Washington Swept Here

by Jim Siergey

Herb Washington
Designated to run
Not to shake hands
Or kiss baby’s faces
But solely to suit up
And steal some bases.

 

We salute Herb on this other Washington’s birthday: 33 runs scored and 31 stolen bases in 105 games with nary a time at bat! (A repost from 2017.)

MLB All-Black-Friday Team

by Michael X. Ferraro

1B   Marv Droneberry
2B   Etsy Caballero
SS   Kevin OverStocker
3B   Frank “Home Shopping Network” Baker

OF   John Vander Wal Mart
OF   Randy Arozamazonarena
OF   Nick Markdownkakis

C   Pat Borders

LHP   Chris Sale
RHP   John “Discount of” Montefusco
RP   Craig Leffertovers

MGR   Clearance “Cito” Gaston

ANNOUNCER   Buy Saam

 

Recap: In the first two installments of this short tall tale (links here — Part 1 and Part 2), the re-animated Philadelphia A’s owner-manager Connie Mack has traveled six feet up and 3,000 miles west to lay claim to his former team. Mr. Mack and his new lawyer (gimmicky billboard class-action guy Howard Gumption) have just dropped some bombshell news on the A’s imminently carpetbagging front office: if they try to move to Vegas, he has the right to buy back his team.

 Part III:

“Go West, Dead Man…”

After a whirlwind meeting, Mr. Mack and his entourage left the building. The current owner of the A’s, Joe Fissure, was presently in mid-fume, grilling his high-priced Ivy League lawyer about how the holy hell a dead guy and a billboard clown had him on the ropes.

“I’m not saying we’re on the defensive, Joe,” said the lawyer. “I’m just saying that if that agreement turns out to be legit, they might have a case to present in court.”

Meanwhile Doyle Cabal, the team president, was googling information about the claims that had been put forth in this room. Fissure groaned: “How the fuck am I getting jammed up by a zombie with a cocktail napkin?! I thought zombies weren’t real! Since when is that a thing? I need to be briefed on the new trends.”

Cabal groaned even louder, and all heads in the conference room whipped his way. He grimaced, reading from his screen. “So, it definitely looks like there were league meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1954 when they were trying to sort out the sale of the A’s. So that part of their story lines up, at least.”

Mack’s eldest sons, Roy and Earle, had been the driving force behind the team’s sale, and, by many accounts, were not the sharpest spikes in the equipment room. Mr. Mack, despite being long revered as an icon of the game, was one of the least financially solvent owners in the majors. He’d retired as manager after the 1950 season (his 50th at the helm), but four years later, at the age of 91, had decided that he needed to cash out, for his wife and children, rather than continue the struggle against decreasing odds of success. The other team in town, the National League’s upstart Phillies, had finally tasted some success and stolen much of the A’s thunder, and Mr. Mack couldn’t afford to run a farm system, which was what all the successful franchises were now doing…

It gutted him that he and his sons couldn’t find qualified local buyers to keep the team in Philadelphia. He was not at all pleased that the team would be moving to Kansas City after its purchase by new owner Arnold Johnson, for he knew that generations of Philadelphia Athletics fans would feel abandoned.

So, unbeknownst to almost the entirety of the outside world until seven decades later, the one concession he got that Fall, during special meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria, was an agreement by league owners and AL President William Harridge that, “If the franchise is ever going to head East again, Mr. Mack alone (and not his heirs) will have the first right of refusal to purchase the team back at fair market value.” This codicil (thought to be merely a symbolic gesture at the time) was written on the hotel napkin, and signed by both the league president and Mr. Mack. The man was 91 at the time. Practically insolvent, if not incontinent. It was a gesture. A courtesy.

The Philadelphia A’s weren’t even sold to Johnson’s group until a month later, but it turned out the napkin lasted longer than anything else in that room.

************

And now, 69 years later, the formerly threadbare wallet of Cornelius McGillicuddy was bursting with well over a billion bucks. The GoFundMe started by Ho Gumption had obliterated all previous online fund-raising records, with posts from George Clooney, Stephen King, Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell stoking public interest to the tune of eight figures of donations. Late night TV host Stephen Colbert even had actor James Cromwell, a Mack doppelganger, on the show, portraying the baseball man and “passing the hat.” (Colbert had initially invited Mack to come on the program and do the solicitation, and the gent was game, but the CBS lawyers kiboshed that plan, leery both of his undead status and the legal implications of soliciting funds. Colbert waggishly said CBS was intentionally spiting its top demographic, “centenarians into boring sports.”)

As you may have noticed, billionaires usually get what they want, so it’s kind of extra fun when two are at odds. Current A’s owner Fissure had the support of MLB Commissar Mangled, some of the other owners and some Vegas movers and shakers, but Mr. Mack had… pretty much everyone else.

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