Forty Years a Giant: The Life of Horace Stoneham by Steve Treder (review)

From its nascent beginnings in New York, the San Francisco Giants franchise has provided its fans with distinct memories, myths, magic, and mayhem over more than 130 seasons. Giants history is saturated with names and events familiar to even the most casual baseball fan: John McGraw, Willie Mays, and the "Shot Heard 'Round the World," to name just a few. However, many other of the organization's past influential contributors are less well known. The most consequential of those forgotten figures, Horace Stoneham, owned the team beginning in 1936, yet relatively little is known about him. His life and legacy are the subject of a full-length biography for the first time thanks to Steve Treder, who has written the thorough and entertaining Forty Years a Giant: The Life of Horace Stoneham.

Treder's highly informative book traces Stoneham's life from New York, where his father, C. A., a successful money manager, acquired the Giants, along with a penchant for skirting the law, in 1919, to San Francisco. Nine-year-old Horace first became acquainted with the team in 1912 when he attended his first ballgame at the Polo Grounds. That day he witnessed living myths in the flesh. Christy Mathewson pitched while Fred Merkle hit third in the line-up. Nearly sixty years later, Stoneham traded Willie Mays to the New York Mets. Mathewson! Merkle! Mays! Stoneham's life intertwined with Giants' history to the point of making one nearly indistinguishable from the other.

Treder's volume deepens our understanding of Stoneham's day-to-day role with the Giants beginning in 1936 following the death of his father, while simultaneously challenging the narrow narrative about his protagonist on big picture issues. Treder argues that "Stoneham was an extraordinarily important figure in the history of professional baseball, both as a business operator and as a competitor for championships" (ix). Uniquely, Stoneham served as his own general manager, and Treder details his personnel moves and how they impacted the team on the field. Stoneham made his share of brilliant trades and signings, but he also made some bewildering choices that cost the franchise dearly as the team endured ebbs and flows during his forty years at the helm.

Stoneham's most important decision involved moving the Giants franchise to the West Coast, and this is where Treder's work really shines. The author challenges the popular narrative of Stoneham as a dimwitted tool, who blindly followed Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley to California. Treder asserts that this "popular lore" survives because "it plays to the easy narrative caricatures of both O'Malley as master player/Brooklyn villain and of Stoneham as useful idiot/lucky bumbler" (192). Treder has none of it. "In this story the abiding myths, as all myths do, serve to make sense out of confusion by forging a simplified narrative in place of a complex and nuanced truth," he argues (193). Rather than blindly follow O'Malley, Stoneham wanted to move the Giants out of New York due to the club's deteriorating financial situation, and he strongly considered Minneapolis before he selected San Francisco, the most prudent business strategy for his franchise.

Treder neither lionizes nor demonizes Stoneham but presents him as a complex human being with successes and failures. This even-handed study provides the reader with a balanced portrayal devoid of hyperbole. Stoneham enjoyed late night gatherings to talk baseball over drinks, but his reticence to speak publicly left fans, and at times his players, bewildered by his unexplained actions. Stoneham did not excel at public communication, and that makes him a particularly challenging subject for a biographer. Drawing upon primary articles and a vast array of secondary sources, Treder steps in and ably interprets Stoneham's actions with astute observations.

The most notable aspect of the book outside of the Giants' relocation is Treder's treatment of Stoneham's relationship to race. Stoneham made headlines by signing future Hall of Famer...