Baseball Has Undergone Change, but Cowboy’s Love for Game Hasn’t : At 80, Autry Is Still Chasing Champion

A bronze sculpture by Western artist Bill Rains occupies a corner table in Gene Autry’s office at radio station KMPC.

It depicts an aging cowboy, wearing chaps and holding a lariat, staring down at his son, who is in the stance of a hitter, bat overhead, glove at his feet. It is titled: “I Don’t Want to Be a Cowboy, Daddy.”

As he celebrates his 80th birthday today, Orvon Gene Autry can remember being that boy. Born in Tioga, Tex., Sept. 29, 1907, he can remember the grass-roots dream shared by so many boys.

Autry, in fact, almost pursued it.

He was a 19-year-old shortstop with Tioga’s American Legion team when the St. Louis Cardinals’ Tulsa farm club offered him a tryout, then a minor league contract for $100 a month. Autry was already earning $150 a month as a railroad telegrapher and recalls being concerned about his hitting abilities.

A self-described banjo hitter, he soon turned to the guitar, which he was strumming during an idle moment behind the telegraph key one day when Will Rogers strolled in to send a wire, liked what he heard and encouraged Autry to keep it up.

Such is the seed of a show business legend. Autry discarded the bat permanently, got serious with the guitar and became the singing cowboy.

Talk about statistics! He made more than 95 movies and 125 records, selling 40 million and counting. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” has sold 10 million alone. He had a national radio show and toured the country with his own rodeo. The $150-a-month telegrapher built a radio empire, branched into hotels and land, and broke into the Forbes’ batting order of the nation’s richest men.

Through it all, however, his love of baseball persisted. He booked his World Championship Rodeo into Madison Square Garden each October in the hope that one of the New York teams would be in the World Series. He booked appearances to coincide with the schedule of his favorite Cardinals. Boyhood friend Dizzy Dean introduced him to the game’s top players. The boy became a man, then pocket change became a bankroll that allowed him to buy in.

The American League expanded in 1961, and Gene Autry and partner Robert O. Reynolds traveled to a major league meeting in St. Louis, where they were voted the Los Angeles franchise.

Now, 27 years and several heartaches later, his Angels have finished at .500 or better only 10 times and have lost 141 games more than they have won. Autry can look back on three Western Division titles but no World Series, his ultimate dream.

He acknowledges that his hobby has become a business, his passion replaced, in large measure, by economic pragmatism. He remains upbeat, however, refusing to dwell on the scars. With his 1987 team attempting to avoid the division cellar, he looked back and said:

“I don’t live with the disappointments. I try not to place blame or carry it with me. If I did, I’d be 85 and not 80.”

Autry sat behind his desk at KMPC. A cane rested against a corner of the desk. He is recovering from a broken hip but remains active.

There is a daily schedule of business meetings and appointments. The Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum is scheduled to open near Griffith Park next year. A judge’s decision in his $100-million suit against the city of Anaheim regarding construction in the Anaheim Stadium parking lot is expected in November or December.

Autry wants detente.

“I wouldn’t want to leave Anaheim,” he said. “There’s a new city council and a new city manager and no reason we can’t get along.

“Of course, I wouldn’t want to lose the parking lot. If something came along that reduced the parking, I’d have to reconsider. I haven’t talked to (Raider owner) Al Davis or anyone from Irwindale about the stadium they plan to build there, but I might have to if we were to lose our parking.

“Maybe (the loss of the Raiders) will shake up the Coliseum Commission. I only know what I read, but it seems like they need to be shaken up.”

Autry has tried different things at different times to shake up the Angels. He has had 10 managers and 5 general managers. He poured millions into free agency, believing that he needed marquee names to combat the popularity of the Dodgers and trying to produce an instant winner. There was a drive, he admits, to win one for the Cowboy before he died.

Now the philosophy is aimed at creating stability and balancing the bankbook. Jackie Autry, his wife and a former vice president of Security Pacific, has been a strong influence, Autry said. He calls her an owner in training and predicts that she will be a success. The Angels now are committed to building from within, mixing in an occasional trade, blending predominantly young players with a few veterans.

“I’ve never said we wouldn’t sign another free agent if the price was right,” Autry said. “I don’t know anything about a conspiracy. No one has ever told us what to do.

“I mean, with today’s salaries, you have to operate it as a business and not a hobby. You have to make it pay. We were losing $1 or $2 million a year until about 1981 or ’82. We’ve made a little since then but we wouldn’t make anything without the (national) TV money (about $6.1 million a club per year).

“Hell, at one point our payroll was close to $17 million. It’s hard to make money at that, even drawing 2.7 million and leading the league in attendance.

“I mean, people keep bringing up Jack Morris (the Detroit Tigers free agent of last winter). I’m not going to pay a pitcher $2 million. For that, he has to win every time he goes out there. I don’t want to have to expect that. It’s not fair to the pitcher or the club.

“I believe in paying players what they’re worth, but we can’t go crazy again. We signed all those free agents and kept finishing second or third. In some cases we didn’t get much return at all.

“We gave Fred Lynn a lot of money and he’d get a scratch and wouldn’t play. What the hell? I don’t think Fred ever played a full season. I’ve talked to the people in Baltimore and I know they’re very disappointed in him, too.

“We didn’t want to sign Donnie Moore for that much money ($3 million for three years), but we felt that if he did even 60% as well as the year before (1985, when he had 31 saves) we’d be all right. But how many games has he pitched this year? It’s discouraging. He’s got one more year on his contract, and we don’t know what to expect. That’s why we’re leery now of multi-year contracts.”

The evolution in Angel philosophy has produced an image of a cold, calculating organization. People point to the departures of Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson, Doug DeCinces.

Autry rejects that image. He said that DeCinces wasn’t released to save $140,000 in termination pay but because he was 37, his production had diminished and he had seemed to become a clubhouse lawyer.

He alluded to Jackson’s contributions on the field and at the gate and said he had no regrets over Reggie’s acquisition.

His departure?

“Reggie was 40. His home runs were down. Look what he hit this year (.205 with the Oakland A’s),” Autry said.

“And with Carew, people forget that we gave him five years to start with, then two more after he went through the (free-agent) draft, and no one took him. Nothing personal, but his last year with us wasn’t too good, and he never drove in as many runs as he should have.

“I think the sad part is that a lot of baseball players, like actors, never know when to quit.

“If you’re going to keep a baseball club in contention, you’ve got to keep the young blood moving in. We expected this to be a tough year, but I’m still disappointed we’re not winding up better. Maybe we were asking too much of our young players to have them replace the veterans all at once, but we also had some difficult injuries to our pitching.

“We know we’ve got to improve our balance by getting some power, and we’re going to try to do that. I think that if our pitchers are healthy, we can be a competitive club again. I think our young players put us in a position like Minnesota and Milwaukee. They should be strong for many years now.”

Only in recent years has Autry, cognizant of the inflationary spiral, begun looking harder at players and speaking out about them. He had previously been a fan. Seldom did a player leave the Angels without receiving a letter of thanks from the Cowboy.

He could often be found in the locker room, trading stories with Jim Fregosi and Bobby Knoop, Lew Burdette and Jack Sanford. He was disappointed when his general managers drew the line and refused to sign Warren Spahn and all his other personal favorites when they called to seek employment after being released elsewhere.

He still talks affectionately about the early Angel years with Eddie Yost and Bob Cerv and Big Klu and Little Albie. He still ranks the 7-2 victory over the Baltimore Orioles in the Angels’ first game as his biggest thrill.

“I’m as big a fan as I’ve ever been or I wouldn’t go the park as often as I do,” Autry said. “It’s just that I look at it with a little different perspective now, though I still think it’s fun. It’ll be 28 years in December, and it doesn’t seem possible. It’s gone by so fast.”

If there is hurt at never having raised a pennant or gone to the World Series as a winner, Autry hides it. He acknowledged frustration over the Angels’ failure to put away Milwaukee after winning the first two games of the 1982 playoff, to win the division title in ’85 when they failed by a game, and to beat Boston in the ’86 playoff when they were one strike from the pennant, the deepest wound of all.

“We’ve had frustrating years and we’ve had happy years,” he said. “I don’t get angry when people poke fun at us for never having won. It’s true. I have to be realistic. We’ve had our chances to win and didn’t. I could blame injuries in some cases but I won’t. I’ve always said that if it was easy, you’d have 26 winners every year. Nothing comes easy, but we’ll keep trying.”

In other words, the Cowboy isn’t going to ride off into any sunset just because of a few setbacks or because he’s now 80. He has never believed in making a big thing of birthdays anyway, he said, and isn’t going to start now. Dinner with Jackie and a few friends, then back to work tomorrow.

“I feel good, I feel strong,” he said. “I expect to last five or six more years at least.”

Forget just five or six. The former Tioga shortstop has been assured of immortality. Sidekick Pat Buttram told him when he purchased the Angels that it was his wisest move.

“ ‘Hell, Gene,’ ” Autry recalled Buttram saying, “ ‘on the sports page a man can live forever. Look at Dempsey. They still call him Champ. Look at DiMaggio. He’s as big as ever. If he was an actor out of work, he’d be considered a has-been. I mean it, Gene. On the sports pages you never die.’ ”