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Share your memories of George Weiss
HERE IS WHAT OTHER METS FANS HAVE TO SAY:
Ed K
July 17, 2007
The press about George was always that he was a cheapskate and signed too many over-the-hill players in the early Mets years instead of simply going with youth from the start. And the press never warmed up to him because he was a quiet guy, the opposite of Casey. But he does deserve some credit because the Mets only had 18 months to create a ball team after being awarded an expansion franchise, and he got all the mundane details done that needed doing: ticket office, business staff, refurbishing the Polo Grounds, convincing Casey to manage, etc. It was no easy task.
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Shickhaus Franks
September 7, 2007
Not only was George frugal, he was a RIGHT-WING HATE MONGER! When he was the Yankees GM, he refused to have Black and Latino ballplayers until 1955 when he brought up Elston Howard. He was just as bad as the late Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey; the reason he kept his Bronx Bombers lily-white was to appease his mostly suburban redneck/WASP fan base.
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Mark Healey
October 22, 2008
George Weiss drafted/signed/traded for the guts of the 1969 championship team. Seaver, Grote, Koosman, Boswell, Nolan Ryan, Cleon Jones, Buddy Harrelson, etc.He did not do all of the above willingly, but his ability to work with people that he did not agree with was a great strength. As was his ability to see great things in strange places; he hired Stengel to be manager of the Yankees in 1949, when everyone thought he was a fool for doing so. He had many faults, but as a baseball man, he was perhaps one of the greatest GMs ever. You could make the case that had he is perhaps the best Mets GM ever.
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Joe Figliola
October 29, 2008
I have to agree with Mark. Often, we look at the product on the field to determine whether an executive is doing his job. Despite the losing, George Weiss was doing his job by developing a team that would become world champions seven years after it first played on a diamond.
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Ed K
November 11, 2008
As to the charge that Weiss was a "right-wing hatemonger," the record suggests otherwise. Yes, the Yankees were clearly wrong in being the next-to-last team in the 1950's to integrate - one more reason not to like them. The supposed reason was that their attending fans would not like it. But the decision was probably the Yankee ownership's, not a decision by Weiss. Weiss was a cheapskate and if he thought he could get good players at a bargain, he'd probably would have done so if allowed no matter what their ethnic background. Note that in the book "Tales of the New York Mets" which was written just a few years ago, Al Jackson and Roadblock Jones talked about how in the 1962 spring training (before the Civil Rights Act), the Mets hotel in St.Petersburg, FL tried to discriminate against the African-American ballplayers and the Mets took a tough stand to the point of pulling all their players out of the restaurant dining room. Weiss should get at least some of the credit for the Mets doing so.
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