A graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology, Angley as of 2014 still held the Georgia Tech record for career batting average (.436) and career slugging percentage (.763).2 In his first three years in Organized Baseball (1927-1929), he led the South Atlantic League in batting, hit .323 in the Southern Association, and  then topped the American Association in batting. His offensive numbers were so good that in 1929 Cubs manager Joe McCarthy kept Angley on the club as a fourth-string catcher and pinch-hitter. But when fate thrust him into the starting catcher’s role after injuries to three Cubs catchers, McCarthy quickly found a replacement, ending Angley’s major-league career at five games. No other major-league team took a chance on the poor fielding Angley.

Thomas Samuel Angley was born on October 2, 1904, in Baltimore, the first of two children born to Thomas and Lelia Viola Burrows Angley. His father was a career Army man so the family was always moving. Five years before Angley’s birth, his father was stationed in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War. In 1910 the family was living in South Portland, Maine, when the senior Angley was stationed at Fort Williams, and in 1920 they were at Fort Howard in Baltimore. From Baltimore the family moved to Fort McPherson in East Point, Georgia, just outside Atlanta.3

It was in Atlanta while attending the University School for Boys that Angley blossomed as an athlete. He participated in four sports at the prep school, playing football, basketball, and baseball for four years, and running track and field for two years. In football Angley set what was purported to be the “world’s record” for the most dropkicks in a game against Georgia Military Academy, when he booted 13 through the goalposts in an 86-0 win. He was the captain of the basketball and baseball teams in his senior year.4

After high school, straying not too far from home, Angley chose Georgia Tech to attend. By his sophomore year, he was a starter on the varsity baseball team. As a right fielder, he batted .422 in 21 games with seven home runs. In 1926 he switched to catcher, leading Georgia Tech to the Southern Conference championship with a 21-4-1 record. Angley batted .500 in 26 games with nine home runs. On April 10, against Auburn, he banged out three doubles to set the Georgia Tech record for the most doubles in a game. During the season, nationally syndicated sportswriter Roy Grove called Angley “the greatest hitter ever to appear in southern college baseball.”5

Angley wasn’t the only talented player on that 1926 Yellow Jackets team. Bobby Reeves, also a junior, went straight to the Washington Senators after the season and played in the majors for six years. Junior center fielder Doug Wycoff, who hit .430, went on to play in the National Football League for the New York Giants. And first baseman John Brewer played five seasons in the minors after college.6

Angley also played football at Georgia Tech and in his senior year he made the starting varsity as a guard. After the football season, when January 1927 rolled around, it was announced that the Atlanta Crackers of the Class A Southern Association had signed Angley. He was to report after graduation to Macon of the Class B South Atlantic League. While the 1927 Georgia Tech baseball team wasn’t quite as good as it had been in 1926, the team went 15-6. Angley, the captain, had another fine season, batting .388 in 28 games with two home runs.7

After graduating, Angley left for Macon. In his first game with the Peaches, he crushed a grand slam. He easily picked up where he left off in college and was hitting well over.300 as the season progressed.

On July 13 Angley was involved in probably the most disturbing event of his career. Playing against Asheville at Macon, with the game scoreless in the bottom of the third, Angley singled. He took a big lead on Asheville pitcher Tom Ferrell while Raymond “Pete” Mann, Macon’s third baseman, squared to sacrifice Angley to second. The first two pitches were wide and outside. Anticipating another wide offering, Mann stepped far out toward the plate. Instead of throwing outside, Ferrell fired a pitch that bore in toward Mann. Before Mann could get out of the way, the ball struck him in the chest. He collapsed and died. An autopsy revealed that his rib had shattered and pierced his heart. Mann is the only minor-league player to die after a pitched ball struck him in the chest.8

After the tragedy, Angley continued his torrid hitting, batting .357 as of August 1. On September 15 it was announced that he had been purchased by the Atlanta Crackers for 1928. By season’s end, Angley led the league in hitting with a .386 mark. He pounded out 19 doubles, 6 triples, and 2 home runs.9

When Angley reported to Atlanta, he weighed in at 212 pounds. At 5-feet-8, he was decidedly heavy. But in ten days he managed to shed 17-plus pounds. He came into camp as the second-string catcher and his fielding didn’t help his chances. Dick Hawkins of the Atlanta Constitution wrote of him during spring training, “Tom Angley’s failing on foul balls may buy him a ticket back to Macon for a bit more seasoning.”10 But Angley’s bat not only kept him on the team, it pushed him into the starting lineup.

Angley finished with a .323 batting average, and on October 4, the Chicago Cubs drafted him from the Crackers. And to top off a great year for Angley, he married the former Harriet O’Neal of Atlanta.11

As the 1929 Cubs’ spring training went along, it appeared that Angley was ticketed for Atlanta for another season. The Cubs had future Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett as their first-string catcher. Behind him was steady veteran Mike Gonzalez. Rookie Earl Grace had batted .336 in Little Rock of the Southern Association the year before and was more polished behind the plate. But toward the end of spring training, Hartnett came up with a lame throwing arm. With his return uncertain, Angley, based on his hitting, made the squad. For the first five games of the season, he sat the bench waiting for his chance. Then against the St. Louis Cardinals in Chicago on April 23, first Gonzalez and then Grace hurt fingers while catching in the top of the fifth inning. Angley was forced into the game. He acquitted himself well with both the bat and glove. He drove in two runs on sacrifice flies in a 9-6 loss to the Cards.12

With no backups, Angley started the next day in Pittsburgh. He went 3-for-5 with two RBIs and a walk. The first hit of his career came off future Hall of Famer Burleigh Grimes. But despite Angley’s batting, Joe McCarthy frantically sought a starting catcher. He acquired veteran Johnny Schulte from Double-A Columbus. Schulte started the next three games but on April 28 he was spiked and forced out of a game at Cincinnati. With both Grace and Gonzalez still laid up, Angley again stepped in. He scored a run and drove in another. He started the next two games. The second of them, on April 30, was his last major-league game. Despite driving in six runs and batting .250 in five games, Angley was back on the bench. Grace recovered enough to take over the catching duties on May 1. Two weeks later Gonzalez was back into the lineup as was Schulte.13

With four catchers, plus Hartnett available for pinch-hitting duties, Angley was sold to Reading of the International League. But under the Organized Baseball rules, because Angley had been drafted from Atlanta, he was to have been offered back to the Crackers. Since he wasn’t, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis declared him a free agent. By June 8 he had signed with Kansas City of the American Association. Two months later, Angley was second in the league in hitting with a .369 mark. By season’s end he was the leading hitter in the American Association (.389). His offense helped propel Kansas City to not only the American Association title but also a Little World Series victory over the Rochester Red Wings of the International League.14

In 1930 Angley started the season with Kansas City but the Blues tired of his poor fielding. In his fourth season in Organized Baseball as a catcher, he still had trouble on pop flies. Typical of Angley’s play was this sequence as related by the Milwaukee Sentinel about a game on May 30 against the Brewers: “Tom Angley must have had another one of his ‘nervous’ spells, judging by the way he chased a couple of popups around the plate. He muffed [Ed] Grimes’ foul in the third and then failed to touch [Buck] Stanton’s popup in front of the plate in the sixth. Buck’s ball bounced foul and on his next chance tripled against the scoreboards.”15

On July 15 Kansas City had had enough. Angley was sold to Indianapolis of the American Association. The Indians were in need of catching help after losing Joe Sprinz to Cleveland. Angley ended the season with a batting average of .334 with six home runs. That winter he went to Cuba to play in a short-season winter league. He played for Marianao where he was the teammate of future Hall of Famer and Negro League great Oscar Charleston. Angley batted .267 in the three-week-long season.16

In 1931 Angley had his best year in professional baseball. Playing for Indianapolis, he finished tied for second in the league in batting to Art Shires with a .375 mark. He belted out 18 home runs and had a slugging percentage of .595. Midway through the season The Sporting News wrote that if “Angley continues his terrific hitting, it is difficult to see how he … can be kept out of the majors in 1932.” The paper even saw improvement in his defense: “(H)is work behind the bat also has been excellent.”17

But no major-league team came calling for Angley. He returned to Indianapolis’s spring-training site in Sarasota, Florida, for a second time in 1932. Angley had enjoyed his time the previous winter and now was a Sarasota resident in the offseason. (He was part of a large contingent of baseball players who wintered in the area.) Angley played in January with a group of them called the Sarasota All-Stars in a mini-barnstorming tour through Florida.18

During the 1932 season, Angley was almost a part of another tragic event. Indianapolis was facing Kansas City when Angley smashed a line drive off rookie pitcher Frank Gabler’s skull. The ball hit so hard that it ricocheted back to home plate. Gabler spent three months in the hospital with a fractured skull but eventually returned to baseball and pitched for several seasons in the major leagues.

But despite Angley’s offensive fireworks, Indianapolis soon wearied of his defensive play. On June 22 he was released to Terre Haute of the Class B Illinois-Indiana-Iowa (Three-I) League. The Indians said that Angley “failed to come up to expectations this season.” But by July 9, he was back playing with Indianapolis. For the season, he batted .311 for the Indians in 95 games and pounded out nine home runs.19

Sometime before wintering in Sarasota, Angley and his wife, Harriet, had divorced. While in Sarasota, Angley met Eloise Lorraine Archibald, the daughter of a prominent businessman, and on January 14, 1933, they were married in Sarasota. Shortly after the wedding, Angley was back in spring training with Indianapolis.  This time, the Indians held onto Angley for the entire season. He batted .303 in 92 games.20

After the season was over, Angley took a job as an assistant football coach for Sarasota High School in the fall and then was the head basketball coach for the Ringling College of Art team in the winter. He would continue in those capacities for the following year as well.21

In March 1934 Angley crossed paths with Joe Sprinz again when they were traded for each other. With the deal, Angley ended up with Columbus, the fourth team he had played for in the American Association. In May, with Columbus having to pare down its roster to meet the 20-player limit, the Red Birds sent Angley to Elmira of the Class A New York-Pennsylvania League. He tore up NYPL pitching, batting .367 in 29 games. On June 25 Columbus recalled Angley. His chief job for the rest of the season with Columbus was pinch-hitting. By season’s end, he had batted .338 in 57 games.  Columbus went on to win the American Association title and then beat Toronto of the International League for the Little World Series crown.22

In January 1935 Columbus sold Angley to Houston of the Texas League. As usual, he continued hitting well. The Sporting News wrote in May that Angley “can wear out that nugget but his throwing and fielding have left much to be desired.”23 On June 13 Houston left Angley home as it departed for a 16-day road trip, saying that “his catching has not reached expectations.”24 In reality, Angley and Houston owner Fred Ankenman were in a salary dispute. Ankenman, unhappy with having to pay Angley the $400 a month that his contract with Columbus called for, tried to cut his salary. When Angley balked at that move, Ankenman threatened to suspend him and then tried to ship him to Jacksonville of the Class C West Dixie League, where the salary limit was $100 per month.

On June 17 Houston announced that Angley had been optioned to Jacksonville. Instead of reporting, though, Angley retired from Organized Baseball and took a position with Sun Oil in Brenham, Texas. His main job with Sun was player-manager for the company baseball team, the Brenham Sun Oilers. It was the start of a long semipro playing career for Angley.25

Angley stayed with Brenham for a couple of seasons then moved on to play for teams in Waco and Conroe, Texas. In 1939 he hooked up with a Houston team called the Grand Prize Brewers. For the next few years, the Brewers were the class of the state of Texas in semipro baseball. In 1940 the Brewers played in the National Baseball Congress Semi-Pro World Series in Wichita, Kansas, finishing in third place. Angley set a record by launching three home runs in consecutive at-bats against Lancaster, South Carolina, during a game in the tournament.26

In 1941 Angley took a job at the Boeing Aircraft plant in Wichita and played for its company team, the Wichita Stearman Trainers, who also played in the prestigious NBC tournament. The following year the team became the Boeing Bombers and with fellow former major leaguers Woody Jensen and Fred Brickell joining Angley on the roster, the Bombers won the NBC tournament. Angley continued to play with the team through the 1946 season. He also took over as the official scorer of the NBC tournament. He eventually left Boeing and became a sporting-goods salesman.  On the side, he refereed sports. He continued to live in Wichita with his wife and three daughters.27

During the summer of 1952, Angley was admitted to St. Francis Hospital in Wichita with kidney problems. The Sporting News reported in August that he was critically ill. Reports said Angley’s weight had fallen from 220 pounds to 115. On September 3 the Boeing Bombers played the Fort Myer Colonials in a benefit game for Angley. On October 26, 1952, Angley died in the hospital at the age of 48 of pneumonia brought on by complications from kidney failure. He was survived by his wife and three daughters and was buried in Wichita Park Cemetery and Mausoleum in Wichita.28

In 1970 Angley was inducted into the Georgia Tech Hall of Fame and in 1991 he went into the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame.29

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Karl Green, the chairman of the SABR Collegiate Baseball Research Committee, and Marilyn Somers, director of the Georgia Tech Living History Program. for their time and effort. It was greatly appreciated.

Notes

1 The Sporting News, March 21, 1935.

2 2013 Georgia Tech Media Guide, ramblinwreck.com/sports/m-basebl/13mediaguide.html.

3 Washington Evening Star, December 18, 1899.

4 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 15, 1929; The Technique (Georgia Tech school newspaper), December 2, 1926; Macon Telegraph, March 4, 1923.

5 2013 Georgia Tech Media Guide; Hagerstown Morning Herald, April 24, 1926.

6 1926 Georgia Tech Yearbook.

7 Thomasville (Georgia) Times Enterprise, October 26, 1926; The Technique, November 25, 1926; Salamanca (New York) Republican-Press, January 25, 1927; 2013 Georgia Tech Media Guide.

8 Greensboro (North Carolina) Daily News, July 14, 1927; The Sporting News, July 21, 1927; Robert Gorman, Death at the Ballpark (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009), 29.

9 The Sporting News, August 11 and November 10, 1927; Greensboro Daily News, September 16, 1927.

10 Atlanta Constitution, March 16 and 27, 1928.

11 Baton Rouge State-Times, February 23, 1928; Danville (Virginia) Bee, October 5, 1928; Unidentified newspaper article dated October 4, 1928, in Angley’s Baseball Hall of Fame player file.

12 Syracuse Herald, February 9, 1929; Alan Levy, Joe McCarthy: Architect of the Yankee Dynasty (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005), 127; Rockford (Illinois) Morning Star, April 16, 1929; Davenport (Iowa) Democrat and Leader, April 24, 1929.

13 Rockford Register-Gazette, April 25, 1929; Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent, April 29, 1929.

14 Logansport (Indiana) Pharos-Tribune, May 21,1929; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 16, 1929; Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Daily News, June 3, 1929; Joplin (Missouri) Globe, June 9, 1929; Centralia (Washington) Daily Chronicle, July 30, 1929; Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press, December 10, 1929.

15 Milwaukee Sentinel, June 1, 1930.

16 Omaha World-Herald, July 16, 1930; Jorge S. Figueredo, Cuban Baseball: A Statistical History 1878-1961 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003), 194.

17 The Sporting News, August 6, 1931; Seattle Daily Times, November 21, 1931.

18 Sarasota Herald-Tribune, October 27, 1952; Tampa Morning Tribune, January 18, 1932.

19 The Sporting News, August 27, 1936; Canton Repository, June 22, 1932.

20 Letter from Nancy Angley Armstrong to Lee Allen in Angley’s Baseball Hall of Fame player file.

21 Sarasota Herald-Tribune, October 19, 1933, and March 6, 1934.

22 The Sporting News, March 1 and October 18, 1934; Canton (Ohio) Repository, May 11, 1934; Dallas Morning News, June 26, 1934; Toledo News-Bee, July 4, 1934.

23 The Sporting News, May 16, 1935.

24 San Antonio Light, June 13, 1935

25 Canton Repository, January 22, 1935; The Sporting News, May 16, 1935;San Antonio Light, June 13, 1935; Galveston Daily News, June 8, 1939; Dallas Morning News, June 18 and September 2, 1935; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, June 29, 1935.

26 The Sporting News, April 1, 1937; Pampa (Texas) Daily News, July 23, 1937; Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, June 15, June 16, and August 10, 1939; Greensboro Daily News, August 26 and September 2, 1940; Omaha World-Herald, August 26, 1940.

27 Sarasota Herald-Tribune, January 20, 1946; Wichita Morning Eagle, October 27, 1952; Bob Rives, Baseball In Wichita (Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 67.

28 Wichita Morning Eagle, October 27, 1952; The Sporting News, August 20 and November 5, 1952; Arizona Republic (Phoenix), September 4, 1952; Tom Angley’s Kansas Certificate of Death.

29 Wichita Eagle, February 1, 1991.

The new century had barely dawned when Clyde Eugene Beck was born on January 6, 1900, in the Los Angeles suburb of Bassett, California.1 He was the third son and youngest of four children of Charles Beck of California and Melvira (McGarvin) Beck of Missouri.

Beck acquired his baseball skills playing semipro ball around California.  He finally got his chance in the professional ranks with the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League in 1922.  As a rookie, Beck got into only 46 games, but batted a respectable .279 with eight doubles and one triple among his 38 hits. 

There was some uncertainty over what team he would play for in 1923. The Angels had tried to sell Beck to the Wichita Izzies of the Class A Western League prior to the season and appeared to have difficulty consummating the deal.  In fact, The Sporting News reported in its February 8, 1923, edition that the proposed trade had fallen through and that Beck would play for the Angels that season. The sale to Wichita was completed in late March.2

Minor leaguers sometimes played many more games in those days than their major-league counterparts.  The Western League season was a grueling 169 games long and Beck played in 168 of them.3  He averaged close to one hit per game (167) and batted.284. In the field he compiled a .941 fielding percentage at shortstop while committing 49 errors.  He was recalled by the Angels at the end of the season and played six games for them, getting four singles in 20 at-bats for a .200 average.

Beck’s performance with the Izzies was impressive enough for the Angels to bring him back in 1924.  He played in 148 Pacific Coast League games that year, batted .268, and showed some sock with six home runs.  More significantly, he set a league record for second basemen that still stood in 2014 when he had 12 assists in a game on October 5 against the Seattle Indians.

The 1925 season was a strange one for Beck.  He played in a whopping 188 games, all at second base. He hit 17 home runs, an astounding total for someone who never hit more than six homers in any other professional season. It’s impossible to determine what accounted for Beck’s power surge, especially when he never came close to hitting that many home runs in a season before or after.  The Angels did move into a new ballpark late in the season but that didn’t explain it.  They played most of their home games that year at old Washington Park where the dimensions were 325 feet down the lines and 411 feet to straightaway center field.  On September 29 they moved into brand-new Wrigley Field.  That ballpark’s dimensions were even bigger: It was 340 feet down the left-field line, 339 feet down the right-field line, and 412 to straightaway center.

The large number of games played doesn’t account for the difference, either, as Beck played in only 40 games more than the previous season yet hit almost three times as many home runs.  Whatever batting stroke or stroke of luck that worked for him that year never worked for him again.

Of course no one could have predicted his future paucity of power, but Beck’s 1925 numbers prompted the Cubs to buy his contract. In return, the Angels received cash and four players.4

Beck wasn’t used very much when the 1926 season started. His first major-league appearance came as a pinch-runner in a May 19 game against the Boston Braves.  He was optioned to Milwaukee of the Double-A American Association on May 22 and had an immediate impact with the Brewers. He did so well, in fact,  that he became a pawn in a feud between the Milwaukee and Chicago owners.

The Brewers had a player named Fred “Fritz” Schulte whom Brewers owner Otto Borchert wanted to sell for $100,000.5  Cubs president Bill Veeck wanted Schulte for his team, but Borchert sold him to the St. Louis Browns.  At the time, the Brewers were in a tight race for the American Association pennant  — they finished in third place with a 93-71 record, 12½ games behind the league champion Louisville Colonels — and Beck was an integral part of the Brewers’ success:

“Beck was fielding like a big leaguer, covering a world of ground and playing the keystone sack so brilliantly that he has made fans forget all about (former Brewer) Oscar Melillo,” wrote George F. Downer in the Milwaukee Sentinel.  “Coming here reputed to be a weak hitter, Beck had developed into a dependable clubber, having hit safely in the in the last sixteen consecutive games.”6

“As a backlash of the failure of Wrigley’s money to sway Borchert,” said The Sporting News, “the big-league club took a retributive poke at the Brewers by recalling second baseman Clyde Beck. …”7

Of course Beck was just caught in the middle of all this, and considering that he played in only 30 games for the Cubs that season and hit only .198, he probably was not integral to the Cubs’ 1926 pennant hopes. (They finished fourth with an 82-72 record, seven games out of first.)

The Cubs gave Beck a chance to strut his stuff in 1927 and he had a solid if not spectacular season, getting into 117 games, mostly at second base.  He batted .258 with 101 hits, 2 home runs, 44 RBIs, and 44 runs scored.  In the field, he committed 19 errors, a respectable total (Brooklyn’s Jay Partridge led National League second basemen with 52 errors).

An offseason move assured Beck of regular playing time in 1928.  The Cubs acquired future Hall of Famer Kiki Cuyler from the Pirates for second baseman Sparky Adams and outfielder Pete Scott.  Beck played in 131 games that year, splitting his time primarily between third base (87 games) and shortstop (47 games).  He hit .257 with three home runs, one of which was a grand slam that drove in all the Chicago runs in a 4-3 victory on July 17 over the Philadelphia Phillies, the team’s eighth and last victory during a midseason winning streak.

Beck was married by the time the 1928 season began, and his wife, Gertrude, wasn’t one to let him off the hook if he played poorly, as a September 20 newspaper article amply illustrated:  

“Clyde Beck of the Chicago Cubs has a wife whose heart and soul are on winning ballgames and there is no smile at home for the Chicago infielder when he fails to do his part.

“Recently, Mrs. Beck sat in the grandstand in the Cubs’ park.  In a nearby seat was a rooter who had no idea of the lady’s identity.  Beck came up in a pinch and struck out. 

“ ‘Damn that Beck!’ exploded the irate fan.  ‘I could shoot him for that.’ ”

“Then noticing the lady looking at him, and thinking she disapproved of his profanity, he started to offer an apology.

“ ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Mrs. Beck.  ‘I echo your sentiments.  You see, I happen to be Clyde’s wife, and believe me, I could shoot him myself!’ ”

“But all ball players’ wives are like that.”8

Beck probably slept wearing a bulletproof vest during the 1929 season.  Even before the season began, the media speculated that the Cubs would swing a trade for Les Bell of the Braves to get some better hitting from the third-base position.9  That trade fell through, but journeyman Norm McMillan replaced an injured Beck at third base early in the year and held on to the hot corner for the remainder of the season.  Beck played in only 54 games at third base and shortstop, hitting a meager .211.  He didn’t play in the World Series, in which the Cubs fell to the Philadelphia Athletics in five games.

The Cubs acquired Bell off the waiver wire on October 29, 1929, the same day as the US stock-market crash that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression.  Hopefully this turn of events didn’t cause Beck any great depression, for even though Bell’s presence on the Cubs should have severely limited his playing time in 1930, injuries to teammates forced manager Joe McCarthy to use Beck in his infield. Bell suffered an arm injury that prompted McCarthy to move regular shortstop Woody English to third and install Beck at short.10  For the season, Beck got into 83 games (57 at shortstop), but his weak hitting (.213 batting average) ensured that he would not be a regular player.  Oddly enough, he hit six home runs that year, more than he hit in any other major-league season and exactly half of his career total of 12.

Beck’s 1931 season did not get off to a good start.  In fact, it didn’t get off to any start as he sat on the bench for the Cubs’ first 37 games before being released on June 3.  He was picked up by the Cincinnati Reds, ostensibly the “player to be named later” in a preseason trade for utility outfielder Cliff Heathcote.11  In what turned out to be his last season in the majors, Beck hit just .154 in 53 games as a part-time infielder, primarily at third base.  The Reds sent Beck down to the St. Paul Saints of the American Association at the end of the 1931 season, ending his major-league career. 

Beck played two seasons for St. Paul before returning to his old California stamping grounds with the PCL’s Mission Reds of San Francisco. At 34, he proved there was still some life in the ol’ glove yet when he led PCL shortstops in fielding in 1934 with a .970 fielding percentage in an exhausting 188 games.  And to prove that 1934 was no fluke, he repeated the feat again in 1935, topping PCL shortstops with a .957 fielding percentage.

After playing one more year with the Mission Reds in 1936, Beck was traded to the Oakland Oaks for pitcher Tom “Dutch” Conlan. Apparently the Oaks adopted an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach in acquiring him.

“Although he is no DiMaggio at the plate, Beck, nevertheless, has been a thorn in the side of Oakland hurlers,” wrote Emmons Byrne in The Sporting News.  “The front office thought something should be done about it and henceforth, if he is going to hit in the clutch, it will be for the Oaks.”12

Well, it seems that the front office changed its mind because the Oaks released Beck on May 20, 1937. He was immediately picked up by the Seattle Indians.  Between the two teams Beck played in 20 games and hit a paltry .171. This was his final season as a professional baseball player.

After his playing days ended, Beck moved back to Los Angeles with his wife and two children, Evelyn (born 1927) and Charles (1931), and made his living as a motor winder.13  Even though he never went back to baseball, he participated in activities commemorating events that took place during his career. He played in an old-timer’s game held on October 7, 1950, to honor the 25th anniversary of the first game played at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.  He attended dinners put on by the Pasadena Sports Ambassadors to honor former ballplayers who played in the World Series. (The fact that Beck didn’t actually play in the 1929 Series with the Cubs didn’t seem to matter.)

Beck may also have been surprised by the results of an opinion poll of Cubs fans commissioned by the Chicago club that was published in 1950.  One of the questions was, “Who do you think is the greatest Cub player of our time?” Stan Hack, who retired in 1947, led the results with 14.2 percent of the vote and Gabby Hartnett was second respondents with 13.9 percent.  Other Hall of Fame players such as Hack Wilson and Grover Cleveland Alexander were on the list. Beck also made the list, with 0.9 percent of the vote, which is strange considering that even Joe Tinker didn’t make the list.14

Clyde Beck lived in the Los Angeles area until he died of an acute myocardial infarction on July 15, 1988, in Temple City, California.  He was 88 years old.

Sources

Ancestry.com

Ballparksofbaseball.com

Baseball-Reference.com

Borchertfield.com

Milb.com

The Sporting News

Clyde Beck player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame

Notes

1 Different sources cite different places and dates of birth.  The 1910 US Census indicates Beck was born in 1899, and an undated newspaper article lists his date of birth as January 6, 1902, in bordering El Monte, California.  Beck himself listed January 6, 1900, as his birthdate.

2 “Clyde Beck Sold to Wichita Ball Club,” Dubuque (Iowa) Herald, March 26, 1923.

3 In a review of Western League statistics on baseball-reference.com for the 1923 season, no player appeared in more than 169 games.

4 Associated Press, “Angels Do Well in Beck Deal,” The Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, December 11, 1925.

5 “If the Ice Plants Will Only Hold Out,” The Sporting News, July 22, 1926 .

6 George F. Downer, “Following Through With Downer,” Milwaukee Sentinel, July 16, 1926.

7 The Sporting News, July 22, 1926.

8 Clipping, publication unknown, from Beck’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

9 Associated Press, “Cubs and Braves Plan to Swing Trade,” St. Petersburg (Florida)  Evening Independent, January 31, 1929.

10 William Weekes, “Reserve Player Sent Into Lineup of Cubs as Hornsby Breaks Ankle Leads Chicago to Double Victory,” St. Petersburg Evening Independent, May 31, 1930.

11 Associated Press, “Cubs Release Beck to Cincinnati Club,” Milwaukee Sentinel, June 4, 1931.

12 Emmons Byrne, “Well Thinned Oaks Wait on New Buds,” The Sporting News, January 28, 1937.

13 The birth years are based on Evelyn’s being listed as 13 years old and Charles as 9 at the time of the 1940 US Census.

14 “Barber Shop Poll 86.6 Per Cent for Farm Aid,” The Sporting News, January 25, 1950.

Imagine you’re one of two widget-winders working in the same factory and that you have to compete for the Number One job with one of the greatest widget-winders in history.  That is exactly the situation that Clarence “Footsie” Blair found himself in when he played second base for the Chicago Cubs.  That is, he played when the other guy, future Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, didn’t.

Clarence Vick Blair was born in Enterprise, Oklahoma, approximately 130 miles east of Oklahoma City, on July 13, 1900.  He was the oldest of three children born to Charles H. Blair, originally from Arkansas, and Cora E. Blair, from Tennessee. Charles Blair held a number of jobs over the years.  He is known to have worked as a night watchman at a mill and as a fireman in an oilfield.

Blair grew up in Texarkana Ward 4, Bowie, Texas.  He didn’t receive much education, leaving school after completing the seventh grade.1  Blair began his professional career close to home in 1924 with the Texarkana Twins of the Class D East Texas League, where he batted an undistinguished .245 in 88 games as an infielder, including 36 games at second base.

There are no records of where Blair played in 1925, but by1926 he had moved up to the Class A Southern Association with the Little Rock Travelers, a team that included future New York Yankees catcher Bill Dickey, himself a future Hall of Famer.  Blair appeared in only 41 games that year, all at shortstop.  Offensively, he hit a respectable .284, but his defense had highs and lows; of the three shortstops on the team that year, he had the most errors, 23, and the lowest fielding percentage, .896.

Blair’s mediocre season resulted in his demotion to the Columbia (South Carolina) Comers of the Class B South Atlantic League for 1927.  It seems that returning to a lower level and going back to a more natural position at second base agreed with him.  He got a lot more playing time, appearing in 128 games, and his batting average shot up to .301.  He committed the same number of errors as the previous season, 23, but in more than three times as many chances (759 compared with 221 in 1926).  Blair finished the season with an excellent .970 fielding percentage and a return engagement to Little Rock for 1928.

This time he was ready.  His batting average dipped slightly, to .294, but he hit a career-high nine home runs, only one fewer than he hit in his three major-league seasons combined.  He dazzled with the glove as well, committing only 13 errors in 121 games at second base for an excellent .983 fielding percentage.  These numbers were good enough for a ticket to “The Show” with the Chicago Cubs in 1929.

In baseball, as in life, timing is everything.  Unfortunately for Blair, he arrived in Chicago at the same time as the aforementioned Hornsby, considered by many the greatest right-handed hitter of all time.  With the Boston Braves in 1928, the 32-year-old Hornsby had led the National League in batting average (.387), on-base percentage (.498), and slugging average (.632).  A 28-year-old rookie like Blair couldn’t expect much playing time backing up an all-time great, and he didn’t get much, a mere 77 plate appearances and a smattering of starts at first base and third (seven at each), along with two appearances at second base.  He did bat .319 and hit one home run, but he spent a lot of time riding the pines. He had one plate appearance in Game One of the 1929 World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics, but the only positive aspect about it was that he wasn’t one of Howard Ehmke’s record-setting 13 strikeout victims. 

One could have forgiven Blair for having a feeling of déjà vu when the movie 42nd Street came out in 1933.  That’s the famous movie where the leading lady of a Broadway show broke her leg just before opening night and plucky Ruby Keeler went out in her place as a nobody and came back a star. 

In Blair’s case, the star second baseman, Hornsby, broke his ankle sliding into third base in the first game of a doubleheader on May 30, 1930, against the St. Louis Cardinals. Blair replaced Hornsby in the first game, and was the Cubs’ leadoff hitter in the second game. He wowed the audience, going 3-for-5 with a home run and six RBIs.

The similarity to 42nd Street ends there, unfortunately for Blair, because he went out in Hornsby’s place as a nobody and came back as, well, still a nobody.  Granted, he took full advantage of his playing time.  In 134 games, he batted .273 with six homers and 59 runs batted in.  But his 1930 season didn’t have a Hollywood ending because he simply didn’t get on base enough to be the offensive catalyst a good leadoff hitter should be. His batting average was mediocre for the top spot in the order, and his .306 on-base average was the lowest among the starting eight in the Cubs’ lineup. True, he crossed the plate 97 times, but three teammates had substantially higher run totals, including Kiki Cuyler (155), Woody English (152), and Hack Wilson (146).  Even accounting for these players having played more games than he did, Blair’s total was low, especially for a player hitting at the top of the order for a good offensive team. 

Research indicates that 1930 is also the year that Blair got his nickname of Footsie.  In his book on baseball nicknames, J.K. Skipper says that the sobriquet stems from a quote in a 1930 article in the Chicago Tribune, which reads, “Blair is a speedy fellow despite enormous contact with the ground, which accounts for his nickname.”2

Blair probably knew his playing time would be limited when spring training for 1931 rolled around.  Not only had Hornsby’s ankle healed, he was now the Cubs player-manager, having replaced Joe McCarthy with four games left in the 1930 season. The Cubs also had a blue-chip prospect in 21-year-old Billy Herman, who gave a hint of his own Hall of Fame career to come by hitting .327 in 25 games.  For the 30-year-old Blair, his .258 batting average in 86 games simply didn’t cut it. 

To Hornsby’s credit, he did sit himself down when he was mired in a 1-for-26 slump in early June 1931 and had Blair play in his place.  At the time, Hornsby’s average had fallen to .297. By the third game of Hornsby’s self-benching, Blair’s average for the season was at .191, so Hornsby figured the team was better off having himself in the lineup.  The rest no doubt did the Rajah some good because he ended up leading the team in home runs (16) and RBIs (90), and tying for the team’s highest batting average (.331).  Blair’s last major-league appearance came in the final game of the 1931 season, when he pinch-hit in the fifth inning for starting pitcher Guy Bush.  He struck out.

The Cubs sold Blair to the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League in March 1932.  It seems the Texarkana resident didn’t much like the California sunshine.  He played 46 games for the Angels and then quit the team abruptly in June after fans got on him for his play.

“Fans had been riding Blair since he committed four errors in one game, then threw the ball into the grandstand at his caustic critics,” wrote the San Jose News.3

Not surprisingly, the Angels suspended Blair for the remainder of the season, then sold him to the Cincinnati Reds.  As training camp for 1933 approached, Blair, who had to pay his own way to spring training, as did all other players, couldn’t get any money out of his bank because of the Great Depression.  He wired the Reds about his predicament, and they arranged for a train ticket on credit for him to get from Texarkana to Tampa, Florida, by rail.  Blair didn’t make the Reds during spring training and was sent to the International League’s Jersey City Skeeters.  He never reported to the Skeeters, perhaps because they were a financial disaster.  The club was in such dire financial straits that each of the other International League clubs had to supply it with players.4

The Skeeters scooted up to Syracuse to become the Chiefs before the 1934 season started, and Blair did play for them that year. He had an undistinguished season, batting .266 with two home runs, although he tied the Rochester Red Wings’ Tom Winsett for the league lead in triples with 13.

That number was unlucky for Blair because the Boston Red Sox, the Chiefs’ parent team, demoted him to the Class A Southern Association’s Knoxville Smokies for the 1935 season.  He began a three-year stint with the Smokies (1935-37) that began the winding down of his professional career.  His batting averages declined with each season, from .293 in 1935 to .285 in 1936, then to .263 in 1937.  In 1938 Blair went down to the Jackson (Mississippi) Senators of the Class B Southeastern League.  He had a good year, batting .318 in 127 games with a .418 slugging average.

The following year in Jackson, Blair added the manager’s title to his business card and still managed to get into 108 games, batting .275 with three home runs — his highest total in three years — and a .379 slugging average.

The following two years Blair played some for the Senators, 12 games in 1940 and 50 games in 1941, but he devoted himself primarily to managing, and the results showed. The Senators won the Southeastern League championship in 1940 and lost in the league final the following season.  The 1941 season was his last in baseball.

After his diamond career ended, Blair returned to Texarkana, where he ran a service station. He and his wife, Lois, had three children, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.  He died in Texarkana just 12 days shy of his 82nd birthday, on July 1, 1982.

Clarence Blair’s baseball career may not have been distinguished, and he may not have spent much time in the big leagues.  But he was probably the only player in major-league history who could honestly boast that the great Rogers Hornsby the manager benched Rogers Hornsby the player in favor of him.  A great story for the grandkids.

Sources

BaseballReference.com

Texarkana (Texas) Gazette, July 3, 1982

Tuscaloosa(Alabama) News, September 25, 1940, and September 17, 1941

Notes

1 1940 US Census.

2 J.K. Skipper, Baseball Nicknames:  A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings (Jefferson, North Carolina:  McFarland and Company Inc., 2011), 23.

3 “Suspend Blair, Angels Outfielder,” San Jose News, June 22, 1932, 4.

4 “Brief Bits of Gossip,” The Sporting News, December 28, 1933, 3.

John Frederick Blake was born on September 17, 1899, in Ansted, West Virginia, to Jesse Alfred and Lula Mae (Holder) Blake. He grew up in the rugged Appalachian terrain of central West Virginia, where coal mining was a way of life for most families. His parents were hard-working, industrious people of Scotch-English descent. His father worked in the coal mines for more than 40 years, rising to the post of foreman. His mother raised eight children born over the course of two decades. Fred, as his parents called him, was the third born and the first of two sons. With access to education limited and money scarce, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that young Fred would join his father in the mines by the time he was 14. His father trained him to operate mining machinery as a way to escape backbreaking and dangerous manual work.

Baseball offered miners and small towns in Appalachia a temporary respite from the harsh realities of their surroundings.  Blake’s father was an accomplished amateur pitcher and taught his son the art of pitching. By the time Fred was 16, he was pitching with adults on local coal-field teams. In light of American’s imminent entry into the World War, the Blakes sent Fred to the Greenbrier Military School in Lewisburg in 1916, hoping that a military career would provide their son an escape from the perils of mining. Fred played football and baseball at the boarding school, but despised the rigid discipline and quit after about two years.

Blake’s big break occurred when he enrolled at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, where he made a name for himself as “one of the most phenomenal young pitchers” in the northwest part of the state, reportedly striking out 63 batters in four games in 1919.1 Blake caught the attention of Earle “Greasy” Neale, who had coached the college’s football team and was also a fleet-footed outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds at the time. On Neale’s recommendation, Reds scout Gene McCann signed the hard-throwing right-hander. 

For reasons Blake never understood, the Reds placed him on waivers some time after their World Series triumph over the Chicago White Sox in 1919. The Pirates, who had attempted to sign Blake the previous year, claimed him. Blake suffered a severely sprained ankle at the Pirates’ spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was subsequently released. He returned to West Virginia, and began pitching for the semipro Charleston Senators, a former team in the Class D Ohio State League. Recalled by the Pirates in midseason, 20-year-old Blake made his big-league debut on June 29 during the second game of a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs at Cubs Park. He tossed the final inning of relief in a 14-3 drubbing, yielding two hits and two runs. He pitched five more times in relief and finished with a lofty 8.10 ERA over 13⅓ innings.

The Pirates assigned Blake to the Rochester (New York) Colts, and then Tribe, of the Double-A International League for the 1921 and 1922 seasons, where he was managed by George Stallings, best known as the skipper of the “miracle” Boston Braves championship team of 1914. “He was the greatest man there ever was,” Blake told oral historian Eugene Murdock.2 According to Blake, Stallings was a demanding manager who taught him to keep the ball low and encouraged him to rely on his fastball and curveball. Though Rochester finished in second place behind the Lefty Grove-led Baltimore Orioles both years, Blake developed into one of the league’s premier pitchers. In his first year in the IL, he established career bests in wins (21) and innings (300); the following year he won 17 and posted a 2.76 ERA.  Like the young Grove, Blake suffered from poor control and finished second to the future Hall of Famer in walks in 1921; however, while Grove developed impeccable control, Blake battled bouts of wildness throughout his 21-year professional baseball career.

Blake credited Stallings for giving him the nickname Sheriff. “[It] was back during Prohibition,” he explained. “Stallings knew I was from West Virginia [and also knew] that there was a lot of moonshining going on in West Virginia. He went to call me one day and could not think of my name, so he said ‘Hey you moonshining sheriff, come here.’”3 The name remained with Blake for the rest of his life. He learned to embrace it, but admitted that he had to explain for the remainder of his baseball days that he was not really an elected official in charge of enforcing the law.

After his fourth consecutive spring training with the Pirates, Blake was sent to the Seattle Indians of the Double-A Pacific Coast League for the 1923 season. Described by The Sporting News as a “terrible bust,” Blake limped to a 13-20 record and his ERA ballooned to 4.71.4 During the National Association meeting in December, the Pirates traded him to the Chicago Cubs. Blake had been the subject of rave reports from Cubs scout Jack Doyle, who considered his record to be an anomaly and predicted success for him. According to The Sporting News, Blake was “dissatisfied and indifferent” about playing so far from home and his pitching consequently suffered.5

Standing an even 6 feet tall and weighing about 180 pounds, Blake was quiet and easy-going, especially compared to his more rambunctious teammates Pat Malone and fellow West Virginian and good friend Hack Wilson. With his gray eyes, black hair, and bushy eyebrows, Blake spoke with an unmistakable Appalachian drawl that newspapers in Chicago often mentioned. Recognized by his slow, unpretentious gait, Blake was known to conserve his energy before he pitched. While a member of the Cubs, he married Marguerite H. “Madge” Cross, who, like other well-known wives of Cubs players, was a constant presence at home games at Wrigley Field. Despite the trappings and lifestyle the big city had to offer, Blake was a country boy at heart, and spent his offseason at home in West Virginia where he occasionally pitched in late-season coal-field league games, hunted, fished, and golfed.

Touted as a “stuff” pitcher for most of his career, Blake began his first season with the Cubs in the bullpen. Against the St. Louis Cardinals at Cubs Park on April 24, he pitched a scoreless frame of relief in the ninth inning, and picked up his first big-league win when the Cubs scored two in the bottom of the ninth to win the game, 5-4. On July 5 he tossed a complete game to defeat the Cardinals in St. Louis, 6-2, in his first major-league start, then hit his stride by winning five of six decisions through late August. But he struggled down the stretch, losing his last four decisions. With 11 starts among his 29 appearances, Blake finished the season with a 6-6 record and a high, 4.57 ERA in 106⅓ innings.

While the last-place Cubs took a large step backward in 1925, finishing with a losing record for the first time in four years, Blake became a regular in the starting rotation, joining his boyhood hero, 38-year-old Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander. Like the Cubs, who burned through three different managers during the season, Blake was maddeningly inconsistent. He led the team with 31 starts, and had 10 wins but also 18 losses (tying for the second-most in the league). He tossed complete games in all of his victories (including a ten-inning, ten strikeout performance) and carved out a nifty 2.47 ERA; yet in his other 36 appearances his ERA was well over 6.00. The root of Blake’s Jekyll and Hyde act was a lack of control. He finished second in the league with a career-high 114 walks. During the course of his six-year run in the starting rotation (1925-1930), Blake’s 591 free passes were the most among NL hurlers, but he led the league just once in the dubious category (1926).

Switch-hitter Blake’s seven RBIs in 1925 were his most in a given season; he batted .211 in 558 career at-bats. In his only postseason at-bat, he singled to shortstop during Game Two of the 1929 World Series.

A turning point in Cubs history occurred in 1926 when they hired Joe McCarthy to pilot the club. McCarthy endeared himself to his players by his unwavering support for them, even when they struggled. Blake discovered that trait two months into the season. The lanky West Virginian’s ERA was north of 7.00 as a swingman and reliever, but with the Cubs just three games off the pace in a tight pennant race, McCarthy gave his beleaguered pitcher another chance on the mound. Blake responded by hurling a four-hitter to defeat the Phillies at the Baker Bowl. Two starts later, Blake authored the best game in his big-league career as he held the eventual champion St. Louis Cardinals to one hit and matched his career high with ten strikeouts en route to a 5-0 victory at Sportsman’s Park during the second game of a doubleheader. Though a poor September (13-14) doomed the Cubs’ pennant aspirations, Blake’s 6-3 record and sparkling 2.64 ERA in the pressure-packed games of August and September proved to McCarthy that he was an invaluable member of the staff despite his overall pedestrian record of 11-12.

Blake had a reputation as a quick worker on the mound and regularly completed games in well under two hours.  He claimed he learned to speed up his rhythm from home-plate umpires, like legendary Bill Klem. “Klem always told young pitchers to work fast,” he recalled. “In one of the first games I pitched when he was umpiring, he brought the ball out to me and said to me, ‘Young fellow, now let’s have a real fast game. These fans want to get home for supper. All good pitchers pitch fast games.’”6 And despite all of his walks, undoubtedly many on full counts, the level-headed Blake rarely argued with umpires or became emotionally unhinged because of a bad call like teammates Charlie Root or Pat Malone, and was never ejected from a professional baseball game in his 21-year career. Blake’s only pitching vice might have been his liberal use of the rosin bag, which drew the attention of The Sporting News in 1926 when the bag was introduced to the big leagues.7 

For most of the 1927 season, the Cubs played streaky baseball. After Chicago’s fourth consecutive loss and sixth in seven games to fall to 22-19, Blake tossed a five-hit shutout against the Boston Braves on June 5 to commence the North Siders’ 12-game winning streak and rekindle the club’s pennant aspirations. The Cubs moved into first place on July 7 (owing to  nine straight wins), but were unable to pull away from the second-place Pittsburgh Pirates. After losing 10 of 13 games to fall back into second place, the Cubs and Blake got hot at the same time. In his first three starts in August, the West Virginian tossed three consecutive complete-game victories, allowing just one earned run in 28 innings. Included was a season-long ten-inning effort against the Cincinnati Reds on August 13 and a five-hit shutout of the Brooklyn Robins in the first game of a doubleheader on August 19 to maintain the Cubs’ five-game lead over the Pirates. But the Cubs lost 16 out of their next 20 games to fall out of contention, and ultimately finished in fourth place. For the season, Blake won 13 and lost 14 and posted a 3.29 ERA (tenth-best in the NL) in 224⅓ innings.

Blake reported to the Cubs spring-training facility on Catalina Island in 1928 still reeling from the team’s late-season collapse the previous September. Up by two games on August 30, the North Siders lost 18 of their last 30 contests to finish in fourth place again. Blake started the 1928 season red hot, wining five consecutive decisions with a sub-1.00 ERA. “[He’s] the backbone on the Cubs pitching staff to date,” exclaimed The Sporting News.8 Led by the pitching quintet of Bush, Malone, Root, Blake, and Art Nehf (who combined to start 129 games and log in excess of 1,100 innings) and the home-run slugging of Wilson, the Cubs climbed to within two games of the league-leading Cardinals on September 13, when Blake limited them to four hits in a complete-game victory.  Though the Cubs were collectively disappointed by their third consecutive “near-miss” and third-place finish, Blake enjoyed his first winning season, setting career highs in victories (17), innings (240⅔), ERA (2.47), and complete games (16); his four shutouts tied for the league lead with four other hurlers.

During the closing weeks of the season, Blake suffered a career-altering injury to the fingers on his right hand when a line drive damaged several of them. “I didn’t pitch at all for about a week or so and then when I started again I held the ball a little differently,” said Blake. “I even threw underhand for a while. I couldn’t grip the curveball very well.”9 Unfortunately for Blake, the height of his personal success also marked his steady, but swift decline. Without his “fast breaking curve” Blake was out of the big leagues three years later.10

Chicago acquired the extremely talented yet equally divisive second baseman Rogers Hornsby in the offseason making them the favorites to win the pennant in 1929. While the Cubs battled the Cardinals and Pirates for first place through July, the fingers on Blake’s right hand continued to bother him. Described as a “mystery” by The Sporting News, Blake lost eight of his first ten decisions despite a sub-3.00 ERA.11 His control worsened (he walked at least five batters in 12 of 29 starts) as the season progressed, and his ERA steadily rose to 4.29 by season’s end. Aided by the high-scoring Cubs offense, Blake won 12 of 15 decisions to finish with a winning record for the second and last time in his career (14-13) and logged 218⅓ innings. The Cubs cruised to their first pennant since 1918.

McCarthy opted for a three-man rotation (Root, Malone, and Bush) against the overwhelming favorite Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. The Cubs lost the first two games in Chicago; Blake pitched 1⅓ innings of scoreless relief in Game Two before being lifted for a pinch-hitter during the Cubs’ fifth-inning rally. Bush’s win in Game Three at Shibe Park breathed new life in the North Siders, who were seemingly on the verge of tying the series, two games apiece. Leading the A’s, 8-0 in the seventh inning of Game Four, the Cubs collapsed, surrendering ten runs in the bottom of the frame in an eventual 10-8 loss. Blake was the third of four pitchers in that fateful inning. With the Cubs still in the lead, 8-7, Blake relieved Art Nehf with one out and Mickey Cochrane on second base. “I lost that game,” said Blake, “pitching to only two batters. [Al] Simmons bounced one over the third baseman’s head and [Jimmie] Foxx grounded another one through the infield.”12 Blake was lifted for Pat Malone, and subsequently was charged with the defeat when Jimmy Dykes cranked a double scoring Foxx, representing the lead run, and Bing Miller to complete the comeback. Miller’s dramatic walk-off, Series-clinching double with two outs in the ninth inning of Game Five ended the Cubs’ nightmare.

For the first and only time in his career, Blake was named Opening Day starter in 1930, and went six innings to defeat the Cardinals. He tossed a complete game in his next outing to start the season at 2-0. It went downhill after that. He lost seven of his next eight decisions with an ERA hovering over 6.30.  Blake was still capable of strong outings, such as an 11-inning complete-game victory over the Brooklyn Robins in August; however, he surrendered hits and walks at an alarming rate (1.67 per nine innings), exceeding even the league average in the Year of the Hitter. The Cubs appeared poised to take their second consecutive pennant but squandered a five-game lead during the last month of the season as pressure and mounting dissent led to McCarthy’s resignation with four games remaining. Relegated to the bullpen, Blake made just two starts in the last five weeks of the season, finishing with a 10-14 record and 4.82 ERA in 186⅔ innings.

Just 31 years old, Blake reported to spring training early and was still considered an important cog in the Cubs staff. But Blake chafed under the authoritarian rule of manager Hornsby, struggled in the field, and was ultimately placed on waivers. With an 0-4 record, Blake was claimed by the Philadelphia Phillies on July 20. He took his acquisition in stride, but had little to offer the league’s worst pitching staff.  He won four of nine decisions, but posted a dismal 5.58 ERA, and was released at the end of the season.

Blake spent the next nine years as a baseball nomad, wandering the upper minor leagues hoping to catch on with a big-league club in need of a cagey veteran. He also pitched annually in coal-field leagues in West Virginia once the professional season was over. Two years pitching in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system earned him an invitation to the Cincinnati Reds spring training in 1934. Among the last cut, Blake spent the next three years in the Double-A International League with the Toronto Maple Leafs and Baltimore Orioles, where he averaged about 13 wins and 225 innings per season.

The pitching-starved St. Louis Browns, managed by his one-time tormentor Rogers Hornsby, invited Blake to spring training in 1937. He made the team as a reliever, but was released on July 15 owning an astronomical 7.61 ERA. Two days later the St. Louis Cardinals unexpectedly signed the veteran as insurance in light of Dizzy Dean’s injury in the All-Star Game. He tossed a 10⅓-inning complete game but lost in his first appearance as a Redbird. Though he pitched well in his 14 outings (3.71 ERA), he lost all three of his decisions and was released at season’s end.

Blake hung on for three more seasons (1938-1940), winning 30 games and logging in excess of 500 innings for the Class A1 Birmingham Barons and Oklahoma City Indians, before retiring. “I was one of those fellows who never got a sore arm,” said Blake.13 Except for the injury to his fingers, Blake never suffered from shoulder or elbow woes. He logged 3,967 innings in his professional career; 1,620 of them were in the big leagues, where he won 87 games and lost 102.

Blake tried his hand at managing, but lasted less than a full season with the Huntington (West Virginia) Aces of the Class D Mountain State League in 1941.  He returned to his home in Beckley, West Virginia, and worked for a coal-mining company for more than 20 years.  He continued to pitch well into his late 40s for various mining teams and was a local celebrity of sorts.

Sheriff Blake died on October 31, 1982, in Beckley after a long illness. He was 83 years old and never lost his childhood enthusiasm for baseball. He was buried at the Sunset Memorial Park.

Sources:

Ehrgott, Roberts, Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club. Chicago & the Cubs During the Jazz Age (Lincoln, Nebraska, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

Golenbock, Peter, Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999).

Murdock, Eugene, Baseball Players and Their Times: Oral Histories of the Game, 1920-1940 (Westport, Connecticut: Meckler, 1982).

Stout, Glen, The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).

Stewart, Johnny, “Sheriff Blake Recalls 20-Years Baseball Career.” Raleigh Register (Beckley, West Virginia), April 30, 1957.

Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette

Chicago Daily Tribune

New York Times

Raleigh Register (Beckley, West Virginia)

The Sporting News

Ancestry.com

BaseballLibrary.com

Baseball-Reference.com

Retrosheet.org

SABR.org

Sheriff Blake player file, Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York.

Notes

1 “Glen White, W. Va,” Raleigh Register (Beckley, West Virginia), April 24, 1919, 9.

2 Eugene Murdock, Baseball Players and Their Times: Oral Histories of the Game, 1920-1940 (Westport, Connecticut: Meckler, 1982), 193.

3 Murdock, 194.

4 The Sporting News, July 26, 1923, 3.

5 The Sporting News, December 20, 1923, 1.

6 Murdock, 199.

7 The Sporting News, July 8, 1926, 7.

8 The Sporting News, July 5, 1928.

9 Murdock, 189.

10 The Sporting News, July 1, 1926, 1.

11 The Sporting News, July 25, 1929, 1.

12 Murdock, 190.

13 Murdock, 188.

Jimmy Burke, a coach for the 1929 Cubs, was the quintessential baseball lifer. A marginal ballplayer at best, he somehow managed to hang around in the game for 38 years. His long career as player, manager, coach, and scout began in 1896 with the Peoria Distillers of the Western Association, where he felt privileged to play the game he loved for a modest $125-a-month salary. In later years he jokingly remarked that he would have gladly played for even $25.  For nearly four decades Burke was never without a job in baseball. He crisscrossed the country on countless train rides over tens of thousands of miles, ready to play for any team that wanted him and offered a baseball paycheck. When deteriorating health brought his career to an abrupt end in 1933 he retired in comfort to the city of his birth, St. Louis, Missouri.

James Timothy “Sunset Jimmy” Burke was born on October 12, 1874, in St. Louis, the son of John Burke and Catherine McGary, immigrants from Ireland’s County Cork. Other known siblings included a brother John and an unidentified sister. Little is known of Jimmy’s early years. The schools he attended are unknown and he did not attend college. His introduction to organized baseball came in the early 1890s with the Shamrocks, a sandlot club of kids who wore flamboyant white flannel suits trimmed with green caps, green belts, and green stockings. The Shamrocks were considered the best independent team in the St. Louis vicinity, and many major leaguers emerged from their ranks. His wife was named Lottie, but details of her life, their courtship, and the date of their marriage are also unknown. Lottie died at an early age, leaving Jimmy a young widower with one child, his beloved daughter Marion, who died while Jimmy was a coach for the Boston Red Sox in the 1920s. Jimmy remained an unmarried widower for the rest of his life.

Burke is often remembered as the manager who in 1911 “canned” Joe McCarthy from the minor-league Indianapolis Indians. As he said at the time, ”McCarthy couldn’t hit his weight.”1 McCarthy never held a grudge against Burke over this dismissal, claiming in later years that it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He admitted that he was over his head at Double-A Indianapolis, and his focus shifted from playing to where his talents lay: leadership. This became the first step on McCarthy’s path to his Hall of Fame managerial career. In a wonderful slice of baseball irony, Burke and McCarthy later became fast friends. Burke became McCarthy’s trusted right-hand man during a successful pennant run in Chicago and a world championship in New York. Burke may have been directly responsible for McCarthy’s landing his first big-league managerial job. While managing the Double-A Toledo Mud Hens in 1924, Jimmy recommended McCarthy to Cubs owner William Wrigley, who shortly after inked McCarthy as the new Cubs skipper. Burke is also remembered, along with Rogers Hornsby, Branch Rickey, Gabby Street, and Marty Marion as the only managers who took the helm of both St. Louis teams, the Cardinals and the Browns. Of this group, he is the only one who was also a St. Louis native.

Burke did not look like a ballplayer. He was small in size at 5-feet-7 and 160 pounds. With his red hair, florid complexion, steel-blue eyes, ready smile, and sunny disposition, he was the personification of a strapping Son of Ireland.  He was blessed with the Irish gift of gab and always had a baseball anecdote on the tip of his tongue ready to share with his many friends on and off the field. He hailed from St. Louis’s famous Kerry Patch district, located north of downtown. It was described by sportswriter Fred Lieb as a “breeding ground for big leaguers.”2 It may be a bit of a reach to characterize the Patch as the San Pedro de Macoris of its day — that small Dominican town that turns out so many of today’s finest Latin ballplayers. Like San Pedro, Kerry Patch produced an inordinate amount of major-league talent, but in this case the players were Irish.

Burke was typical of many second-generation Irish ballplayers from the early decades of the 20th century: Often diminutive in stature, they made up for their lack of size and limited skills with a combative nature, a competitive spirit, and a willingness to use their fists wherever and whenever the occasion arose. Like their role model John McGraw and his feisty Baltimore Orioles, they hated to lose and loved to fight. They battled umpires and opposition teams with equal intensity. In 1931, when Jimmy was a Yankees coach near the end of his career, he reflected on his combative approach to the game:

“I had to be a fighting ballplayer. That’s how I got by. I wasn’t a great ballplayer, so I made the best of such assets as I possessed. I put all of the fight and enthusiasm I could into my work. So even if I had shortcomings, owners knew I always worked and hustled for them. Besides, in the old days a player had to have a reputation as a fighter in self-defense. It didn’t do to be too meek. Everyone would step on you.”3

Burke made his major-league debut at the age of 23 on October 6, 1898, as a scrappy, slick-fielding third baseman for the National League Cleveland Spiders. In 13 games he hit a less-than-robust .105 (4-for-38). That year also saw a return to the Peoria (Illinois) Distillers of the Class B Western Association and stops with the Milwaukee Brewers and Minneapolis Millers of the Class A Western League.

Burke had a two-game cup-of-coffee with the National League St. Louis Perfectos in 1899, but spent most of the year with the Rochester (New York) Bronchos of the Class A Eastern League. In 1900 he was a member of the Milwaukee Brewers of the newly named American League. The AL was a Class A minor league that year, having evolved from the Western League under Ban Johnson, and elevated itself to major-league status in 1901. That season Burke played with three different American League teams, the Milwaukee Brewers, Chicago White Sox, and Pittsburgh Pirates. He spent all of 1902 with the pennant-winning Pirates. It was his best season offensively, as he hit .296 in 60 games. In 1903 he was traded for infielder Otto Krueger, this time to his hometown St. Louis Cardinals. He became the team’s player-manager in early May 1905, succeeding Kid Nichols. Burke finished his major-league playing career that year, appearing in his last major-league game on October 8, 1905. In his seven-year major-league career he played in 550 games and compiled a modest batting average of .244. With his major-league playing days over, he commenced on his second career, which included jobs as manager, coach, and scout in the major and minor leagues. This second career continued unbroken for 27 years.

Burke had minor-league managerial stints from 1906 to 1912 with three American Association teams, the Kansas City Blues, Louisville Colonels, and Indianapolis Indians; and with the Fort Wayne Billikens of the Class B Central League. He returned to the majors with Detroit from 1914 to 1917 as a coach and scout for manager Hughie Jennings, a future Hall of Famer. Next came three years (1918-1920) as manager of the St. Louis Browns succeeding the unpopular Fielder Jones. Jimmy’s outgoing, optimistic personality made a striking contrast with the dour Jones and he was received warmly. He had limited success with the Browns, finishing no higher than fourth. In his four years as a major-league manager his teams had an unimpressive 206-236 record.

The St. Louis years were followed by three as a Red Sox coach under another future Hall of Famer, Hugh Duffy, and then back to the minors for two years as manager of the Toledo Mud Hens in the American Association. In 1926 he returned to the National League for five years as McCarthy’s lieutenant in Chicago, which included the first of McCarthy’s nine pennants, in 1929. When Marse Joe fell out of favor with owner William Wrigley in 1930 and was dropped as manager, his first item of business after being hired by the Yankees was to secure the services of his loyal friend and adviser Burke to succeed retiring coach Charlie O’Leary.

In 1932 Burke played an important role in the Yankees’ sweep of the Cubs in the World Series, one remembered for Babe Ruth’s purported called home-run shot off Charlie Root at Wrigley Field. As a former Cubs coach, Burke knew their weaknesses especially the throwing ability of their outfielders. This proved to be valuable information, which he readily shared with the players. His contribution to the Yankees’ championship was summarized by a sportswriter:

“As a result of this knowledge on the part of their coach, such lumbering players as Gehrig, Ruth, and Bill Dickey scored from second on short hits to the outfield on which ordinarily they would have had to pull up at third or be thrown out at the plate.”4

Over his long career, Burke played with many of the game’s stars. Toward the end of his career, he was asked whom he regarded as the greatest player he ever saw. He replied without hesitation: Honus Wagner, ranking him ahead of Speaker, Cobb, and even Ruth:

“I think he was the greatest because he was such a marvelous defensive ballplayer in addition to his brilliant batting and baserunning ability. Wagner was without doubt the greatest shortstop, but he was just as great in center field or at first base. When I first went to Pittsburgh … Wagner played center field and I never saw anyone, not even Speaker, play the position any better. If a ball was hit to center, left, or right, Hans always yelled: ‘I got it.’ And the Dutchman was a smart ballplayer, as smart as they came. He didn’t look it but the man who played alongside of him or with him knew it.”5

After the World Series victory in 1932, Burke was unceremoniously released by the Yankees at the age of 58 as part of league-wide cost-cutting measures. The Yankees decided two coaches were enough and felt coaches Art Fletcher and Cy Perkins were more valuable. Given his unconditional release by Yankees business manager Ed Barrow, Burke, like McCarthy before him in 1911, took his dismissal like a man, held no grudges, and laughed as he quoted from, as he called it, his “walking papers”: “We regret to inform you that your services will no longer be required, etc., etc.”6 Speaking of his dismissal, Burke remarked:

“I’m glad of it. You know a fellow’ll never quit in this game. He’ll carry on and on and on. The years seem to whistle by — one after another — and he sticks to his job. But this release means that Jimmy’s going to enjoy a vacation. I haven’t spent a full summer in St. Louis since 1895. The town’s grown considerable since then and I want to see what’s been going on since I put on my first uniform.”7

The move proved to be unpopular with the players and fans and the Yankees soon reconsidered. They offered Burke the opportunity to return to the team for the 1933 season. However Jimmy suffered a debilitating stroke that spring and was unable to continue with his coaching duties. His career was over and he had no choice but to retire. The stroke left Burke an invalid and he spent his remaining days chair-bound in his home at 5477 Queens Avenue in St. Louis. After a ten-year battle with Parkinson’s disease he was admitted to St. John’s Hospital on March 20, 1942, and died on the 26th of complications from pneumonia. Burke was 67. He was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis and was survived by a brother, John, and a sister.

Although his Baseball Encyclopedia entry reveals unimpressive career statistics as a player and manager, baseball lifer Burke could boast of membership on five pennant-winning teams. Not many ballplayers can say the same. Although he was never a candidate for the Hall of Fame, he played an important advisory role as a loyal coach to Joe McCarthy, the most successful manager in baseball history. He survived in the game he loved for 38 consecutive years — much longer than almost anyone else from his generation. He did it with the successful combination of his endearing personality, his unquestioned loyalty and love for the game, and his acknowledged baseball “smarts.” When Jimmy Burke died in 1942, the game lost one of its most colorful and beloved figures.

Sources

Farrington, Dick, “It’s Better Game Today — Jimmy Burke,” The Sporting News, date unknown, clipping from Jimmy Burke’s Hall of Fame player file.

Keener, Sid, “Sid Keener’s Column,” St. Louis Star, 1933, clipping from Jimmy Burke’s Hall of Fame player file.

Lee, Bill, The Baseball Necrology (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2003).

Lieb, Fred, “Cutting the Plate With Fred Lieb,” The Sporting News, February 24, 1931, clipping from Jimmy Burke’s Hall of Fame player file.

New York Times, obituary for Jimmy Burke, March 27, 1942.

Reichler, Joseph, The Baseball Encyclopedia, Ninth Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

Spatz, Lyle, The SABR Baseball List & Record Book (New York: Scribner, 2007).

Baseball-Reference.com

BaseballQuest.com

Retrosheet.org

Baseball Hall of Fame Library, player file for Jimmy Burke.

Notes

1 The Sporting News, date unknown, clipping from Jimmy Burke’s Hall of Fame player file.

2 The Sporting News, February 24, 1931.

3 Ibid.

4 Unknown author and publication (probably The Sporting News), November 24, 1932, clipping from Jimmy Burke’s Hall of Fame player file.

5 The Sporting News, February 24, 1931.

6 Sid Keener, St. Louis Star, 1933, clipping from Jimmy Burke’s Hall of Fame player file, exact date unknown.

7 Ibid.

Among a lifetime of lively anecdotes, perhaps none better evokes the colorful and adventurous life of Ed Burns than that told by another renowned sportswriter from the profession’s glory days, Red Smith. Writing four days after Burns’s untimely death, on January 27, 1955, at the age of 64, Smith suggested that his colleague “probably was the only sports reporter in America who was prodded into the craft by the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun.”1

The episode took place in Chicago during the Al Capone-era Prohibition days of gangland warfare. At the time, Burns was in his second incarnation with the Chicago Tribune. Having joined the paper as an artist early in 1918, his employment was interrupted in July of that year when Burns was drafted into the Navy, where, Smith reported, he was “valorous in defense of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”2 After discharge, Burns rejoined the Trib, but this time as a news reporter, assigned variously to the Federal building and criminal courts. On the latter beat, Burns “became personally acquainted with commanders, lieutenants and foot soldiers of the underworld’s several clashing forces.”3

One day while Burns was walking down Michigan Avenue, he was joined by one of these nefarious characters, who engaged him in conversation. When it came time for the two to part, the associate seemed reluctant to leave Burns’s side; he kept Burns talking for a considerable time. The next day, Burns encountered a member of a rival gang, who asked, “You bumped into Big Tony yesterday, didn’t you? Did you happen to notice a car following you along the curb?” When Burns answered no, the man explained, “Some of us boys were in it. We were gonna take care of Big Tony, but we didn’t leave him have it because you were in line.”4

Moments later, Burns stood before his managing director and told him, “I have come to the conclusion that sports-writing is my true métier.”5

For almost 30 years, sports fans were thrilled that he had made the switch.

As a boy, Burns had the perfect role model for a journalism career. Born in Frankfort, Indiana, on January 17, 1891, Edward Harold Burns, Jr. was the second son (the first son, Robert, died at 5 in 1892; and sister Blanche was born in 1894) of Edward and Flora Burns. After a stint as editor of the Frankfort Banner, in 1887 Edward Sr. became a partner and joint editor of the Frankfort Evening News, which he later owned. For four years beginning in 1906, Edward Sr. also served as Frankfort’s postmaster.  

Edward Jr. began his career in the newspaper business at 14 by gathering personal items for his father’s newspaper. (In his obituary, it was also noted that Burns later worked on several newspapers, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he attended school, as well as in Illinois, at the Joliet Herald-News and the Chicago Examiner, but the timeline is unclear.) Around 1909, Burns then enrolled at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, where he was a member of the Delta Chi fraternity. Whether Burns majored in journalism at Wabash is unknown, but after graduation he expanded his creative nature by studying at the Chicago Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts, before he joined the staff of the Chicago Herald in 1914. Four years later, he moved to the Tribune and took a job in the art department.  

With his artistic talents, Burns’s career might have turned out differently, although he eventually merged both journalism and art. In reporting upon Burns’ being drafted in 1918, the Tribune wrote, “If he can draw a bead on a Teutonic dome with half the cleverness with which he portrays their features on paper there will be fewer Fritzes to return to the fatherland.”6 After his service in the Navy, Burns returned to Chicago and took a job in the art department of an advertising agency, which he held for two years. In 1923, however, he returned to the Tribune as their crime reporter. His switch to sports took place in 1927.

It was the last position Burns ever held (the exception being supplementary work he did for years with The Sporting News); for the rest of his life, almost literally until the day he died, Burns reported on sports for the Tribune. A big, jovial man, who was a master of satire and an expert in the art of ribbing and needling,7 in addition to baseball, Burns also covered football and hockey, and “won (a) reputation for his whimsical writing style.”8 (Burns was a charter member of the National Hockey League selection committee that yearly named the All-Star players and winners of hockey’s Lady Byng, Hart, and Calder trophies. When he died, Burns’s impact on hockey, it was claimed, would best be remembered by a suggestion he made to widen the blue lines on the rink from a thin, obscure marker to one 12 inches wide. Burns also originated the term “feathering the puck,” then standard in describing the practice of ragging the puck to kill penalty time.9)

Burns couldn’t have been more physically different from the athletes he covered. Indeed, he was a rather large man. Writing about their young artist in 1918, when Burns left the paper for the Navy, the Tribune first reported that he “weigh[ed] something more than 200 [pounds.]”10 In 1973 sportswriter Edgar Munzel, a contemporary of Burns for many years at The Sporting News, with whom Burns spent many springs during the 1930s at Chicago Cubs training camps on Catalina Island, offered an even more inflated account when he recalled Burns as “the 300-pound Tribune chronicler.”11 And perhaps Red Smith said it best when he wrote, in his own inimitable style, of Burns as both possessing a “large spherical silhouette” and a man who was also “corpulent and sedentary.”12 Together with his jovial personality, “delicious wit” and “wide friendliness,” the bespectacled Burns endeared himself to his contemporaries in the press box.13

That wasn’t always the case with the athletes, though. In days when writers often glossed over the foibles of the men whom they covered, Burns, recalled Red Smith, “could see deeper than a sweatshirt and, having measured an athlete’s talents accurately, could sum up his judgment succinctly.” “No hero worshipper” was Burns, wrote Smith, “enshrining demigods on pedestals of prose.”14 (When the Cubs blew a six-game lead in 1930, Burns wrote: “Don’t shoot your rifles at that thar balloon, boys — the Cubs are in it.” Later, he blamed the team’s collapse on a pair of peacocks Rogers Hornsby had bought from the late William Wrigley, Jr.’s Catalina Island bird farm during spring training. Peacocks, he insisted, were bad luck. “Back home in Indiana,” he wrote, “we tolerated ’em only on millinery. And then only on certain folks.”15) 

More than once, Burns’s bluntness and criticism provoked outrage and anger from an aggrieved athlete; and yet, “if occasionally there were threats of violence from some ballplayer he had written about with what the athlete deemed an excess of candor,” Burns nonetheless remained undisturbed. “He had no patience with professionals who came complaining when he’d written the truth about them, whining, ‘You’re taking away my bread and butter.’”

“How do they think I earn my bread and butter?” Burns would retort. Of course, it helped that “he outweighed most ordinary infielders by 100 pounds or so.”16 

Sometimes Burns’s critical commentary could be relentless. Witness the feud he had one season with Cubs shortstop Dick Bartell. One day during 1939 spring training with the Cubs on Catalina Island, recalled Munzel, Burns was walking across the ball field with Cubs traveling secretary Robert Lewis, another man of large girth, after a team workout. Spotting the two men, Bartell yelled, “When does the balloon go up?”

“And did Rowdy Richard [Bartell] pay for the remark!” exclaimed Munzel. “Burns was on Bartell for the rest of the year. It was never a vicious frontal attack, but big Ed jabbed the needle in day after day by tabulating Bartell’s errors … Another boot by Dick Bartell, his 22nd of the season, cost the Cubs the game … Bartell’s 31st error of the season set up another run for the Cardinals. And on and on it went, with Bartell unwittingly playing right into Burns’s hands. He had a terrible season.”17

In his 1988 autobiography, Bartell himself remembered that year. “Dizzy Dean, Woody English and I were walking up the path to the ballpark. Up ahead was a rotund, heavyset guy. He had to turn sideways to get through the gate.

“I called out, ‘Hey what time does the balloon go up?’ It was a common barb we used to throw at overweight players.

“Dean said, ‘Do you know who that is?’

“I said no.

“Dean said, ‘That’s Ed Burns, the writer for the Chicago Tribune.’

“Burns turned and pointed a finger at me. ‘You’ll hear from me all summer,” he said.

“Well, the season started and I was being charged with errors on plays where there was no error, like a double play we didn’t finish. But Burns was the official scorer. He would give me one, anyhow. And anything that might have been called a hit for me, he’d charge the other team with an error. …

“The other writers in the press box heard “Error, Bartell” so often, every time I booted one or threw it into the stands, everyone sang out, “Error, Bartell.’”

Burns’s enmity would rarely last, though. Years later, according to Bartell, Burns apologized “for coming down so hard on me that year.”18

By the time Burns joined the Tribune sports department in 1927, another Tribune sportswriting legend, Irving Vaughan, was beginning his second decade of Chicago sports coverage. From that point on, Burns and Vaughan alternated their reporting between the city’s two baseball teams. A typical article that appeared in a July 1937 edition of The Sporting News accurately conveyed their teamwork.

“Switching time is at hand for the Chicago scribes,” the article explained. Unlike “some of the New York boys” who covered three teams yet usually switched their coverage “willy nilly,” Burns and Vaughan always traded places at midseason. “The Trib pair have arranged an intricate switch. Burns, who will leave the Cubs to cover the White Sox in Detroit, July 5, en route to the All-Star game, will rejoin the Cubs in Pittsburgh for three days en route home, then will return to Chicago to join the Sox for the remainder of the season. Vaughan will pick up the Cubs at a night game in Cincy, July 12.”19 Their changes almost always went off seamlessly.

The two also yearly alternated spring trainings. (In 2002 veteran journalist Godfrey Sperling, who enjoyed a 59-year career with the Christian Science Monitor, recalled that Vaughan and Burns were “my favorite sports writers in those days. … How I envied them their assignments, covering the White Sox and the Cubs. They would start out with one team at spring training and then trade teams at midseason.”20)  Burns’s first spring with the Cubs at Catalina Island occurred in 1929, the year the Cubs won the National League pennant. That spring was also the first time Burns met Cubs owner Philip Wrigley. Writing in 1947, during his first visit back to Catalina after a five-year hiatus, Burns declared, “I felt pretty proud being greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Wrigley when I got off the boat the other day. First time I ever met P.K. was right on that same wharf. He was helping unload a snow white Arabian stallion. Don’t imagine the hoss is still about his business hereabouts.”21  

Filing dispatches from whichever locale happened to be his assignment was, of course, paramount for Burns, but once his working day was through, he always found the nightlife appealing. (Of Burns’s writing method, Sperling wrote, “In later years, I happened to meet Burns, who told me he always wrote his stories in longhand and that there was one Tribune (Linotype) operator who always handled his stories because he was the only one who could decipher Burns’s handwriting.”22) During his early years at Catalina, Burns stayed at the St. Catherine Hotel, where he would often entertain friends. “Bob Lewis [the traveling secretary] used to fix it with the management so I had the same room each year,” Burns wrote. “It was on the third floor north front, overlooking the ocean. … Once a gent … came to my room [for drinks]. … As we sat for several hours discussing world problems, my guest forgot where he was. Furthermore, it was high tide and the waves were roaring up to the walk under my window. My landlubber friend heard the roar, looked out, blinked as he beheld nothing but water, then cried: “My gawd, we’re at sea. I’ve been shanghaied. Then he fainted. Quite a mess getting him to his own bed.”23 

By 1947 Burns had relocated. “I’m a little sad about the dormant state of the St. Catherine  hotel, but delighted with my quarters in the Atwater. Never in all the years I’ve been coming here had I set foot in the place, although I spent many hours on my feet and otherwise in a neighborhood establishment when it was known as the White Cap. That was when we used to get up and come down for the 4 a.m. show. There was a banjo player who had a three piece orchestra and he billed his unit as “Professor Burns and his Thirty Dirty Fingers.”24

If Burns gained national renown and respect for his Tribune work (in 1942 he became chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America; in 1947, president of the national BBWAA; and in 1952, a member of the BBWAA board of directors), he possibly exceeded that work elsewhere. As baseball writer-turned-baseball executive Garry Schumacher opined in a 1961 TSN article when he named Burns and New York Herald-Tribune writer Bill Hanna as the best writers of his time, “Actually, Burns did his best work for The Sporting News.”25 There, Burns often combined his writing with his art.

In 1937 Burns interviewed Cubs coach John “Red” Corriden, who had been in the game for 30 years, concerning “inside baseball” and the variety of signs used by managers and coaches. In the piece, Burns accompanied the narrative with a panel of his own humorous drawings, such as a coach touching the brim of his hat with his left hand, while with his right simultaneously touching his ear lobe. This action, Burns wrote, “is an absent-minded coach touching skin and clothing simultaneously. If you understand baseball signs you know this kind of careless business is likely to make an obedient ball player try to run in opposite directions at the same time thus precipitating havoc. Or he might hit a triple when he was supposed to bunt.” Another cartoon shows a coach holding an open pouch of tobacco in his left hand while in his right he pinches a bit between thumb and forefinger. In this case, wrote Burns, “A coach taking a chew in this fashion would mean one thing. Pouring the scrap into his face direct from the pouch might mean an entirely opposite message with disastrous results.”26 Several months later he also produced “Burns-Eye Views of Big Time Parks,” a 15-part serial that featured, in intricate and exacting detail, Burns’s handwritten drawings of every stadium in the major leagues accompanied by “a paragraph here and there about the fan inmates thereof, together with miscellaneous historical matter and maybe an anecdote or two.”27 At the time of his death almost 20 years later, he was hoping to resume his Sporting News column, “Bouncing Around With Ed Burns.” Truly, these works represented Burns at the peak of his creativity.

The end came over a span of six months. On June 1, 1954, Burns was in Boston while traveling with the White Sox when he was stricken with an illness that turned out to be cancer. After several operations, he returned to his Oak Park, Illinois, home to recuperate. (A lifelong bachelor, for many years he lived with his sister Blanche and her family on South Maple Drive in Oak Park.) That November, Burns returned to the Trib when he covered his 28th Purdue-Indiana football game. His final assignment was Christmas night, 1954, at the opening of the Hollywood Ice Revue in Chicago Stadium. After his story was completed, Burns collapsed. For three weeks he lay in a coma at Chicago’s Wesley Memorial Hospital, before a clot on a brain artery took his life.

Two days after his death, Ed Burns was laid to rest beside his parents in Chicago’s Rose Hill Cemetery. Among his pallbearers was his good friend, Irving Vaughan.

Sources

Sincerest appreciation is expressed to SABR member Bill Mortell for his invaluable contribution to this biography. Bill utilized Geneaology.com and Ancestry.com, as well as several online sources referenced below.

Newspapers/Magazines (online):

Seattle Times

Chicago Tribune

Catalina Islander

The Sporting News

Christian Science Monitor

Baseball Digest

Notes

1“Red Smith: Views of Sport,” Seattle Times, January 31, 1955.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Chicago Daily Tribune, July 27, 1918.

7“Ed Burns, Columnist for the Sporting News, Dies,” The Sporting News, February 2, 1955.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Chicago Daily Tribune, July 27, 1918.

11“Munzel – 44 Years of Spring Fun and Frolic,” The Sporting News, March 10, 1973.

12“Red Smith: Views of Sport,” Seattle Times, January 31, 1955.

13“Ed Burns, Columnist for the Sporting News, Dies,” The Sporting News, February 2, 1955.

14“Red Smith: Views of Sport,” Seattle Times, January 31, 1955.

15“Ed Burns, Columnist for the Sporting News, Dies,” The Sporting News, February 2, 1955.

16 Ibid.

17“Munzel – 44 Years of Spring Fun and Frolic,” The Sporting News, March 10, 1973.

18 “Dingers & Zingers,” Phily.com, August 9, 1995.

19“Switching Time for Chi Scribes,” The Sporting News, July 1, 1937.

20 Christian Science Monitor, July 23, 2002.

21 Catalina Islander, February 20, 1947.

22 Christian Science Monitor, July 23, 2002.

23 Catalina Islander, February 20, 1947.

24 Ibid.

25 The Sporting News, March 29, 1961.

26 The Sporting News, April 29, 1937.

27 The Sporting News, June 24, 1937.

An often overlooked pitcher on successful Chicago Cubs teams of his era, Guy Bush was among the National League’s winningest pitchers from 1928 to 1934 and finished with 176 victories in his 17-year career. Success was far from foretold when the 21-year-old Mississippi Mudcat made an unlikely debut for the North Siders in September 1923. After his Class D league folded, Bush was afraid to leave the friendly confines of the rural South for those of Wrigley Field (at the time known as Cubs Park); consequently, he assumed an alias and hid out in another low-level league for six weeks before being persuaded to come to the Windy City.

Guy Terrell Bush was born on August 23, 1901, in Aberdeen, a small town and once a busy port on the Tombigbee River in northeastern Mississippi.1 His parents, George W. and Willie (Gray) Bush, married in 1899 and raised six children (Gahal, Guy, Getrude, Granville, Gay, and Gazell) on their cotton farm in Monroe County and later Lee County, about 150 miles southeast of Memphis. Growing up in hard economic times, Guy had little time to pursue sports and worked year-round on his family’s farm. Sensing an opportunity for Guy to pursue a career as a soldier, George and Willie sent him to the nearby Tupelo Military Institute to start high school in 1916. Working on campus to pay for his tuition, room, and board, Guy became interested in baseball. Tall and lanky, he impressed his coaches with his ability to throw and pitched for four years in high school (and in some accounts for an additional year as a postgraduate). Bush often told the story that when he left the school, headmaster George W. Chapman gave him $250 and told him, “Pay it back out of your baseball earnings.”2 Playing semipro and independent ball in leagues throughout the northern part of the state, Bush had a stroke of luck while pitching for a team that played in Shelby and Merigold, two small towns in Bolivar County, Mississippi, in 1923, when George Wheatley, president and scout of the Greenville (Mississippi) Swamp Angels, saw him pitch and signed him to a professional contract.

Crediting manager Harold Irelan for helping him harness his fastball, Bush overpowered competition in the Class D Cotton States League.3 After tossing shutouts against Vicksburg to win both games of a doubleheader, the 21-year-old Bush was signed by Chicago Cubs scout Jack Doyle for a reported $1,200. When the league folded in late July 1923, the Cubs wired Bush to report to Chicago immediately. “I was afraid of all the sinful things I had heard existed in Chicago,” said Bush, whose idea of Chicago was based on Al Capone and gangsters.4 Deciding not to report to the Cubs, but not informing Bill Veeck, Sr., Bush joined the Milan (Tennessee) Twins in the Class D Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League under an assumed name and without a contract. In early September Bush finally reported to the Cubs after a harrowing overnight train ride to the big city. The green “recruit pitcher” made his major-league debut on September 17 by pitching a scoreless ninth inning, striking out two and surrendering one hit, in a loss to the New York Giants at Cubs Park.5

On Catalina Island, California, in 1924, Bush, participating in his first Cubs spring training, impressed manager Bill Killefer with a “mighty neat curve ball and plenty of speed.”6 He made the Cubs’ Opening Day roster, but the 6-foot right-hander was optioned to the Wichita Falls (Texas) Spudders of the Class A Texas League in May after just two appearances. With a 9-3 record in 99 innings as a starter and reliever, Joe, as sportswriters began calling him for “no particular reason,”7 was recalled two months later to replace the ailing Grover Cleveland Alexander. Years later, Bush said that Alexander, more than any other player, had helped him make the transformation from a “thrower” into a big-league pitcher.8 After a strong eight-inning outing in his first major-league start, surrendering three runs (two earned) and getting the loss, 3-2, against the Phillies on July 16, Bush pitched a complete game and struck out seven to defeat the Boston Braves 7-4 on July 20 and earn his first victory. With his 16 appearances evenly divided between starts and relief appearances, he won two of seven decisions and notched a 4.02 ERA in 80? innings. For the last-place Cubs in 1925, the inexperienced Bush tied for the NL lead in saves (4) and tied for second in the league in appearances (42) while proving that he was equally valuable as a starter, reliever, and all-around fireman, logging 182 innings, but winning just six times in 19 decisions.

With the hiring of a new manager, Joe McCarthy, the Cubs and Bush were in transition in 1926. While Marse Joe ushered the team into an era of hitting, Bush was developing into a trustworthy and effective starter. After flopping just before midseason during a stint as a starter (with an ERA approaching 6.00), he was given another opportunity to prove himself in August with the Cubs just 6½ games out of first place, Bush arguably had the best month of his career. He won all five of his starts and another game in relief, and pitched consecutive shutouts over the Giants and the Brooklyn Robins in Chicago as part of a stretch of 25 consecutive scoreless innings. For the month Bush surrendered just one earned run in 51? innings for a microscopic 0.17 ERA. Extending his winning streak to eight games in September, Bush finished with 13 wins (the first of ten consecutive years of at least ten wins), and had a 2.86 ERA in 157? innings, while the Cubs became stagnant down the stretch to finish in fourth place.

Named a starter to begin the 1927 campaign, Bush hurled an 18-inning complete game on May 14 to defeat the Braves 7-2 in Boston. Always a quick worker on the mound, he faced 71 batters in that game, which lasted just 3 hours and 42 minutes. In his next start (one week later), Bush pitched another complete game to defeat the Robins and it appeared as though he had become one of the game’s elite pitchers. But he was stricken by a case of mumps and missed four weeks in June. In his first start in six weeks, he shut out Brooklyn on five hits, winning 1-0 on July 10 to give the Cubs a surprising one-game lead in the pennant race. Often a victim of poor run support, Bush won just three more times (losing seven) while the Cubs faltered from late August into September by losing 11 of 13 games to fall out of contention and end again with a fourth-place finish. During the first game of a doubleheader on September 17 Bush pitched a 13-inning complete game to defeat the Braves 3-2 in Chicago for his tenth and final victory of the season. He logged 193? innings and posted a team-best 3.03 ERA.

From 1928 to 1934, Bush, Pat Malone, and Charlie Root formed one of the best pitching trios in baseball. Although Malone and Root attracted most of the press and adulation of the fans, Bush was more consistent, winning 15 or more games in each of those seven seasons, and led the trio in wins with 121 to Malone’s 115 and Root’s 100; his .621 winning percentage was easily the best. While Root and Malone burst on the scene by winning 18 games in 1926 and 1928 respectively after outstanding minor-league seasons, Bush had limited experience pitching before sticking with the Cubs in 1925 and came across as having struggled and labored for his success. Irving Vaughan of the Chicago Daily Tribune called Bush “one of the National League’s outstanding ‘finds’ ” whose success resulted when he learned to “master a curve ball [and] also control.”9

After a successful 1928 campaign, in which he won 15 times and logged 200-plus innings for the first of seven times in his career, Bush braced for even more personal and team success in 1929. After the Cubs’ offseason acquisition of Rogers Hornsby, many experts picked them to take the pennant. Bush tossed a three-hit shutout to defeat the reigning NL champion Cardinals 4-0 on April 21 in his season debut. Starting regularly (30 starts) and used in relief consistently (20 times), Bush was the hottest pitcher in baseball for most of the season. He pitched a ten-inning complete game to defeat the Robins, 6-5, in the first game of a doubleheader on July 20 and put the Cubs in a first-place tie with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Bush tossed a three-hit, 1-0 shutout over the Braves on August 1 and a complete-game victory against the Phillies on August 9 to improve his record to 16-1. His personal-best 11-game winning streak was broken by the Braves on an unearned run in a relief outing on the 12th, but three days later Bush hurled his tenth complete game in 11 starts to defeat the Robins. At that point he was running on fumes. McCarthy had a tendency to overuse hot pitchers even as the Cubs ran away with the pennant. With 11 appearances in the month of August (six starts), Bush’s complete-game win over the Reds on August 25 was his 18th and final victory of the season. After a disastrous September (0-3 and a 6.03 ERA), Bush’s position in the starting rotation was in jeopardy for the World Series, the Cubs’ first since 1918. By season’s end Bush had appeared in a major-league-high 50 games (including 30 starts), pitched a career-high 270? innings, won 18 games, and tied for the NL lead in saves (8).

After the Cubs lost World Series Games One and Two in Chicago with Root followed by Malone on the mound, McCarthy “decided to gamble” (in the words of the Chicago Daily Tribune) by choosing Bush to start Game Three against Connie Mack’s vaunted Philadelphia Athletics, the overwhelming Series favorites.10 Bush, who had pitched two innings of relief in Game One, was surprised to be named the starter, but not by the outcome of the game: He held the A’s to nine singles while going the distance in a 3-1 victory in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. F.C. Lane wrote in Baseball Magazine that Bush was underappreciated during his career “and generally not rated as a great pitcher.” Bush approached the art of pitching cerebrally and “dissect[ed] every game with painstaking care,” Lane wrote.11 After Bush’s victory, the A’s crushed Root and three Chicago relievers during the seventh inning for 10 runs in Game Four to come back from an eight-run deficit and then edged out Malone with a walk-off win in Game Five to win their first Series since 1913.

Bush’s success in 1929 brought him added notoriety in Chicago. Local sportswriters began calling him the Mississippi Mudcat instead of Joe and portrayed him as a good-natured country boy with a “deep Southern drawl” (phonetic spelling of his words added local color) who learned about life, money, and baseball in the big city.12 In 1927 Bush married Frances Richardson, a college graduate from Virginia and a department head in a North Side Chicago bank. By all accounts, Bush was an approachable, friendly, fun-loving teammate. He and Pat Malone were good friends. Bush regularly attended hockey and football games, and golfed and hunted during the offseason. But his most time-consuming pursuits involved money. He opened and personally ran gasoline stations and sponsored baseball and basketball teams. He had a fondness for fast, luxurious cars and was known as the best-dressed Cubs player with “more than a score of suits and hundreds of neckties.”13

Weighing just about 165 pounds for most of his career, Bush was often described as “frail.”14 Catcher Gabby Hartnett thought Bush was a nervous type whose slight stature came from worrying too much. Bush himself admitted, “I would get more hop on my fastball if I had a little more beef behind my throws,” but never packed on the pounds like the portly Root and the husky Malone.15 Bush is “stronger physically than he looks,” wrote Chicago sportswriter Ed Burns, and was “fidgety” on the mound.16 Prone to bouts of wildness, Bush survived on his fastball, which he threw with a “hop-toad” lunge.17 He had a high windmill windup, threw overhand to three-quarters overhand, had a high leg kick and a long stride toward the plate, and sprang forward to finish in a squat position. “I found that I can get more on the ball,” said Bush, “if I come forward with everything I got. I naturally throw myself off balance.”18 He’d stretch forward as far as he possibly could (much like Tom Seaver 40 years later) which he thought shortened the distance from the mound to home plate and made his fastball even faster. “In a tight hard pitched game,” he recalled, “I’ll generally skin my right knee.”19

Bush had a disastrous start in 1930. Pounded in his first five appearances (two starts) and saddled with an 11.02 ERA in 16? innings, Bush slipped while fielding a ball, twisted his elbow, and missed three weeks in May. After several relief appearances, he rejoined the starting rotation but his fastball lacked velocity. Pummeled by opponents (they batted .316 against him), Bush surrendered a staggering 174 runs and a new (post-1900) National League-record 155 earned runs in just 225 innings, and led the major leagues in wild pitches (12). Amazingly, he won 15 games (thanks to the Cubs’ offense) and lost just ten times. In the “Year of the Hitter,” Bush’s 6.20 ERA was not the worst in the league; that honor went to the Phillies’ Les Sweetland, who posted a 7.71 ERA in 167 innings. Betrayed by their pitching and inconsistent offense in September, the Cubs were overtaken by the St. Louis Cardinals in the last two weeks of the season and finished in second place.

Tall, dark, and handsome, with slicked-back hair and sideburns, Bush had a reputation of a quirky player who “pride[d] himself as a slugger,” even though he batted just .161 (143-for-888) during his major-league career with no home runs and 52 runs batted in.20 Sportswriters often joked that when the National League introduced new baseballs with thicker stitches to improve pitchers’ grip and a thicker hide to slightly deaden the ball in 1931 in reaction to the record-setting hitting barrage the previous season, Bush bemoaned that his hitting would suffer. He was also an accomplished fielder, despite his delivery, and tied for the NL lead in fielding percentage (1.000) for three consecutive seasons (1935-1937).

Cubs batters continued to bash the ball in 1931, but the pitching staff was mired in another collective funk, ranking sixth in earned-run average and runs surrendered. Bothered by an early-season arm injury through most of July, Bush pitched inconsistently and rumors circulated that he was washed up. However, he unexpectedly turned his season around beginning on July 31 when he pitched a complete game to defeat the league-leading Cardinals 10-3 in St. Louis. Recording eight complete games in his last 12 starts, Bush was the “mainstay of the team” and finished with a 16-8 record.21 Within a span of five weeks, Bush threw his only two career one-hitters and both were unusual. At the conclusion of his dominating 1-0 victory over the Cardinals on August 9, teammates rushed to congratulate Bush for his first no-hitter. Minutes later, the mood turned somber when word emerged from the press box that George Watkins’ first-inning grounder, which shortstop Woody English had fielded poorly then dropped, was scored a hit and not an error. The episode sparked national debate. Outraged by the general lack of information given to players and fans during games, such as the number of hits and errors, The Sporting News led efforts to require that scoreboards show hits and errors.22 On September 13 at Wrigley Field in the second game of a doubleheader, Bush surrendered just a legitimate single, but two errors led to an unearned run in an 8-1 drubbing of the Braves.

Bush had the reputation of being one of the most athletic and physically fit players on the Cubs. Reporting on his legendary workouts at spring training in Catalina Island, the Associated Press wrote that “no one can outwork him.”23 Asked about his offseason preparation, Bush responded, “I smoke several cigars a day, eat sparingly, and just study baseball,”24 (which might also explain his rail-thin physique).

In 1932 the Cubs became the last major-league team to put numbers on players’ uniforms. With four complete-game victories in his first six starts, Bush, donning number 14 (and later switching to 24), was off to a fast start for second-year manager Rogers Hornsby. The 30-year-old Bush pitched a 13-inning masterpiece, defeating the Braves, 5-3, in Boston on June 12 to give the first-place Cubs a 1½-game lead, but the team was on the verge of unraveling. In the midst of player injuries and inconsistencies, shortstop Billy Jurges was shot twice by a local chorus girl in early July. The team sputtered to a 26-29 record in June and July. Hornsby was fired on August 2. The manager was a chronic gambler and had racked up an estimated $40,000 of debt. He borrowed money from players, including Bush, to pay his bookies. In early August the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that Commissioner Kenesaw Landis had launched an investigation into gambling on the Cubs. “I don’t give a damn what anybody says, the gambling stories printed in Chicago are lousy,” said Bush, who was one of the targets of the investigation.25 Eventually five players, including Bush, were exonerated during a hearing conducted in St. Louis in August.

The Cubs rallied around first baseman Charlie Grimm, who succeeded Hornsby. A player-manager, Jolly Cholly was easygoing and helped relax the team, whose players had been on edge all season from Hornsby’s autocratic ways. As Bush won eight of ten decisions in the last six weeks of the season, the Cubs went 37-18 for Grimm to overtake the Pirates and cruise to the pennant. For the first time since 1926, the Cubs pitching staff paced the NL in team ERA (3.44), led by 23-year-old Lon Warneke’s 2.37. Bush’s 19 wins ranked third in the league (behind Warneke’s 22 and Brooklyn’s Watty Clark’s 20). He posted a 3.21 ERA in 238? innings.

Facing the overwhelming favorite New York Yankees in the opening game of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush surrendered just three hits in 5? innings but was unexpectedly wild, issuing five walks and giving up eight runs in a 12-6 shellacking. The Sporting News reported that Bush was still smarting from a finger injury suffered in his last start of season, and that the “top of his right finger looked like the sawed-off end of a raw ham.”26 With the Cubs down three games to none, Bush had a chance to redeem himself in Game Four, but lasted only one-third of an inning, facing five Yankee hitters and surrendering two singles and a walk and hitting a batter. The Yankees, cruising to another lopsided win and their first World Series championship since 1928, helped manager Joe McCarthy exact revenge on the team that had fired him just before the 1930 season ended. The Series is better known today for Babe Ruth’s “called shot” in Game Three off Charlie Root.

Bush was among the highest paid pitchers in the National League from 1930 through 1933. He injured his arm during spring training in 1933, but remained confident in the Cubs’ ability. Bush was confident that the Cubs would win the pennant again.27 But for the first ten weeks of the season, he struggled (failing to make it beyond the fifth inning in five of ten starts), and the Cubs treaded water in fourth place, barely above. 500. Tensions and frustrations were high even at the beginning of the season when, during an especially poor start against St. Louis, Bush challenged Dizzy Dean to a fight during the game. While Dean heckled Bush, Grimm clashed with Cardinals manager Gabby Street. Bush was a streaky pitcher and at 31 had just perfected a new pitch to replace his slowing fastball. “I got my new screwball down,” Bush said. “Last year I couldn’t throw it as often as I wanted because it made my finger sore.”28 A complete-game victory over the Pirates at Wrigley Field on June 16 commenced one of his best and longest streaks. Used almost exclusively as a starter for the first time in his career, Bush responded by winning 15 of his final 21 starts, including 16 complete games. For just the second time in his career, he tossed shutouts in consecutive starts when he blanked the Phillies on three hits in a 5-0 victory in Philadelphia on August 24, and then on short rest tossed a 2-0 two-hitter against the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Aiming for his 20th victory in his last start of the season, against his rival Dizzy Dean in St. Louis, Bush hurled a five-hitter and struck out a season-high seven batters in a 12-2 thumping of the Redbirds. “I get more satisfaction out of beating that guy once than I do winning from anyone else twice,” Bush said of facing Dean.29 Bush set career highs in wins (20), starts (32), complete games (20), and shutouts (4), while posting a career-low 2.75 ERA in 259 innings. Despite his preseason predictions, the Cubs finished a disappointing third.

Bush won his first seven decisions (including six complete games) to start the 1934 season, finished with 18 victories, and recorded a winning percentage of .600 or better for the seventh year in a row, despite missing almost five weeks because of a rib injury in June and an ear infection in July. But the season was practically a repeat of 1933 for the Cubs: They plodded along (still struggling with the death of team president Bill Veeck, Sr. in the offseason) and the offense never got on track in 1934. Appearing in relief in both games of an August 16 doubleheader against the Braves two days after being clobbered by them in a start, Bush clashed with Grimm because he felt he was being overworked. He had an increasingly acrimonious relationship with his skipper, and Bush’s days in Chicago were numbered. In “the sensation of the week” during baseball’s postseason winter meetings in Louisville, 32-year-old Bush, outfielder Babe Herman, and pitcher Jim Weaver were traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates for workhorse pitcher Larry French and future Hall of Famer Fred Lindstrom.30

Despite his claim that he was excited to be going to Pittsburgh, Bush regretted leaving Chicago (he continued to live there during the offseason) and had difficulty adapting to his new team and surroundings in 1935. Plagued by inconsistencies, he twice lost his position in the starting rotation, but still managed 25 starts in 41 appearances. Proclaimed a “bust” by The Sporting News,31 Bush finished with a disappointing 11-11 record and a 4.32 ERA in 204? innings.

Like his teammate Charlie Root, Bush’s legacy is inextricably tied to Babe Ruth. In a fateful game on May 25, 1935, against the Boston Braves, Bush relieved Red Lucas and surrendered the final two home runs of Ruth’s career. (Ruth had already hit a home run off Lucas.) The second of the two surrendered by Bush, Ruth’s 714th, was the first home run ever to clear the right-field grandstand at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. “I got a signal for another fastball and I came through with one,” Bush recalled in 1974 when Hank Aaron broke Ruth’s home-run record. “[Ruth] got ahead of the ball and hit it over the triple deck, clear out of the ballpark. I’m telling you, it was the longest cockeyed ball I ever saw in my life.”32 The 1992 film The Babe underscored the rivalry between Bush and Ruth which began in the 1932 World Series when Bush led the Cubs’ merciless harassment of Ruth.

Bush’s fall from an 18-game winner in 1934 to ineffective mop-up artist in 1936 was a startling and unexpected surprise.33 Bush, who at the time ranked second in the National League in career wins behind Jesse “Pop” Haines of the Cardinals, was released in July and signed with the Boston Bees (so named since 1936 after their horrendous 38-115 record the previous season). Manager Bill McKechnie, well known for his handling of cast-off pitchers, coaxed a 4-5 record and 11 starts out of Bush in the second half of the 1936 season. On arguably the major leagues’ best pitching staff in 1937 (the Bees led baseball with a 3.22 ERA), Bush rebounded with an above-league-average 3.54 ERA in 180? innings. He had 11 complete games in his first 16 starts. But Bush was often the victim of poor run support, struggled the last two months of the season, and finished with an 8-15 record while starting 20 times in 32 appearances.

Like many players of his era, Bush wrung every possible inning from his arm before retiring. He was sold to the Cardinals before the 1938 season, but was released by St. Louis in early May. He signed with the Los Angeles Angels, the Cubs’ affiliate in the Double-A Pacific Coast League, for an estimated $5,000 bonus, and helped lead them to the league title in 1938 as a spot starter and reliever.

Retiring in Chicago with his wife, Bush opened a tavern, suffered the loss of his gas stations due to fuel rationing during World War II, and worked for the Pullman sleeping-car company. With baseball rosters thinning because of the war, Bush staged an unlikely comeback at the age of 42. After working out with the Cubs, he signed a contract with the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Class A-1 Southern Association in July 1944. Bush’s 5-3 record and 3.13 ERA in ten games (nine starts), caught the attention of his former Braves manager and current Cincinnati Reds skipper Bill McKechnie, who invited him to spring training in 1945. Bush made four appearances in relief and, with players beginning to return from military service, was released in late May. Retiring for the second time, Bush finished his 17-year major-league career with a 176-136 record and a 3.86 ERA in 2,722 innings.

A farmer and Southerner by heart, Bush spent a few years after his playing days in Chicago before retiring permanently to Shannon, Mississippi, near where he grew up. Raising vegetables and soybeans on his 50-acre farm, Bush never tired talking about baseball and moving from the small town to the big city to find fame on the mound. On July 2, 1985, he died of cardiac arrest at the age of 83. Funeral services were held at the First Baptist Church in Shannon and he was buried in the Shannon cemetery.

This biography appears in “Winning on the North Side: The 1929 Chicago Cubs” (SABR, 2015), edited by Gregory H. Wolf.

Sources

Occasionally, a player is taken out of the lineup due to personal misfortune. But in 1930 a scheduled pitcher didn’t take the mound (or ever pitch again) because he died an agonizing death on that very morning. Hal Carlson was a right-handed journeyman who pitched for three teams in the National League. He was a fairly talented pitcher, but his success hadn’t come easily. His 14-year career was disrupted by World War I, the spitball ban, chronic health problems, and, finally, an early grave.

Harold Gust Carlson was born on May 17, 1892, in Rockford, Illinois, close to the border with Wisconsin. He was the oldest of four children1 of working-class Swedish immigrants who instilled in him the values of hard work and self-reliance, qualities that later served Carlson well. While growing up, he attended Wight School, a neighborhood school in the heart of Rockford’s Swedish-American community.2 On the sandlots of Rockford’s east side, young Hal honed his skills, pitching for the semipro Rockford Maroons.

The Maroons, an independent team of Swedish-American men, worked regular jobs during the week, and on weekends they traveled to play other teams in the region, often in Wisconsin, Indiana, or Iowa. Hal started pitching for the Maroons in 1911.3 He enjoyed the camaraderie of playing baseball and remained friends with many of his teammates for the rest of his life. He experimented with the spitball, soon discovering many ways that he could magically affect the weight, motion, and trajectory of the baseball. The spitball pitch would become Carlson’s specialty.

Baseball scouts soon noticed Carlson’s talents and in 1912 he joined the Rockford Wolverines of the Class C Wisconsin-Illinois League. Although Carlson showed potential and was popular with hometown crowds, he struggled somewhat. In April 1913 the Rockford Register Gazette reported that he had been cut from the team: “Harold Carlson, a Rockford boy who did some pitching for the team last season, was dropped today. It was hard to find room for him, against the greater experience of others on the staff.”4 This temporary setback did not discourage Carlson, nor did the Rockford club lose interest in him. The next season, he was picked up again. According to the Rockford Morning Star, “Harold Carlson, the local pitcher who has shown considerable promise when wearing the Rockford uniform, was yesterday added to the pitching staff at the insistence of manager Orville Wolfe, who thinks he can develop him into an effective hurler.”5 

Carlson had a good year in 1914, posting a winning percentage of nearly .550, and was considered “to possess the best spitter of any pitcher in the W-I Circuit.”6 On August 24, 1914, he was sold to the Milwaukee Brewers of the Double-A American Association for $750.7 Carlson’s time in Milwaukee was short; he soon came down with a bad case of the flu and was unable to report to the team.8 It is uncertain whether Carlson recovered enough to actually pitch, as there is no formal record of his performance. Apparently, Milwaukee was unimpressed. In January 1915 the Brewers sold Carlson to the Central League’s Grand Rapids Black Sox.9 In the early months of the season he was 4-5 with an earned-run average of 2.96. In June Carlson obtained his release from Grand Rapids and joined the hometown Rockford Wakes of the Class B Three-I (Illinois-Indiana-Iowa) League. After a subpar 1915 season with the Wakes (4-11, 3.07 ERA), Carlson’s best performance in the minors came in 1916, when he posted a record of 23-13 and an ERA of 2.79. In a game against Moline, Carlson pitched 18 innings, with a no-hitter going into the ninth.10 Although Rockford eventually lost, 1-0, the game illustrated Carlson’s endurance and solidified his growing reputation. 

Clarence “Pants” Rowland, who had scouted in the Three-I League and often seen Carlson pitch,11 was now managing the Chicago White Sox and in 1916 he invited Carlson to team tryouts in the spring of 1917.12 Had things worked out differently, Carlson might have spent his rookie year playing with the world champion White Sox of 1917. For reasons unclear, the White Sox canceled their invitation to him.13

Carlson got another opportunity on September 21, 1916, when the Pittsburgh Pirates signed him for $1,200.14 In his rookie year of 1917, as a spot starter and reliever, he went 7-11, with a respectable ERA of 2.90. In May 1918 Carlson joined the Army to serve in the World War.15 He was able to play a little more baseball before being shipped to Europe, pitching for the 86th Division team at Camp Grant, in Rockford.16 When he got overseas he served as a machine gunner in the Battle of the Argonne Forest.17 Like many of his comrades, he was exposed to poison gas, and there was speculation that this contributed to the health problems that plagued Carlson and eventually took his life 20 years later.18 Carlson was discharged as a sergeant and returned home in May 1919, in time to rejoin the Pirates.

While Carlson was overseas, a major controversy brewed regarding spitball pitching. Club owners felt that the time had come to ban the practice for ethical reasons as well as safety concerns. The ban was instituted for the 1920 season, except for two pitchers on each team whose stock in trade was the spitball. They were given one season to adjust. After the 1920 season club owners were allowed to submit the names of spitball pitchers who would be allowed to continue using the pitch until they retired. This list of 17 spitball pitchers did not include Carlson because Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss did not submit any names. This was probably more than just a clerical oversight; Dreyfuss was a staunch opponent of the spitball who served on the commission that banned it. He may have tried to get Carlson’s name on the list, but, according to at least one sportswriter, was rebuffed by the other owners.19

Carlson was forced to reinvent his repertoire and again master some fundamentals: throwing curves and  fastballs, and altering speeds. His pitching faltered and his statistics declined. In 1919 he was 8-10 with an ERA of 2.23. In 1920 he was 14-13, but his ERA had risen more than a full run, to 3.36. On July 7, 1921, in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, Carlson struck out Babe Ruth twice.20 But he was soon sidelined with a sore arm, and ended the season with a dismal 4-8, 4.27 record. There was no noticeable improvement in 1922 (9-12, 5.70). In 1923 Carlson made only four appearances before the Pirates demoted him to the Wichita Falls Spudders of the Class A Texas League, where he spent the rest of the season. In Texas Carlson was rejuvenated, ending the season 20-10. It was enough of an improvement for the Philadelphia Phillies to take a chance on Carlson, acquiring him for 1924.

On October 24, 1924, Carlson married Eva Nelson, a local schoolteacher, whom he had met while she was attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Carlson’s granddaughter, Kristine Pratt, recalled that her grandmother said a friend asked her to go to a party where a “famous baseball player” was going to be. “My grandmother refused initially, as she couldn’t care less about baseball players of any kind, famous or otherwise,” Pratt said. “I wonder if that’s what interested him in her initially; the fact that she wasn’t in awe of him or one of his groupies?”21 The Carlsons’ first child, daughter Betty, was born two years later.

With a new team came new opportunity. When Carlson joined the Phillies in 1924, they were struggling. In 1924 and 1925, Philadelphia finished next to last in the National League, then dead last in 1926 and 1927. Against this backdrop, a mediocre hurler like Hal Carlson could distinguish himself, if he performed well. His first two years in Philadelphia were unspectacular, but in 1925 he led the National League with four shutouts. The 1926 season was his best year yet, when he posted a record of 17-12 and the best ERA (3.23) since his rookie days. Carlson also earned a few votes for 1926 National League MVP, placing 11th in the vote tally. Withal, on June 7, 1927, Carlson was traded to the Cubs for pitcher Tony Kaufmann and shortstop Jimmy Cooney.

Carlson’s hometown of Rockford is 75 miles northwest of Chicago, so when he was traded to the Cubs, it felt like a “homecoming” in many respects. Carlson continued to be very popular with the people of Rockford. Whether he was winning or losing, he was widely admired and always captured local headlines. On August 25, 1926, when he was still pitching for the Phillies, more than 500 fans from the Rockford area journeyed to Wrigley Field to honor their hometown hero. They presented Carlson with a grandfather clock.22  (After many decades keeping time in the Carlson family’s home, the clock, along with other baseball artifacts, was presented to Rockford’s Erlander Home Museum.)

Carlson made his debut with the Cubs on June 8, 1927, the day after he had been traded, at Wrigley Field against Dazzy Vance and the Brooklyn Robins. Carlson pitched a complete game and allowed only two runs as the Cubs edged the Robins, 3-2. In his first four weeks in Chicago, Carlson won six games, helping put the Cubs in first place by July 7. He won 12 games and lost 8 for the Cubs with an ERA of 3.17. (His combined record was 16-13 with an ERA of 3.70.)

Carlson suffered a setback in the Cubs’ 1928 spring training camp on Catalina Island; he was stricken with a bad case of the flu. This and serious bouts of pleurisy rendered him ineffective for most of the season. He was dropped from the pitching rotation and started only four games, ending the year 3-2 with an ERA of 5.91. Carlson’s chronic health problems were a permanent condition, related to his being gassed in World War I. A doctor in California told him that he probably only had months to live.23 Carlson didn’t share this grim news, nor did he let it deter him from playing.24 He returned to Chicago hopeful for one more comeback, both for himself and for the Cubs’ postseason hopes.

In spite of his age (36) and ill health, Carlson did his best to stay in shape. One day before he had to pitch, he asked the Cubs trainer, Andy Lotshaw, for a deep tissue massage on his sore elbow. Lotshaw advised Carlson to lie face down. Then, while the ailing pitcher wasn’t looking, he rubbed Hal’s arm with Coca-Cola from the bottle he’d been drinking. Carlson pitched successfully that afternoon, and from that day on, Lotshaw continued to give him this “special therapy” without telling him what it was.25

The 1929 World Series, against the Philadelphia Athletics, was the pinnacle of Carlson’s 14-year career. By then he had recuperated and was pitching better than ever, with a record of 11-5 and an ERA of 5.16. In the World Series he pitched twice in relief, giving up seven hits and three runs in four innings. The three runs he gave up came in Game Two, when he was one of three pitchers who hurled in relief of Pat Malone as the Cubs list, 9-3. One of the five hits he gave up in three innings was a two-run homer by Al Simmons. In Game Four, in which the Cubs took an 8-0 lead but gave up 10 runs in the seventh inning, Carlson pitched a scoreless eighth inning.

Carlson began the 1930 season feeling healthy and upbeat. He and his wife were expecting their second child that summer, and his Cubs salary allowed them to build a home in Rockford. Carlson also enjoyed the camaraderie of his teammates, even though he was older than most of them. Despite being called “The Silent Swede” with his reserved personality, he had a fun-loving, mischievous side. “He could be a practical joker,” said his granddaughter Kristine Pratt.26

Carlson relished his role as the dugout bench jockey. Chicago Tribune sportswriter Edward Burns wrote, “A job such as Hal’s, of course, involves a great deal of research. If, for instance, any one of the opposing pitchers ever was in jail for horse stealing, Hal should know about it. To be a good jockey as Carlson is, his timing must be perfect.”27

On May 27, 1930, an unseasonably cold day, the Cubs home game against the Cincinnati Reds was rained out. The Cubs were 19-19 and Carlson led the pitching staff with a 4-2 record. After an early dinner, Carlson returned to his apartment at Hotel Carlos, just up the street from Wrigley Field. He knew that he would be starting in the next day’s game and, feeling a little under the weather, he turned in early that night.28

In the middle of the night, the 38-year-old Carlson awoke with an awful pain in his stomach. Though it was about 2:15 A.M., the pain was bad enough that he called Ed Froelich, the Cubs’ clubhouse attendant, who also stayed in the hotel. “I feel pretty bad. You better call a doctor,” Carlson said. Froelich rushed to Carlson’s room. Carlson told him that it was probably just an attack of his stomach ulcers. He thought that if the pain abated, he might be okay. Concerned, Froelich sat with him for a while. By 3A.M., blood started to come up into Carlson’s mouth. Now in a state of panic, Froelich called three other Cubs players who were in the building: Kiki Cuyler, Riggs Stephenson, and Cliff Heathcote. By the time they arrived, Carlson was fading fast. Immediately they summoned the team physician, Dr. John Davis, who was nearby. By the time Dr. Davis arrived, Hal was losing consciousness. An ambulance was called, but by the time it arrived, it was too late. At 3:30 A.M., as his teammates watched helplessly, Carlson breathed his last. The cause of death was officially listed as a stomach hemorrhage.29

There is some debate as to the exact cause of Carlson’s stomach hemorrhage and whether his death could have been prevented.  One theory is that Carlson was injured when he was struck in the abdomen by a batted ball at spring training that year.30 This may have damaged the fragile artery within the stomach, proving fatal if undetected. Another possibility is that the poison gas in World War I did long-term organ damage, and eventually caught up to Carlson. It is uncertain which of these things is more directly responsible for Carlson’s death, as medical knowledge was much more limited in 1930, and Carlson closely guarded his medical privacy.31

Eva Carlson was not with Hal at the hotel because she was eight months pregnant and was resting at their home in Rockford. This was not uncommon, as late-term pregnancies and childbirth could become risky in those days. Kristine Pratt said she believed her grandfather was unconscious by the time Froelich and the players arrived, and that he had actually died alone. “He felt the pain and he knew something was wrong and started calling the other players on the team, crying out in agony and begging them to do something, as he was dying,” she said. “Unfortunately, he was known for being a practical joker. So he died alone in his room. Of course it’s a game we can all play isn’t it? If he hadn’t played practical jokes, if someone had come, if my grandmother had been there, would it have turned out differently? Medical care isn’t what it is now. Could anyone have helped him? Regardless, the end result is the same.”32

The Cubs, stunned and wearing black armbands for their fallen pitcher, played their scheduled game against the Reds that afternoon, winning 6-5. Kiki Cuyler, who had been at Carlson’s deathbed hours before, hit a two-run homer in the first inning. The next game was postponed, as a delegation of Cubs players accompanied Carlson’s body back to Rockford.

Carlson was buried that weekend. Crowds lined the streets as the funeral procession passed, and 5,000 mourners gathered at Rockford’s Arlington Cemetery.33 Carlson’s pallbearers were local friends with whom he had played ball in his early days with the Rockford Maroons. Honorary pallbearers were Cubs personnel, including fellow pitchers Charlie Root and Percy Malone.34 The rest of the Cubs soldiered on. On the afternoon that Carlson was buried, they won a doubleheader from the St. Louis Cardinals.

On July 7, 1930, five weeks after Carlson died, Eva gave birth to their second daughter, Kathleen. As a single mother and with only her meager schoolteacher’s income, Mrs. Carlson successfully raised both girls, no small accomplishment during the Great Depression. She never remarried and lived another 59 years. She kept a portrait of Carlson hanging over her bed and would say goodnight to him every night for the rest of her life.35

Carlson was remembered by his friends and colleagues for his hard work, patriotism, and perseverance, on and off the field. Perhaps the most fitting eulogy was given by Cubs president Bill Veeck, Sr. who said: “Hal Carlson was a splendid example of moral courage and was loved by everyone who knew him. While he was fighting for his country in the World War, his stock in trade as a pitcher, the spitball, was taken from him through an oversight. But instead of quitting like most humans, he came back to greater success than ever. In all my life I have never known a finer type than Carlson. He was strong in every way, morally and physically.”36

Sources

Asprooth, Fritz, Hal Carlson: A Rockford Legend. (booklet), Library of Congress

No. TXu 000330544, 1988.

Boone, Robert, and Gerald Grunska, Hack: The Meteoric Life of one of Baseball’s First Superstars (Highland Park, Illinois: Highland Press, 1978).

Ehrgott, Roberts, Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs During the Jazz Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

Rockford Daily Republic

Rockford Morning Star

Rockford Register Gazette

Rockford Register Star

Baseball-Reference.com

Retrosheet.com

Genealogybank.com

Ancestry.com

Kristine Pratt, email correspondence with author, October 2013

Notes

1 Carlson was born in 1892, although the author came across several stories and biographies that stated, inaccurately, that he was born in 1894. In one instance, Carlson himself spoke this mistruth to a reporter:  “The Cub Takes A Week Off and Goes to Work,”    Rockford Daily Republic, June 22, 1927, 6.

2 Fritz Asprooth, Hal Carlson: A Rockford Legend. (booklet) Library of Congress

  No. TXu 000330544. 1988, 6.

3 Ibid.

4 “Team Chosen By Marshall,” Rockford Register Gazette, April 29, 1913, 7.

5 “Series of Dances Planned in Aid of Baseball Club,” Rockford Morning Star, January 30, 1914,   7.

6 “Sell Carlson to Milwaukee Club,” Rockford Register Gazette, August 24, 1914, 5.

7 Ibid.

8 “Drizzle Prevents Clash of Indians With Rockfords,” Rockford Morning Star, August 29, 1914, 9.

9 “Breakfast Table Chat,” Rockford Morning Star, January 1, 1915, 10.

10 Asprooth, 8.

11 “Carlson to Get Trial With Sox,” Rockford Register Gazette, May 5, 1916, 9.

12 Ibid.

13 “Carlson Star for Pirates,” Rockford Register Gazette, May 5, 1917, 5.

14 “League Meets Oct. 10,” Rockford Daily Republic, October 6, 1916, 10.

15 “May Brings Rockford Baseball Fans Memories of Hal Carlson,” Rockford Morning Star,      May 11, 1952, 20.

16 Asprooth, 12.

17 Dick Ramey, “Hal Carlson, Rockford’s Only Major League Player, Dies Suddenly in Chicago,” Rockford Register Gazette, May 28, 1930, 2.

18 Robert Boone and Gerald Grunska, Hack: The Meteoric Life of One of Baseball’s First    Superstars (Highland Park, Illinois: Highland Press, 1978), 93.

19 Burt Whitman, “Aid Pitching By Letting Down Bars to Spit Ball Delivery,” Boston    Herald, December 28, 1924, 3.

20 “Harold Carlson Fans Babe Ruth Twice Thursday,” (Associated Press article) Rockford Register Gazette, July 8, 1921, 14.

21 Kristine Pratt, correspondence with author, October 27, 2013.

22 Dooney Trank, “Carlson Loses but Gets Gift from Fans Here,” Rockford Register Gazette, August 26, 1926, 11.

23 Robert Ehrgott, Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs During the Jazz Age    (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 127.

24 Ehrgott, 104.

25 Ehrgott, 108.

26 Kristine Pratt, correspondence with author, October 17, 2013.

27 Edward Burns, “Who Are These Cubs?” Omaha World Herald, September 30, 1929, 10.

28 Ehrgott,  232.

29 Ibid.

30 Bill Wolverton, “Who was Hal Carlson?” Rockford Register Star, April 3, 1996, 4B.

31 Ehrgott, 104.

32 Kristine Pratt, correspondence with author, October 17, 2013.

33 “Friends Pay Last Respects to Hal Carlson,” Rockford Daily Republic, June 1, 1930, 1.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Bob O’Neal, “Local Pitcher Loses Battle To Ill Health,” Rockford Daily Republic, May 29, 1930, 1.

Though contemporary newspaper reports typically referred to Hall of Fame outfielder Hazen Cuyler by his given name, the right-hander is more easily recognized by one of the most unique, yet most often mispronounced nicknames in baseball history: Kiki.  “It came from shortening my name,” Cuyler explained about acquiring the moniker (which rhymes with “eye-eye”) as a minor leaguer in 1923. “Every time I went after a fly ball, the shortstop would holler ‘Cuy’ and the second baseman would echo ‘Cuy’ and pretty soon the fans were shouting ‘Cuy Cuy.’ The papers shortened it ‘Kiki.’”1 According to another story, the sobriquet had less glamorous origins: It arose as a way to mock Cuyler, who struggled to overcome his stuttering.

Cuyler had been dead for almost two decades and his accomplishments had largely faded with memory when the Veterans Committee elected him to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1968. But during his heyday in the mid-1920s through mid-1930s with the pennant-winning Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs, Cuyler was considered one of the most popular and most exciting players in baseball. Blessed with uncanny speed, quick reflexes, and a powerful arm, Cuyler was a solid line-drive hitter with surprising power. In an 18-year career (1921-1938) that was also marred by injuries and an enduring controversy with a manager, he batted .321, collected 2,299 hits, led the major leagues in stolen bases four times, and had a legacy-defining, Series-winning hit in Game Seven of the 1925 World Series for the Pirates.

Hazen Shirley Cuyler was born on August 30, 1898, in Sturgeon Point, a small village in northeast Michigan on the coast of Lake Huron. Cuyler’s Canadian-born parents, George Alonzo and Anna Rosalind (Shirley) Cuyler, married in 1891 and were naturalized as US citizens in 1895, about three years after their first child, Edna, was born. While Anna found piecemeal work as a dressmaker, George, a former semipro baseball player, served in a local coast guard, the Life Saving Service of Sturgeon Point.  He suffered an injury in the line of duty in 1906, prompting the family to relocate five miles to the south, to Harrisville, where he became a respected public servant. “Cuy,” as Cuyler was known to his friends and family, was an active youth who enjoyed fishing and hunting, and an all-around athlete. By the age of 14 he was playing baseball in local sandlot and semipro leagues. At Harrisville High School he played baseball, basketball, and football, and ran track. He graduated in 1917 as the valedictorian of his class of five students.  After finishing high school he enlisted in the US Army and served in Company A of the 48th Infantry Regiment, but was not sent to France during World War I.  He briefly attended the US Military Academy at West Point before returning to Michigan and marrying his high-school sweetheart, Bertha M. Kelly, in 1919.

Cuyler and his young bride (soon to be joined by their first child, Harold) moved to Flint, Michigan, where Cuyler worked in a Buick factory and carved out a reputation as a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher in competitive industrial leagues in Flint and Detroit, about 70 miles south. According to Ronald T. Waldo in his informative biography of the player, George H. Maines, president of the Class B Michigan-Ontario League, signed Cuyler to a contract for the Bay City (Michigan) Wolves in 1920.2  When Cuyler was spiked while sliding into second base, Wolves manager Calvin Wenger moved him permanently to the outfield. During the season Cuyler batted .258 in 69 games.

With a vastly improved batting average in his second season (.317), Cuyler attracted the attention of big-league clubs. Ty Cobb, in his first year as player-manager of the Detroit Tigers, wanted to sign the local star; however, the Tigers’ owner, Frank Navin, refused. Undeterred by reports that Cuyler had difficulty hitting a curveball, the Pittsburgh Pirates, acting on the recommendation of scout Frank Haller, purchased the speedy outfielder for an estimated $2,500.

A gifted yet green prospect, Cuyler needed to prove he could hit big-league pitchers. After the Michigan-Ontario League playoffs, the Pirates called up Cuyler in September 1921. He made his major-league debut on September 29, starting in right field in the second game of a doubleheader against the St. Louis Cardinals, going 0-for-3 in the 5½-inning contest. He had to wait nearly a year to get into another major-league game, and then appeared in only one, as a ninth-inning pinch-runner.

Cuyler was optioned to the minors for more seasoning after participating in spring training in 1922 and 1923. He batted .309 for the Charleston (South Carolina) Pals, champions of the Class B Sally League, in 1922, followed by his breakout season with the Nashville Volunteers of the Class A Southern Association. Named the league’s most valuable player, Cuyler, whom fans and sportswriters had begun calling “Kiki,” led the circuit in runs scored (114) and stolen bases (63) while batting .340. Cuyler attributed his hitting success to a decision to stand deep in the batter’s box. In his third consecutive late-season call-up with the Pirates, Cuyler rapped five hits in his last 11 chances to finish with a .250 average in 40 at-bats.

A perennial first-division team, the Pirates got off to a slow start in 1924 in their quest to unseat the three-time NL pennant-winning New York Giants. Cuyler had played primarily center field in the minors, but that position belonged to veteran Max Carey, long acknowledged as the best basestealer and one of the fastest players in the NL. Relegated to the bench as the season started, Cuyler went 3-for-4 with a double and triple in his first start of the year, on May 6, en route to collecting 11 hits in 17 at-bats in the first four games he started, and he worked himself into batting third in the regular lineup.

By early June Cuyler had replaced the slumping veteran Clyde Barnhart in right field. In early July he was moved to left field in place of the struggling Carson Bigbee. He collected six hits, including three doubles and a triple, in the Pirates’ 16-4 drubbing of the Philadelphia Phillies on August 9 during the first game of a doubleheader. “Cuyler has had much to do with the success of the Pirates,” wrote Pittsburgh beat reporter Ralph. S. Davis. “[He’s] won a place in the heart of Pittsburgh fans.”3  In the Pirates’ doubleheader sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals on September 6, Cuyler homered in each contest and drove in a total of six runs, raising his batting average to .380, to keep the Pirates just one game behind the league-leading Giants and a half-game behind the Brooklyn Robins in a tight three-team pennant race.

The Sporting News described Cuyler’s rise to stardom as “meteoric” and compared his aggressive hitting to that of Rogers Hornsby. But Cuyler, suffering from a sore right shoulder, slumped in September, batting .211 in 17 games beginning September 7. His season came to a premature end on September 25 after a crushing three-game series sweep by the Giants at the Polo Grounds.  Almost universally praised as “one of the season’s sensations,”4 Cuyler easily led the Pirates in batting (.354, fourth best in the NL) and home runs (9) while scoring 94 runs and rapping 16 triples in just 117 games.

Despite the success in his rookie campaign, Cuyler began his sophomore season under pressure to prove that he was not a “flash” and that his late-season slump was merely an aberration.  Though the Pirates started the season poorly again, occupying last place as late as May 9, Cuyler re-emerged as the offensive catalyst for the club. On June 4 he hit for the cycle for the only time in his major-league career and drove in three runs in the Pirates’ 16-3 throttling of the Philadelphia Phillies in Forbes Field. He experienced a career day on June 20, belting two home runs for the first of three times that season (and five times in his career), driving in a personal-best six runs, and tying a career high with five runs scored in Pittsburgh’s 21-5 victory over the Brooklyn Robins in the Smoky City. Continuing his relentless hitting, Cuyler guided the Pirates to a 55-32 record from July through September as they captured the pennant by 8½ games over the Giants. Described by The Sporting News as “closing the season in a blaze of glory,”5 Cuyler tied an NL record by collecting ten consecutive hits over three games September 18-21, and then went 4-for-4 on September 22, giving him 14 hits in 16 at-bats.  Syndicated sportswriter Norman E. Brown compared Cuyler to the Pirates’ 35-year-old center-fielder, Max Carey (en route to leading the NL in stolen bases for the tenth and final time in 13 seasons). Carey tutored the youngster in the finer points of baserunning, including sliding technique and avoiding pickoff attempts. After swiping 32 bases in 1924, the “Flint Flash” was successful on 41 of 54 attempts in 1925, and then led the major leagues in stolen bases in four of the next five seasons. In one of the most prolific seasons in Pirates history, Cuyler set a post-1900 NL record with 144 runs scored, led the majors with 26 triples among his 220 hits, clouted a career-best 18 home runs, and finished fourth in batting average (.357). His 369 total bases still rank as the most in Pirates history (as of 2024). Cuyler finished second in the NL MVP race to the Cardinals’ Rogers Hornsby.

Cuyler’s clutch hitting helped propel the Pirates to victory over the reigning champion Washington Senators in the 1925 World Series. After Pittsburgh lost Game One to Walter Johnson at home, Cuyler belted a game-winning two-run homer off starter Stan Coveleski in the eighth inning of Game Two to give the Pirates a 3-2 victory. Losses in Games Three and Four left them down three games to one, but the Pirates battled back to force a Game Seven, which the Associated Press at the time described as “perhaps the most thrilling seen in World Series history.”6 In a “rain-soaked, furious dramatic struggle” at Forbes Field, Cuyler came to bat with the bases loaded against Walter Johnson in the bottom of the eighth inning with the game tied, 7-7.7 He hit what appeared to be a home run down the right-field foul line; however, the ball dropped in the outfield, buried itself in a tarpaulin, and was ruled a ground-rule two-run double. It gave the Pirates a 9-7 lead, and the championship.

With the offseason acquisition of hitting phenom Paul Waner, a center fielder, from the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, the Pirates were expected to duplicate their success of the previous season; however, the 1926 season devolved into one of the most disappointing and acrimonious in Pirates history.  In light of his World Series heroics, Cuyler held out for more money, and his ensuing wrangle with Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss played out in the papers before Cuyler signed a contract. After a slow start, he batted .449 (53-for-118), scored 25 runs, and knocked in the same number over a 28-game span to raise his average to a league-leading .381 on June 11.

On July 26 the Pirates took sole possession of first place and seemed destined to claim another pennant. The turning point in the season came to be known as the ABC affair. The controversy started when Pirates vice president Fred Clarke, who was sitting on the bench and acting in the role of assistant coach, made disparaging remarks about Max Carey, who was struggling uncharacteristically with a .214 batting average, and demanded that manager Bill McKechnie replace him during a doubleheader shutout loss on August 7 to the seventh-place Braves at Boston. Veterans Babe Adams, Carson Bigbee, and Carey held a team meeting to decide whether Clarke should be allowed to remain on the bench.  On August 13 Pirates brass quashed the insurrection by releasing all three players; however, the damage had been done. Pittsburgh limped to a 23-24 record and a third-place finish after the players were released. The tensions in the team clubhouse seemed to affect Cuyler, too. In his final 51 games after the initial brouhaha, he seemed at times indifferent, batted just.288, and drove in only 21 runs.  Cuyler led the league in games played (157), runs (113), and stolen bases (35); however, critics pointed to his lower batting average (.321) and drop in home runs (18 to 8) and RBIs (102 to 92) as evidence of a poor season.

Donie Bush replaced McKechnie as manager of the Pirates in 1927 and vowed to run a more disciplined ship.  Rekindling his aggressive approach, Cuyler was batting. 329 for the first-place Pirates on May 28 when he tore ligaments in his ankle sliding into third.  During the weeks after he returned to the lineup on July 9, tensions between the player and his manager flared, resulting in one of the most enduring mysteries in Pirates history. Not only upset that he was moved from center field to right field, Cuyler objected to batting fifth and especially second, instead of his customary third position. 

The situation came to a head when Cuyler failed to slide during a force play at second base in a game against the New York Giants on August 6, earning him a $50 fine. The controversy became a national story when Cuyler was subsequently benched and started only one game for the remainder of the season even though the Pirates were battling for the pennant. The Sporting News reported that Dreyfuss instituted the benching because he still fumed over the player’s holdout after the 1925 season; others countered that the player was moody and egotistical, and wanted more publicity.8 The fans, however, were unanimous in their desire to see Cuyler on the field.  Even without Cuyler, the Pirates captured the pennant and faced the New York Yankees in the fall classic. “The ‘Cuyler Case,’” wrote Ralph S. Davis, “almost overshadowed interest in the World Series.”9 While theories for his benching and rumors of his trade swirled, Cuyler did not play in the Series, and the Pirates were swept in four games by the Bronx Bombers. Other than a few superficial remarks, neither Dreyfuss, Bush, nor Cuyler ever publicly discussed the behind-the-scenes machinations of the controversy.

While Cuyler’s departure from Pittsburgh was a foregone conclusion, it was a surprise on November 28, 1927, when the Chicago Cubs acquired the player in exchange for infielder Sparky Adams and outfielder Pete Scott. The Sporting News quickly dubbed Riggs Stephenson, Hack Wilson, and Cuyler as the “best fly chasing trio in baseball,” and predicted that Cuyler’s arrival “will tip the scales in favor of the Cubs” in the pennant race.10 With an exceptional spring training, Cuyler eased worries that he was a self-absorbed player or, worse, a troublemaker. Cubs manager Joe McCarthy boasted, “I’ve got the best hitting outfield in the National League,” fueling expectations that Cuyler would duplicate his success from 1925 and 1926.11 In a preseason exhibition game in Kansas City, Cuyler seriously injured his right hand when he ran into a wall attempting to catch a fly ball. The injury, which made it difficult to hold a bat, plagued the outfielder the entire season, and contributed to his poor start. Furthermore, he was an aggressive, first-pitch hitter and had difficulty adjusting to McCarthy’s approach of taking pitches when ahead in the count.  Batting third and playing right field, Cuyler was hitting just .206 on June 11, and his season appeared to be a washout. However, he surged in his last 49 games, batting .338 and scoring 39 runs.  Cuyler led the major leagues with 37 stolen bases and the team with 92 runs, offsetting a disappointing .285 batting average.

With the Cubs’ offseason acquisition of Rogers Hornsby from the Boston Braves, many experts picked them to take the pennant in 1929. Chicago boasted one of the most imposing lineups in NL history with Cuyler, Hornsby, Wilson, and Stephenson batting third through sixth. The quartet, affectionately called Murderers’ Row, collectively batted.362, belted 110 home runs, drove in 520 runs, and scored 493.12 Other than a leg injury that limited him to pinch-hitting duties for three weeks in July, Cuyler enjoyed relatively good health all season and excelled in an environment where the national spotlight focused on Hornsby and Wilson. “There was never a more valuable team player,” said McCarthy.13 A hallmark of consistency, Cuyler surged over the last 55 games of the season (he batted .396, scored 51 runs, and knocked in 48) as the Cubs built an insurmountable lead over the Pittsburgh Pirates to capture their first pennant since 1918. No player in the NL could match Cuyler’s unique combination of speed and power. He batted a career-best .360, led the majors with 43 stolen bases, mashed 15 home runs, and drove in 102 runs.

In their highly anticipated matchup with the Philadelphia Athletics, the Cubs lost Games One and Two at Wrigley Field. Cuyler, who struck out five times and managed just one hit, was roundly castigated as a “goat.”14 With the score tied, 1-1, in the sixth inning of Game Three, Cuyler “whistled a single through the box and out to centre [center field],” driving in Woody English and Hornsby to give the Cubs the lead and eventual victory.15  In Game Four Cuyler connected for three singles and drove in two runs. In Game Five he collected his first extra-base hit of the Series (a double). But the Cubs lost both games in monumental fashion. The A’s overcame an eight-run deficit by scoring a series-record ten runs (tied in 1968) in the seventh inning of Game Four, and then staged another dramatic comeback in Game Five when they scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to capture the title.

In an era when many ballplayers were considered uncouth for their excessiveness off the field, Cuyler was an exception. Often described as one of the “gentlemen of baseball,” he neither drank nor smoke, and rarely argued with umpires or opposing players.16 Standing 5-feet-10½ and weighing a trim 175 pounds, Cuyler was good-looking, with wavy, dark hair and dark, penetrating eyes. Sportswriter J.T. Meek called him the “game’s fashion plate” and an “exponent of diamond neatness.”17 Cuyler kept his svelte figure by playing sports year-round. He resided in the offseason with his wife and two children (daughter Kelly June was born in 1928) in Harrisville, and played in nascent professional basketball leagues. He led his various teams on barnstorming tours to Pittsburgh and Chicago (among other cities) to capitalize on his notoriety and publicize the emerging sport. His interests included hunting and fishing, but also the arts. He was an accomplished dancer who frequently won waltz tournaments at the Cubs’ spring training site in Catalina Island. Blessed with a fine voice, Cuyler enjoyed singing, and not just in the clubhouse showers. He spent four weeks in 1930 on a vaudeville stage in Chicago with teammates Wilson, Gabby Hartnett, and Cliff Heathcote.18

The Cubs’ title aspirations were dashed when they lost the reigning National League MVP, Rogers Hornsby to a broken ankle in late May 1930, but Cuyler assumed a greater role in the Cubs’ offensive juggernaut, which set a franchise record by scoring 998 runs in the “Year of the Hitter.” Over a 13-game stretch beginning on June 23, Cuyler batted .483 (28-for-58), scored 17 times, and drove in an eye-popping 27 runs to help the Cubs transform a 2½-game deficit into a 1½-game lead in the pennant race. “So accustomed are the fans to watching this fellow burn up the bases,” wrote The Sporting News, “that it goes almost unnoticed with his constant hitting, running, fielding, and throwing.”19 Behind the hitting of Cuyler, Woody English (152 runs scored, 214 hits, .335 average), and the record-setting slugging of Hack Wilson (56 home runs, 191 runs batted in, .356 average), the Cubs increased their lead to 5½ games by August 30 and seemed poised for another NL pennant. “Cuyler’s brilliant work and the ‘never say die spirit’ of the team are reasons why the Cubs hold first place,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. But on August 31 they began an epic collapse by losing 14 of 21 games leading to finger-pointing and McCarthy’s ouster with just four games remaining. Hornsby, who had been jockeying behind the scenes for the managerial position, took the reins of the team for the final four games. In a dramatic and disappointing season, Cuyler played in all 156 of the team’s games (the third time he led or co-led the league in games played), scored 155 runs (tied for 24th-most in big-league history as of 2014), set career highs in hits (228), doubles (50), and RBIs (134), and led the major leagues in stolen bases with 37.

A five-tool player, Cuyler drew comparisons to Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Veteran Cubs scout Jack Doyle considered Cuyler the “most graceful player of all time, a fellow who could do more things with a glove than Cobb, who could throw better than Cobb, who could pick up groundballs on his outfield patrol like grounders.”20 Cuyler played all three outfield positions equally well; his strong arm made him an ideal right fielder and his speed was invaluable as a center fielder. Six times he ranked among the top five in assists for outfielders. “There is no center fielder who runs farther for long fly hits,” opined syndicated sportswriter John B. Foster.21

Ironically Cuyler’s athleticism, seemingly effortless play, and gentlemanly persona also drew criticism. “Cuyler had only one flaw that kept him from being rated with the immortals of the game,” suggested The Sporting News in his obituary, echoing sentiments heard throughout the player’s career. “He lacked the ruthlessness that might have carried him to greater heights and made his record even more brilliant.”22 Considered sensitive to criticism, Cuyler responded best to players’ managers, like McKechnie and McCarthy, instead of authoritarian types (Bush and Hornsby).

Cuyler proved to be one of the few bright spots in the Cubs’ mediocre and inconsistent season in 1931, during which players bristled at Hornsby’s autocratic managerial methods.  Batting leadoff through most of June, Cuyler was moved back to the third spot to provide the team with more offense in light of Wilson’s precipitous drop in power (13 home runs).  He batted .330, tied for third in the league with 202 hits, and ranked fourth by scoring 110 runs.

Cuyler’s reputation as one of the fastest players in baseball ended after he suffered serious injuries in 1932 and 1933. While rounding third base on April 24, 1932, Cuyler cracked a bone in his left foot and missed six weeks. Robbed of his ability to take an extra base, Cuyler struggled after his return on June 8. In a weak year in the NL, the Cubs occupied first place for much of May and June, but the season was careening out of control.  Players were increasingly resentful of the tyrannical Hornsby, who was also under investigation by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis because of his gambling debts. On July 6 starting shortstop Billy Jurges was shot twice by showgirl Violet Popovich Valli (Jurges survived).  In an odd twist, Valli blamed her actions on Cuyler, who had apparently tried to persuade Jurges to end the sordid affair. The Cubs began a miraculous transformation when affable first baseman Charlie Grimm replaced Hornsby as manager on August 4. The Cubs responded by winning 23 of their first 27 games under “Jolly Cholly” and cruised to an unlikely pennant. Cuyler surged under his former Pittsburgh teammate (.373 average with 28 RBIs in the last 28 games) to finish with a .291 average and 77 RBIs in 110 games.

In the World Series the Cubs lost four straight games to the overwhelmingly favorite New York Yankees, led by Joe McCarthy. There were few Cubs highlights in a Series best remembered for Babe Ruth’s supposed “called shot” in Game Three. In that dramatic contest, Cuyler went 3-for-4 with a double and solo home run to deep right field, but was otherwise quiet (5-for-18).

In 16 World Series games, Cuyler batted .281 (18-for-64), scored nine runs, and knocked in 12.

Cuyler splintered the fibula bone in his right leg during a spring-training game in 1933 and was limited to just 70 games (batting .317) for the third-place Cubs.  While the rumor mill churned out reports of Cuyler’s trade to the Cincinnati Reds in the offseason, he reported to spring training in 1934 with his status as a starter in doubt. Cuyler’s productive spring enabled Grimm to juggle his outfield, moving offseason acquisition and reigning NL Triple Crown winner Chuck Klein to left field, inserting Cuyler in center, and keeping strong-armed Babe Herman in right field. While the Cubs contended for the title most of the season before finishing in third place, the 35-year-old Cuyler made a remarkable comeback.  He ranked third in hitting (.338) and led the league with 42 doubles, and his 15 stolen bases trailed only St. Louis’s Pepper Martin’s 23. In the second year of the midsummer classic, Cuyler was named to his first and only All-Star team. Starting in right field, he went 0-for-2.

The Cubs caused a “minor sensation” when they released Cuyler (batting.268) on July 3, 1935.23  The Cincinnati Reds outbid at least five other teams to sign the aging star. On July 11 Cuyler debuted for the Reds as their center fielder. While the Cubs won 21 consecutive games in September to capture an unlikely pennant, Cuyler played on a losing team for the first time in his big-league career, and batted just .251 for the Reds.

The oldest regularly starting position player in the NL, Cuyler made yet another comeback in 1936. After batting primarily in the leadoff position through May, he went back to his customary third spot and hit at a .345 clip from June 4 on. He celebrated his 38th birthday by going 5-for-9 with two triples in the Reds’ doubleheader sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies at Crosley Field on August 30. He led the fifth-place Reds in hits (185), extra-base hits (47), runs (96), and RBIs (74), and batted .326.

During the Reds’ youth movement in spring training 1937, Cuyler suffered a broken cheekbone when he collided with Cincinnati second baseman Alex Kampouris during an exhibition game against the Detroit Tigers on April 1. Though he was ready to play by Opening Day, Cuyler revealed that the injury bothered his timing all season long. He batted just .271 with no homers and 32 RBIs for the NL cellar-dwellers. On September 21 he announced that he was retiring at the end of the season, and was granted his release on October 4. 

A student of the game, Cuyler had long made it known that he wanted to transition into managing. After considering several minor-league managerial positions, he surprisingly signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a player on February 2 with the hope of moving into a coaching position that season. The NL’s oldest player, Cuyler started 58 games in the outfield and tutored a trio of 20-something flychasers — Buddy Hassett, Ernie Koy, and Goody Rosen. Cuyler was released as a player on September 16 and re-signed as a coach for the remainder of the season.24

A respected teacher, Cuyler spent his final 11 years in the dugout of minor- and major-league teams, but never achieved his dream of piloting a big-league club. Less than three months after retiring as an active big leaguer, Cuyler accepted a position as player-manager of Chattanooga in the Class A1 Southern Association. In his rookie season, he led the Lookouts to the pennant. He resigned after 2½ seasons with the club to accept a coaching position with the Chicago Cubs, serving under manager Jimmie Wilson through the 1943 season. Cuyler piloted the unaffiliated Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association for five seasons (1944-1948), guiding them to first-place finishes in his first three years and to the league title in 1946. He spent his final year in baseball (1949) as a member of Joe McCarthy’s coaching staff for the Boston Red Sox.

Cuyler suffered a heart attack on February 2, 1950, while ice fishing near his home in Harrisville. Two days later, while he was in a local hospital, a blood clot formed in his leg. The likely cause was varicose veins, which plagued Cuyler his later years.25 When the situation worsened, he was sent by ambulance to a hospital in Ann Arbor but died in transit on February 11 at the age of 51. His funeral service was held on February 14 at St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Harrisville, and he was buried in St. Anne’s Cemetery.

Last revised: December 1, 2021 (ghw)

Sources

Ancestry.com

BaseballLibrary.com

Baseball-Reference.com

Chicago Daily Tribune

New York Times

Pittsburgh Press

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Retrosheet.com

SABR.org

The Sporting News

Hazen “Kiki” Cuyler player file from the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York.

Notes

1 The Sporting News, February 10, 1968, 18.

2 Ronald T. Waldo, Hazen “Kiki” Cuyler.  A Baseball Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland,  2012) 14.

3 The Sporting News, July 24, 2.

4 The Sporting News, August 7, 1924, 1.

5 The Sporting News, October 1, 1925, 1.

6 Associated Press, “Pittsburgh Defeats Washington, 9-7, to Win World’s Baseball Championship,” Berkeley (California) Daily Gazette, October 15, 1925, 1.

7 Associated Press, “Pirates Win Seventh Game and World’s Championship,” Scranton (Pennsylvania) Republic, October 16, 1925, 1.

8 The Sporting News, August 18, 1927,1.

9 The Sporting News, October 20, 1927, 1.

10 The Sporting News, February 9, 1928, and March 1, 1928, 3.

11 John B. Foster, “Kiki To Play in Right Field, Latest Plan Of Cubs,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 8, 1928, 15.

12 The term Murderers’ Row is most readily associated with the 1927 New York Yankees, and Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri, who batted three through eighth.

13 Werner Laufer, “Lady Luck At Last Shines On Kiki Cuyler” (NEA), Freeport (Illinois) Journal-Standard, September 7, 1929, 10.

14 “Cubs Goats Become Heroes,” Chicago Tribune,  October 12, 1929, 23.

15 John Drebinger, “Cubs Triumph, 3-1, In 3d Series Game Before 30,000 Fans, New York Times, October 12, 1929, 1.

16 The Sporting News, August 4, 1932, 4.

17 The Sporting News, March 31, 1932, 5.

18 Associated Press, “Hack Wilson Puts on Vaudeville Act,” Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune, October 9, 1930, 1.

19 The Sporting News, July 24, 1930, 3.

20 The Sporting News, February 22, 1950, 20.

21 The Sporting News, March 24, 1932, 3.

22 The Sporting News, February 22, 1950, 20.

23 The Sporting News, July 11, 1935, 1.

24 Waldo, 212.

25 The Sporting News, February 22, 1950, 20.

Pana, Illinois, Cvengros’s hometown, lies in the heart of coal country. The fifth of the nine children of Michael J. Cvengros, a laborer, and Helen (Buray) Cvengros, Michael John, the future major leaguer, was born on December 1, 1900. According to Cvengros’s Hall of Fame file, his parents were natives of Austria, as were their parents. In 1923, after Cvengros joined the Chicago White Sox, manager Kid Gleason told the New York World that Cvengros “is Czecho-Slovak.”1 In 1927, when Cvengros pitched for the pennant-winning Pittsburgh Pirates, newspapers described him as the son of Polish parents.2 Triangulating from these separate sources, it’s a safe guess to say that Cvengros’s parents’ homeland was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which before World War I encompassed parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia.   

Young Michael labored for a time in the coal mines; a newspaper described him as a “powerful youngster who got that way in the coal mines of Central Illinois.”3 He learned to play baseball with teams in and around Pana before he found his way at the age of 19 to Little Rock of the Southern League. How he ended up there is unclear, but Cvengros’s professional baseball career had begun. 

There appears some contradiction over his first season. Online sources indicate that Cvengros first took the mound professionally in 1921, for Chickasha, Oklahoma, in the Class D Western Association, and that he joined Little Rock in 1922. However, a January 16, 1927, article in the Pittsburgh Sunday Post said that Cvengros had been “given two trials with Little Rock by Manager Kid Elberfeld. In his first trial [in 1920] he relieved J. Hank Robinson after the fifth inning in a game against New Orleans at Little Rock on August 27,” and “allowed just 3 hits in 4 innings” during a 6-1 Little Rock victory. Two days later, the article said, Cvengros pitched in relief against Memphis and was lifted after walking five batters in less than an inning. Cvengros “never appeared again that season,” the article said, but he “was reserved for Little Rock for 1921.” Those two games appear to be the true beginning of Cvengros’s professional career.

After spring training with Little Rock in 1921 during which he received “no chances to pitch,”4 Cvengros was sent to Chickasha. It’s difficult to imagine what that experience must have been like for the 20-year-old. To contemplate the statistical story of that season is to envision a constant barrage of baserunners and runs scored by the opposition, as in 152 innings over 47 games he compiled a mind-boggling WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched) of 3.104 and lost 22 games (although he also won 17). Perhaps the team was short on pitchers, or maybe Cvengros’s batting skills (he played 17 games in the outfield and produced averages of .275 batting and .358 slugging) gained him a reprieve; nevertheless, he remained with the Chicks the entire season and apparently learned some lessons. For by the following season, his performance resulted in a dramatic change of fortunes. After a nightmarish 1921 season, Cvengros found himself atop a big-league mound in 1922.

Returning to Little Rock in 1922, the 21-year-old Cvengros caught the eye of major-league scouts while posting 17 wins, a 2.88 ERA, and a 1.372 WHIP. He also batted .295, and even played a game in left field. New York Giants scout Dick Kinsella saw Cvengros and recommended him to Giants manager John McGraw. In September the Giants signed Cvengros, and on September 30 at the Polo Grounds in New York, he made his major-league debut, starting against the Boston Braves. Though he lost, 5-1, Cvengros pitched a complete game and allowed just six hits, although his four walks assuredly didn’t help his cause. (The New York World commented the next season that Cvengros’s pitching “made folks sit up and take notice.”5) Just two years removed from the coal mines, Cvengros was a major leaguer. Staying there, though, often proved problematic.

Tracking down what kind of player Cvengros was and gauging his ability is frustrating; there’s not much available reference material. What is readily apparent, though, is that at 5-feet-8 and just 159 pounds he was “somewhat undersized”6 for a major leaguer. Over his career Cvengros often struggled with control, as attested by his 1.582 WHIP; he also walked more batters (285 in 551 innings) than he struck out (201). Cvengros was an effective hitter, particularly in the minors, where he sometimes played the outfield and frequently pinch-hit. In 1,309 minor-league at-bats, the left-handed swinger batted .265 and smashed six home runs.

Of his contemporaries, Cvengros probably bore the closest resemblance as a pitcher to another man of similar stature. In June 1923, the New York World suggested that Cvengros “gives promise of being something of the same sort of pitcher as Dickie Kerr,” of the White Sox, also a left-hander, who was just 5-feet-7 and weighed 155 pounds. That Kerr would be offered as an example was probably not a mere coincidence. In 1923 Cvengros and Kerr had become teammates.

Fresh from his major-league debut, Cvengros returned home to Pana after the 1922 season and joined the local ballclub. He was sensational. On October 16 he pitched a no-hitter against Nokomis, giving up just one walk. On the 22nd he handed the Decatur All-Stars and their 51-year-old pitcher, Joe “Iron Man” McGinnity  a 7-1 defeat. At the end of January 1923 Cvengros joined 19 other pitchers at the Giants’ spring-training camp at Marlin Springs, Texas. “McGraw apparently thinks very well of Cvengros,” said a sportswriter, “and seems to think the Pole has quite an opportunity before him.”7 But on Opening Day, April 17, Cvengros was returned to Little Rock, which released him the same day.

Cvengros wasn’t without a team for long. During his previous stay with Little Rock, White Sox manager Kid Gleason had seen him work and been impressed with the southpaw’s skills. So when Little Rock waived Cvengros, Gleason “was quick to grab him.”8 Cvengros joined Chicago for the 1923 American League season and posted a 12-13 record for the seventh-place team. Cvengros spent three seasons with the White Sox, and if his work that first season was respectable, it was a performance he was never able to replicate. After that, in fact, he was just not very good. (In 88 career appearances for the White Sox, Cvengros finished 18-34 with a 4.74 ERA.) Cvengros did, however, produce a few highlights for the White Sox, particularly in 1923. In his debut appearance, on April 22 at St. Louis, in relief of starter Ted Blankenship, he was the winner when the White Sox came from behind to beat the Browns, 4-3; in 4⅓ innings, he allowed just two hits. On June 8 at Yankee Stadium, he pitched a complete-game victory, twice striking out Babe Ruth. In late July he pitched complete-game victories against the Philadelphia Athletics and Boston Red Sox, allowing just one run in each contest.

In 1924 things fell apart. Perhaps it was the loss of his benefactor, Gleason, who had been fired after the 1923 season and replaced by Frank Chance (who was himself replaced by Johnny Evers after Chance became ill prior to Opening Day; he died on September 15). From his first appearance, the season was a disaster for Cvengros; he won just three games while losing 12 and posted a 5.88 ERA. On April 26, at Detroit’s Navin Field, Cvengros again made his season debut by relieving starter Ted Blankenship. In four innings the Tigers rocked Cvengros for nine hits and 11 runs (six earned). In the fifth inning, after giving up five runs, Cvengros “walked out of the box and went to his hotel.”9 Asked to explain his sudden disappearance, Cvengros tersely replied, “I took myself out.”10 Evers later fined the pitcher $200. Cvengros never recovered.

Neither did he ever solve The Bambino. Like many other pitchers of his era, Cvengros struggled mightily against Ruth. With the exception of the two strikeouts in 1923, Ruth usually got the best of their confrontations. During his career Cvengros allowed 24 regular-season home runs, five of them by Ruth. None was more dramatic than the first. In 1944, in a syndicated newspaper series called “My Biggest Baseball Day,” Ruth recalled that blast.

“One day we were playin’ in Chicago against the White Sox,” Ruth told sportswriter John P. Carmichael, “and Mark Roth, our secretary, was worryin’ about holdin’ the train because we were in extra innings. He was fidgetin’ around behind the dugout lookin’ at his watch, and I saw him when I went up to hit in the 15th. ‘All right, quit worrying,’ I told him.’ I’ll get this over with right now. Mike Cvengros was pitchin’ and I hit one outta the park [on the first pitch]. We made the train easy. It was fun.”11 In a Herculean effort, Cvengros lost the complete-game 15-inning affair, 3-1.12  

Cvengros’s final season with the White Sox was 1925. Working that year for manager Eddie Collins, he pitched in just 22 games, 11 as a starter, and finished 3-9. On September 1 he was released by Chicago, and the next day signed with the New Orleans Pelicans of the  Southern Association. He took the mound that same day for New Orleans, and over the remainder of the season went 4-0. Returning to the Pelicans in 1926, Cvengros posted an impressive 18-5 mark and batted.352, as he was often called on to pinch-hit. After the season the Pirates drafted him, and, just one season removed from the big stage, Cvengros returned to the major leagues.

There were few highlights for Cvengros during the 1927 season. Having won the World Series just two years before, Pittsburgh fielded a veteran team. With solid starters Lee Meadows, Vic Aldridge, and Ray Kremer returning, there seemed few opportunities for Cvengros, and he was rarely used, making just four starts among 23 appearances and pitching just 53⅔ innings as the Pirates marched to the pennant. Cvengros hadn’t had much of a season, but he was in the World Series, against the Yankees.

The seldom-used Cvengros didn’t appear to have much chance of working in the World Series. Bush said he “probably would use no left-handed pitchers against the Yankees unless emergency relief so demanded.”13 As Emil Yde and Cvengros were the only “port-side hurlers and neither is in Class A,”14 Cvengros undoubtedly prepared to spend the Series on the bench.

But Cvengros did indeed take the mound against the Yankees. In Game Two, at Forbes Field, with New York leading 4-1, he relieved starter Aldridge with one out in the top of the eighth and the bases loaded. He hit the first batter he faced, Earle Combs, forcing home a run, then gave up a single to Mark Koenig, allowing another run to score. Ruth and Lou Gehrig grounded out. Cvengros was pinch-hit for in the bottom of the inning. 

The next day, at Yankee Stadium, he again met his nemesis. With one out in the bottom of the seventh, three runs in and runners on second and third with the Yankees now leading, 5-1, Cvengros relieved starter Meadows. The first batter Cvengros faced was Ruth and The Babe crushed a three-run homer, putting the game out of reach. Cvengros then struck out Gehrig and Bob Meusel. He allowed a single and coaxed three groundouts in the eighth before being lifted for a pinch-hitter in the ninth.  Cvengros worked 2⅓ innings in his two Series appearances and allowed three hits, including the Ruth home run, in the only postseason action of his career. 

The 1928 season once again found Cvengros in the minor leagues. The Pirates’ offseason acquisition of left-hander Fred Fussell from Wichita Falls of the Texas League made Cvengros expendable, and he and catcher Ike Danning were sent to Wichita Falls to complete the Fussell deal. Again Cvengros was outstanding against minor-league hitters, going 21-8  (his career mark in 408 minor-league appearances was 177-130, with a 3.29 ERA),and again drawing the attention of major-league scouts. On October 3 the Cubs drafted him, and Cvengros returned to the major leagues.

Things were looking up in Chicago. In 1928, their third season under manager Joe McCarthy, the Cubs had produced 91 wins and finished third. Management felt all the pieces were in place to improve, save for a big-time bat. Then came the blockbuster: the acquisition of second baseman Rogers Hornsby from the Boston Braves in exchange for five players and $200,000. One of the five players was left-handed pitcher Percy Jones, who had tossed ten wins that season for the Cubs. Seeking to replace Jones’s productivity, the Cubs added Cvengros to their roster for 1929.

In an experience similar to that with the 1927 Pirates, Cvengros was again used sparingly. He nonetheless made his presence felt. Starting on April 23, Cvengros had five consecutive scoreless relief appearances, working 12⅔ innings and allowing just seven hits. On May 21 Cvengros made his first start and was hammered, surrendering nine hits and six runs in 4⅔ innings. For the season he pitched in 32 games, four as a starter, and produced five wins, all in relief. He did not pitch in the World Series. In December the Cubs sent him to Indianapolis of the American Association in exchange for pitcher Arthur “Bud” Teachout. It was the final major-league deal in which Cvengros was involved. After 25 wins in 144 games, he never again appeared on a major-league roster.

Cvengros pitched eight more seasons in the minor leagues. After going 15-9 for Indianapolis in 1930 and opening the 1931 season with the club, he was traded during that season to league rival Columbus. After a 10-10 season Cvengros was traded to Houston of the Texas League, where in six seasons he compiled a record of 79-62 (including 21-11, 2.38 in 1933). After a 4-16 season in 1937, the 36-year-old Cvengros retired.

In 1932 Cvengros had married Dolores Mary Hurve Vandalia, Illinois. By 1937, Cvengros’s final season, the two were living, apparently childless, on Clay Avenue in Houston. Cvengros had a job as a laborer for the Gulf Brewing Company.

In February 1938 Cvengros was announced as the manager of Abbeville of the Class D Evangeline League,15 but by May he had “resigned due to ill health.”16 That appears to be Cvengros’s final connection with Organized Baseball.

A final reference to Cvengros appears in the 1940 US Census, which recorded Mike and Dolores living, with no children, in Ramsey Township, Fayette County, Illinois. He was a tavern keeper and she a tavern helper.

Cvengros died August 3, 1970, aged 69, at St. Joseph Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Three months earlier he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer with metastasis. He was buried in the Calvary Cemetery, in Hot Springs.

Sources

My sincerest appreciation to SABR member Bill Mortell for his diligent genealogical research.

Mike Cvengros player file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

Biloxi (Mississippi) Daily Herald

Bridgeport (Connecticut) Telegram

Decatur (Iowa) Daily Review

Eau Claire (Wisconsin) Leader

Kingston (New York) Daily Freeman

Newark (Ohio) Advocate

New York World

Oakland (California) Tribune

Ogden (Utah) Standard Examiner

Pittsburgh Sunday Post

San Antonio Light

Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press

Twin Falls (Idaho) Daily Times

Uniontown (Pennsylvania) Morning Herald

Winnipeg (Manitoba) Free Press

Baseball-Reference.com

Retrosheet.org

Notes

1 New York World, June 9, 1923.

2 Pittsburgh Sunday Post, January 16, 1927.

3 Undated clipping in Cvengros’s file at the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York.

4 Pittsburgh Sunday Post, January 16, 1927.

5 New York World, June 9, 1923.

6 Undated clipping in Cvengros’s Hall of Fame file.

7 Bridgeport (Connecticut) Telegram, February 16, 1923.

8 New York World, June 9, 1923.

9 Undated clipping in Cvengros’s Hall of Fame file.

10 Pittsburgh Sunday Post, January 16, 1927.

11 Winnipeg Free Press, November 13, 1944.

12 The game took place on May 22, 1923, at Comiskey Park.

13 Twins Falls (Idaho) Daily Times, October 4, 1927.

14 Ibid.

15 Biloxi Daily (Mississippi) Herald, February 23, 1938.

16 San Antonio Light, May 17, 1938.