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MAURY ALLEN |
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Baseball's King of Laughter  DANNY GARDELLA...Dead at 85 |
He sued baseball before
it became fashionable
of TheColumnists.com
He would hang out of hotel room windows by his finger
tips to scare his roommate to death. He would burst into song
with his brassy baritone at any excuse. He would imitate his
baseball Hall of Fame manager, Mel Ott, with that crazy one-leg-in-the-air
swing.
Danny Gardella died the other day and I laughed, as I always
did, when I read about him as a kid, met him as a sportswriter
or became fast friends as aging adults.
Gardella was baseball’s giddiest guy, a joyous countenance
every minute he walked this earth. He had a song, a smile and
some funny things to say when he marched through the pearly gates
at the age of 85.
“Laughter and love, that’s what it is all about,”
he often said.
He spent some 60 years with his wife Katherine before she died
last year. They had 10 children and shared the joys of no less
than 27 grandchildren.
And, oh, yes, he is the guy responsible for the $26 million a
year salary of Alex Rodriguez and the millions all the others
now get just for playing that little kid’s game of baseball.
Gardella was a little guy, maybe 5-7 when he was cheating on
his height, a bulky, well-muscled 165 pounds with a constant
smile, two deep dimples and thick hair to the end.
He was a New York kid who played baseball for fun as a teenager,
went to work as a shipyard roustabout after school, played on
several club teams and actually was spotted as a possible big
leaguer during the years of World War II when most of the big
names--Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Joe DiMaggio--were
off fighting the war.
He joined his hometown New York Giants in 1944 off his ship building
team, hit six homers in 47 games and actually smacked 18 homers,
without steroids, in 1945.
“I just loved hitting in the Polo Grounds,” he would
say about his Manhattan home field, now a Harlem housing project.
“I could spit the ball over the fence. I was a good spitter.”
He gained more attention for his antics than for his baseball
success. His non-English speaking roommate, Nap Reyes, almost
died of shock when he walked into the room they shared one night
and saw an open window and Gardella nowhere in sight.
“I thought he jumped,” Reyes told a Spanish speaking
teammate. “He had gone oh for four that day and said he
had to kill himself.”
It was only for laughs. Everything Gardella did was for laughs.
Reyes called the other players and one found Gardella hanging
by his hands some 15 floors above the ground.
“Didn’t you worry about losing your grip?” teammate
Buddy Kerr asked after the rescue.
“Nah,” said Gardella, “not with these arms.”
He did have Popeye arms, a thick neck and very strong legs.
The Giants didn’t care about that when the war ended, the
big guys returned and Gardella was ticketed for the minors again.
A Mexican entrepreneur named Jorge Pascual enticed Gardella and
several others--Sal Maglie, Max Lanier, Mickey Owen and Lou Klein--south
of the border for a lot more money than they were making in the
U.S.
Gardella sued baseball after he returned home without a baseball
job. He was testing the Holy Grail of the game, the reserve clause,
which prevented a player from signing with any other team until
sold or released. It was baseball’s form of economic slavery.
It shook baseball to its heels. Dire consequences were predicted.
Players would be running wild to the highest bidders. Did these
guys in jocks think they were capitalists?
After much legal wrangling, Gardella and the others were reinstated
in the game and he was awarded a quiet $60,000 by the game as
long as he didn’t tell the press. He told the press. Let
baseball sue him.
It would be another 30 years before the game lost its grip on
the players via the reserve clause. Open bidding and huge salaries
resulted.
Gardella never saw much money. He worked as a hospital orderly,
a factory hand, a moving man, a truck driver and even a street
sweeper in his hometown of Yonkers. He raised his family in a
comfortable home and lived his later years with Katherine with
surrounding grandchildren and love and laughter.
We became pals in the 1960s and he would often jog the 10 miles
from his home to mine, showing up for a soda pop and old tales
of the game. He had become a religious man despite the financial
setbacks and problems he faced and wrote off all the disappointments
as the will of the guy upstairs, and, he said, “I don’t
mean Mel Ott.”
A few years back I took him to Shea Stadium where his old teammate,
Buddy Kerr, was scouting for the Mets. They started talking and
laughing about the World War II New York Giants. The stories
were as vivid for Gardella as they were almost half a century
earlier.
The baseball establishment didn’t make much of a fuss over
Gardella when he left us. But remember this. He led the league
in laughter in his time. That’s Hall of Fame stuff in my
book.
©2005 by Maury Allen. This column first posted March 21,
2005.
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