In conversation with her future Mets chairman M. Donald Grant back in the late 1940s, Joan Whitney Payson mentioned that the one thing she would love to buy with her money was the New York Giants. Payson would later become a 10% stockholder in the team, and tried in vain to buy out the ownership group and keep that franchise in New York when they left for San Francisco.
This perhaps made Payson a natural choice for lawyer William Shea—empowered by committee with the goal of bringing National League Baseball back to New York—to head an ownership group for a team in the proposed Continental League.