Sport: Sam’s Last Sale

Silver-haired Sam Breadon stepped out of his St. Louis office into a corridor crowded with reporters. They had been kept waiting half an hour. They knew as well as Breadon (rhymes with raidin’) what the news would be, but he found it hard to get it out. Said the boss of the St. Louis Cardinals: “Uh—the Cardinals, that is uh—uh—a deal has been consummated. The Cardinals have been sold.”

Money talked, even if Sam couldn’t.

The sales tag was an estimated $3,500,000, a figure that would make it the biggest baseball deal ever swung. But Sam Breadon, baseball’s supersalesman, didn’t look happy. His chin trembled and he went on haltingly: “I feel very badly. … It’s such a big organization and so successful.” Bob Hannegan, who quit as Postmaster General (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) to take Sam’s place as boss of the Cardinals, stepped forward to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

It was a big moment for sports-loving Hannegan too: he had been a three-sport letter man at St. Louis University, an in corrigible baseball fan in Washington and a faithful follower of the football Redskins. Hannegan was the new name, but old baseball reporters couldn’t keep their eyes off the old face : they had never seen Sam so visibly shaken.

Crepe & Cardinals. Sam Breadon was not a shaky character. Back in 1926, when he calmly traded off Rogers Hornsby, the hero who won the first World Series St. Louis ever had, riotous fans hung crepe on Sam’s office door, jumped on the running board of his car to shout insults. Sam’s chilly blue eyes never flickered. He crossed up the fans again when he peddled off the great Dizzy Dean at the height of Dizzy’s fame, for $185,000 (the Cubs bought a pitcher with a bad arm). Sam Breadon sold baseball heroes as he also sold Pierce-Arrows, and the fertile Cardinal “farm system” which Vice President Branch Rickey built for him produced new-model heroes who won nine National League pennants. St. Louis thought of Sam as a skinflint horse-trader.

Tall Ones and Trades. In private guise, Sam Breadon was a hospitable fellow, a genial server of long tall drinks. He liked to sing in barbershop quartets. He was a good guy, most baseball writers agreed; but he “would trade his grandmother if the price was right.” In his way, he had a certain amount of sentiment for his ball club. Last year, when he flew down to Mexico, rumors spread that he was selling the Cardinals to Mexico’s Pasquel Brothers. Sam denied it. Said he, grinning: “The Cards are not for sale . . . that is, [unless] some one wants to pay five times what they’re worth.”

No one thought that Bob Hannegan & Co.* had paid anything like five times too much. But it was no secret that the Cardinal farm system was running a bit dry.

(Rickey was now growing a better crop in Brooklyn.) Whether that prompted 72-year-old Salesman Sam’s last big sale, nobody knew. All Sam Breadon said was:

“Every day I am less sufficient, and at my age it’s time to quit.”

* A syndicate of St. Louis businessmen.