Baseball on the Lake

That folks in the Rochester, N.Y. area would play eager hosts to aspiring athletes was established once and for all time as early as Nov. 13, 1829. Sam Patch, the vaunted falls-jumper, fresh from a triumphant plunge off Goat Island into the Niagara River, appeared before 8,000 adoring fans on the banks of the Genesee in downtown Rochester, primed for a 125-foot dive into the river beneath the Great Falls. Patch offered a short speech, then flung himself with Reggie Jackson-like panache headlong from his lonely platform, struck the water on that late autumn day — and reappeared downstream, encased in ice, the following spring.

Bad form. But a great turnout.

Still, the story of Rochester-area sport — baseball in particular — might better be spun out of material which is at first a little less, but finally far more, dramatic. Here is an anecdote: It is early December. A young man — a boy, really — who has grown up playing sunrise-to sundown baseball in the Rochester city parks and whose loyalties lie with that hell-bent-for-leather gang of gashousers in St. Louis, is picking up some spending money one Sunday morning at his employer’s downtown music store. The boss is there with him; so in an 80-year-old co-worker.

A radio plays in the background. Almost unnoticed, the music rises and falls, the notes climb and descend again, and finally there comes the Last Note, though at the moment it sounds the three workers have no way of knowing it for the Last Note. Perhaps it is only a brief, precarious eighth-note, but a world in an eighth-note, from which pivotal point that world abruptly spins away, erratic, off-balance. A voice interrupts to announce the attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.

From the perspective of the 80-year-ood, the war to come will not be his war, even as the world in general is no longer his world. Coming of age in the late 19th century, his was the world of Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn, Rochester’s splendid and tireless gift to baseball in the 1880s, he of the 60-victory season in 1884. In the old man’s time, Rochester had hosted professional baseball clubs variously called the Brownies (after the turn-of-the-century camera marketed by the local giant of industry, Eastman-Kodak), the Bronchos, the Beau Brummels, and, eventually, the Tribe. Ned Hanlon played here briefly, as did Dan Brouthers and Buck Ewing. Reddy Grey, brother of novelist Zane, blasted 12 home runs for the 1901 Bronchos.

His world was the world of Wally Pipp. And George “High-Pockets” Kelly, both of whom played in Rochester around the time of his war, the Great War of 1914-1918, of Ypres and Verdun and Passchendaele. The the doughboys came home, several White Sox fixed a World Series, and George T. Stallings’ Rochester teams won an astounding 309 games from 1921 to 1923.

But in 1941, the world and the war fell to the 17-year-old and thousands like him throughout America. Now managing partner of the Rochester accounting firm which bears his name (and which he co-founded in 1970 with SABR member Melvin J. Poplock), Cortland L. Brovitz found himself, not long removed from the position of music store clerk, flying planes over western Europe, remembering in brief airborne flashbacks the glory days of the Rochester Red Wings.

Gateway to St. Louis

In the winter of 1928, the Rochester ball club became the property of the St. Louis Cardinals at a time when young Branch Rickey was pledged to establish a farm system unrivalled by anyone. Billy south worth managed that first club and, with an extraordinary flair for theatrics, pushed the club to a final day doubleheader sweep of Montreal to clinch the International League pennant over Buffalo by one percentage point.

On May 2, 1929, the wings played their first game at Red Wing Stadium, 500 Norton St., Rochester, which 60 years later is still their home address. Tex Carleton threw brilliant ball for the club in ’29, as did Paul Derringer. Rip Collins supplied the bulk of the power, and for the second successive season, the Wings advanced to the Junior World Series. But for the second year in a row, they lost.

That pattern was broken with the arrival of John Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin in 1930, as the fledgling Cardinals, led by “The Wild Hoss of the Osage,” finally captured the elusive Junior World Series crown over Louisville, and added a second the next year, defeating St. Paul with the help of George Sisler, who capped a Hall of Fame career by hitting .303 for the Wings that season.

In fact, you could lift virtually the entire decade of the ’30s out of Red Wings’ history and bronze it for posterity. Johnny Mize, Marty Marion, Johnny Hopp, Whitey Kurowski — they left an indelible trail of memories. In 1933, Babe Ruth’s Yankees played an exhibition game at Red Wing Stadium. Walter Alston passed through. Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, the Washington Redskins’ Hall of Fame quarterback, played shortstop there in 1938. And the following, year, the decade was brought to a close with fireworks and flourish, courtesy of Estel Crayton Crabtree.

Crabtree (born, incidentally, in Crabtree, Ohio) really had three careers in professional baseball. The first and third, from 1929 to 1932 and from 1941 to 1944, respectively, were markedly unspectacular major league stints. The middle career, however, won him the undying affection of Rochester fans for his graceful center field play, his steady presence in the Red Wing lineup, and especially for a two-out, bottom-of-the-ninth, three-run homer that tied up a crucial playoff game against the Newark Bears in late September 1939. It was a game, and a playoff, the Red Wings finally won. Nearly 50 years after the fact, a local newspaper poll to name a Red Wings Dream Team still showed Crabree the people’s choice in center field.

Another pennant followed in 1940, and the following summer, appropriate to a year where one could hardly have imagined what the immediate future would hold, Stan Musial hit .326 for the Wings in a brief stopover on the road to Cooperstown.

And these were the memories, the images of giants, that a young, baseball-adoring Rochester boy took off to war with him. Meanwhile, his employer, the owner of the music store, was yet to have his say in Rochester baseball.

Amazingly, the post-war Cardinals equaled and in some ways surpassed the year-in, year-out excellence of their forerunners, and standout performers such as Harry “The Hat” Walker and Bill Virdon continued to post impressive individual statistics. But by the end of the 1956 season, it appeared the Cardinals, citing financial pressures, were no longer interested in maintaining their Rochester farm club. Enter Morrie Silver, the music store owner who 15 years after Pearl Harbor, became first president of Rochester Community Baseball, Inc., after spearheading the successful local effort to keep the Wings in Rochester. Later, in the mid-60s, returning to the presidency again with the club struggling financially, he set matters straight once more. These were easily the two most crucial “saves” ever recorded by anyone affiliated with the Red Wings. Consequently, in 1968 Red Wing Stadium was renamed Silver Stadium. If there is a central connecting link in the entire long tradition of Rochester baseball, it its certainly Morris Silver.

A New Era With the Orioles

By the time the stadium was rechristened, there had been a break in continuity and a new era was well under way; in 1960 the Cardinals and Red Wings had dissolved their affiliation and a new bond had been formed with the Baltimore orioles. With the St. Louis connection gone, longtime fans like Cortland Brovitz found it hard to maintain enthusiasm for the Cardinals, but equally difficult to generate excitement for anyone else. That being so, Silver Stadium nonetheless remained the stage for minor league heroics.

Boog Powell sparkled in Rochester on his way to Orioles fame. New manager Earl Weaver won a pennant in 1966. Bobby Grich was Minor League Player of the Year in 1971 with a stellar set of stats; .336 batting average, 32 homers and 83 RBIs; teammate Don Baylor had captured the same award the previous year. Joe Altobelli, who in 1983 piloted the Orioles to a World championship, steered the Red Wings to a first-place finish in 1971, and then finished fourth, second, second, second, and first again. Cal Ripken Jr., only two years away from an American league MVP award, amassed a .288 batting average with 23 home runs and 75 RBIs in 1981. In 1986, engineering the team’s return to excellence following a number of sub-par seasons, current Red Wings general manager Bob Goughan was named Minor league Executive of the Year by The Sporting News. The 1988 edition of the Red Wings took the International League pennant before dropping the Junior World Series to Indianapolis.

The Rochester area is home to a number of people either formerly or presently associated with major league baseball. Herb Washington, Charley Finley’s designated runner, owns four McDonald’s franchises locally. Altobelli, now a coach for the Cubs, also resides here, as does Curt Motton, once a favorite pinch-hitting weapon off the Orioles’ bench and now a coach for the Birds. Johnny Antonelli, the marvelous lefthander for the Giants and Braves who attended Rochester’s Jefferson High School, is head man at Antonelli’s Fireston, and American League umpire Ken Kaiser comes hone each winter to to host one of the country’s most impressive sports celebrity banquets. Former Yankee standout Vic Raschi was an area resident until his death last year.

Continuity certainly is an appropriate word to use when discussing baseball in Rochester. The city of Rochester had had a professional baseball team every year since 1895. The club also has used its Red Wings nickname since 1928. Additionally, the franchise has been affiliated with only one major league club since 1961.

The story of Rochester baseball previously has been chronicled in a pictorial history entitled The Red Wings — A Love Story (1969), by John L. Remington, to which this brief summary is much indebted. Remington’s book, in turn, cites Billy McCarthy’s Rochester Diamond Echoes (1949) as a source. Such works, of course, always serve to underline the fact that baseball through its long evolution has become in many ways very different from the game played in the days of Old Hoss Radbourn; alongside its legends and nostalgia are its hard, present-day realities.

But Red Wings general manager Bob Goughan eloquently brings together past and present, in words which speak worlds for the history of Rochester baseball and, for that matter, baseball anywhere:

I think you can be down to earth and pragmatic about it and still not take away one little bit of the glitter. It doesn’t lose anything. It’s still an unbelievably textured, stylized exercise in this uniquely, almost ornately carved field of play. It’s all of that, and it’s all of those things that everybody wants it to be.