Arthur "Red" Patterson
American baseball executive (1909–1992)
Arthur Edward “Red” Patterson (February 1, 1909 – February 10, 1992) was an American professional baseball executive who spent more than 40 years in Major League Baseball and served as club president of the California Angels from February 22, 1975, through October 20, 1977. A former sportswriter, he gained prominence as the director of public relations and promotions for the New York Yankees (1946 through 1954) and Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers (1954 through 1974). In 1975, Patterson dubbed himself "the dean of sports promotions guys".
Innovative sports promoter
In that role, Patterson supervised such innovations as the annual "Old-Timers' Day" at Yankee Stadium in 1947 (created to raise funds for the Babe Ruth Foundation, a charity formed that year by the gravely ill slugger to help under-privileged children), team yearbooks, and "Cap Day", one of the earliest examples of logo-bearing sports apparel merchandising—an idea initially scorned by his employers, the Yankees, themselves.
He also became known as for publicizing the term "tape-measure home run" to describe Mickey Mantle's mammoth blast at Washington's Griffith Stadium on April 17, 1953, which glanced off a beer billboard above the left-center field fence, sailed out of the stadium itself, and landed in a residential neighborhood beyond. Patterson, who was in the press box that day, used the dimensions from home plate to the left-center-field wall—460 feet (140 m)—then added the distance he personally paced off from the stadium's exterior wall to where an eyewitness said he saw Mantle's blow land, and he estimated that the ball traveled 565 feet (172 m). Although that famous number has since been questioned by physicists, who have calculated the distance at anywhere between 510 feet (160 m) and more than 538 feet (164 m), Patterson's measurement has been "enshrined" at Cooperstown and remains fixed in the popular imagination.
Later, in his role as assistant general manager and PR director of the Brooklyn Dodgers in October 1957, Patterson read to the assembled media the club's official announcement that it would abandon Brooklyn and relocate to Los Angeles. Accompanying the Dodgers to Southern California, Patterson helped establish the team as a local institution, making at one point an estimated 300 speeches a year on its behalf and staging such as promotions as "Straight-A Students Night" at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Dodger Stadium.
Writing in 1985, the Los Angeles Times called Patterson "one of the most innovative and successful publicists and marketing executives in baseball." By that time, he had been associated with 13 pennant-winning teams in his 40 years in baseball—seven with the Dodgers and six with the Yankees.
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