A Legacy of What-Ifs: Horace Stoneham and the Integration of the Giants

Bobby Thomson's home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants is quite possibly the most celebrated single play in the history of baseball. It holds this status primarily, of course, because it was such a suddenly dramatic and heroic act, climaxing an incredible pennant race story with an even more incredible exclamation point. But "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" is also so widely known and so gleefully (or achingly, by Dodger fans) remembered because of the spectacular radio call it brought forth from Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges, whose manic "The Giants win the pennant!" and "I do not believe it!" repetitions were a magnificent explosion of flabbergasted joy. But the careful listener to Hodges's exultations will also hear him proclaim, once he has finally regained the capacity to report on more than his own level of astonishment, these words: "Horace Stoneham has finally got a winner!"

It's interesting that the broadcaster would choose, at this of all moments, to invoke the name of the team's owner. Somehow one doubts that Walter O'Malley's achievement would have been interjected had the Dodgers won. It's revealing of the warm regard in which Horace Stoneham was held by those around him that among all else being celebrated at that frantic moment, the end of the owner's fourteen-year wait between Giants pennants was a prominent note.

In this age of billionaire owners, and sports franchises filling the role of provinces within vast corporate empires, it may seem hard to hard to believe that the Giants baseball team was the only business that Horace C. Stoneham ever pursued. The Giants were a family business--the family business--in the purest sense of the term.

Horace's father, CharlesA. Stoneham, had been raised in New Jersey, and, according to Roger Angell, "his boyhood idol, his particular hero, was the great Giant left fielder Mike Tiernan, who came from Jersey City." ¹ Charles Stoneham grew up to be a successful Wall Street broker and financier but always remained a passionate Giants fan. He developed a friendship with the legendary Giants manager John McGraw, who was an avid stock market player. When McGraw was informed, in 1919, that the Giants ownership was looking to sell the team, he sought out Stoneham, "and the deal for the transfer of the Giant stock was quickly effected." ² Stoneham jumped at the chance to devote himself full-time to operating his beloved ball club.

Stoneham's son, Horace, was sixteen at the time. The boy had seen his first Giants game at age nine, at the Polo Grounds on the Fourth of July, 1912. Christy Mathewson pitched, and young Stoneham, like his father, was irretrievably engaged in a lifelong devotion to the game. He would go on to play for his high school team as a self-described "mediocre second baseman," and by the time he was in his early twenties, he was working in the family business. ³ He started out in the ticket department, and in his own description, "bit by bit I got into the running of the ball park, and then my father put me in charge of operations there." ⁴ When the senior Stoneham died in early 1936, his son inherited ownership; at age thirty-three, Horace Stoneham became the youngest man ever to own a Major League team. ⁵ He would make the Giants his life's work until being forced by financial necessity to sell the club, and retire, in 1975.

Temperament

Horace Stoneham, in temperament, could hardly have been more different from such flamboyant moguls as Bill Veeck, Charlie Finley, Ted Turner, and George Steinbrenner. He was "shy, self-effacing, and apparently incapable of public attitudinizing." ⁶ He was a hands-on owner in the sense that all...