The Roger Angell Baseball Collection - Plot & Excerpts
The news, which appeared in the Times late last month, was somehow both startling and boring—instant antipodal emotions that only stories about quintuplets or the business side of sports arouse in me. The Times’ account was a blurry, hedging affair, beginning with a denial by the Giants’ front office of the reported deal, followed by several paragraphs explaining why it probably would go through. It was generally known, of course, that the club has been in financial difficulties for several years, and earlier this summer its president, Horace C. Stoneham, announced that his controlling share of the National Exhibition Company (which is the team’s florid, nineteenth-century corporate handle) was up for sale. A San Francisco-based group, headed by a real-estate man named Robert A. Lurie and including the National League president, Chub Feeney, who is a nephew of Stoneham’s, and Bill Rigney, a former Giant manager, had been talking with Stoneham, but the Japanese offer of seventeen million dollars—for the club, its minor-league affiliates, and some baseball and hotel properties at the Giants’ spring-training headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona—is apparently a good deal higher than any other bids so far.* The sale, in any case, will require the approval of the other National League owners, who will vote on the matter sometime after the World Series.
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