Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,705
By This is the grave of George Weiss.
Born in 1894 in New Haven, Connecticut, Weiss was a middle class kid. His family ran a grocery store. He was a great student and managed to get into Yale, but had to leave to help with the store. He never did get that degree. Instead, he decided to use his mind on baseball, his passion. He certainly wasn’t good enough to play but he thought he could create his own team and that was the New Haven MaxFeds in the Colonial League, which was associated with the Federal League. That didn’t last long because the Federal League didn’t last long. But he was good with money and in 1919, got someone to loan him $5,000 to start a New Haven team in the Eastern League, at that time a Class A league. It became a successful franchise through the 20s in an era where these teams weren’t that connected to major league teams and they were expected to actually compete instead of serving the big league’s needs at a given time. Well, his did and he was hired in 1928 to run the Baltimore Orioles, then in the Class AA International League.
In 1932, the New York Yankees hired Weiss to run its minor league operations. Well, we all know how this turned out, with too many damn titles for the Yankees. They were already on a great run at the major league level of course, but Weiss helped them continue this for decades. The pioneers of the modern farm system concept were the St. Louis Cardinals and Yankees owner Jacob Rupert wanted to bring this idea to the American League. Yeah, I’d say that worked out alright. In 1931, the Yankees had four affiliated farm teams. In 1937, they had 16. Today of course most of the teams are back down to about 5 because the owners are tremendously cheap billionaires who don’t care about baseball and investing in the future of their team, and I say this with no bitterness as a Seattle Mariners fan watching his team waste the best starting rotation in the game with Mitch Garver in the starting lineup.
Anyway, using the Kansas City Blues and Newark Bears as its main pipelines, Weiss’ regime started pumping new talent onto the major league roster. Joe DiMaggio was in fact purchased from another minor league team directly, but among the talent that came up through Weiss’ operation includes Yogi Berra, Joe Gordon, Phil Rizzuto, Jerry Coleman, Hank Bauer, and a lot of other solid contributors to the Yankees’ dominance from the late 30s through the 50s. Rupert sold the Yankees to a group that included Larry MacPhail in 1945 and Weiss’ time almost ended in 1947 because MacPhail, a violent drunk, started shouting at Weiss one night at a team function and then fired him, but what happened after that is the other partial owners bought MacPhail out and promoted Weiss to general manager.
After that, Weiss effectively ran the franchise. Dan Topping and Del Webb (yep, the Sun City retirement community guy) were hands-off owners, especially Webb. So Weiss had the best team, the mind, and all the resources. It will not surprise you that the Yankees remained really good with all this going for them. Weiss’ first major move was trading for Eddie Lopat from the White Sox in 1948, who immediately became the team’s best pitcher. In fact, one of Weiss’ new avenues of brilliance was exploiting the idiocy and stinginess of other owners and effectively turning them into a farm system too. After 1948, Weiss also fired Bucky Harris as manager after a not great year and brought in Casey Stengel and so then the Yankees had the best manager in the game too.
The system kept working through the 50s. The famous story of Mickey Mantle being discovered in random park in Oklahoma came because Weiss had a lot of scouts out there looking to keep the Yankees on top and let’s say that signing worked out fairly well for all involved. Whitey Ford also came through the system in this era. Of course scouting minor league players will lead to mixed success at best and no team in the sport has ever had a perfect record here. That includes under Weiss. But then Weiss knew by then that he could use other major league teams as effective minor league teams, taking useful players from them for very little. Weiss treated both the Baltimore Orioles and Kansas City A’s this way. The number of players Weiss picked up from these and a few other teams is ridiculous–Bob Turley, Don Larsen, Clete Boyer, Ralph Terry, Roger Maris. The Maris trade came directly from having a really bad season for them in 1950–79-75 and 3rd place, 15 back of the White Sox. Weiss wasn’t having any of that shit. Thus, Maris, who merely immediately won back to back MVPs and set the single season home run record.
Weiss was, uh, no saint. For one, he was a racist and did not want to integrate the Yankees. He finally did with Elston Howard and he wasn’t the last GM to do that, but he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, he would brag about how he would never integrate the team and there was an unofficial policy that while the Yankees might have Black players in the farm system, they would never get promoted. Supposedly, this is why Howard was switched to catcher, so that Weiss could use the excuse of “sorry, we have Yogi Berra.” But eventually Weiss couldn’t keep a player this good off the team and of course everyone wondered when the Yankees would bring a Black player on the roster. But even outside of the racism, very few people actually liked Weiss. Even Berra noted that Weiss was “difficult.” Later baseball writers such as Roger Kahn and David Halberstam wrote at length Weiss and his awfulness.
After the 1961 season, Weiss was up for a new challenge. With the National League returning to the New York, he decided if he could build the Mets up from nothing and became their president. His first move was to bring Casey Stengel over. In the end, this probably had a bigger negative effect on the Yankees, who did win the World Series in 1962, but started fading shortly after and were actually bad by the late 60s. This was largely an ego thing from Weiss, who most certainly had a very large ego. It didn’t work. He did not create a solid farm system with the Mets and pretty much the best player he developed was Ed Kranepool, The Maven of Mediocrity himself. They did however soon beat the Yankees in attendance, which was something I guess.
Weiss retired from the Mets in 1966. In 1971, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He died in 1972, at the age of 78.
George Weiss is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.
Weiss was named the Sporting News Executive of the Year four different times. If you would like this series to visit other executives to win that honor, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lee MacPhail, one of three members of that famed baseball family who have won this and who won it in 1966, is in Scarsdale, New York and Dallas Green, who won in 1994, is in Newark, Delaware. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.