Time: 8:38 Central (?)
Weather: Dry but hot, 91°
No opponent’s SB site, a popular fansite is Crashing the Pearly Gates
TV: Twins TV. Radio: Gene Autry’s wife talked him into recording “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
26-year-old Angels starter Grayson Rodriguez had two promising seasons with Baltimore until missing all of last year with injury; he eventually had “elbow debridement surgery,” and you can click on the Wiki link to see a gory photo of what such surgery looks like, if you wish. He’s a classic four-pitch pitcher with a 96 MPH fastball; pre-injury, the changeup was his best pitch. He had a good August, but other than that has struggled all season. Some of that might be bad luck; he’s got an enormously
high .328 BAbip.
I was gonna write about the tenure of Arte Moreno, the Angels’ owner from 2003 until just recently, when the team was sold to Stan Kroenke, a real estate billionaire who got his start the hardscrabble way; he married into the Wal-Mart owners’ family. Moreno was considered a hero to Angels fans for years; he successfully landed some of the biggest cable rights packages in baseball, and promised to spend the money on the team. By the time the sale was announced on Sept. 1, fans were thrilled to see Moreno gone. Just shows “you never know what you’ll get” when a new owner arrives.
There’s speculation about Kroenke’s stadium plans, perhaps in Anaheim, perhaps elsewhere. Writing about the land surrounding Angels Stadum, an L.A. Times writer says “The last time a team owner pitched a development plan for those parking lots — current owner Arte Moreno, in 2019 — the city estimated all the shops and restaurants and hotel rooms and offices and homes would generate $10 million per year in tax revenue.” Um, tax revenues from sports facilities NEVER add up anywhere CLOSE to projections. And, oh, also, there’s the little matter of how that whole deal was so corrupt and illegal that it landed the mayor in federal prison.
But, instead of writing about Arte Moreno and Stan Kroenke and associated dullards, I’ll do it about the original Angels owner: the Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry. (Most of this is from Warren Corbett at SABR and Frank Jackson at The Hardball Times; some is from Wiki pages on Autry and the minor/major league teams he was involved with.)
Autry was born in north Texas in 1907. The family was poor because Autry’s father was “worthless” (per Corbett), and survived off of the generosity of relatives in Texas in Oklahoma. Autry dropped out of high school and got a job with the railroad as a telegraph operator in Chelsea, OK to help pay the family’s bills.
According to Autry, who had played American Legion baseball as a shortstop, he was good enough to get an offer from the Cardinals to play for a Class D team. (The lowest level of the minors back then.) But the offer was for only $100/month. Autry was making $150 from the railroad. “If baseball paid as well as the railroads then, who knows, I might have a line or two today in the Encyclopedia of Baseball,” Autry said. He did continue playing for the company baseball team.
Autry would sometimes sing to himself on the night shift of the telegraph office; he’d bought his first guitar when he was eight years old. One night, a customer, the popular humorist Will Rogers, heard him singing and encouraged him to make it a career. (That might have been B.S., it’s a story Autry only told after Rogers died.) At age 20, Autry traveled to New York to audition for a “talking machine” company (record company). He didn’t get the job, but he got some advice to try working in radio, and he got a new name; he’d been born Orson Grover Autry.
By 1928 Autry was singing for a Tulsa radio station; by 1929, a recording deal with Columbia Records. Then he got a job on the Chicago station WLS-AM, on the show National Barn Dance. At the station, Autry got to meet some of the Cubs players; occasionally, he’d play some songs in the clubhouse. By 1934, Rogers was in Hollywood, along with songwriting partner Smiley Burnette. In Hollywood, Rogers met Cubs remote broadcaster Ronald Reagan, and tried dissuading him from trying to get into movies; “Well, it seems to me you’ve already got one of the best jobs there is. You get into all the games free and you get to hang around with the players.” (Reagan, you may have heard, got into movies despite Autry’s advice.)
Autry’s movie career started as a sidekick to the popular Western actor Ken Maynard. Maynard was eventually fired for boozed-up tantrums on set, and Autry took over as the star, making over 90 movies over the next three decades, all but one listed on IMDb as playing “Gene Autry.” Per the Corbett article, these movies quickly set up a rule; Gene Autry must never kiss the girl. The primary audience was pre-teen boys, and they thought kissing was yucky.
The movies made Republic Pictures boatloads of money, and Autry tried to get out of his lowballing contract; when he did, Republic invented another “singing cowboy,” Roy Rogers. When Autry served in WWII (mostly entertaining troops for morale), Republic terminated his contract and promoted Rogers; after the war, they went to court to have the contract re-instated. They won.
After the contract ended in 1947, Autry took a job from Columbia that paid much better. He eventually got into TV too, doing nearly 100 episodes of The Gene Autry Show. All the while doing a show on radio, as well. The radio show developed a “cowboy list of commandments,” including to never shoot first, be kind to children and animals, and never “advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.” Oh noes! Gene Autry was WOKE! (The TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sure is, too. Read about the background of the song sometime; it involves a guy writing a story for his kid because her mom was dying of cancer, jeez.)
And don’t forget the promotional stuff! Several different kinds of cap guns, comic books, lunchboxes, all sorts of things:
this site and this one. Man, if you had given me this stuff at age five, I would have been NUTS over it." data-portal-copyright="" />
What with the music, movies, radio, TV, promotional stuff and his investments in hotels/oil wells/real estate, Autry became LOADED. And he eventually bought a piece of the minor-league Hollywood Stars team (other co-owners included Gary Cooper, William Powell of The Thin Man, and Barbara Stanwyck of The Lady Eve). The team was a broadcasting pioneer; they were the first to regularly broadcast home games. And the first team to adopt batting helmets.
In 1960, Autry was contacted by Tigers legend-turned baseball executive Hank Greenberg; Greenberg was negotiating to get a new AL expansion team soon to play in Los Angeles. They discussed Autry’s radio station getting the rights to the games. But when Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley demanded compensation for having another team in “his” market, Greenberg (and his partner Bill Veeck) backed out. Autry jumped in. He’d have to pay the Dodgers $750,000 a year for awhile, yet it was worth it.
The Los Angeles Angels played at the minor-league Wrigley Field in 1961 (the Cubs did spring training in California). From 1962-1965 they played at Dodger Stadium (and paid O’Malley rent). And finally in 1966 they moved into Anaheim Stadium (now Angels Stadium).
The team under Autry’s ownership… just wasn’t that good. Despite drafting Nolan Ryan, despite Autry being willing to pay for free agents once that became possible (maybe he remembered his days getting lowballed by Republic Pictures). The team signed Reggie Jackson out from under the Yankees, traded for Rod Carew, and signed former Twin Lyman Bostock (who was tragically murdered at the end of his first Angels season). They just made a bunch of other decisions that didn’t pan out.
Many fans blamed Autry. He wasn’t a hands-on owner who forced dumb decisions on the front office. But he wasn’t someone who liked firing people, either. Autry seems to have been a genial guy who liked getting along with everybody. He never even hated his rival Roy Rogers. He wasn’t a good husband; he drank way too much, and cheated a lot in his younger years. Yet Ina May Spivey stayed married to him until she died in 1980. Presumably even if she couldn’t have gotten a ton in alimony, she would have gotten more than enough to be comfortable; Autry had a LOT of money. Spivey stayed with him. Everyone has their reasons. (Soon after she died, Autry married a woman 34 years younger — he was well into his 70s — who has an extremely odd Wiki photo.)
Ultimately Autry strikes me as about as harmless a Hollywood/music industry celebrity as one could wish for. Those are two notoriously nasty businesses; Autry seems to have been less about backstabbing others and holding grudges than he was about making the most bank on what opportunities he could. There’s an irony, of course, in a star whose movies wouldn’t even allow kissing being kind of a serial cheat. But he wasn’t selling anything deceptive in his persona to the general public. He was selling fun western adventures to kids, and telling them not to shoot first + to be nice. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
And if you want to hear Autry singing “you can feel on my legs and you can feel on my thighs, but if you feel on my legs, you got to ride me high,” oh, you know I’ve got you covered right here.
Isn’t that better than writing about later Angels owners? It is for me.
