First pitch: 7:10 Central
Weather: National Weather Service somewhat still gutted, partly cloudy, a nice 72°
Opponent’s SB site: Gaslamp Ball. (Not the same as the movie.)
TV: Twins TV. Radio: The Chicken first appeared in a 1974 cartoon TV ad for radio station KGB
The Padres starter, Nestor Cortes, was traded by the Yanquis to Milwaukee in December, and from Milwaukee to San Diego for some light-hitting OF dude, and Cortes has only pitched in six games all year and Zebby Matthews isn’t very good yet, sooooo…
Today we are going to talk about Joan Beverly Mansfield, who later became Joan Kroc when she married McDonald’s owner Ray Kroc. (Or, became Mrs. Kroc when she changed her name to that. You don’t have to change your name when you get married, we didn’t,
and it doesn’t automatically change when you get married, you have to file paperwork for this.)
Joan Mansfield was born in West Saint Paul in 1928; her father was a shopkeeper and, later, a railroad telegraph operator. (So, sending “it’s fu**ing cold” via Morse Code beeps and bloops.)
Joan had musical talent (as did her mom), and played keyboards at The Criterion, a swank restaurant on University Avenue (where the treasured local restaurant Trung Nam is today). In 1957, Ray was touring the country, checking up on his McDonald’s franchises and looking to open more, when he was at The Criterion and saw Joan. He got bitten by the Love Bug. Here’s the image I could find of The Criterion:
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Why parrots? I have no idea why parrots. It doesn’t sound nearly as cool, to me, as the old Diamond Jim’s Supper Club in Mendota Heights, which had actual LADIES SWINGING ON TRAPEZES OVER YOUR HEAD, but, hey, sometimes diners want it mellow. Plus parrots.
In any case, Ray & Joan fell hard for each other, a bit of a problem as both were already married to other people. But the course of true love never did run smooth.
Now things get odd! Joan sticks with her husband, and Ray divorces his wife. Then he marries a DIFFERENT person, a Hollywood socialite who was John Wayne’s secretary. Then, Joan & Ray bump into each other at a McDonald’s convention — in 1969, 12 years after they first met! Why was she at a McDonald’s convention? Oh, after they fell in love the first time, Joan’s husband ended up with the first McDonald’s franchise in Rapid City, SD.
I told ya it got odd.
This time, after meeting at the convention, they both get divorces and marry each other. (He was 68, she was 40.) Ray, of course, was by then fabulously wealthy. The original McDonald’s was a restaurant in San Bernadino, run by two brothers named McDonald. Ray paid them Not Much for the franchise rights and made out like a bandit using their ideas. It’s dramatized in the movie The Founder, with Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc. (It’s mostly a snoozer, although Keaton is good, as are Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch as the brothers.)
In 1973, Ray buys the San Diego Padres. He’d grown up a huge baseball fan, and used to play the game as a kid in the alleyway behind his family home, with a garbage-can lid as home plate; backyard baseball rules activate! The team had been “sold” to another guy, an owner of a grocery-store chain who planned to move the team to D.C. But — they still had 15 years left on their lease! Sound familiar?
Ray Kroc kept the Padres in San Diego, which is good (not like they would have gotten out of that lease anyways), but, mostly, as a team owner, he was an ignoramus. (The vast majority of team owners are.) Opening weekend, his first season as owner, he goes on the P.A. and yells about the players being “stupid.” (Willie McCovey was not pleased.) Kroc signs whatever names he can remember hearing somewhere and later trades them away because they cost too much. He’s passionate about baseball but doesn’t understand how to build a team (or hire somebody who can), and is constantly griping about everything to the press. In the meantime, Ray donates to Tricky Dick and probably helped kill a minimum-wage increase. Then, in 1984, he dies.
Joan Kroc, inheriting a giant ton of money, promptly starts giving much of it away to causes & charities Ray would not have approved of. Homeless shelters, AIDS research, nuclear disarmament campaigns, Walter Mondale.
And Joan is not as big a baseball fan as Ray. (When he told her he was interested in buying the Padres, she asked him if that was some kind of monastery.) So she tries to give away the Padres. For free!
As Marc Normandin writes, Joan Kroc tried giving the Padres to the city of San Diego! With a $100 million trust fund to cover any initial losses!
The other baseball owners said “no,” and that was the end of that. No publicly-owned teams, not in our sport!
There’s a word for this. Would you like to sing it with me? To the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme.
M-O-N. O-P-O…
Now, other businesses don’t have any say in who gives their business to whom.
Let’s say I own the finest collection of vintage porn since the director of I Love Lucy (yes, he made a ton of pornos in the 1920s), and I own a store that rents out these Fine Films, and I decide to donate it to the city of Saint Paul. Being wise and benevolent city managers who approve of flapper wankage, the city managers say “thanks” and accept my gracious offer.
The other owners of Porne Shoppes can’t get together and say “fie! No city ownership of a business such as ours!”
But baseball owners can. They have an anti-trust exemption gifted them by the Supreme Court in 1922, and they didn’t even have to buy the Court bribery vacations for it. The author of the decision was Oliver Wendell Holmes. Do you think he has a baseball card? Darn tootin’, he has a baseball card:
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Would a publicly-owned baseball team be run well? There’s absolutely no guarantee that it would. It might be run by morons.
But then any stadium built by taxpayers for such a team wouldn’t be shoveling money into the pockets of some weirdos who inherited it, or stole their most lucrative idea from somebody else, or whatever completely useless and probably quite socially harmful thing they did to get obscenely rich.
Is it impossible? Not as impossible as you might think!
The Supremes (not the fun ones who sang to the backbeat of the GREATEST BASS PLAYER EVER) could possibly look at baseball’s antitrust exemption.
In 2019, some finance dude bought Cangrejeros de Santurce, one of six pro baseball teams in Puerto Rico. He found out that the stadium they played in had withstood some hurricane damage in 2017. (Yes, and the Twins played there in 2018, because “grounds crews are straightup bad-asses.”) The finance dude and the major of San Juan got into it over who would pay for fully fixing the building. The finance dude threatened to move the team to another city an hour away.
The Puerto Rico baseball league told this finance dude to get bent, seized control of the team, and sold it to somebody else.
Now the finance dude says “no, that’s a monopoly, you can’t run a monopoly just because in 1922 some judge said baseball owners can.” He’s suing.
The finance dude has already lost in local and federal court. Who both said that the 1922 exemption applies to “the business of baseball,” not just MLB. So the finance dude could appeal to the Supremes and call for the antitrust exemption to be overturned. As Chris Deubert at Forbes writes,“the Supreme Court has been more willing in recent years to overturn long-held precedents,” which is putting it mildly!
I don’t lay odds on court cases, but it’s strange to think that some finance dude who’s probably worth a lot, but nowhere near as much as Ray Kroc, might be able to overturn a precedent that Joan Kroc didn’t think was worth going to court over.
Oh, and my favorite Joan Kroc story? She banned drinking in the clubhouse. This did not sit well with Goose Gossage. ‘“She’s poisoning the world with her cheeseburgers and we can’t have a beer after a game,” Gossage said. The two later reconciled. “I said something very disrespectful and she fired right back at me. She was as tough as she was nice … and she was probably the nicest, kindest lady I ever knew. At the end of that meeting, we hugged.’”
Here, there’s no Goose, but a different avian creature, played by Ted Giannoulas:
