The Giants Almost Headed Not Quite So Far West

MINNEAPOLIS, June 16 - If not for Walter O'Malley, Willie Mays might be remembered for making a leaping catch 100 yards from a grazing cow.

If not for a few twists of fate, Mays could have an "M" on the cap in his Hall of Fame plaque, and the scrum for Barry Bonds's 73rd home run ball might have occurred in the upper deck of the Metrodome.

The Minneapolis Giants? Fifty years ago, it did not sound so crazy.

On Thursday night, the Giants wrapped up their first regular-season series in the city that was a candidate to be their home when they abandoned New York in 1957. For area baseball fans with long memories, the three games with the Twins offered a reminder of what might have been had O'Malley, the Dodgers' owner, not persuaded Horace Stoneham of the Giants to join him in California.

According to newspaper and historical accounts, Stoneham discussed moving here with Minneapolis officials as early as 1955, when concern over declining attendance and the decrepit condition of the Polo Grounds prompted him to consider his options. The Giants owned the Class AAA Minneapolis Millers, giving them territorial rights, and Metropolitan Stadium was under construction on 164 acres of farmland in suburban Bloomington in hopes of luring a big-league team.

How seriously Stoneham considered Minneapolis before choosing San Francisco is unknown. Stoneham died in 1990, and the major players in the city's effort to woo the Giants are also deceased. Stew Thornley, a Twin Cities author and baseball historian, said he believed Stoneham might have feigned interest in Minneapolis to extract a better deal from New York or San Francisco.

But Clark Griffith, a Minneapolis lawyer and the son of the former Twins owner Calvin Griffith, said that based on conversations with Stoneham, he believed the Giants would have moved here had the Dodgers stayed in Brooklyn.

Stoneham went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., every year for a physical, Griffith said, and visited the Griffiths during those trips.

"He liked Minneapolis-St. Paul," Griffith said. "He had success here with the Millers. It's something he thought about. He had advanced to the point of acquiring real estate here for the purpose of building a stadium."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Jay Weiner, in his book "Stadium Games," published in 2000, said Stoneham bought 40 acres off Wayzata Boulevard west of downtown on May 1, 1951, as a site for a future ballpark.

On the night of Jan. 25, 1954 - 10 months before the Giants won the World Series, and Mays made his famous catch on Vic Wertz at the Polo Grounds - Stoneham revealed a plan to George Brophy, the Millers' general manager, and other club employees. Brophy told Weiner in 1998 that Stoneham said he planned to move the Giants here, with the Cincinnati Reds replacing the Giants in New York.

Stoneham never built on the Wayzata property, which he kept until the 1970's. But with the opening of Metropolitan Stadium in April 1956, everything was in place for a move. That May, Stoneham told The Minneapolis Tribune that he was considering taking the Giants to Minneapolis.

Years later, Stoneham told the writer Neil J. Sullivan, as told in his 1987 book "The Dodgers Move West," that he intended to move the Giants to Minneapolis before he knew O'Malley was headed for Los Angeles. "He had boots on the ground here," Griffith said. "I was under the impression he was very close to coming here. If you're talking about how advanced he was, he was very advanced."

Minneapolis officials made Stoneham a formal offer. But Charles O. Johnson, the late sports editor of The Minneapolis Star and Tribune and a leader of the effort to bring major-league baseball to the Twin Cities, wrote in 1982: "Horace listened attentively, but he gave no indication of his intentions."

The next day, according to Johnson, San Francisco officials met with Stoneham. By then the Dodgers were looking hard at Los Angeles. O'Malley needed the Giants because National League owners, concerned about travel costs, would not approve only one team going across the country.

Yet as late as April 1957, according to Weiner, Stoneham negotiated with two Minneapolis businessmen to move the Giants to Metropolitan Stadium. A month later, the N.L. granted the Dodgers and Giants approval to go to the West Coast.

Though Stoneham said that July that he was weighing offers from San Francisco, Oakland and Minneapolis, and even told The Minneapolis Tribune, "If Minneapolis has a better proposition than San Francisco, we will listen," he may have already made up his mind. On Aug. 18, the Giants' board of directors voted by 8-1 to approve the move to San Francisco. M. Donald Grant, later the chairman of the board of the Mets, cast the only "No" vote.

It took three more years before Calvin Griffith agreed to bring the Washington Senators here, to play in a triple-decked stadium where cows grazed on farmland beyond the outfield fences.

And Mays, who hit .477 in a famous brief stint with the Millers in 1951, played in Met Stadium only once, in the 1965 All-Star Game.

Did Stoneham ever regret ignoring his first instinct? Clark Griffith doubts it.

"I think he liked San Francisco," Griffith said. "I think he probably would have regretted not being the West Coast partner of the Dodgers. It was certainly pretty cool to be the other California team. They continued their interborough rivalry on the West Coast, and it exists to this day."