The Chris Moeller Archives

Arthur was a New York guy, born in the Bronx in 1925. He chased around in the shadows of Yankee Stadium when Ruth and Gehrig were still uniformed stars inside of it, but he and his older brother, Milton, grew up fans of the St. Louis Browns. The why of it? Because the Yankees players walked right past them outside the ballpark. The visiting Browns didn’t. In fact, Arthur said later, sometimes the Browns players even bought meals for them and their urchin friends. He became forever enraptured by such Browns immortals as Harland Clift and Frank Mancuso. 

He went to work for the New York Mirror at the tender age of 17-- the war was on-- and he was a newspaper man throughout the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s-- a copy boy to start, eventually a columnist on the sports page. This was the era when sportswriters and players ate and drank with each other. They socialized together. If they were carousers, they caroused together. Richman’s historic connection to Don Larsen’s perfect game, tossed for the Yankees during the 1956 World Series, was that the pair of them stayed up drinking together the night before. Larsen could bend the elbow-- Mickey Mantle said he was the only Yankees that could outdrink him-- and the pitcher didn’t yet know he was slated to be the starter on the mound the following afternoon. Arthur was the best man at Larsen’s wedding. The pitcher’s rookie season of 1953 was spent with what was to be the last incarnation of the Browns. After that season, they were sold, uprooted to Baltimore, and became the Orioles. (The Orioles-- to this day-- reject all Browns history as an extension of their own. So, unlike, say, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Browns are true baseball orphans.) When Arthur got married at the age of 54, his best man was Willie Mays. The ushers were all current or former ballplayers-- Ralph Kiner, Ernie Banks, Ralph Branca, Joe Torre, Dick Williams, Lee Mazzilli, Joe Pignatano, Ted Sizemore, and Doug Flynn. Everybody in baseball knew Arthur Richman. Author Jeff Pearlman said he met the great Stan Musial because he was dining out with Arthur when Stan stopped by the table to chat. 

Arthur left the newspaper business in 1963, and joined the New York Mets’ front office during only the second year of the team's existence. He was in charge of promotions for a time, then became the club’s traveling secretary. What better gig than that one for a guy that held the connections in every National League city? He was eventually a vice president of the club. This became a second extended career-- the baseball executive. He was popular with the players. When future Hall of Famer Tom Seaver wanted out of Queens in 1977, he called Arthur and told him to inform the general manager. 

In July 1986, four Mets players-- Tim Teufel, Ron Darling, Bob Ojeda, and Rick Aguilera-- were arrested at a bar in Houston called Cooters. (I’m providing the name of the place here just for a little more color.) There had been a fight. Teufel and Darling were charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, a felony. The cops they tussled with were off-duty. Thanks to Arthur, they were out of jail quickly. No player got more than probation as a sentence. They served no suspensions from Major League Baseball and only received small fines. No games were missed by any of them. 

Three months later, the Mets won the World Series. The ground ball that famously rolled through the legs of the Red Sox’ Bill Buckner to win game 6 went very quickly into the possession of Arthur Richman. It was retrieved on the field by umpire Ed Montague, who took it into the Mets’ victorious clubhouse and told Arthur, you should get Mookie Wilson (the hitter) to sign it and you’ve got a great memento. Arthur followed his advice. That ball today has changed owners a small number of times. It's signed by Wilson, of course, but it’s addressed to Richman. It reads “Arthur-- The ball that won it for us. Mookie Wilson.” Richman put it up for auction in 1992, with all proceeds to charity. It was purchased for $93,000 by actor Charlie Sheen. It was subsequently sold again, and once more-- the most recent time to an anonymous buyer, for $418,000, and it became publicly-known last month that the owner of the ball is billionaire Steve Cohen, who has just added to his baseball memorabilia collection by purchasing the Mets. 

After the team’s 1988 return to the postseason, the players conducted the routine assignment of awarding World Series shares to team contributors, on the field and off. Arthur was given a half-share. Evidently, the same thing had happened in 1986. Only three Mets players voted him a full-share the first time around. Interestingly, those votes were all from Black players-- Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, and Kevin Mitchell. Arthur quit his job with the Mets after the second slight. Referring to ’86, he said, “After they voted me a half-share, I told them they could keep their $43,000. And I told them not to call me the next time they wound up in jail.” Arthur said that the Mets owner at that time, Nelson Doubleday, had also used anti-Semitic language around him. 

Turning down in excess of forty thousand dollars was apparently characteristic of Arthur. Acquaintances said it was routine for him to ask, after meeting old friends or new ones, whether they needed money. He was always for the underdog, which is why I keep returning to the Browns. He became a valued member of the official historical society for the once hapless and then long-defunct St. Louis Browns. He was an annual visitor to St. Louis for the old team’s summer reunion event, the Great Brownie Roundup. 

He didn’t stay unemployed for long after leaving the Mets, and he was about to become the opposite of a baseball underdog. The next season, in May, he became an assistant to Yankees club owner George Steinbrenner. He was unquestionably the singular voice in Steinbrenner’s ear that persuaded him to hire the “retread” manager Joe Torre before the ’96 season. It was not a popular hire in New York. Torre had never sniffed the World Series as a player for three different teams, or as the manager of the same three franchises after that. But he clearly had people's respect, that the same three clubs he played for-- the Mets, the Braves, and the Cardinals, all wanted him after to be their field manager. In the Daily News, upon the new hire, columnist Mike Lupica referred to Torre as “Below Average Joe.” The paper’s headline read, with its large tabloid font, “Say It Ain’ Joe.” 

But by the end of the 2000 season, the Yankees had won four championships. Four in five years was the storied club’s greatest run since the early ‘50s. It wasn’t just that Torre had been a buddy to Arthur. Arthur reminded George that he had a young team, and the patient, easy-mannered Torre was the perfect tactical and personality fit to lead it. To say the least, the candidate's characteristics did not fit the Steinbrenner track record for personnel hiring up to that point, or what most baseball observers believed was necessary to be successful in New York. 

Jeff Pearlman went on to write a book about the ’86 Mets and said he would run into Arthur frequently in New York and around the ballpark, always reintroducing himself because Arthur would invariably not remember having met him, yet Arthur would often ask him-- again-- if he needed any money. Pearlman would amuse himself by dropping the name of the ballplayer Shawn Green. Arthur would always reply with a variation of the following, in his memorable “Guys and Dolls” accent… “I tell George all the time-- you have to sign Shawn Green. He’s Jewish. He’s handsome. He would be the Jewish DiMaggio for the Yanks.” The union of player and franchise never came to be, but Green did sign with the Mets and play two seasons in Queens before ending a 15-year career. 

After a stroke in 2006, Arthur stepped away from the Yankees, and he died in 2009. He had been inducted into the St. Louis Browns Hall of Fame under the category of “fan,” and he was buried in his 1944 Browns cap. '44 was the only season in their 52-year existence that the Browns won the American League. This particular rite of fashion was a demand he made of his wife. “I have told (her) to make sure that no damn collector snatches it before they close the casket.” 

Which leads me to the memorabilia purchase I have made. It should relieve you to know that it didn’t involve overextending my credit on a successful bid for the Buckner ball, which Cohen plans to put on display next season at Citi Field. Nor is it Arthur’s precious Browns cap, which no doubt made it with him to his final mattress. But it was the posting for this particular item on eBay that got me to exploring the life of Richman. 

Somebody found, among Arthur’s possessions, a letter that was written to Arthur by Hall of Fame pitcher, Bob Gibson, the great Cardinal, who died only last month. It’s an oddity, no doubt. The letter is postmarked from San Francisco, June 5th, 1972, when Gibson was still an active player. It’s addressed to Arthur at what is presumably his home address then: 175 West 13th St in Lower Manhattan. In very small and intricate handwriting, Gibson has signed his first and last name in cursive on the outer envelope, and listed below that: Busch Stadium, St. Louis, MO 63102, as the return address. What’s inside the envelope is somewhat risqué, but would sneak past the censors on network television. It’s a greeting card that has not been filled out featuring a caricature of a hippie. The card reads, “If I blow your mind….” (Open card) “Will you suck my soul?” So.... yeah. 

Gibson has attached a note in his own hand, upon stationary for San Francisco’s Sheraton-Palace Hotel, “Hi Art, I saw this card and thought you might like to send it to a friend. See you in June. Bob.” The Cardinals will play in New York against the Mets June 24th and June 25th of 1972, winning a single game on the first day, then sweeping a doubleheader on the second. Is it just a jokey card, this reference, or is there some other additional story between pals, perhaps involving a particular other “friend” of Arthur Richman? The answer to the question has most assuredly died with Gibson. 

The hurler’s death, in an unusual fashion, drew me to the older and less-known man. Arthur Richman was the type of baseball man that doesn’t exist anymore. A front office figure that makes his living on the strength of personal relationships. The players then were not simply numbers on a board. They were more than the sum of their “win probability” or bWAR or the like, the type of new statistics in the business that seem-- to me-- to be nothing more than purposefully confusing permission for executives to financially devalue experienced players, shrink each man on the roster down to a numeric “value” that is within a small number of games of each other one, and then pay the cheapest ones and hoard more of the league's immense profit for themselves. It’s a Wall Street-style hustle, which should come as no surprise given the invasion of Wall Street/Ivy League MBAs into the sport’s management ranks. Arthur Richman was the anti-MBA. He was a street guy-- and a baseball man, and I didn’t know I was missing him until I found out who he had been.