There is a type of executive who prefers to rule behind the scenes, laying down a broad program within which his subordinates keep the operation going, putting on pressure subtly but firmly when he wants to change course and seldom baring the iron under the velvet glove. Jorge Pasquel bore not the slightest resemblance to this type. Once, when a no-hitter was broken up in the sixth inning, Jorge summarily restored the prize to the pitcher by overruling the official scorer and calling the play an error. The crowd was as overcome by this gallant gesture as if Pasquel had redeemed a lady's chastity. It accorded him a standing ovation, while Jorge beamed in his private box.
The American players marveled at the things they saw. Each team played four games a week, from Thursday through Sunday. Parque Delta, the stadium in
Mexico City where both the local team and, for some reason,
Veracruz (the city of
Veracruz is 200 miles to the east) played their home games, was a reasonably modern one, ornamented across the outfield with advertisements for soft drinks and whiskey. But in the other cities the players found skinned and bumpy infields enclosed by rickety wooden stands. Dust storms frequently halted the games. In Tampico a spur of the local railroad ran across the outfield.
The crowds were noisy and colorful. Shouting vendors sold tortillas and enchiladas. Gamblers roamed through the aisles placing bets, and cops, armed with tear-gas guns, stood watchfully by. One American reported that the wealthy Mexicans in the stands "wore guns like we wear key chains or jewelry."
The fans were ardent if unsophisticated. They cheered a
jit, accused the enemy pitcher of throwing an
ensalivada and never referred to the man who called balls and strikes as anything but an
idiota. A sacrifice delighted them as much as a home run, and they were so enchanted by dazzling catches that it was suspected some of the players show-boated for their benefit.
The players' lives were not without hazards. Loco Torres, a Tampico pitcher who apparently merited his nickname, refused to leave the mound one day when his manager thought he had lost his stuff. The manager, whose name was Marsans, shrugged and returned to the dugout. When Torres walked the next batter, Marsans trotted back out to the mound. Torres insisted on staying. Marsans ranted, and the crowd shrieked for a new pitcher. But Torres stayed.
When Marsans made his third appearance on the field, he carried a fungo bat with him. Waving it at Torres, he drove him off the field. Each time Torres stopped to argue, Marsans whacked him across the buttocks, driving him finally into the waiting arms of the local police, who dragged him off to jail.
Gardella and
Owen seemed to possess similar properties for attracting trouble. Danny, finding himself alone in Pasquel's office shortly after his arrival, picked up a pistol he saw lying on a filing cabinet. "I wanted to see if it worked," Danny says. He pointed it out the window and pulled the trigger. It worked.
As soon as he arrived,
Owen was named manager of the Veracruz Blues. His tenure was brief and stormy. One day
Babe Ruth, who had been fishing in
Mexico, agreed to put on a batting demonstration before a game. Ram?n Braga?a, a
Veracruz pitcher, was assigned to serve them up to the Babe. The great slugger, 10 years out of the majors and badly out of shape, huffed and puffed but could not get a piece of the ball. On the sidelines the manager of the
Mexico City Reds began to heckle the sweating Braga?a, who was doing the best he could to let the Babe hit one.
When the Red manager went to the mound to tell Braga?a that he wanted to bring in a pitcher of his own, Braga?a shoved him away. The manager, angered because he had lost face in front of the crowd, came to blows with Braga?a in the dressing room after the game.
Owen broke up the fight by pushing the
Mexico City manager out of the clubhouse. But in a moment there came a loud banging on the door.
"Somebody wanted in pretty bad,"
Owen recalls. "The hasp went flying off and in ran this character with an old-fashioned six-shooter. He turned out to be the manager's brother. He forced Braga?a to get down on his knees and told him to apologize. I guess he got the apology. I didn't wait around to see."
Trouble lurked everywhere. Once when Owen believed the umpire, who was a Cuban, had missed a close play at the plate, he rushed toward him to complain. "Don't go too close, Mickey!" yelled outfielder Bobby Estalella, another former major leaguer. "He'll crack you over the head with his mask."
Suddenly Mickey found Jorge Pasquel, who had rushed out onto the field, arguing at his side. The umpire threatened to bring down his mask on Jorge's head, and the omnipresent bodyguard pulled a knife. The umpire the field and, that evening, the country.
If the umpire thought
Cuba looked better than
Mexico City,
Vern Stephens made a similar comparison between the
St. Louis Browns and
Mexico. His short happy Mexican life began when Pasquel whisked him from the airport to the ball park, where he introduced his latest acquisition to the cheering crowd. After the game, Pasquel asked
Stephens to be his house guest. The "house" proved to be a palace five stories high, one of which was a gymnasium and another a gigantic closet containing Jorge's wardrobe.
Stephens was quartered in a room above the seven-car garage, which also housed Pasquel's bodyguards.
"I slept under velvet sheets,"
Stephens says. "The rugs were so thick you couldn't see your toes when you walked around barefoot. It was like out of the
Arabian Nights."
That night Pasquel took
Stephens and Gardella to dinner at a luxury hotel. The inevitable bodyguards tagged along. "When we walked in, the head waiter literally ran toward the door," Vern recalls. "Some people hadn't quite finished their dinner at the best table, but the waiters hustled them right out of there. We sat down, and the bodyguards eased the .45s out of their holsters and plunked them down on the table alongside the silverware."
The next morning
Stephens agreed verbally to a five-year contract that he claims totaled $250,000. Pasquel mailed a certified check for $25,000 to Vern's wife in Long Beach and put the rest in escrow in a
Mexico City bank. In his first game
Stephens singled to win the game in the ninth inning. The spectators carried him off the field triumphantly.
"But I could see that the thing wasn't going to work out financially," he says. "It was a wonderful dream but the people Pasquel was appealing to couldn't afford it, no way. I knew that when I wanted the $250,000 it wouldn't be there—or I couldn't get it."
Stephens was treated as something special. He did not travel with his team but flew around the circuit in a private plane with one of the Pasquel brothers. His special treatment included a bodyguard, who went everywhere with him and who apparently opened his letters before they were passed on to him.
"I knew after three days I wanted to go home,"
Stephens says. "But the question was
how?"
On the other side of the border there were interested parties who asked themselves the same question. One morning when
Stephens arrived in
Monterrey, near the American border, he was met in the hotel lobby by an American friend. "The Browns say they'll give you what you're asking for," he told
Stephens. Vern could not help looking over his shoulder. "Now listen to this. Your dad and Jack Fournier [a scout for the Browns] are in a bar close by. Go two blocks down the street to your and two bars on the right."
In a few minutes
Stephens was joined for breakfast, as usual, by his bodyguard. Fortunately, the bodyguard was nursing a hangover and abruptly asked to be excused.
"When he went in the men's room door,"
Stephens says, "I went out the front door. In 10 minutes we were on our way. It's about a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the border, and we knew that if Pasquel realized what was going on he had the power to have us stopped. They checked cars, anyway, at the border, and if there were more people in one than the permit listed, you might be in trouble."
Two blocks from the border Fournier stopped the car and
Stephens got out. He put on Fournier's hat and his father's coat and walked gingerly across the bridge to
Laredo, in
Texas.
"That ended Mexican ball for me," he says. "All I had were the clothes on my back. The rest of my things were still in the hotel. Even my spikes and glove."
Though Stephens returned the check for $25,000, Pasquel was furious. That players he had befriended and paid generously were betraying him was bad enough. He was even more affronted by American baseball officials who called him an "outlaw." He complained that it was he, and not they, who was being harassed. As evidence, he cited the fact that he was not able to buy American-made bats and balls because the manufacturers feared a retaliatory boycott by Organized Baseball.
"When our league was struggling to get started," Pasquel said, "major league scouts came down here and stole our players. Why? Because they offered them more money. We're giving those people a dose of their own medicine."
Pasquel stepped up his raids on the major leagues.
Bob Feller rejected his offer.
Ted Williams ignored the blank contract Pasquel sent him. But other American stars wavered in the face of temptation. Bernardo Pasquel entertained Yankee Shortstop Phil Rizzuto and his wife at dinner in the
Waldorf-Astoria, offering him a long-term contract at 512,500 a year and a 515,000 bonus.
Rizzuto promised to think it over. Before Pasquel received an answer, the
Yankees brought suit to keep him from tampering with their players.
Later Alfonso Pasquel visited
Stan Musial in his hotel room. While
Musial, who was making $13,500 a year with the
Cardinals, watched in astonishment, Pasquel spread five cashier's checks, each for $10,000, on his bed. This, Pasquel told him, was merely a bonus. While
Musial turned the offer over in his mind, Cardinal Manager Eddie Dyer (an old
Rickey man) effectively intervened.
"Stan, you've got two children," Dyer said. "Do you want them to hear someone say, 'There are the kids of a guy who broke a contract'?"
Musial declined to go to
Mexico, but the Pasquels scored their most dramatic coup by hijacking three other
Cardinals, Pitchers Max Lanier and Fred Martin and Second Baseman Lou Klein. Lanier was the prize. Considered by some baseball men to be the best pitcher in the
National League, he had a 6-0 record with
St. Louis when he for
Mexico in June.
The uproar took on special overtones. In
Washington, a
State Department official wished Organized Baseball would show a desire to clean up its differences with the Mexicans. "Baseball is making it tough for us," the anonymous official said. "We try to build up good will, and this sort of thing tears it down." In
Cincinnati, Baseball Commissioner A. B. (Happy) replied that the U.S. Department of State Department has enough to do without meddling in baseball."
But the Mexican problem was beginning to solve itself. Attendance, after the novelty of new faces had run its course, quickly declined. There were heavy rains that summer. At critical moments during a night game the electricity would fail. Both the playing fields and the equipment were inadequate (American players often referred to their "drugstore bats").
As conditions deteriorated tempers grew shorter. The Mexican players (making about $250 a month) resented the high salaries paid to foreigners. American players complained about the food and climate. Travel was arduous at best, and sometimes hazardous. Landing strips in a few towns were simply open pastures. "It was unnerving,"
Mickey Owen says. "Coming in for a landing we'd look out and see eight or 10 of those big black Mexican vultures waiting for us. That's one of the things I remember best about Mexico—those vultures."
Yet the planes came to look awfully sweet to
Sal Maglie, who was the only American player assigned to Puebla. "I didn't care much about flying," Maglie says, "but the only other way to get in and out of Puebla was by bus over the mountains. The buses were driven by madmen. They used to push those old wrecks as hard as they could on the narrow, winding roads in the mountains." Sal, too, has alarming memories of vultures.
Nor did the American players prove to be the superstars Pasquel thought he had bought. When
Veracruz, which Pasquel had stocked with the best players because it was his favorite team, sank into fourth place, Jorge took matters into his own hands. He fired Owen as manager and named as Owen's successor—Jorge Pasquel!
"It's quite possible I did a lousy job of managing," Mickey says. "But I think the main thing was that Jorge had a sneaky ambition to be the manager himself."
Pasquel, in uniform, took his place in the third-base coaching box. When he waved his arms, which he did frequently, his 12-karat diamond ring glittered in the sun. The crowd roared its appreciation. Between innings Pasquel retired to the dugout, where a valet, a napkin draped over one arm, served him steaming cups of vegetable juices and platters of chicken or crabs. When he had finished eating, his valet produced a tooth brush, with which Jorge cleaned his teeth. At the end of 10 days,
Veracruz still languished in fourth place, the cheers for its gallant leader were not so delirious, and Jorge stepped aside in favor of a man named Chili Lopez.
Meanwhile Owen was growing restless. "Mickey came to me one day looking very worried," Maglie recalls. "He'd heard somewhere that I was going to leave
Mexico. I told him there was nothing to the rumor. 'That's good,' Mickey said. 'We've got to stick together.' "
A day or two later Danny Gardella called at Owen's apartment to drive him to the ball park. It was his usual procedure, but Mickey did not appear in response to Danny's horn. Finally, the landlady came out and said that Mickey had gone off in a cab.
"I knew I'd made a mistake, and I wanted to go home," Owen says. "I was afraid if I tried to leave by train or plane Jorge would find out and have me quarantined. I took the cab to
Brownsville,
Texas, and it cost me $250. It was the biggest cab fare I ever ran up."
Though the league lingered fitfully for one more season and part of another, Owen's defection was its death blow. The illusion of stability, which had been Pasquel's biggest selling point, was shattered. A few Americans returned to
Mexico in 1947 because they had no place else to go. In most cases their salaries were cut, and only a handful of players lasted until the end of the season. Pasquel lost interest and turned his attention to other things, like big-game hunting in
Africa. Several years after the great raids, he was killed when his private plane crashed in the Mexican hills.
There were no outstretched arms awaiting the prodigals in their native land. Organized Baseball had imposed a five-year suspension on all the "contract-jumpers" except
Stephens, who had returned to the Browns before opening day. With the collapse of Pasquel's league, the 18 suspended players sought jobs outside of Organized Baseball. They played in
Cuba during the winter and in
Canada during the summer. In 1948 they formed a team called the Max Lanier All-Stars and barnstormed across the
United States. Barred from stadiums owned by teams in Organized Baseball and able to play only against semipros, the All-Stars won all of their 81 games but arrived home broke.
Players like Gardella, who had a family and no savings, were in trouble. "On Sundays I plied my trade with a team on
Staten Island," Gardella says. "One day a wire came from the Commissioner's office informing our opponents, a Negro team called the Cleveland Buckeyes, that none of their players would be allowed into Organized Baseball if they played against me.
I was an outlaw!"Nobody would have me. God invests himself in every atom of the universe, but I was cast out. Finally a friend of mine sent me to his dentist's brother, who was a lawyer. I gave him earnest ear."
The lawyer was Frederic A. Johnson, who had been a baseball fan since childhood, a classmate of at <a href= "http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/topic/article/Harvard_Law_School/1900-01-01/2100-12-31/mdd/index.htm">Harvard Law School and the author of an unfavorable treatise on baseball's reserve clause. Johnson and Gardella sued Organized Baseball for $300,000 in damages. Shortly afterward, Lanier and Fred Martin, having retained their own lawyer, sued baseball for $2,500,000, charging that it was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.