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• 55 • 4. What May Be Isn’t it great to have the old game back—the old game with the old stars?” Boston sportswriter Harold Kaese asked rhetorically.1 Postwar baseball was off to a great start. Stadiums were full, and most of the veterans returned to pick up where they left off, a little older, but with few apparent ill effects from their time away from the game. To be sure, some, like Washington’s great shortstop Cecil Travis, whose feet were frozen in the Battle of the Bulge, were never able to perform again as they had before and saw their careers cut short, while others, like Cardinals center fielder Terry Moore, had to overcome leg and arm discomforts that delayed their return to full-time duty. These were the exceptions, however, and did little to dampen the excitement fans felt to see that the national pastime—the national game—had, like the nation itself, survived the war to come back strong as ever. As May arrived, St. Louis sportswriter Sid Keener captured the moment, enthusing about the “grand and glorious feeling” all shared now that the “cloud of gloom hovering over the pastime these past four years had evaporated.”2 The clouds of war may have vanished, but others fluffed in the baseball heaven to cast their shadows upon the game. None seemed more ominous than the Mexican League, which, with the American Baseball Guild, historian Charles Alexander observes, were “unsettling to the owners’ equilibrium .”3 As April drew to a close, there were reports of more offers made by the Pasquel brothers to baseball’s top players, Stan Musial of the Cardinals among them. None of the stars defected, but Mexican recruiters were successful in taking two more players away from the already hard-hit New York Giants.4 Pitchers Ace Adams and Harry Feldman became the eighth and ninth Giants to cast their lots with the Mexican League. Their defections “ • 56 • WHAT MAY BE were the more ominous because, like Mickey Owen, both were established major leaguers, and neither was Latin. In the opinion of St. Louis sportswriter Whitney Martin, the Pasquels had evolved from “an inconsequential annoyance into a hangover headache.” Adams, a stocky, thirty-four year-old right-hander from California, had been a stalwart in the Giants bullpen since 1941. A hard thrower with uncertain control, he led the National League in saves in both 1944 and 1945. Feldman, twenty-six, was a native of New York City who had been playing for his hometown team for five years. More of a breaking-ball pitcher than a hard tosser like Adams, he had a .500 record as a starting pitcher and had won in double figures in each of the two previous seasons during which the Giants had slumbered in the National League’s second division. The pitching-poor Giants could ill afford to lose any moundsmen, yet manager Mel Ott appeared to dismiss the matter lightly, telling reporters, “We haven’t lost anyone we were really sure would help us.” Giants owner Horace Stoneham went farther, expressing “gratitude” to the Mexican League for having “really done us a favor, taking the players they have off our payroll .” His true feelings, however, seemed more evident when he added, “no player with a head on his shoulders will listen to them.”5 Stoneham was widely seen as a penny-pincher and was among the owners sportswriters most often blamed for the exodus of players to Mexico. Other owners were seen as cheapskates—Connie Mack of the Athletics and Clark Griffith of the Senators—but none was a more frequent or spirited target of criticism than Stoneham’s counterpart in Brooklyn, Branch Rickey, who was regularly faulted for failing to pay salaries to his players commensurate with the crowds they drew to Ebbets Field. New York teams had been the primary target of Mexican raiders, and every indication was that they would continue to be. The Yankees were the exception. They had lost no one to Pasquel’s enticements, but when Larry MacPhail learned that shortstop Phil Rizzuto had a clandestine meeting with Mexican agents under a west-side elevated highway and come close to signing a $60,000 contract and that third baseman George Stirnweiss had also been approached by representatives of the “tamale league,” he went to court.6 On May 4, MacPhail obtained a temporary restraining order from the New York Supreme Court to prevent representatives of the Mexican League, including...

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