Babe Ruth had done on June 13, 1948, when the team retired his number 3 during a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of Yankee Stadium. Ruth, dying of throat cancer, walked from the dugout to the third-base line with the aid of a bat belonging to visiting pitcher Bob Feller. The Babe would die two months later, and the photo of him, taken from behind, leaning on Feller’s bat, would win a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Herald-Tribune photographer Nat Fein.

  The bat was a companion in old age, familiar in the hand, literally a crutch to lean on.

  In 1954, while attending an Indians game in Cleveland, eighty-seven-year-old Cy Young was photographed leaning on—and gesticulating with—a cane made from a baseball bat. The bat was given to him fifty-seven years earlier by Cleveland fans, in 1896, when Young was twenty-nine years old and in the prime of his career, and in no need of a walking stick.

  Eighty-seven-year-old Cy Young gesturing with his baseball-bat cane at a Cleveland Indians game on April 17, 1954, fifty years after his second no-hitter. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  There was, of course, irony in these two great pitchers—Cy Young and Cy Young–winner Catfish Hunter—bedeviled by bats in their physical prime, using them for comfort and support in their infirmity. And yet the sight of Hunter on his way up the stairs would have moved Johann Frederich Hillerich. His name was on all of those bats, which comprised—at long last, if perhaps a century too late—the product he originally intended to put his name on: a glorious balustrade in a respectable home.

  Chapter 3

  THE LOST CITY OF

  FRANCISCO GRANDE

  On April 11, 2000, the Giants opened their new ballpark at 24 Willie Mays Plaza in San Francisco. There, on a concourse above the left center field bleachers, the team had installed the world’s largest baseball glove.

  It’s a four-fingered model from 1927, an exact replica—but thirty-six times larger—of a glove owned by the father of Giants general counsel Jack Bair. The glove is twenty-six feet tall and thirty-two feet wide, and should a batter ever reach it with a 501-foot shot—Marlins slugger Mike Stanton came closest, in batting practice in 2011—the ball could very well get lost in its pocket, which is twelve feet deep. In the park’s first seasons, the Giants offered a $1 million bounty—payable to a randomly selected fan—if any hitter reached the glove in a game. When it became clear that nobody would do so, the Giants dropped the prize, and its $40,000 annual insurance premium, none of which made the glove any less alluring. On the contrary: In addition to the twenty thousand pounds of steel and fiberglass, its marine-grade rope, and its authentic brass grommets, the glove has been insulated over the years with “delicate garments” thrown by “female revelers” hoping to leave not just their hearts but their underwear in San Francisco.

  It is difficult to tell, at a glance, which is the greater summer icon: the Giants’ giant glove or the eighty-foot sculpture next to it, of Coca-Cola’s contoured bottle, designed by Earl R. Dean in 1915. Suffice it to say that baseball’s objects have long inspired art and architecture on a grand scale. When Yankee Stadium reopened after its renovation in 1976, the boiler stack outside Gate 4 was disguised as a bat, 138 feet tall and branded with the Louisville Slugger logo. It served as a beacon for a generation of lost fans. When Louisville Slugger opened its new museum in 1996, the company built an even larger Slugger outside—a Babe Ruth model branded with Bud Hillerich’s signature—and leaned it against the building. The bat was 120 feet tall and weighed 34 tons, not ounces.

  For South Korean sailors returning to port in Busan—home to a baseball academy that produced Cleveland Indians star Shin-Soo Choo, among others—the baseball bat lighthouse there is literally a beacon. It commemorates South Korea’s baseball gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and is oriented, like Oldenburg’s Batcolumn sculpture in Chicago, with the knob on the ground and the barrel in the air.

  Oldenburg, the Swedish-born son of a diplomat, also created a large glove sculpture, 12 feet tall and weighing 5,800 pounds, fashioned after a first baseman’s model he bought at a dime store. “Cezanne painted apples,” he said. “I make mitts.”

  More broadly, Oldenburg rendered everyday objects—clothespins, tablespoons, rubber stamps—larger than life, as if viewed from the perspective of a child. “It’s something I don’t deny,” he said of that childlike viewpoint. “It’s something I believe in.”

  Which explains the appeal of the leather chair made to look like a giant fielder’s mitt, positioned in a shaft of sunlight in the children’s section of my hometown library: Nestling into it, like a lazy pop foul, to read about baseball, a child felt literally held in the hand of God, or at least in the hands of a god, a Willie Mays or a Mickey Mantle.

  I was hardly the first person to imagine himself living in a piece of baseball equipment. In 1961, three years after he moved his team from Harlem to San Francisco, Giants owner Horace Stoneham opened “the finest baseball training facility and one of the most attractive resort complexes in the land.” Francisco Grande was—in accounts of the day—a “diamond palace,” “the most lavish, unique and fabulous baseball camp in the world,” and “well on its way to becoming one of the wonders of the West.”

  “Welcome to Franceesco Granday,” Stoneham told a crowd of local citizens and baseball officials gathered in the restaurant of the hotel he’d built on 1,150 acres of Arizona scrubland. “The bar is open all night.”

  If he sounded a bit like Mr. Roarke, welcoming visitors to Fantasy Island—well, in a sense he was doing just that. The village of Casa Grande, Arizona, was fifty miles south of Phoenix, seventy miles north of Tucson, and—as newspapers loved to point out, to emphasize its obscurity—fifty miles east of Gila Bend. But in that no-man’s-land, Stoneham built a $4.5 million spring training complex to house, feed, and entertain his players and their families in a kind of opulent isolation.

  Like William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, Stoneham’s Francisco Grande—a portmanteau of San Francisco and Casa Grande—had its own airstrip, 4,600 feet long, to accommodate private jets and commercial aircraft. It also had an eighteen-hole golf course and five baseball diamonds, one of which was in a modern stadium, with 10,000 square feet of clubhouses, a press box, and seating for 3,000 spectators drawn to Casa Grande by the team’s brace of famous Willies, Mays and McCovey.

  The centerpiece of the complex was a nine-story hotel, where Giants slept in custom-made beds of Mexican mesquite, in orange-shuttered rooms—each one “air-cooled” and TV-equipped—that gave onto flower-scented verandas. In the social hall, players shot pool, watched TV, grooved to the Shirelles in the hi—fi room, or—three nights a week in spring training—viewed a movie in current release in the Francisco Grande theater.

  Buses idled out front each evening, prepared to convey the Giants five miles into Casa Gr
ande (population 8,500), but the town’s pleasures could not compete with Francisco Grande’s.

  So the Giants lived in hermetic solitude at Francisco Grande for the first ten days of every camp before moving north to Phoenix, where they played the bulk of their exhibition games. But the whiff of cologne left behind by the famous ballplayers, Stoneham hoped, would be enough to lure vacationers and conventioneers to Francisco Grande for the rest of the year. That first spring, the hotel booked several conventions, and soon, among those making a regular pilgrimage was the original Pilgrim, John Wayne, who frequently filmed in Arizona.

  Francisco Grande was to be a destination, with Interstates 10 and 8—then still on the drawing board—expected to meet just south of Casa Grande. On 3,100 acres contiguous to Stoneham’s resort, singer Pat Boone and lumberman Ben Cheney—a minority owner of the Giants—planned the Desert Carmel subdevelopment of “several thousand homes,” whose property values would benefit from a happy proximity to this baseball paradise. “It’s like a box seat back of home plate where you are in view of all the action,” read the ads that ran in newspapers across the American North, offering lots at $2,295, with just $25 down. “The San Francisco Giants are your springtime neighbors!”

  Next door, the gates to Francisco Grande were marked by a giant two-dimensional baseball, atop a Rat Pack–worthy marquee, so that Willie Mays could read, as he sharked by in his pink Cadillac with the SAY HEY plates:

  San Francisco

  GIANTS

  OPERATING

  FRANCISCO

  GRANDE

  COCKTAIL LOUNGE

  DINING ROOM

  Beyond that giant baseball was the finest example ever wrought of what we might call Midcentury Mickey Mantle–ism, an architectural style—and interior decor ethos—inspired by baseball’s objects.

  The hotel’s hundred-thousand-gallon swimming pool was shaped like a baseball bat, permanently poised to strike the round whirlpool, the pair sitting side by side like St. Kitts and Nevis. When viewed from the Desert Sky Lounge on the ninth floor of the hotel, the concrete pool deck revealed itself to be a baseball diamond.

  The flower beds were shaped like bats and balls. The exterior stairwells on the south side of the hotel exactly mimicked those on a baseball stadium, so that a man returning to his room with a bucket of ice might briefly believe himself to be ascending to the second deck of Candlestick Park.

  A concrete patio overhang protruded from the ninth floor, making the entire hotel—by design—appear to be wearing a baseball cap. The parking lot was laid out like a baseball diamond, fanning out from the home plate of the hotel entrance, where the arrival of Mays, in asparagus-green pants and matching cardigan, could scarcely be missed, except when he stood camouflaged against the asparagus carpet of the lobby. “The rates are reasonable,” read a newspaper display ad, “and you’ll enjoy the grandeur and informal ‘baseball’ air.” Interested parties were urged to contact Francisco Grande’s general manager, Mr. Rosy Ryan, who—older guests might have recalled—pitched in three consecutive World Series for the Giants from 1922 to 1924.

  It was Stoneham, with Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, who realized baseball’s manifest destiny in the American West. And here, from the second level of a two-story observation tower on the grounds of Francisco Grande, he could—like Alexander the Great astride Bucephalus—survey the world he had tamed: those five lush baseball diamonds blooming in the sand. Seven, if he counted the parking lot and pool deck.

  Francisco Grande wasn’t baseball’s first themed city. In 1948, O’Malley built a sixty-seven-acre village, a Levittown of leather and ash, on an abandoned naval base in Vero Beach, Florida. Like the Vatican in Rome, Dodgertown was a theocratic community contained entirely within a secular city. The Dodgertown streetlamps were topped by white globes painted with red stitches, and shone their light onto avenues named for Dodgers legends. Children in Vero Beach still attend Dodgertown Elementary School, though the Dodgers themselves left for Arizona in 2008. That year, to meet the ongoing demand of people wanting to live in a 1950s baseball Elysium, Ebbets Field Estates opened in Edwardsville, Illinois. It is a subdivision of suburban homes where the streets—as in Dodgertown—are named for Dodgers immortals: Koufax Court is one, Lasorda Lane another.

  The Dodgers franchise had a long-standing affection for baseball objects as architectural filigrees. The cramped rotunda at Ebbets Field, designed by Clarence Van Buskirk in 1913, was eighty feet in diameter and ringed by fourteen ticket windows. At the center of its marble floor was an enormous baseball made of white mosaic tiles and “marked with the circular stitching peculiar to baseballs.” The domed ceiling, twenty-seven feet high, was decorated with stars and clouds. Descending from that false sky was a chandelier that looked from a distance like a twelve-legged spider suspended from silk. In fact, each of the chandelier’s twelve arms was a baseball bat. To the end of each bat was fixed a glass-globed baseball, lit from within.

  In its fixtures, the Ebbets Field rotunda would have owed a debt to the Third Base Saloon in Boston. It was called Third Base by spectators leaving the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds, and with good reason. For many of those fans of the Boston Americans—the team would change its name to the Red Sox in 1908—it was the last stop before home. Foremost among those fans was Michael T. McGreevy, the saloon’s proprietor. Renowned as “Nuf Ced” McGreevy, he was the arbiter of all barroom arguments, and “Grand Exalted Ruler of Rooter Row.” As president of Boston’s Royal Rooters, the fan club of the Boston Americans, Nuf Ced ruled a congregation that included John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, to become better known in his posthumous role as grandfather to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  But almost as lasting as that association was McGreevy’s status as a seminal American sports bar. Opened in 1894, his saloon was lit by frosted globes seamed and stitched like baseballs, and suspended from bats used by Napoleon Lajoie, Cy Young, and others. A manual scoreboard on the sidewalk out front brought news to passersby (and to passers-out, of which there were many). Portraits of athletes gazed down on their corporeal counterparts—Babe Ruth drank there, as did John L. Sullivan, passing the time as a grandfather clock ticked away the seconds, its pendulum a baseball bat, weighted by the gong of a baseball.

  Francisco Grande was McGreevy’s Third Base Saloon—and the Ebbets Field rotunda—writ large, the closest man has ever come to a baseball theme park. Its only rival in this regard was not Dodgertown—which retained, with its naval barracks, a military feel—but another milestone of Midcentury Mantle–ism. In 1957, Mantle’s business partner, Harold Youngman, opened Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn in Joplin, Missouri, where tabletops in the Dugout Lounge—and scratch pads on the guest-room nightstands—were shaped and seamed like baseballs.

  Images of bats and balls and caps and gloves and home plates and number 7 jerseys repeated throughout the carpet of the Dugout Lounge, in the way that mouse ears repeat in the carpet and wallpaper of the Disney resorts, those temples to that other famous American Mickey.

  All of it was imbued with the essence of Mickey Mantle, perhaps fatally so. “We were doing pretty good there, and Mr. Youngman said, ‘You know, you’re half of this thing, why don’t you do something for it,’ ” Mantle recalled at his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1974. “So we had real good chicken there and I made up a slogan. Merlyn doesn’t want me to tell this, but I’m going to tell it anyway. I made up the slogan for our chicken and I said, ‘To get a better piece of chicken, you’d have to be a rooster.’ And I don’t know if that’s what closed up our Holiday Inn or not, but we didn’t do too good after that.”

  Indeed, Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn eventually made way for the Lowe’s home improvement store that served Joplin after the tornadoes that killed more than 160 residents in 2011. As for Casa Grande, the interstates did come but the holiday hordes and Hollywood A-listers did not. The Giants remained temporarily in residence each spring at Francisco Grande until 1981, when the California Angels moved
in for three dispiriting springs. The neighborhood next door, Desert Carmel, only built a few dozen homes, its parceled lots mostly empty and inert, save for the skittering of gila monsters.

  Horace Stoneham, whose father had signed my grandfather in 1926, died in 1990 in a nursing home in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he spent the last thirteen years of his life in retirement near the Giants’ permanent spring training facility.

  Ten years later, the Giants opened their new ballpark, with its enormous glove. Francisco Grande closed in 2003 for an $8 million renovation that preserved some of its period touches. Removed from its original context, the patio overhang just manages to look like the bill of a ball cap, while the swimming pool lost its tapering and now resembles a rolling-pin bat of the late 1800s. And while a portrait of the Duke hangs in the bar—called Duke’s—the ghost of John Wayne has relocated twenty-three miles to the west in Maricopa, to the John Wayne RV Ranch on the John Wayne Parkway.

  The observation tower from which Giants manager Alvin Dark shouted instructions to Orlando Cepeda and Gaylord Perry remains standing at Francisco Grande. But there are no more diamonds to survey. Imagination is required, as when touring Roman ruins, to see what was once both an exemplar of the architecture of baseball and the supreme worship of its objects, which continues to this day.

  When he retired from the New York Rangers, Wayne Gretzky was given a gift by his teammates. The greatest hockey player of all time received a leather sofa shaped not like a stick or puck or an ice skate, but rather a baseball glove. To a child of the twentieth century, nothing was more evocative of North American boyhood. When a thirteen-year-old entrepreneur in Ohio began to market “man candles”—candles with masculine scents—among the first he created was Baseball Mitt, for a baseball mitt was instantly evocative of masculinity.