Joan was a sports enthusiast who was a minority shareholder in the old New York GiantsMajor League Baseball club. She and her husband opposed moving the team to San Francisco in 1957. After the majority of the shareholders approved the move, Mrs. Payson sold her stock and began working to get a replacement team for New York City. Along with M. Donald Grant, the only other director who opposed the Giants' move, Payson put together a group that won a New York franchise in the Continental League, a proposed third major league. The National League responded by awarding an expansion team to Payson's group, which became the New York Mets. Payson served as the team's president from 1962–1975. Active in the affairs of the baseball club, she was much admired by the team's personnel and players. She was inducted posthumously into the New York Mets Hall of Fame in 1981. She was also the first woman to buy majority control of a team in a major North American sports league, rather than inheriting it. Payson was instrumental in the return of Willie Mays to New York City baseball in May 1972 by way of trade and cash from the Giants.
Joan Whitney also inherited her father and grandfather's love of thoroughbred horse racing. Following her father's death, her mother took over management of his Greentree Stable, an equestrian estate and horse racing stable in Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Greentree breeding farm in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1932, her mother gave her a colt named Rose Cross whom she raced under the nom de course, Manhasset Stable. Rose Cross won the 1934 Dwyer Stakes and finished a good fifth in the Belmont Stakes. In partnership with her brother, Joan Whitney operated the highly successful Greentree stable, winning numerous important Graded stakes races including the Kentucky Derby twice, the Preakness Stakes once, and the Belmont Stakes four times. Payson and her husband owned an art-filled 50-room mansion at Greentree, the Whitney family estate in Manhasset, New York.
John Whitney Payson, who is married to Joanne D'Elia.
Joan Whitney Payson died in New York City, aged 72, after the 1975 baseball season. She is buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery, in Falmouth, Maine. Following her death, her daughter, Lorinda de Roulet, assumed the title of president of the Mets. Her heirs sold their stock in the New York Mets in January 1980 as well as Greentree Farm. In 2005, the equestrian property in Saratoga Springs was put up for sale with an asking price of $19 million. In 1991, her son, John Whitney Payson, permanently installed the Joan Whitney Payson Collection in the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine where the Charles Shipman Payson Building cornerstones the Museum and is home to seventeen paintings by Winslow Homer he donated. Besides the Greentree estate in Manhasset, the family lived in an Italian Renaissance-palazzo style mansion in Manhattan. It was a wedding present from Joan's great uncle, Oliver Payne, her father's namesake, and designed by Stanford White. Located at 972 Fifth Avenue, it housed not just the family but 13 servants.
Philanthropy
Her husband was a Board member of Pepperdine University and together they provided the funds to build the university's library that was named for them. In 1943, she established and endowed the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation for medical research.
