Adrian Constantine Anson, named after two towns in southern Michigan that his father admired, was born in a log cabin in Marshall (later Marshalltown), Iowa, on April 17, 1852. Adrian was the youngest son of Henry and Jeannette Rice Anson, and was the first pioneer child born in the town that his father had founded. Henry Anson, who was born in New York State and had drifted westward as a young adult, was a surveyor, land agent, and businessman who brought his wife and oldest son Sturgis to Iowa in a covered wagon. He found a promising valley in the center of the state, built a log cabin, and laid out a main street. Henry worked tirelessly to build and promote Marshalltown, and is recognized to this day as the patriarch of the city. Jeannette Anson was a sturdy pioneer housewife who died when Adrian was seven years of age, leaving behind an all-male household.

Adrian, whose family proudly claimed descent from the British naval hero Lord Anson, was a strong, strapping boy with reddish hair and a self-admitted aversion to schoolwork and chores. Not until his teenage years, when baseball fever swept through Marshalltown, did Adrian find an acceptable outlet for his energy and enthusiasm. He practiced diligently and earned a place on the town team, the Marshalltown Stars, at the age of 15. The Stars, with Henry Anson at third base, Adrian’s brother Sturgis in center field, and Adrian at second base, won the Iowa state championship in 1868.

Henry Anson enrolled his sons in a preparatory course at the College of Notre Dame for two years beginning in 1865, but Adrian was more interested in baseball and skating than in his studies. A later sojourn at the state college in Iowa City (now the University of Iowa) ended similarly. Young Adrian Anson wanted to play professional ball, and his break came in 1870 when the famous Rockford Forest City club and its star pitcher, Al Spalding, came to Marshalltown for a pair of games. The Forest City team won both matches, but the Anson clan played so impressively that the Rockford management sent contract offers to all three of the Ansons. Henry and Sturgis turned Rockford down, but Adrian accepted and joined the Forest City squad in the spring of 1871.

The 19-year-old Adrian, dubbed “The Marshalltown Infant,” batted .325 for Rockford and established himself as one of the stars of the new National Association. The last-place Rockford team disbanded at season’s end, but the pennant-winning Philadelphia Athletics quickly signed Adrian to a contract. He rewarded the Athletics with a .415 average in 1872, third best in the Association. He played third base for the Athletics that season, but spent the next three seasons shuttling from first to third base with occasional stops at second, shortstop, catcher, and the outfield. The hard-hitting utility man quickly became one of Philadelphia’s most popular athletes.

Boston Red Stockings manager Harry Wright had always dreamed of introducing baseball to England, his home country, and in 1874 Wright and his star pitcher Al Spalding organized a mid-season trip to England. The Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics took a three-week respite from National Association play and sailed to the Old World, where they played both baseball and cricket for British crowds. Adrian Anson led all the players on both teams in batting during the tour, and, more importantly, began a friendship with Spalding. Both were young men from the Midwest, less than two years apart in age, and both had willed themselves to prominence in the baseball profession. Each found reasons to admire the other, and their relationship would play an important role in Anson’s life for the next 30 years.

During the 1875 season, Chicago club president William Hulbert signed four of Boston’s brightest stars, including pitcher Al Spalding, to play for his White Stockings in the new National League in 1876. Spalding recommended that Hulbert also sign two Philadelphia standouts, Ezra Sutton and Adrian Anson. Sutton and Anson reached agreements with Hulbert, though Sutton later reneged on his deal and returned to the Athletics. Anson moved to Chicago in early 1876, and the White Stockings, managed by Spalding and powered by Anson and batting champ Ross Barnes, won the first National League pennant that year.

On a personal note, Anson began dating Virginia Fiegal, daughter of a saloon owner, during his Philadelphia days. He met Virginia when he was 20 and she only 13 or 14, though this was not considered unusual at the time. Their relationship hit a roadblock after Adrian signed his contract with Chicago, when Virginia strongly objected to Adrian’s desire to leave Philadelphia. Anson was no contract-jumper, so he offered William Hulbert $1,000 to buy his way out of the agreement. Hulbert refused, and Anson, unwilling to break his contract and not wanting to lose Virginia, asked Virginia’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Adrian and Virginia were wed in November 1876 and started a family that eventually produced four daughters, all of whom grew to adulthood, and three sons who died in infancy.

Adrian Anson, powerfully built at 6-feet-2 and over 200 pounds, was the biggest and strongest man in the game during the 1870s. Some reports state that he did not take a full swing at the plate; instead, he pushed his bat at the ball and relied upon his strong arms and wrists to produce line drives. An outstanding place hitter, Anson and the White Stockings worked an early version of the hit-and-run play to perfection. So good was Anson’s bat control that he struck out only once during the 1878 season and twice in 1879. He also served as Spalding’s assistant on the field, enthusiastically cheering his teammates and arguing with opponents and umpires. Anson had managed the Philadelphia Athletics for the last few weeks of the 1875 season, and looked forward to the day that he would succeed Spalding as leader of the White Stockings.

The Chicago team failed to repeat as champions under Spalding in 1877. Spalding then moved into the club presidency, but passed over Anson and appointed Bob Ferguson as his successor. Ferguson’s regime was a failure, and Spalding named Anson as captain and manager for the 1879 season. He was now “Cap” Anson, and in one of his first decisions, the former utility man planted himself at first base and remained there for the rest of his career. His 1879 team challenged for the pennant, but fell apart after Anson was sidelined due to illness in late August. However, Anson’s 1880 White Stockings, fortified by newcomers such as catcher Mike Kelly, pitcher Larry Corcoran, and outfielders George Gore and Abner Dalrymple, won the flag with a .798 winning percentage, the highest in league history.

Two more pennants followed in 1881 and 1882 as Anson, who won the batting title in 1881 with a .399 mark, cemented his stature as the hardest hitter and finest field general in the game. He used his foghorn voice and belligerent manner to rile opponents and frighten umpires, and made himself the focus of attention in nearly every game he played. His outbursts against the intimidated umpires earned him the title “King of Kickers.” His White Stockings followed Anson’s lead and played a hustling, battling brand of ball that won no friends in other league cities, but put Chicago on the top of the baseball world. As baseball grew in popularity, the handsome and highly successful Cap Anson became the sport’s first true national celebrity.

Regrettably, Anson used his stature to drive minority players from the game. An 1883 exhibition game in Toledo, Ohio, between the local team and the White Stockings nearly ended before it began when Anson angrily refused to take the field against Toledo’s African-American catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker. Faced with the loss of gate receipts, Anson relented after a loud protest, but his bellicose attitude made Anson, wittingly or not, the acknowledged leader of the segregation forces already at work in the game. Other players and managers followed Anson’s lead, and similar incidents occurred with regularity for the rest of the decade. In 1887, Anson made headlines again when he refused to play an exhibition in Newark unless the local club removed its African-American battery, catcher Walker and pitcher George Stovey, from the field. Teams and leagues began to bar minorities from participation, and by the early 1890s, no black players remained in the professional ranks.

Chicago was the highest-scoring team in baseball, and Anson, as its cleanup hitter, was the leading run producer in the game. The Chicago Tribune introduced a new statistic, runs batted in, in 1880 and reported that Cap Anson led the league in this category by a healthy margin. The statistic was soon dropped, but later researchers have determined that Anson led the National League in RBIs eight times. He is credited with driving in more than 2,000 runs, behind only Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth on the all-time list despite the fact that National League teams played fewer than 100 games per season for much of Anson’s career.

Anson hit more than 12 homers in a season only once. He swatted 21 round-trippers in 1884 by taking advantage of the tiny Chicago ballpark, which featured a left-field fence only 180 feet from home plate (balls hit over the fence had been ruled as doubles in previous seasons). On August 5 and 6, 1884, Anson belted five homers in two games, a record that has been tied (by Stan Musial, among others) but never broken. However, Anson drove in most of his runs with sharp line drives that the barehanded infielders found nearly impossible to stop. Fielding gloves found their way into the National League by the mid-1880s, but Anson’s production continued uninterrupted. He batted .300 or better in each of his first 20 professional seasons, and by 1886 he was baseball’s all-time leader in games played, runs, hits, RBIs, and several other categories.

He was less successful as a fielder, leading the league in errors several times and setting the all-time career mark for miscues by a first baseman. However, Anson was fearless in stopping hard-thrown balls with his bare hands, and his size made him an excellent target for his infield mates. He was an integral part of the celebrated “Stonewall Infield” with third-baseman Tom Burns, shortstop Ed Williamson, and second-baseman Fred Pfeffer. This unit remained together for seven seasons, from 1883 to 1889, and formed the backbone of the Chicago defense.

Anson had been a teetotaler since his younger days, but his White Stockings were a hard-drinking crew that kept their captain up nights with their behavior. His 1883 and 1884 teams failed to win the pennant, partially due to off-the-field controversies, but in 1885 the White Stockings reclaimed their place at the top of the league. New pitcher John Clarkson posted a 53-16 record and led the team to the pennant after a spirited race against the New York Giants. However, Anson’s team played poorly in a postseason “World’s Series” against the St. Louis Browns of the American Association. The series ended, officially, in a tie after a disputed Browns victory caused no end of controversy. In 1886 Anson drove in 147 runs in 125 games and led the White Stockings to the pennant once again, but his charges lost the six-game World’s Series against the Browns when some of the Chicago players appeared to be inebriated on the field.

Spalding and Anson decided to break up the team, selling Mike Kelly to Boston for a then-record $10,000 and dropping veterans George Gore and Abner Dalrymple, among others. The 1887 squad was a better-behaved bunch, but finished in third place despite Anson’s outstanding performance at bat. The 35-year-old captain won the batting title with a career-best .421 in a year in which walks counted as hits (though later researchers removed the 60 walks from his hit totals, leaving his average at .347 and giving the title to Detroit’s Sam Thompson). In early 1888 Spalding sold John Clarkson, baseball’s best pitcher, to Boston for $10,000. Several new men tried, and failed, to fill Clarkson’s shoes, and the White Stockings finished second despite another batting championship by Anson.

After the 1888 season Spalding, owner of the sporting goods company that still bears his name, took the Chicago club and a team of National League all-stars on a ballplaying excursion around the world. Virginia Anson accompanied the party as Anson directed the White Stockings in New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, and the European continent. The trip lost money for its backers, including Anson, but it introduced baseball (and advertised Spalding’s business) to countries that had never seen the sport before. The six-month adventure was the high point of Cap Anson’s life, and takes up nearly half of Anson’s autobiography, published in 1900. At the conclusion of the trip, in April of 1889, Spalding signed Anson to an unprecedented 10-year contract as player and manager of the White Stockings.

By 1890, Anson was a stockholder in the Chicago ballclub, owning 13 percent of the team. A company man through and through, he bitterly criticized the Brotherhood of Professional Ball Players, whose members quit the National League en masse in early 1890 and formed the Players League. Anson, one of a handful of stars who refused to jump to the new league, hastily assembled a new group of youngsters (which the newspapers dubbed Anson’s Colts) and finished second that year. Spalding worked behind the scenes to undermine the rival circuit, while Anson led the charge in the newspapers, denouncing the jumpers as “traitors” and gleefully predicting the eventual failure of the upstart league. The new circuit collapsed after one season, but Anson’s role in the defeat angered many of his former players.

Some reporters called Anson “the man who saved the National League,” but many former Players Leaguers hated the Chicago captain for his attitude toward them. Such stars as Hugh Duffy and George Van Haltren refused to return to Chicago after the collapse of the rival circuit, costing Anson much-needed talent. In 1891, Anson’s Colts held first place until mid-September, but an 18-game winning streak vaulted Boston into the lead amid rumors that Boston opponents threw games to keep the pennant out of Anson’s hands. Chicago finished in second place, and Cap Anson believed for the rest of his life that he lost the championship through the machinations of his former Players League rivals.

Anson, after more than 20 years as a player, began to slow down. His average dipped below .300 for the first time in 1891, though he led the league once again in runs batted in with 120. He had never been a great fielder, but covered so little ground at first base that the pitcher and second baseman had to help out on balls hit to the right side. As stubborn as ever, Anson was the last bare-handed first baseman in the major leagues, finally donning a glove in 1892. At bat, Anson produced one last hurrah with a remarkable .388 average in 1894 at the age of 42, but his slowness on the basepaths bogged down the Chicago offense. As a manager, his increasing strictness and inflexibility angered his charges. He was baseball’s biggest celebrity, even enjoying a run as an actor on Broadway in a play called A Runaway Colt in December of 1895, but his Colts fell steadily in the standings.

His position as manager was weakened in 1891 when Al Spalding stepped down as team president. Anson might have been willing to retire from the field and accept the position, but Spalding, who retained controlling ownership in the team, appointed former Boston manager Jim Hart to the post. Anson held little regard for Hart, who had served Spalding as business manager of the round-the-world tour four years before, and the two men clashed often over personnel and disciplinary matters during the next several seasons.

Spalding and Hart reorganized the club in 1892, and Anson signed a new contract with the Chicago ballclub. This agreement retained Anson’s 13 percent stake in the team, but cut one year off his previous 10-year pact, though Anson claimed that he did not discover the discrepancy until later. At any rate, the new agreement expired on February 1, 1898. Anson, who by 1894 was the oldest player in the league, stubbornly kept himself in the lineup despite his dwindling production and his deteriorating relationships with Hart and the Chicago players. He batted .285 in 1897, a respectable figure today but well below the league average, and his Colts finished in ninth place. Spalding and Hart declined to renew his contract, and after 27 seasons, Cap Anson’s career was over. The 45-year-old Anson retired as baseball’s all-time leader in games played, times at bat, runs, hits, doubles, runs batted in, and wins as a manager.

Spalding offered to hold a testimonial benefit for Anson and raise $50,000 as a going-away gift, but Anson proudly turned it down, explaining that accepting such an offer would “stultify my manhood” and smacked of charity. The former Chicago captain then accepted a position as manager of the New York Giants, succeeding Bill Joyce, who had been sharply criticized by the national press for his part in an ugly on-field brawl. Giants owner Andrew Freedman promised Anson full control of the team, but continually interfered with personnel and management issues. He also ignored Anson’s request to trade or release Joyce, who remained on the team and retained the allegiance of many of the players. Anson led the Giants to a 9-13 record before Freedman fired him and reinstated Joyce after the controversy over the brawl died down.

After his humiliating exit from the Giants, Anson tried to obtain a Western League franchise and move it to the South Side of Chicago, but Spalding, whose approval for the move was necessary under to rules of the National Agreement, refused permission. This act ended the decades-long friendship between the two men. Anson then served as president of a revived American Association, which attempted to begin play in 1900 but folded due to financial pressures. After this defeat, Anson expressed his bitterness in his autobiography, A Ball Player’s Career. “Baseball as at present conducted is a gigantic monopoly,” stated Anson, “intolerant of opposition, and run on a grab-all-that-there-is-in-sight basis that is alienating its friends and disgusting the very public that has so long and cheerfully given to it the support that it has withheld from other forms of amusement.”

Cap Anson was finished with the National League, and although he lived for another two decades, he would never again hold any official position in organized ball. Instead, Anson opened a bowling and billiards emporium in downtown Chicago and served as a vice-president of the new American Bowling Congress. He captained a team that won the ABC five-man national title in 1904, making Anson one of the few men in history to win championships in more than one sport. He then turned his energies to what appeared to be a promising political career. Elected to a term as Chicago city clerk in 1905, Anson soon became embroiled in numerous controversies that he was, by personality and temperament, unable to overcome. He lost a bid for renomination, and his career in public office ended ignominiously. His bowling and billiards business floundered, and in late 1905 the cash-strapped Anson sold his remaining stock in the Chicago ballclub and severed his 29-year connection with the team.

He then devoted himself to semipro ball, investing most of his remaining money in his own team (called Anson’s Colts) and building his own ballpark on the South Side. This effort was a money-loser, and in desperation Anson donned a uniform in 1908 and played first base at the age of 56. He could still hit, but was nearly immobile in the field, and his Colts finished in the middle of the City League standings for three seasons. In those years, Anson played many games against the Chicago Leland Giants, the leading African-American team of the era, without apparent complaint. Anson, his finances stretched to the limit, sold his team after the 1909 season and returned to the stage. He created a monologue and performed it in vaudeville houses throughout the Midwest for the next few years.

Anson’s later life was filled with disappointment. The National League offered to provide a pension for the ex-ballplayer, but Anson stoutly refused all offers of assistance. He declared bankruptcy in 1910, and by 1913 he had lost his home and moved in with a daughter and son-in-law. Virginia Anson died in 1915 after a long illness, and the widowed ex-ballplayer resumed his stage career in a skit written by his friend Ring Lardner titled “First Aid for Father.” The skit starred Anson and his daughters Adele and Dorothy, and the Anson clan crisscrossed the nation, sharing bills with jugglers and animal acts in small town and big city alike. Vaudeville allowed Anson to support himself, but barely, and he retired, penniless, from the stage in 1921. He died on April 14, 1922, three days shy of his 70th birthday, and was buried in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. The National League paid his funeral expenses. Seventeen years later, on May 2, 1939, Anson and his former friend and mentor Al Spalding were named to the Baseball Hall of Fame by a special committee.

A version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. For more information, click here.

Sources

Books

Anson, Adrian C. A Ball Player’s Career (Chicago: Era Publishing, 1900).

Brown, Warren. The Chicago Cubs (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946).

Levine, Peter. A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Spalding, Albert G. Base Ball: America’s National Game (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1911).

Zang, David W. Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

Newspapers and Magazines

Chicago Tribune, The Sporting News, Baseball Magazine, Sporting Life, and The New York Times for the 1870-1920 period.

Winfield “Win” Boggs was a Marine during World War II, and met Susan Graham, a mail-plane pilot, in 1945, marrying her just two weeks later. Win stayed in the military, serving as a pilot in the Air Force during the Korean War and moving his family around as military people often do. The couple had a son, Wayne, and daughter, Ann, and their third child, Wade Anthony Boggs, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 15, 1958.

Wade loved the idea of being in a military family and having a regimented routine every day. This is something that would carry over to his entire baseball career, in which he would become known for doing set things at set times every day before a game.

Wade began playing baseball in Little League, receiving instruction from his father and several coaches. Win Boggs had retired from the military in 1967, and moved the family to Tampa, Florida, where he opened a fishing camp. At Henry B. Plant High School in Tampa, Wade played baseball and football. After he hit .522 as a junior, scouts began watching him play, and he switched from quarterback to kicker on the football team to avoid injury. He was good enough to become All-State in football and get a scholarship offer from the University of South Carolina.

In baseball Boggs had earned a reputation as a hitter, and pitchers wouldn’t throw strikes to him. When he tried to hit balls out of the strike zone he struggled, until his father got him the book The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams. After reading the book he realized he had lost some of his patience at the plate, and took Williams’s advice about not swinging at pitches out of the strike zone.2 When this forced pitchers to throw strikes he hit everything, finishing the season hitting .485.

Scouts had seen Boggs struggle, and even when he hit they weren’t sure if he had the necessary talent to play professional baseball. He didn’t have much speed or range, and was rated poorly in most areas. The Major League Scouting Bureau called him a nonprospect. One scout wrote, “needs a lot of help with bat,” and thought it would take more money than he was worth to persuade him to turn down the football scholarship. But that scout hadn’t seen the drive that Boggs had to play baseball. Boston Red Sox scout George Digby had seen him play, and persuaded the team to select Boggs in the seventh round of the 1976 amateur draft. When the Red Sox offered $7,500, Boggs’s father said “You’re going to have to make a choice, son, college ball or pro ball.”3 An easy choice for the young baseball fan, Boggs signed and went to the minor leagues.

Boggs was assigned to Elmira (New York) of the Class-A (rookie season) New York-Penn League, where he hit .263 and was below team average in almost every category. But the Red Sox saw enough in him to promote him to Winston-Salem of the Class-A Carolina League in 1977. Boggs proceeded to hit .332 that year, and showed an excellent batting eye by walking much more often than he struck out, something he would do every year until he was 40 years old.

Boggs still moved slowly through the Red Sox system. He was slow and he didn’t have much power; all he was showing was that batting average and the ability to earn bases on balls. “I was told in the minor leagues that I’ll never play third in the big leagues. That I don’t hit for power so I’m not going to play in the big leagues. I’m not fast enough. I was told so many different things.”4 What he did have was drive. “The only thing I ever wanted to do was play professional baseball and in the minors I was getting paid to play so I didn’t get discouraged.”5

He spent the 1978 and 1979 seasons at Bristol (Connecticut) of the Double-A Eastern League, followed by the 1980 and 1981 seasons at Pawtucket in the Triple-A International League. An event in baseball history that Boggs played in was the longest-ever professional baseball game, a 33-inning affair in 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that began on April 18 and, after being suspended in the wee hours of Easter morning, was finished on June 23. “When I doubled in the tying run in the 21st inning, I didn’t know if the guys wanted to hug me or slug me,” he said.6 In 1981 he led the International League in hitting with a .335 average, and still didn’t get called up in September. On the last day of the season, his manager, Joe Morgan, suggested that Boggs play first base in winter ball. He went to Puerto Rico to play, but because of injuries to others he ended up playing third base again. This time he hit .354, and the Red Sox couldn’t ignore him any longer, adding him to the 40-man roster.

Boggs knew Debbie Bertucelli in high school, and they began dating. Shortly after his debut in the minor leagues he proposed, and they were married in December 1976. Two years later they had a daughter, Meagann, and eight years later a son, Brett (named for George Brett).

In 1982 Boggs was trapped behind reigning American League batting champion Carney Lansford, the Red Sox third baseman, but he had a good spring and manager Ralph Houk kept him as a utility infielder. It took a couple of extra days due to rainouts, but he made his major-league debut in the second game of a doubleheader at Baltimore on April 10, 1982. Boggs played first base and hit ninth, and didn’t show anything against Orioles starter Dennis Martinez or reliever Sammy Stewart. “I hit four dribblers in the infield, all off changeups,” he said.7 He had a pinch-hit flyout a few days later, then sat for almost two weeks before again playing first base and batting ninth in the first game of a twi-night doubleheader in Chicago. This time, after a couple more groundouts, he came up and led off the eighth inning with a single off White Sox starting pitcher Richard Dotson. Boggs eventually came round to score, on Jim Rice’s single, what proved to be the winning run in a 3-2 game.

Before the June 23 night game versus Detroit, and hitting only .258, Boggs had played in just 15 of the team’s first 66 games. During that evening, Lansford tried for an inside-the-park home run, and suffered a severe ankle sprain in a collision with Tigers catcher Lance Parrish. Coming off the bench to replace Lansford, Boggs was hitless in two at-bats. his batting average dropping to .242. Houk said, “We’ll find out about Boggs,”8 and Boggs took the opportunity with both hands, playing in 89 of the team’s last 96 games, hitting .358 while filling in for Lansford and playing first base when Carney returned a month later. That was enough to convince the Red Sox that he could do the job, and they traded Lansford to the Oakland Athletics after the season, giving Boggs the third-base job full-time. He would keep the job for the next 10 years.

Boggs finished a distant third behind Cal Ripken Jr. and Kent Hrbek for the American League Rookie of the Year award. But he knew he would be starting in the major leagues, and he would take the opportunity he had been given.

The comfort of being set as the everyday third baseman in 1983 gave Boggs a great deal of confidence. He spent the first month primarily in the leadoff position for the Red Sox, moved to fifth in the order for a couple of months, and spent the second half of the year hitting second. These moves never fazed him; he hit wherever he was put. Boggs was 6-feet-2 and weighed 190 pounds. He threw right-handed, but was a left-handed batter. He hit .397 in Fenway Park, hitting to the opposite field and taking advantage of the Green Monster, and hit .321 everywhere else. Boggs was consistent no matter what happened, and he was rewarded by comfortably winning his first American League batting title with a .361 average, which was 22 points better than runner-up Rod Carew (.339) of the California Angels. Boggs’s .444 on-base percentage led both leagues.

He followed up in 1984 by hitting .325, which placed him third in the American League, then began a streak of four batting titles in a row, 1985 through 1988. Consistency was again the watchword, as in those four seasons Boggs’s highest average was .368 and lowest was .357. His 240 hits in 1985 were the most in a major-league season since 1930. He led all of baseball in on-base percentage for five years in a row, through 1989. In 1985 he got his first of 12 consecutive All-Star selections, as the league recognized his hitting talent.

Boggs hit 24 home runs in 1987, more than double his total of any other years, seeming to indicate that he had more power potential than he usually employed, focused as he was on getting base hits and getting on base.

For all his efforts, and before Boggs arrived in Boston, the Red Sox had meandered around the middle or bottom of the AL East Division since 1980, until it all came together in 1986. Pitcher Roger Clemens came into his own, starting 14-0 as the Red Sox climbed to the top of the division. On May 14 they moved into a tie for first place in the division, and two days later they had the lead by themselves and never relinquished it for the rest of the season.

But a terrible disruption to the season occurred for Boggs on June 17, when his mother was killed by the driver of a cement truck who ran a red light. That driver was on work release from jail, and wasn’t supposed to be there, and got off with a charge of running a red light. Boggs was devastated. It took him years to let the incident go.9

Boggs returned to baseball six days after his mother’s death, and baseball gave him a relief from it. He had his routines, embracing everything he did on game day, and that helped keep him from thinking about his mother. He resumed hitting, the Red Sox kept winning, and they ended up back in the postseason for the first time since losing the 1975 World Series. A tough best-of-seven American League Championship Series with the California Angels ensued, the Red Sox trailing three games to one before rallying to win three in a row. Boggs hit just .233 in the series.

In the 1986 World Series, the Red Sox faced the New York Mets. Boggs fared a little better, hitting .290, but was not much of a factor until the 10th inning in Game Six, when he doubled and later scored to give the Red Sox a 5-3 lead. But in perhaps the most famous ending to a World Series game ever, Boggs was playing third base when the ball was hit to Bill Buckner, and watched it travel through his legs to lose the game. Boggs said, “The ball could’ve easily been hit to me and gone through my legs. Nobody is blaming anybody. It’s fate.”10

In Game Seven Boggs singled with two outs in the second inning to push the Red Sox to a 3-0 lead. But they couldn’t hold the lead and the Mets took over in the late innings and won the World Series. Boggs sat in the dugout and cried, the world thinking he was crying because his team had lost. But Boggs later said that wasn’t the case, that he had buried himself in baseball to forget about his mother’s death, and now that baseball was over his mother had come flooding back in. “When it was over, I was thinking, ‘Now I’ve got to go home and when I walk in the house, she’s not going to be there.’”11

Boggs went home and commiserated with his father. Wade had decided that he would retire from baseball, because he wanted to spend more time with his family. Win persuaded him to carry on in baseball. “I told him life goes on, that he had to face up to his loss,” Win said.12

Boggs returned to baseball and the Red Sox, and resumed hitting. He hit over .300 every year from 1982 to 1991, and in 1988 and 1990 the Red Sox won the AL East again, but both times they were swept by Oakland in the ALCS. Boggs hit .385 and .438 in the two series, but that wasn’t enough to get his team to a single win.

Scandal began for the Boggs family in 1988, when it was revealed that Wade had a four-year affair with a woman named Margo Adams. She had sued him for millions of dollars in a palimony lawsuit, and began telling her story to anyone who would listen, including Penthouse magazine and the Phil Donahue daytime television show. She said she had traveled with Boggs on Red Sox road trips, and that the whole team knew about her. Any time he would be away from home he would try to arrange for her to be there; even when he left spring training (with permission) for a couple of days to record his voice for an episode of the TV show The Simpsons, he took her with him to Los Angeles.

As the scandal broke around the team, Boggs told his wife, Debbie, everything. It was his honesty that made her want them to stay together. “I never had that feeling (of wanting to leave him) because of the way Wade handled it. We had an agreement that he would tell me everything.” The lawsuit was settled out of court and Boggs moved on, but to this day his name is always entwined with that of Adams.

In 1992 everything changed for Boggs. It was the worst year of his career; he hit only .259. He later blamed the Red Sox front office, saying that they had betrayed him in contract negotiations. He had a promise from Jean Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, for a five-year contract, because she wanted him to follow in the footsteps of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski as career-long Red Sox legends. But she died before the contract was signed, and when Boggs talked to the new management, all they were offering was a year and an option. Boggs felt slighted, lost his legendary focus, and struggled in his last season with the Red Sox before the team decided not to re-sign him and let him become a free agent.

Despite his carefully regimented lifestyle, Boggs managed to find himself in the headlines for odd reasons over the years. In 1988 he received a minor cut on the neck from a knife after an altercation outside a bar in Gainesville, Florida. Two men, possibly attempting to rob Boggs and his friends, threatened them with the knife and a gun. Boggs said that he “willed himself invisible” during the fight.13 In another incident, Boggs fell out of the family Jeep and was run over by his wife, Debbie. Although he was not seriously injured, his arm had scrapes and bruises. Comedians across the country suggested that Debbie was getting payback for the Margo Adams situation.14 Red Sox fans tended to love Boggs more for his many quirks.

The last line on Boggs’s Hall of Fame plaque is “Legendary for his superstitions,” and he was. Numerous stories tell of his different superstitions, whether it was wearing the same socks for every game, or fielding exactly 150 groundballs in practice each day. Every time he batted, he drew the Jewish word “chai,” meaning good luck and life, in the dirt, to wish himself luck. Perhaps the best-known superstition Boggs had was eating chicken before each game every day, and he became known as “Chicken Man” because of it. Boggs even authored a book titled Fowl Tips, which presented various chicken recipes. He readily acknowledged his superstitions, saying in his Hall of Fame induction speech, “Believe me, I have a few superstitions, and they work.”

In a surprising move, after so many years with the Red Sox, Boggs signed a three-year, $11-million contract to play for their archrivals, the New York Yankees. From being a Boston hero, he found himself returning to boos every game. His focus meant he was able to block it out, and resume his hitting. Again Boggs was back over .300 for his first four years with the Yankees.

The Yankees were on the rise, and Boggs wanted to be part of it. He enjoyed some good seasons with New York, and won a Gold Glove in both 1994 and 1995, but they missed the playoffs his first season, the entire 1994 postseason was wiped out by the players strike, and in 1995 they lost a classic best-of-five ALDS to the Seattle Mariners.

In 1996 the Yankees again made the playoffs, and Boggs struggled. He hit just .158 that postseason, losing playing time for hitting so poorly. His biggest moment was as a 10th-inning pinch-hitter in Game Four of the World Series, when he walked with two outs and the bases loaded to give the Yankees the go-ahead run. But the rest of the Yankees did well during the Series, coming back against the Atlanta Braves, and Boggs got his first World Series ring. In yet another iconic moment, he rode around Yankee Stadium on the back of a police horse as he celebrated.

In 1997 Boggs hit .292, split time, and ultimately lost his third-base job to Charlie Hayes. Boggs hit .429 in seven postseason at-bats, but New York again lost in the ALDS, this time to the Cleveland Indians, and his time with the Yankees was over.

Boggs returned home to Tampa, to play in his hometown for the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays. As a 40-year-old his time was over; he hit an anemic (for him) .280 in 1998 and finished out his career hitting .301 in 1999. He had been hanging on long enough to get his 3,000th hit, which came on August 7, and was ironically, given his lack of power throughout his career, a home run off Chris Haney of the Indians. A couple of weeks later he was done, ending his career with 3,010 hits and a career batting average of .328.

Boggs spent some time in the front office of the Devil Rays, acting as assistant general manager in 2000, then returning to the field as hitting instructor for the team in 2001. After that he took off the uniform for good.

Boggs was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005, his first year of eligibility, receiving 91.9 percent of the votes. Speaking about being elected, he said, “The only time the Hall of Fame ever came into my mind was probably the time I was rounding first going into second when I hit my home run for my 3,000th hit. I thought, ‘Well, there’s my ticket. If anybody wants to vote for me for Cooperstown then I’ve got the credentials to get in.’”15

There was controversy before Boggs’s induction when it was reported that the Devil Rays had a part of his contract written so that when he went into the Hall of Fame his plaque would have a Devil Rays cap on it. Boggs denied that had happened, and noted that the Hall of Fame had the choice of what cap he would wear. As it happened, given his five batting titles with Boston, they put him in a Red Sox cap.

Boggs was widely known as a beer drinker, and in retirement undertook promotional tours for the Miller brewing company. His teammates have told stories about his drinking prowess, including stories of Boggs downing dozens of cans of beer on cross-country flights. Boggs did not downplay these stories, and it is fair to say that the stories of his consumption of beer have now reached legendary status.

After retiring from professional baseball, Boggs didn’t stay unemployed for long. His son, Brett, was playing high-school baseball, and Wade became an assistant coach for the team while Brett was there. Brett moved on to play at the University of South Florida, where Wade would watch him play. As of 2015, Wade and Debbie lived in Tampa, where they both grew up.

Last revised: March 7, 2021 (ghw)

This biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode ‘Homer At the Bat'” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dana Berry for getting this biography under way.

Notes

Brown was born October 19, 1876, in the farming community of Nyesville, Indiana, to Jane (also known as Louisa) and Peter Brown.

Because the year of his birth was our country’s centennial, Mordecai was given an extra middle name. Although it is generally assumed that the quite religious Browns chose their son’s names from the Bible, Peter was his father’s name, and there was an uncle named Mordecai. The family claimed to be of Welsh and English descent, but genealogical records indicate there may have been some Cherokee Indian heritage as well.

Mordecai had seven brothers and sisters. One of his brothers, John, also played baseball. According to Mordecai’s great-nephew, Fred Massey, John was as good as Mordecai though he never played above the semipro level because he didn’t apply himself.

In his playing days, Mordecai Brown was 5-feet-10 and weighed 175 pounds. Although not considered a large man by today’s standards, he was often referred to as “big” by contemporary baseball commentators. Brown was a switch hitter.

Mordecai’s most familiar nickname was Three Finger, although he actually had four and a half fingers on his pitching hand. Because of childhood curiosity, Mordecai lost most of his right index finger in a piece of farming equipment. Not long after, he fell while chasing a rabbit and broke his other fingers. The result was a bent middle finger, a paralyzed little finger, and a stump where the index finger used to be.

Mordecai’s other nickname also described him. He was called Miner Brown because he worked in the coal mines when he was a teenager.

In those days the working class found relief from the daily grind by playing baseball. The mining towns near Mordecai’s home had their own teams, and Mordecai played for Clinton, Shelburn, and Coxville. While playing third base for Coxville, Mordecai was called on to fill in for Coxville’s regular pitcher against the neighboring town of Brazil. The year was 1898, and the pitcher’s absence turned into a blessing for Mordecai.

Brown’s deformed hand enabled him to throw a bewildering pitch with lots of movement. Although the jumping ball was a problem when Brown was an infielder, it was an advantage when he pitched. Despite having what had seemed like a terrible handicap, Brown’s pitching performance that day was daunting. The Brazil manager was impressed, and the team offered Brown more money to play for them, but he didn’t jump until he’d completed the season.

In 1901 Mordecai, with the help of 600 fans who threatened to boycott the games if he didn’t make the team, secured a spot on the Terre Haute Tots (or Hottentots) in the newly formed Three-I League. Mordecai led the semiprofessional team to the first-ever Three-I championship, posting a 25-8 record.

Mordecai was picked up by Omaha in the Western League the following year, and reporters started calling him Three Finger. He became the staff workhorse, posting a 27-15 record and finishing every game he started.

After that season in Omaha, Mordecai joined the St. Louis Cardinals in 1903. His major-league debut for St. Louis, against Chicago of the National League, was similar to the outing in Coxville. In both games Brown pitched five innings, and his dominance over hitters was obvious to all observers. While his rookie record was not impressive, 9-13, it should be remembered that St. Louis was the last-place team that year in the National League, 46½ games back. Brown’s earned run average was the lowest on the team at 2.60, and his nine wins tied veteran Chappie McFarland for most on the team.

Mordecai and Christy Mathewson began their famous face-offs during Brown’s rookie year. The first time they met, on July 9, they dueled through eight innings, not allowing a run. In the ninth inning the Giants got to Mordecai for three runs and beat the Cardinals, 4-2.

After the 1903 season, Brown and catcher Jack O’Neill were traded to the Chicago Cubs, the team Brown beat in his rookie appearance and the team for which he would set records that have not been broken to date. The Cardinals received veteran pitcher Jack Taylor, who was suspected of throwing games, and rookie catcher Larry McLean. The Cardinals, being the last- place team, were probably desperate for an experienced pitcher, and Brown had not yet proven himself. It was the Cubs, however, who benefited the most by the trade because Brown had his greatest years while pitching for Chicago.

After joining the Cubs in 1904, Brown improved his record to 15-10 and lowered his ERA to 1.86. Brown still holds the Cubs record for most shutouts (since 1900) with 48 and lowest career ERA of 1.80. In addition, Brown is the Cubs record holder for most wins in a season, 29 in 1908, and the lowest ERA in a season, 1.04 in 1906. When Brown joined the club he was already 27 years old, the same age as his manager, Frank Chance, and older than most of his fellow players.

Besides capturing the interest of the Cubs in his rookie year, Brown also caught the eye of Miss Sarah Burgham. They married December 17, 1903, in Rosedale, Indiana, shortly before he joined the Chicago team. The marriage lasted 45 years, until Mordecai’s death. Sarah died 10 years later on October 5, 1958. They had no children.

Brown’s greatest years were during his tenure with the Cubs, 1904 to 1912, when he won 186 games and had six straight seasons, from 1906 to 1911, posting 20 or more wins. During that time he led the Cubs to two World Series championships.

His best year was 1906 when his winning percentage was .813. He pitched nine shutouts that year, and his 1.04 ERA is baseball’s third best in a single season. The Cubs won a remarkable 116 games in 1906 but lost the World Series to their cross-town rival White Sox, known as the Hitless Wonders because the team’s batting average was a weak .230. Mordecai won one of the World Series games, but one he lost, Game Six, 8-3, lifted his series ERA to 3.66. However, Mordecai could not have been called the Hitless Wonder. At the plate, he went 2-for-6.

The following year was also a good one for Three Finger Brown. In 1907 he posted a 20-6 record and an ERA of 1.39. That year the Cubs did win the World Series, beating the Detroit Tigers in five games. In that series Brown pitched in only Game Five, winning 2-0.

Brown continued his winning ways. In 1908 he posted an ERA of 1.47, second to Christy Mathewson’s 1.43.

But if one could ask him when his greatest game was, as many did when he was still living, he’d say October 8, 1908, at New York’s Polo Grounds. In John P. Carmichael’s My Greatest Day in Baseball, Brown said, “I was about as good that day as I ever was in my life.” That was the day the Giants and Cubs met for a playoff game to determine the National League championship.

The game was made necessary because of the “Merkle Play.” In the ninth inning during the September 23, 1908, game between the Giants and the Cubs, young Fred Merkle failed to touch second base on a play that should have scored the winning run for the Giants. Johnny Evers, remembering a similar play earlier when the call had not gone his way, solicited the ball Al Bridwell had hit. Whether he got that ball or another one is uncertain, but he stood jumping up and down on second base until he captured the umpire’s attention. Merkle was called out. Because the field was overrun by fans who thought the game was over, it was decided the game would be declared a tie, only to be replayed at the end of the season if it became necessary. It did. At the end of the season the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants were deadlocked at the top of the National League standings.

In Brown’s How to Pitch Curves, an instruction manual written for young boys and published by Chicagoan W.D. Boyce, Brown referred to that playoff game as a time when having nerve served him well in baseball. He had plenty of “pluck,” as he put it, to pitch in front of a hostile crowd after receiving death threats. Gambling was commonplace in those days, and many had everything they owned riding on that game.

Jack Pfiester started the game for Chicago, and Christy Mathewson took the hill for New York, a repeat of the Merkle game match-up. Mordecai had started or relieved in 11 of the Cubs’ last 14 games so manager Frank Chance decided not to start his ace. The crowd was enormous; some accounts put the total at 250,000 spectators, taking into account the throng outside the gates. While that number is highly unlikely, people did fill every available space inside and outside of the Polo Grounds, lining fence tops, sitting on the elevated train platform, and perching on housetops.

The Giants rocked Pfiester in the first inning, scoring their first run. Not willing to take any chances, Frank Chance called on Mordecai. Pushing through the overflow crowd, Brown made his way in from the outfield bullpen and went on to win his 29th regular season game, securing the Chicago Nationals a third straight pennant and sending them on to play the Detroit Tigers and Ty Cobb in the World Series.

After the game, believing the Cubs had stolen the pennant from their team, New York fans threw hats, bricks, and bottles at the Chicago players. Frank Chance received a blow from a spectator that so injured his throat he couldn’t speak for days. The riotous atmosphere required a police escort for the Cubs by paddy wagon.

The following World Series must have seemed anticlimactic. Despite the opener in which Chicago scored five in the ninth to win 10-6—a win Brown received after relieving in the eighth inning—there were no amazing feats to compare with the October 8 playoff. Mordecai also won Game Four, 3-0. Detroit won only Game Three, even with Ty Cobb, American League batting champion, batting .368 in the series. The final game still holds the record for the lowest fan attendance in a World Series game. Only 6,210 Detroit fans showed up to see the Cubs defeat the Tigers.

Ty Cobb once described Brown’s lively pitch as the most devastating he’d ever tried to hit. His words are forever enshrined on a marker erected to Mordecai Brown in Nyesville, Indiana. It is high praise from a man who had remarkable success at the plate during the time when the ball had little juice. In his career, Brown won five World Series games for the Cubs and lost four. Cobb hit .273 off Brown during World Series play, but Brown won every World Series game he pitched against Cobb and the Tigers.

During the Deadball Era defense was king. The ball didn’t travel far, unlike today, and low scoring games were common. Teams couldn’t afford costly errors. Brown was an excellent fielder. In 1908 he handled the ball without error in 108 chances.

The rivalry continued between Brown and Christy Mathewson throughout their careers. Brown lost to Mathewson on June 13, 1905, a no-hitter for Matty, but after that he beat the Giants star nine consecutive times. The ninth game was the October 8 replay of the Merkle game.

The Cubs in those days were a rowdy bunch. Fights in the clubhouse were common, sometimes landing players in the hospital. But Brown was well respected. A search in Brown’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame produced a quote from teammate, Johnny Evers. Evers described Brown as having “plenty of nerve, ability, and willingness to work under any conditions. He was charitable and friendly to his foes.”

By 1912 Brown had lost his previous form. By that time he was 35 and only appeared in 15 games, posting a 5-6 record. After the 1912 season, ailing from a knee injury, he was traded to the Cincinnati Reds, where he went 11-12.

In 1914 Brown joined with other big leaguers and jumped to the short-lived Federal League. There he was player/manager for the St. Louis team before going to Brooklyn. Between the two teams he was 14-11 with a swelling ERA of 3.52. When he joined the Chicago Federals in 1915, he improved to 17-8 with an ERA of 2.09, and his team won a championship.

When the Federal League folded, Brown returned to the Cubs. His records indicate that major league dominance was behind him. At age 39 he made only 12 appearances, winning two games and losing three. His ERA was his highest ever at 3.91. Brown’s final game in the majors was September 4, 1916, the final face-off against rival Christy Mathewson, now pitcher and manager for the Cincinnati Reds. The Labor Day event was highly promoted and turned out to be the last big-league performance for both pitchers. Although Mathewson won that day, Brown slightly bested him over all, going 12-11 with one no-decision in their 24 matchups.

With his big-league years behind him, Brown accepted an invitation from his old Cubs teammate, Joe Tinker, now manager of the Columbus Senators of the American Association, to pitch in Ohio’s capital. Brown was 40 years old by then and posted a 10-12 record. Mordecai filled in as manager whenever Tinker was out scouting players. An article in the July 11, 1918, Columbus Citizen, notes that while playing in Louisville, Brown received more applause than the home team did. His popularity may in part explain the large fan attendance Columbus enjoyed while he played there. In 1917 the Senators drew just under 105,000—in a city with a population not much larger than that. In 1918 he appeared in only 13 games, but that was a year shortened by war and the flu outbreak.

In 1919 Brown went back to Terre Haute, Indiana to manage his former semipro team. Later that year, after Terre Haute’s season was completed, he joined Indianapolis of the American Association, but made little contribution to their pennant aspirations. His last year pitching was 1920, but after that he kept his hand in the game by managing oil company teams and buying an interest in the Terre Haute team.

Later in life Brown owned and operated a gas station in Terre Haute. He remained popular, occasionally showing up in newspaper reports about old-timer games or columns about players’ lives after baseball.

In his 14 years in the majors, Brown won 239 games and lost only 130. He led the league in wins once, in 1909, and led the league with most shutouts in 1906 and 1910. He had a lifetime ERA of 2.06 and from 1906 to 1911 he posted 20 or more wins—numbers sparking the attention of the Hall of Fame Committee on Baseball Veterans. He was elected in 1949. He may have known he was being considered for election, but he didn’t live to see it because he died on February 14, 1948, in Terre Haute, Indiana at the age of 71.

Forty-six years after Mordecai Brown died, his relatives, led by great-nephews Joe and Fred Massey, erected a three-foot-high granite stone to mark the birthplace of Nyesville’s famous son. On July 9, 1994, on land donated by farmer David Grindley, family and friends of the legendary three-fingered pitcher gathered to remember him. The author of this biography, cousin to Mordecai Brown, was in attendance.

In How to Pitch Curves, Mordecai leaves a farewell, “I would like to meet every one of you personally if such a thing were possible. But as it isn’t possible, I want you to believe right now that Mordecai Brown’s hand is reaching out to you in the distance and he is wishing you—good luck.”

Last revised: May 4, 2021 (zp)

An updated version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. It originally appeared “Deadball Stars of the National League” (Brassey’s, 2004), edited by Tom Simon.

Sources

Anderson, David W., More Than Merkle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

www.baseball-almanac.com

Brown, Scott, personal family collection

Brown, Mordecai, How to Pitch Curves (Chicago: W.D. Boyce Company, 1913).

Carmichael, John P., My Greatest Day in Baseball: Forty-seven Dramatic Stories by Forty-seven Stars (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), c.1945.

National Baseball Hall of Fame Research Library, Mordecai Brown file.

Perhaps no other player in major-league history has been blessed with as much talent and at the same time burdened by such erratic impulses as José Canseco.1 Amassing borderline Hall of Fame numbers with 462 home runs and 1,407 runs batted in during a 17-year major-league career, the former American League Rookie of the Year (1986) and Most Valuable Player (1988) has found his name as often in the tabloids as in the sports pages.2 In the aftermath of his 2005 tell-all memoir, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, in which Canseco admitted to personal steroid use and also named several other ballplayers who he claimed used performance-enhancing drugs as well, Canseco was reduced to a baseball pariah, cast aside to the distant margins of the national pastime.3 “I was known as the godfather of steroids in baseball,” he wrote unapologetically. “I introduced steroids into the big leagues back in 1985.”4 That he was more forthright than most in his chronicles of anabolic steroid use provided him with little solace after his career.

In 2007, when Canseco’s name first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, he received only 1.1 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America — in spite of having been named to six All-Star teams,5 garnering four Silver Slugger Awards, and compiling a then-unprecedented 40-homer, 40-stolen-base season in 1988 as he led the Oakland A’s to the American League pennant. By the end of his career he was known in baseball circles simply as “The Chemist.” While he continued to serve as fodder for late-night comedians, in many respects, his troubled life — and his roller-coaster career — can just as easily be viewed as an American tragedy.

José Canseco Capas Jr. was born on July 2, 1964, in Regla, a borough of Havana, Cuba, overlooking the city’s shipyards.6 His identical twin brother, Osvaldo “Ozzie” Canseco Capas, who would have a brief career in major-league baseball, was born two minutes before. Canseco’s parents, José Jr. and Barbara, were both of recent Spanish lineage to Cuba and had an older daughter, Teresa, born a decade earlier. Canseco’s father had worked in oil refineries in the United States during the 1950s and, the year following the birth of his twin sons, was able to secure his family’s immigration to the United States, where the Canseco originally settled in Opa-locka, Florida, 15 miles northwest of Miami. In his various interviews and memoirs, Canseco identifies his father as a stern taskmaster who was highly critical of the two brothers as they worked their way through various youth leagues. He identifies himself frequently as “scrawny” throughout his youth and acknowledges that he played junior-varsity baseball at Coral Park Senior High School until his senior year, when he was scouted by his teammate’s father, the former major-league pitcher Camilo Pascual. In 1982, following his high-school graduation when he was still only 17, Canseco was selected as a 15th-round draft choice by the Oakland A’s.7

Canseco began his professional baseball career inauspiciously in Idaho Falls of the Pioneer League, batting .263 in 28 games, with only two home runs. In Miami of the Class-A Florida State League he batted .111 in six games. The following year, he started the season at Single-A Medford (Oregon) of the short-season Northwest League, where he batted .269 with 11 home runs, making the All-Star team, but also recorded 78 strikeouts in only 59 games. He finished out the season at Madison (Wisconsin) of the Single-A Midwest League, where he struggled to a .159 average with three home runs in 34 games.

The following year, 1984, Canseco was sent to Modesto, the A’s “high” Single-A team, the top Class-A team of the California League, where he got off to a good start before receiving a call that his mother was dying in a Miami hospital from complications due to diabetes and hepatitis. In his memoirs, Canseco claims that his mother’s death, coming when he was just 20 years old, was the catalyst that that led him to dedicate his life to becoming “the best athlete on the planet.” He batted .276 at Modesto, with 15 homers and 73 runs batted in, and returned home from the offseason to Miami, where, he asserts, he began his first use of anabolic steroids with a friend from Coral Park Senior High, combined with vigorous weight training. As a result of his new regimen, Canseco put on several pounds of muscle and continued to grow in height.8

In 1985, still only 20 and following his initial use of steroids, Canseco had a breakout season, starting with Double-A Huntsville (Alabama) in the Southern League, where he batted .318 with 25 home runs in a mere 58 games. He was then moved up to Triple-A Tacoma of the Pacific Coast League, where he batted .348 with 11 home runs in 60 games and where his power was beginning to make headlines. At one point Canseco was batting .525 and had hit 500-foot home runs in games at Vancouver and Las Vegas. He hit another ball over the 32-foot right-center-field fence at Tacoma’s Cheney Stadium. Suddenly he was being dubbed “the next Mickey Mantle.” Tacoma’s general manager, Stan Naccarato, echoed those sentiments in an interview sent out over the wire services by United Press International. “Everybody you talk to says he has Mantle’s speed and Mantle’s power,” Naccarato declared. “There’s electricity in the air.”9 Canseco received a late-September callup with the A’s during which he batted .302 with five home runs, including a towering 480-foot drive onto the left-field roof at Comiskey Park in Chicago. After the season, “the rip-roaring, 21-year-old slugger” received Baseball America’s Minor League Player of the Year Award.

The following spring, Canseco’s rocket ship took off. In a telling spring-training profile of him appearing in March of 1986, the Associated Press noted, “When Oakland A’s rookie outfielder José Canseco talks, people don’t always listen. But when he hits, they fear for their lives.” Triple-A Phoenix manager Jim Lefebvre compared him to sluggers Richie “Dick” Allen and Willie Stargell, with yet another nod to Mantle. A’s hitting coach Bob Watson compared him to Roberto Clemente, Dale Murphy, and Reggie Jackson, “all rolled into one.” All heady company. Karl Kuehl, then the A’s director of player development, said his one concern was how Canseco would handle all the attention he was receiving. “He’s been very good in the local theaters,” Kuehl observed. “Now, he’s going to Carnegie Hall.”10

In truth, Canseco’s rookie season on the A’s more than matched his hype. Managed at the start of the season by Jackie Moore, replaced near midseason by interim skipper Jeff Newman, and then finally replaced by Tony La Russa in early July, the 1986 A’s were a lackluster team with little offense (no starter batted over .285 that year) and mediocre pitching (no pitcher won more than 13 games). Canseco provided one of the few bright spots, storming to a unanimous selection by edging out the California Angels’ Wally Joyner as the American League Rookie of the Year. Although batting only .240 with a thunderous 175 strikeouts, third most in the league, Canseco belted out 33 home runs (tied for fourth in the league) and had 117 runs batted in (good for second), along with 15 stolen bases. There was also some promise for the future: Under La Russa’s tutelage, the A’s went 45-34 to finish the season. Moreover, there was also another rookie who appeared on the A’s roster briefly that year — playing as a third baseman — a 22-year-old from Southern California named Mark McGwire.

The following season, 1987, Canseco’s star was eclipsed by his rookie teammate, McGwire, who had switched over to first base and batted cleanup in the A’s lineup. While Canseco maintained solid power numbers — 31 home runs and 113 runs batted in –McGwire surpassed him, generating huge amounts of press and crashing a record-breaking 33 home runs before the All-Star break. He destroyed the longtime rookie standard of 38 round-trippers with 49 home runs and was unanimously voted American League Rookie of the Year. The two sluggers soon became known as the “Bash Brothers,” hitting 80 home runs between them and driving in 231 runs while also making the pounding of their celebratory forearm bump famous. The A’s finished at an even .500 pace that year, good for only third in the American League West, but the ’87 season set the stage for three straight World Series appearances and a world championship in the trio of seasons ahead.

Soon after McGwire’s spectacular rookie campaign, according to Canseco, the glamour of the Bash Brothers took on an ominous undertone. In his memoirs, Canseco asserted that beginning in 1988, “Mark and I started talking about steroids again, and soon we started using them together. I injected Mark in the bathrooms at the Coliseum more times than I can remember. Sometimes we did it before batting practice, sometimes afterward.”11 (McGwire originally denied Canseco’s charges; later asserted his Fifth Amendment rights before Congress; and, finally, in 2010, admitted to continued steroid usage throughout his career, beginning in the 1990s. (He continued to deny Canseco’s allegations that he shot McGwire with syringes.)12 Canseco has continuously contended that A’s manager Tony La Russa was aware of McGwire’s steroid use, which La Russa has denied, saying that he was not aware of McGwire’s use until McGwire admitted it to him personally during a phone conversation in 2010 when La Russa hired his former slugger as a hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals.13 “I’m tired of justifying what I’ve said,” Canseco said about steroid use in baseball during the late 1980s and 1990s. “I’ve polygraphed, I’ve proven that I’m 100 percent accurate. I never exaggerated. I told it the way it actually happened. I’m the only one who has told it the way it actually happened. Major League Baseball is still trying to defend itself. It’s strange. All I have is the truth, and I’ve proven that.”14

Whatever was revealed to have gone on behind the scenes long afterward, on the ballfield during their three-year run from 1988-1990, the A’s had one of the best three-year records of any baseball team over the last 30 years. They averaged 102 wins for each of the three seasons (for a remarkable .630 winning percentage during that period).

Canseco led things off in 1988 with a campaign for the ages. In April of that year, after getting off to a quick start, he declared: “I think I can have a 40-40 season. Let’s go for a big time goal.”15 Canseco’s prediction was more than a bit brash: He had never stolen more than 15 bases before in a year. But by June 2, only 51 games in, Canseco was leading the league with 13 home runs and was third in stolen bases with 17. “I’m trying to shake off the stereotype of just being a power hitter,” he declared.16 It was also a way of differentiating himself from McGwire and returning himself to the spotlight. Meanwhile, the A’s were operating on all pistons, at one point earlier in the season winning 18 out of 19 games (including 14 in a row) and extending a nine-game lead over the second-place Minnesota Twins.

By midsummer Canseco had captured the imagination of the entire country. He was moving from baseball star into the realm of cultural icon. Vanity Fair‘s Annie Leibovitz photographed him shirtless for an American Express ad campaign. In a memorable midseason profile appearing in the Washington Post, baseball writer Thomas Boswell wrote of him: “After lockering next to Reggie Jackson last year, Canseco has incorporated the Spanish language version of ‘The World According to Buck’ into his act — how to play the outfield standing sideways, how to wear the tight uniform, how to gaze lovingly at the long homers and how to cook quotes like ‘I don’t expect to reach my pinnacle for a few years.’”17 Canseco led all American league outfielders in votes for the All-Star Game, and manager Tom Kelly of the Twins let it be known he considered Canseco the best player in the game.18 The game was played that year in Cincinnati. Canseco joined Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson (both then on the Yankees) in the American League’s starting lineup. Although Canseco went 0-for-4 in his starting role, Kelly played him for all nine innings of the annual showcase, initially in left field and then moving him to right.

Canseco came out hot again in the second half of the 1988 season. On September 18 he clubbed his 40th homer. The following day, the A’s clinched the division title over the Twins by more than a dozen games, behind the pitching of the indomitable Dave Stewart, who picked up his 19th win. Then on Friday, September 23, Canseco banged out three hits, including his 41st home run, and stole two bases, to reach the 40-40 plateau. Canseco admitted after the game that when he made his prediction at the beginning of the season, he hadn’t realized that no one had done it before. He had now created an exclusive club. “I’m greatly relieved at having done it,” he declared. “I didn’t want to go through the season and come up short and say I stuck my foot in my mouth.”19

That fall would mark the first of three straight trips for Canseco and the A’s to the fall classic. But in the week leading up to the American League Championship Series, the Washington Post’s Boswell, who had earlier heaped praise on Canseco in his midseason profile, appeared on Charlie Rose’s middle-of-the-night television talk show Nightwatch. The conversation turned to the end-of-the-season pennant races and to Canseco’s unprecedented 40-40 accomplishment. Canseco, Boswell declared, is “the most conspicuous example of a player who has made himself great with steroids.” He also said that other players referred to steroids as “a Canseco milkshake.”20

Boswell’s charges against Canseco, vague and unsubstantiated as they were, marked the first time that steroid allegations in baseball had broken to the surface of the mainstream media. Ironically, Boswell’s comments never appeared in the Post. His editor, George Solomon, would later contend: “You have to have your sources. You have to be 100 percent sure of what you print. At that point, we were not.” What Boswell had said on television, Solomon declared, was strictly “Boswell’s opinion.” 21

Nevertheless, the charges were explosive. Headlines echoing Boswell’s remarks appeared across the country. Canseco was forced to deny the charges. “It’s just not true,” he declared. “It was an ignorant statement, and I usually don’t pay attention to ignorant statements. There was no background and no basis to it.”22 Baseball’s Establishment went into full defensive mode. La Russa, in the midst of getting his team prepared for the playoffs, immediately denied Boswell’s allegations. So, too, did former A’s slugger Reggie Jackson, who had retired from the game a year earlier and said that Boswell “had done a disservice to baseball.”23 But the damage had been done. According to Canseco, Pepsi pulled a $1 million endorsement away from him as a result of the controversy. When the A’s appeared in Boston for the first games of the ALCS, Red Sox fans chanted “STER-oids! STER-oids!” when Canseco came to the plate.

The chanting didn’t seem to intimidate Canseco. He belted a critical home run at Fenway Park in the A’s opening 2-1 win over the Red Sox; he hit a two-run homer off Roger Clemens in the A’s 4-3 Game Two victory; and after going 0-for-4 in Game Three, he went 3-for-4 in the clincher with another home run and two runs scored. For the series, he batted .313 with a .938 slugging percentage. He also declared what would become his mantra, albeit a deceitful one, for the next two decades. “If you guys saw what I went through during the offseason, you’d know where this body came from,” Canseco said. “My brother and I work out about 3 hours a day, 6 days a week. We play volleyball in the sand to build up the legs, swim to build up the shoulders and back, and then lift weights.”24

In the ensuing World Series, however, between the A’s and the Los Angeles Dodgers, Canseco’s — and the A’s — bubble burst. In the very first game at Dodger Stadium, Canseco put the A’s ahead 4-2 with a grand slam off Dodgers starter Tim Belcher, providing him with an auspicious start to the Series and giving the A’s a lead, which they held, 4-3 going into the ninth inning. The A’s brought in their star closer, Dennis Eckersley, needing only three final outs to secure the Game One victory. With two down and Mike Davis on second base, however, Kirk Gibson, who had been injured in the NLCS against the New York Mets, hobbled to the plate as a pinch-hitter. Gibson managed to work a 3-and-2 count and, based on a scouting report, was looking for a backdoor slider as Eckersley’s next delivery. Gibson used his wrist and upper body strength to drive the pitch well over Canseco’s head and into the right-field bleachers. It was one of the most momentous home runs in World Series history — and completely took the wind out of the A’s sails, even though they had been widely favored to win the Series. Had Eckersley secured the save, Canseco would have been the hero; instead, he was all but forgotten as Gibson assumed the spotlight. The A’s were cooked. The Dodgers closed out their world championship in five games, with Canseco going 0-for-17 the rest of the way for an .053 Series batting average. McGwire was just as feeble, going 1-for-17 with an .059 average. The “Bash Brothers” had become the “Crash Brothers.”

If the World Series loss to the Dodgers had been a profound disappointment, the offseason was even worse for Canseco. In early February, headlines across US sports pages read that Canseco and the A’s could not reach an agreement on his forthcoming contract — arbitration seemed inevitable. At the eleventh hour, however, his agent reached an agreement with the A’s, resulting in the largest raise in baseball history to a one-year contract for $1.6 million. A’s general manager Sandy Alderson was forced to acknowledge “the number he submitted was a fairly reasonable one.”25 It might have been a moment of triumph leading him into spring training. Instead, only days later, however, Canseco was arrested by Florida state troopers for driving his new Jaguar 125 miles per hour on Interstate 95. Canseco was cited for reckless driving, creating more headlines. 26 (He was found guilty and fined $500.)

From that point on, the bad press and the bad behavior never seemed to slow down. That same month Canseco was a no-show at a baseball-card convention in New York. A local radio station took to publishing a sign called a “Slam-O-Gram,” featuring short derogatory blasts about the A’s slugger (an early precursor to Twitter):

“Canseco — major league player, minor league human being.”

“Canseco, MIP — Most Invisible Player.”

The bad press continued. Canseco was stopped for running a red light in spring training, during which time he argued with police, and had three other traffic tickets that spring. He opened up the 1989 season with a stress fracture in his left wrist. By the third week of April, he hadn’t had an at-bat. While getting treatment for his fracture at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, Canseco was arrested by campus police and FBI agents for being in possession of a loaded 9mm handgun on a state campus. In January an unidentified traveling companion of Canseco’s had been stopped in Detroit for carrying a 15-shot, Italian-made handgun on an airline flight. Canseco seemed to be in freefall. Alderson was terse in his response. “Oakland does not condone this event,” he declared, “nor are we happy with the series of events. I am embarrassed for the organization.”27 Canseco, however, was anything but recalcitrant. He claimed he was carrying the gun for protection following anonymous threats he had received. “I’m no felon,” he declared. “I am no criminal. I am no rapist. I am no murderer. They ought to spend more time apprehending criminals.”28 Canseco later pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges and performed community service.29

By early May Canseco was on a 20-day rehab assignment with Double-A Huntsville, but quickly reinjured his wrist again and was forced to undergo surgery at the same medical center where he had been arrested on weapons charges. After more than a month of recuperation, Canseco returned to Huntsville again, and began his second rehab assignment.

Without ever having to come to bat in the American League that season, Canseco found himself winning a position in the American League’s starting lineup in the All-Star Game. He publicly asserted his intent to play in the game, even though he was still in the middle of a rehab assignment in Huntsville. A’s manager Tony La Russa, who had clearly become irritated with his wounded slugger, said that he was “concerned if he has his head on straight about what he’s supposed to be doing, and that’s to help us win the division.” Canseco retorted that he didn’t think the decision was in La Russa’s “jurisdiction.” Alderson interceded. “It’s our decision when he comes off the disabled list,” the GM declared, “and he has to be activated to play in the All-Star Game.”30 In the end, he did not play — the A’s cited his injury — but he did receive yet another speeding ticket while recuperating during the All-Star break. More headlines. More tension with management. It was a dynamic that would repeat itself for the rest of his career.

The A’s were a game and a half out at the All-Star break, and when Canseco finally returned to their lineup on July 13, he did so with a bang — 2-for-3, with a home run, three RBIs, two runs scored and a stolen base, as the A’s pounded the Blue Jays 11-7. They never looked back. The A’s finished the season with 99 wins, seven games ahead of the Kansas City Royals and with the best record in baseball, while Canseco hit 17 home runs and had 57 RBIs in only 65 games, with a slugging average of .542. In the ensuing ALCS and World Series encounters with the Toronto Blue Jays and San Francisco Giants, the A’s lost only a single game on their way to their first world championship since 1974. Canseco registered the signature moment of the ALCS — a towering 480-foot homer off former Cy Young Award winner Mike Flanagan into the fifth deck of Toronto’s SkyDome — but the postseason stars of the Athletics were future Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson, who was named the MVP of the ALCS, and pitcher Dave Stewart, who was named World Series MVP after collecting two wins in the so-called Bay Bridge Series, which had been disrupted by the fatal Loma Prieta Earthquake. The 24-year-old Canseco batted a respectable .294 and .357 in the respective series, but he hit only a single homer in each and would have only three more postseason hits in his career. His baseball pinnacle had been reached much sooner than he anticipated.

It wasn’t quite a downhill slide after that, but there would be far fewer heroics, no more Most Valuable Player awards — not even close. The A’s stormed to their third successive American League West championship in 1990 — Canseco had a respectable season with 37 home runs, 101 RBIs, and another berth on the All-Star team — but he collected only two hits against the Red Sox in the ALCS and a solo home run in the World Series, as the A’s were swept by the underdog Cincinnati Reds in four games. That was the end of their triumphant run.

Canseco won the American League home run championship again in 1991 with 44. That same year the then-married outfielder also had a celebrated late-night rendezvous with pop star Madonna, one that made for tabloid headlines around the world. The New York Post dubbed him “Madonna’s Bat boy.” Yankee fans chanted “Ma-don-na!” when he came to the plate.31At the time, Canseco said that he and the diva were “just friends.”32 Later, he would claim that Madonna wanted to have a child with him. “She had a Cuban child and wanted another one,” he told Us magazine. “She wanted to get married and have a child with me — she wanted a Cuban child.” He said that when he first met her in California, “(S)he came over and said, ‘What would you do if I kissed you?’ and then sat on my lap and kissed me.”33

By the following February Canseco was charged with “aggravated battery” for allegedly ramming his wife Esther’s BMW with his Porsche. Before the start of the 1992 season, Canseco pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated assault and later bargained a deal where he underwent counseling and fulfilled a community-service requirement — but Alderson and La Russa were done with him. Just before the September 1 trade deadline, the A’s humiliated Canseco by trading him in the middle of a game (and while he was on his way to the on-deck circle) to the Texas Rangers for All-Star outfielder Ruben Sierra, pitchers Jeff Russell and Bobby Witt, and cash. Over the course of the ensuing decade, Canseco would play for a half-dozen teams — and even another stint with the A’s after La Russa had left the team to manage St. Louis — but injuries and continued off-field challenges always seemed to get the best of him. In 1994, his final season with the Rangers, Canseco nearly returned to his peak form — he hit 31 home runs and had 90 RBIs in the strike-shortened season — but the Rangers sent him to Boston that December for outfielder Otis Nixon and part-time third baseman Luis Ortiz.

In 1998 Canseco produced memorable numbers at the age of 33 for the Blue Jays — a career-high 46 home runs, 107 runs batted in (albeit with a league-leading 159 strikeouts) — but he watched in the shadows as his former teammate Mark McGwire, now of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs — both players that Canseco later identified as having used performance enhancing drugs — captured the imagination of the nation as they staged an epic battle chasing the seasonal home run record of 61 by the Yankees’ Roger Maris in 1961. McGwire hit 70 and Sosa 66 — but they and Canseco all knew the record was tainted.

From that point on, Canseco’s playing time and his performance diminished. Just 38 home runs shy of the coveted 500 mark, he signed with the Montreal Expos in 2002, but the Expos cut him during spring training after batting just .200 in 14 games, leaving him to sign a Triple-A contract with the White Sox. After batting a meager .172 with five home runs in 18 games with the Charlotte Knights, a frustrated Canseco simply failed to show up at the park one day. Later, his agent, Alan Nero, stated: “José felt that because of personal reasons and a strong desire on his part to spend more quality time with his young daughter, it was time to announce his retirement.”34 A week later, Canseco took a swipe at baseball and augured things to come. “There would be no baseball left if they drug-tested everyone today,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s completely restructured the game as we know it. That’s why guys are hitting fifty or sixty or seventy home runs.”35 He staged desperate comeback attempts with various major-league and minor-league teams — including an open tryout with the Dodgers in 2004 — but he never made it back to “The Show.” As far as Major League Baseball was concerned, the José Canseco saga was finally over.

At least on the field. Canseco would continue to find himself in trouble with the law and surrounded by controversy, his name still constantly in the headlines. In 2003 he was sent to jail by an angry judge who felt that Canseco had not taken the terms of his probation for a 2001 nightclub brawl seriously enough. Canseco had failed to take anger-management courses and perform community service; he also tested positive for steroids, whose use had also been banned by the terms of his probation. In June he was arrested and placed in Broward County Jail without bond. In Juiced, he described the two-plus months he spent in custody as “the low point of my life.”36 He also claimed that he experienced a “nervous breakdown” while he was incarcerated after his ex-wife, Jessica, told him that she was “in love with somebody else.” “I’m not using the term nervous breakdown lightly,” he wrote. “It all became too much for me. It felt like something inside me was being crushed.”37 While he was in jail, his attorneys acknowledged that he was addicted to steroids, but their motion for a medical evaluation for their client was denied.38 In August he was released from custody when a judge ruled that the state could not determine when Canseco had last taken steroids; Canseco also claimed in his memoir that “the chain of custody on my blood test was full of holes.” From that point on, Canseco asserted that he would never set foot in Florida again.39

When his memoir Juiced was first published in 2005, it became an instant cause célèbre. 60 Minutes featured a segment on the book, in which Mike Wallace interviewed Canseco. The baseball Establishment — and many baseball writers — took potshots at Canseco. They remained in serious denial. In the Los Angeles Times, longtime baseball writer Allen Barra proclaimed it “the worst sports book so far in three centuries.” His longtime nemesis Boswell declared that “in baseball, when it’s your word against Canseco’s, they invoke the forfeit rule.” Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated echoed Boswell’s attack by asserting that Canseco had “the kind of credibility not even nano-technology could find or measure.”40 But many fans were apparently beginning to come around to Canseco’s perspective. On March 6 Juiced shot up to No. 1 on the New York Times’ Best Seller List and spent a total of seven weeks on the coveted list. One aspect of Juiced that has long been overlooked, however, is the fact Canseco, in addition to naming names, was still openly advocating for steroid use in its pages. “Yes, you hear me right,” he declared. “Steroids, used correctly, will not only make you stronger and sexier, they will also make you healthier. … Steroids will give you a better quality of life and also drastically slow down the aging process.”41

On March 17, 2005, during the middle of the controversy surrounding Juiced and while the major leagues prepared for the coming season in spring training, several of the game’s most memorable stars — Canseco, McGwire, Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro, and Curt Schilling — appeared before the House Government Reform Committee during the course of an all-day, nationally televised hearing. It was a stunning encounter. Canseco and McGwire were together in the same lineup for the first time since their days together with the Oakland A’s, but no one could have anticipated the venue where they were now appearing. Both made headlines. In the end, McGwire stumbled unconvincingly through his testimony, refusing to answer the ultimate question: whether or not he used steroids. He also took a potshot at Canseco. “I don’t intend to dignify Mr. Canseco’s book,” he declared. “It should be enough that you consider the source of the statements in the book, and that many inconsistencies and contradictions have already been raised.” But when the time came to acknowledge his own participation, McGwire dodged the question. “I have been advised that my testimony here could be used to harm friends and respected teammates,” he declared. “My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family and myself. I intend to follow their advice.”42

The force of public opinion seemed to be bending Canseco’s way. As it would turn out, Canseco’s testimony before Congress proved to be the most honest of all those who testified. On the other hand, McGwire’s performance was universally slammed by the media. Dave Sheinin of the Washington Post declared that McGwire, “once the game’s most celebrated slugger but now the face of the steroid scandal, [was] reduced to a shrunken, lonely, evasive figure whose testimony brought him to the verge of tears.”43

In his follow-up book, Vindicated, Canseco named more names, went on the offensive against several sportswriters, and doubled-down on his charges against McGwire. Five years later, McGwire finally admitted to using steroids, though he denied ever using them with Canseco and claimed to have begun using them a half-decade later only as a response to injuries. Canseco was outraged by what he viewed as an incomplete, insincere admission. “I’ve defended Mark, I know a lot of good things about him,” Canseco told ESPN. “I can’t believe he just called me a liar. There’s something very strange going on here. I even polygraphed that I injected him, and I passed it completely. So I want to challenge him on national TV to a polygraph examination. I want to see him call me a liar under a polygraph examination.”44 McGwire has never taken him up on his offer.

In the years since his retirement, Canseco asserted that he was forced out of the game and was “blackballed” by Major League Baseball. The one-time MVP has been forced to the margins of the national pastime and became something of a celebrity circus act on reality television programs. In 2003 he appeared in a TV special entitled Stripper’s Ball, with porn star Jenna Jameson. He has also engaged in a variety of martial arts and boxing contests, and in 2009 he fought a former child star, 5-foot, 6-inch Danny Bonaduce, to a three-round draw at a bout held in Aston, Pennsylvania. A 2010 effort on Twitter to get Mets GM Sandy Alderson to invite him to spring training elicited no response.

Canseco’s behavioral circus never abated. In 2011 he sent out a series of Twitter postings declaring his “love” for Lady Gaga, proclaiming he “would marry her in a second.”45 In 2012 he filed for bankruptcy, citing $1.7 million in debt against $21,000 in assets. That same year he was banned by the Mexican League, in which he was hoping to stage yet another comeback, for “refusing to take a doping test.”46 The following year, Canseco was named publicly — initially by himself via Twitter — as a suspect in a rape allegation by a fitness model (and the mother of six children) in Las Vegas. He made defamatory countercharges against his accuser via Twitter postings, in which he identified her by name. A month later, he was cleared of all charges by Las Vegas police investigators.47 Later that year he was pulled over with his girlfriend, Leila Knight, and found with a diaper-clad goat in the back seat of their car. The following year, he blew off a portion of the middle finger on his left hand while cleaning his gold-plated Remington .45 handgun, and, a month later, allegedly threatened to kill Knight and her mother. Knight also contended that Canseco was still using the anabolic steroid Anavar to “stay big.”48

In June of 2015, Canseco appeared at Dodger Stadium in what was clearly a publicity stunt aimed at his former Bash Brothers teammate Mark McGwire, the hitting coach of the Dodgers. Canseco was carrying a sign that read: “Sorry Mark — Read My Poem! Love José.” The poem was posted online:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I am sorry I wrote a book about you

The balls we hit used to fly
But to do so we had to lie
In our heyday the Bash Brothers stood tall
But the bigger you are, the harder you fall

I know I exposed your secret injections
I hope this apology doesn’t find a rejection49

It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, and McGwire publicly rejected the overture. Nor was Canseco seeking conciliation with everyone he had outed in his two books. About Alex Rodriguez, he declared: “Fuck him. I can’t stand that guy. He hit on my wife. I’d rather kick his ass.”50

Only weeks later, Canseco was playing baseball in an independent league in Northern California. He signed a three-day contract with the Pittsburg Diamonds of the Pacific Association of Baseball Clubs. In a series against the San Rafael Pacifics, Canseco pitched, went 3-for-5 in the second game with an RBI, and in the final contest, started a bench-clearing scuffle when he was brushed back on successive pitches. “Hey, you never know, maybe next year I’ll manage, maybe a commissioner, maybe a player/manager,” Canseco asserted after the series. “Who knows? A whole lot could happen.”51 Indeed it could: In midsummer of 2015, Canseco generated national headlines once again by declaring that he intended to support newly transgendered Caitlyn Jenner by “dressing up and living as a woman for a week.” His announcement immediately drew criticism, according to the Washington Post, for “misunderstanding transgender issues and even making fun of them.” Canseco was not dissuaded by the criticism. “I wonder what I would look like as a woman,” he Tweeted. “Move over Caitlyn.” He indicated that he intended to carry out his intentions, in part, by appearing as a woman on his Internet show, “Spend a Day With José.”52

In spite of these continued media stunts, Canseco contends that he still loves the game that once brought him fame and fortune. “I love baseball,” he wrote in Vindicated. “Baseball is a great game. Maybe the greatest game ever.”53 But for the time being, as a profile of Canseco in Sports Illustrated noted, the closest he was likely to get to a baseball diamond was in an outlaw league or the lowest level of the minors.54 He has expressed his regrets for writing his memoir and naming names, but the apologies would clearly not bring him an invitation anytime soon to official gatherings in Cooperstown. He remained “a Judas,” in the words of author Howard Bryant, forever banished from the inner sanctums of the game he once dominated. “If José Canseco is ever in the Hall of Fame,” one Hall of Fame player told Bryant, “there shouldn’t be a Hall of Fame. He wasted more ability than most of us ever had.”55

Last revised: October 1, 2016

Notes

1 Special thanks to Joel Domhoff, Mark Nisson, Emily Hawks, Bill Nowlin, and Marlene Vogelsang for their assistance and feedback on this piece.

2 For an interesting discussion about Canseco and the Hall of Fame, see “Jose Canseco and the Keltner List,” by Ryan Wilkins, Baseball Prospectus, May 23, 2002. baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1483. The article came out before the official confirmations of Canseco’s steroid use, and as such, it provides an interesting, more objective, perspective on his career without the steroid question being taken into account. Bill James’s Hall of Fame Monitor has Canseco at 103, slightly higher than the 100 benchmark for a “likely Hall of Famer.” James has otherwise been dismissive of Canseco; in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2010), 811-812, James merely mentions Canseco among other twins who have played major-league baseball. It’s clearly a dig. He does, however, list Canseco at 36th among all-time right-fielders, ahead of the likes of Chuck Klein and Hall of Famer Harry Hooper. Later on, James also acknowledges that Canseco’s RBI-per-game average of .764 ranks him 10th among all outfielders in baseball history.

3 Jose Canseco, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big (New York: Regan Books: 2005); although his name did not appear on the book, it was later revealed that Juiced was ghost-written by Steve Kettman. Canseco published a sequel three years later entitled Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment: 2008).

4 Juiced, 4.

5 Canseco was named to the American League All-Star team in 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1999.

6 As with most ballplayers from Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean, Canseco dropped his mother’s maiden name (Capas) when coming to the United States. I have used the Spanish spelling of his first name, with an accent over the “é.”

7 Biographical data collected from Juiced, 1-46.

8 Juiced, 49-55.

9 Ukiah (California) Daily Journal, July 21, 1985: 11.

10 “The A’s Budding Superstar,” Santa Cruz (California) Sentinel, March 9, 1986: 62.

11 Juiced, 74.

12 Tyler Kepner, “McGwire Admits That He Used Steroids,” New York Times, January 11, 2010. Web edition.

13 Ann Killion, “Steroid Taint Didn’t Extend to Managers,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, 2013, web edition. Killion wrote: “If there were an all-steroid baseball team (Bonds in left, McGwire at first, Clemens on the mound — we can keep going), there’s no doubt who the manager would be. It would be [Tony] La Russa, who managed the A’s in the late ’80s and early ’90s Bash Brothers era, widely considered Ground Zero for rampant steroid use. Then La Russa went on to manage the St. Louis Cardinals, where McGwire made it fashionable to use steroids to break baseball’s most hallowed records. Along the way to this week’s Hall of Fame vote, La Russa has been a hypocritical steroid-era bully, pointing fingers at and calling out players he didn’t like, even ones he managed, such as Canseco, while simultaneously angrily defending McGwire and others.”

14 “Canseco: McGwire Not Fully Forthcoming,” ESPN.com, January 12, 2010.

15 “Canseco Sets Lofty Goal,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 3, 1988: 21.

16 Ibid.

17 Thomas Boswell, “Jose Canseco’s 40-40 Vision Starting to Come Into Focus,” Washington Post, August 19, 1988. In Los Angeles Times web edition.

18 “Bay Area Bombers: Canseco Has Come Long Way,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, July 14, 1988: 13.

19 “Canseco Steals Into Baseball History,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, September 25, 1988: B1-B3.

20 Associated Press, “Slugger Denies Use,” Kokomo (Indiana) Tribune, September 30, 1988: 17.

21 Bryan Curtis, “The Steroid Hunt,” Grantland.com, January 8, 2014.

22 Associated Press, “Slugger Denies Use,” Kokomo Tribune, September 30, 1988: 17.

23 Ironically, Boswell would claim that La Russa had been one of his sources. “Slugger Denies Use.” See also “The Steroid Hunt.”

24 “Slugger Denies Use.” John Weyler, “Canseco Leaves Strong Impression on Red Sox: He Gives Oakland Early Lead With Home Run, Tries to Deflect Steroid Charge,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1988, web edition. Hal Brock, “Shocked Devils,” Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) Times, October 8, 1988: B-1.

25 “Canseco Receives Largest Raise in Baseball History,” Hazelton (Pennsylvania) Standard-Speaker, February 4, 1989: 20.

26 “Canseco Shows New Type of Speed,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, February 12, 1989: 57.

27 “Canseco Arrested on Loaded Firearm Charge,” San Bernardino Sun, April 22, 1989: 17.

28 “Canseco Needs a Wake-up Call,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, April 23, 1989: 51.

29 Santa Cruz Sentinel, August 20, 1989: 28.

30 “Retired, Injured Players Among Most Popular,” Greenwood (South Carolina) Index Journal, July 6, 1989: 12-14.

31 “New York Tabloid Links Jose, Madonna,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, May 12, 1991: 16.

32 “Canseco, Madonna ‘Just Friends,’” Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1991, web edition.

33 “Jose Canseco Claims Madonna Wanted His Baby, Magazine Sez,” New York Daily News, July 10, 2008, web edition.

34 “Major League Player Conseco [sic] Retires as Charlotte Knight,” Greenwood Index Journal, May 14, 2002: 9.

35 “Canseco Talks Steroids,” Gettysburg Times, May 18, 2002: 13.

36 Juiced, 249.

37 Juiced, 254.

38 Catherine Wilson, “Lawyers: Canseco Has History of Steroid Abuse,” Salina (Kansas) Journal, July 8, 2003: 13.

39 Juiced, 255.

40 All quotes from writers in response to Juiced are from Bryan Curtis, “The Steroid Hunt,” Grantland.com, January 8, 2014, a fascinating historical account of how sportswriters failed to respond to steroid use in professional baseball.

41 Juiced, 3. For a balanced review of Canseco’s memoir, see Bill Nowlin, “’Juiced’ Slugger Goes to Bat for Steroids,” Boston Globe, March 2, 2005, web edition.

42 Excerpts from McGwire’s testimony appeared in the Washington Post, March 18, 2005: D6.

43 “Baseball Has a Day of Reckoning In Congress,” Washington Post, March 18, 2005: A1.

44 “Canseco: McGwire Not Fully Forthcoming,” sports.espn.go.com, January 12, 2010. https://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4819250.

45 “Jose Canseco and Lady Gaga: A match made in Twitter heaven?, Yahoo Sports, May 26, 2011.

46 “Jose Canseco Banned by League,” ESPN.com, March 9, 2012.

47 “Jose Canseco Cleared In Las Vegas Rape Case,” Fox News Latino, June 10, 2013. latino.foxnews.com/latino/sports/2013/06/10/jose-canseco-cleared-in-las-vegas-rape-case/.

48 Christian Red, “Jose Canseco’s Fiancée, Leila Knight, Dumps Former Slugger After He Allegedly Threatened to Kill Her and Her Mother,” New York Daily News, November 24, 2014. Web edition.

49 Paul Sacca, “Jose Canseco Apologizes To MLB Players He Said Used Steroids In The Most Ridiculous And Hilarious Ways,” BroBible.com, June 2, 2015.

50 Jake O’Donnell, “Jose Canseco Apologizes to Ped Users He Snitched on (Except A-Rod, Of Course),” SportsGrid.com, June 3, 2015. sportsgrid.com/mlb/jose-canseco-apologizes-to-ped-users-he-snitched-on/. Canseco also devotes an entire section to Rodriguez in Vindicated, in which he asserts that Rodriguez was obsessed with his wife and made sexual remarks about her repeatedly, pp. 180-190. “Try your luck with Google,” he writes (189). “Put in Alex Rodriguez and infidelity and you’ll get about 50,000 hits.” ESPN reportedly refused to let Canseco read the poem on the air.

51 Nate Gartrell, “Jose Canseco Will Return to Play for Pittsburg Diamonds,” Vallejo (California) Times Herald, July 8, 2015. Web edition.

52 Christian Red, “Jose Canseco to live as a woman for a week to support Caitlyn Jenner,” New York Daily News, July 29, 2015, Internet edition; Cindy Boren, “Jose Canseco plans to live as a woman for a week to support Caitlyn Jenner,” Washington Post, July 30, 2015, Internet edition. (Link to latest Canseco headline: https://latintimes.com/jose-canseco-dress-woman-week-support-caitlyn-jenner-332705).

53 Vindicated, 205.

54 Jack Dickey, “Jose Canseco,” Sports Illustrated, July 6 and 13, 2015: 58-62.

55 Howard Bryant, Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball (New York: Plume Book, 2006), Chapter 10, excerpted by ESPN.com.

In spite of the abrupt end to Clemens’ evening and career, as he left the mound, it seemed a certainty that he would be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, as soon as he passed the five-year waiting period for eligibility. Few pitchers in the history of baseball could boast anything near to his accomplishments: a record seven Cy Young Awards, 354 victories, 4,672 strikeouts, seven-time ERA leader with a career 3.12 ERA, six-time 20-game winner, five-time strikeout leader, 46 shutouts in the era of relief specialists and closers, and two-time World Series champion. He was too much of a polarizing figure in his career to exceed Tom Seaver’s record of being named on 98.8 percent of the Hall of Fame ballots, but he seemed certain to be a first-ballot selectee.

On December 13, 2007, little more than two months after Clemens’ final Yankees start, doubt was cast over his future enshrinement among baseball’s immortals when he was mentioned repeatedly in the Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. In the years following the report, Clemens spent almost as much time in courtrooms as he spent on pitcher’s mounds during his career. By the time his first year of eligibility for the Hall of Fame arrived in January 2013, he was named on only 37.6 percent of the ballots and, in his second year, that number declined to 35.4 percent while two of his contemporaries and fellow members of the 300-win club, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, were elected.

Clemens’ life is the tale of a fanatically driven man who worked hard to achieve his dream of stardom and attained the pinnacle of success. Jorge Posada, Clemens’ catcher with the Yankees, was complimentary when he said, “The only thing he wants to do is just win.”1 Cito Gaston, Clemens’ manager with the Toronto Blue Jays until he was fired toward the end of the 1997 season, intended no such praise when he commented, “It’s all about him, nobody else but him.”2 Clemens’ ambition gained him both fans and detractors, helped him to achieve massive success, and ultimately contributed to his fall from grace.

William Roger Clemens was born on August 4, 1962, in Dayton, Ohio, the fifth child of Bill and Bess Clemens. He was only 5 months old when his mother took her children and left his father, with whom he claims to have spoken only once in his life, when he was 10 years old. Less than two years later, Bess married Woody Booher, whom Roger looked up to as a real father. But he became fatherless again at the age of 8 when Booher died of a heart attack.

While his mother provided Roger with an example of the work ethic he would adopt by laboring at several jobs to support her children, he came under the tutelage of his older brother Randy, whom he idolized. In high school Randy was a shortstop on the baseball team, the star shooting guard for the basketball team, and the king of his senior prom, leading Clemens to admit, “While I was growing up, Randy was the star as far as I was concerned.”3 Though the two brothers have become estranged, Randy’s influence was immense as he “instill[ed] in his brother a simple philosophy: Either you’re a winner or you’re a failure.”4 It was a mantra that caused Clemens to question at times whether he was good enough to become the star athlete that both of them wanted him to be.

While Clemens’ baseball career dwarfs his brother Randy’s high-school athletic exploits, his initial attempts to emulate his elder sibling were less than encouraging. He played baseball, basketball, and football, but distinguished himself in none of these sports. In fact, the only notable event from his youth baseball exploits was that he split starts for his 1977 squad with Kelly Krzan, who was the first girl in Ohio to play on a boys’ Little League team.

By the time Clemens was 15 and a high-school sophomore, Randy had married and moved to Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb 20 miles southwest of downtown Houston. Randy had failed to achieve athletic stardom of his own largely due to the development of a substance-abuse problem, but he now wanted to guide his younger brother’s athletic career. After the two brothers received their mother’s permission, Ohio-born-and-raised Roger Clemens made the sojourn to Texas, the state with which he has become identified.

Clemens enjoyed initial success by amassing a 12-1 record and helping Sugar Land’s Dulles High School win a district title, but Randy was plotting a move to more competitive fields. After watching a tournament game between two of the Houston area’s premier high-school teams, Bellaire and Spring Woods, Clemens decided that he wanted to play for the latter team. Bess Clemens had moved to Houston now as well, and she made sure that her son’s wish was granted.

The time spent at Spring Woods High School was a mixed blessing: Clemens played for a coach, Charlie Maiorana, whom he credits for much of his knowledge about mechanics and conditioning, but he spent his junior year seeing little action on a team with two of the state’s best pitching prospects. His determination showed as he became known for his workout regimen, especially his running, and he had his turn as Spring Woods’ number one starting pitcher during his senior year. Still, at that point in his life, the player who came to sit at number three on the major-league strikeout list still threw too softly to draw any notice from either professional or college scouts.

As a favor to Clemens, Maiorana called a colleague, Wayne Graham, the new coach at San Jacinto Junior College, to ask if he could pull any strings to get Clemens to his desired destination, the University of Texas in Austin. Graham could not accomplish that feat, but he did offer Clemens a scholarship to San Jacinto, which is where Clemens’ fortunes were reversed. The failure to achieve high-school stardom resulted in the season that launched Clemens on the path to professional greatness.

The year 1981 was Wayne Graham’s first season to coach at any college level, but he has become a legend by guiding San Jacinto to five national junior-college championships in six years (1985-1990) – a feat that earned him Collegiate Baseball Magazine’s Junior College Coach of the Century Award – and leading Houston’s Rice University to the NCAA College World Series Championship in 2003. What Graham did with Clemens – turning a soft-tossing youth into a flamethrower – was an equally impressive accomplishment. He preached to Clemens that he needed to finish hard on his pitches or he would never have a chance to realize his dream of pitching in the major leagues, a message Clemens took to heart as he finished his sole season at San Jacinto with a 9-2 record while the college won the Texas Junior College Athletic Association championship. His coach’s assessment was that “Roger began the year as one of the guys, and he ended it as an ace.”5

Graham anticipated that Clemens would remain at San Jacinto for a second year, an expectation that was buoyed when Clemens turned down an offer from the New York Mets, who had selected him in the 12th round of the 1981 draft. Clemens went through the motions of throwing for Mets manager Joe Torre and pitching coach/legend Bob Gibson at Houston’s Astrodome, but he had other plans in mind. He had been contacted by University of Texas Longhorns coach Cliff Gustafson, who was now interested in the improved pitcher. The opportunity to play at Texas had been Clemens’ dream, and he pounced on it; however, he failed to contact Graham about his decision and alienated the man who had placed him on the road to stardom.

Clemens fulfilled expectations at Texas, although there were some hiccups along the way. The 1982 Longhorns began their season with a 33-game winning streak that was one win shy of tying the NCAA record. Clemens, who had begun the campaign 7-0, pitched in game number 34 but lost 4-3 to the University of Houston. It was later revealed that he had bursitis while pitching that game, and he missed the next two weeks of the season. He finished 12-2 with a 1.99 ERA, but Texas was eliminated from the College World Series by Wichita State.

The Longhorns suffered under the burden of high expectations in 1983 and plodded through an up-and down season. At one point, the driven Clemens became so frustrated by his personal mound setbacks that he was ready to quit the team, an example of the toll that the insecurity caused by Randy Clemens’ “winner or failure” mentality took on him. While he was not yet a polished pitcher, he still demonstrated great potential. Houston Astros scout Gordon Lakey reported that Clemens’ delivery was not compact enough, but he believed it could be helped and that Clemens would develop more leg drive and become a power pitcher.6 Chicago White Sox scout Larry Monroe’s report echoed that of Lakey as he wrote of Clemens: “Delivery is fluid but does not use body at all. Should be easily improved and no reason why he shouldn’t be in low 90’s. I’m surprised he doesn’t have shoulder problems from standing up and just throwing. Some bend in legs and drive to plate would help velocity, life, and location.”7 Both scouts projected Clemens as a likely second-round draft pick. Owing to rare encouragement from the usually gruff Gustafson, Clemens persevered – he went 13-5 with a 3.04 ERA – and the Longhorns survived their inconsistency to make a return trip to the College World Series.

Before Clemens took the mound for his start against Oklahoma State in the College World Series on June 6, the Boston Red Sox selected him as the 19th player chosen in the major-league draft, a circumstance about which he said, “I was completely surprised. As far as I was concerned, Boston was a foreign country.”8 Five days after defeating Oklahoma State, Clemens capped his Texas career with a complete-game 4-3 victory over Alabama in the College World Series Championship Game to put himself and his team on top of the collegiate baseball world before he departed Austin for Boston, having now been signed by Red Sox scout Danny Doyle. Of course, Clemens did not make it to the parent club straight out of college, but he did take the fast track through the Red Sox’ minor-league system where he already exhibited character traits that became hallmarks of his career.

His first stop was with the Winter Haven Red Sox of the Class-A Florida State League, for whom he went 3-1 with a 1.24 ERA in four starts and where he established his reputation for pitching inside to hitters. Two days before his final Winter Haven start, Clemens had taken umbrage at the Lakeland Tigers’ Ronald Davis taking out his Red Sox (and ex-University of Texas) teammate Mike Brumley at second base, a play on which Brumley was injured. Clemens pitched a 15-strikeout shutout against Lakeland in which he also retaliated for Brumley’s injury by hitting Davis in the head in his first at-bat. Clemens claimed – as most pitchers do – that he had only wanted to brush Davis back and that the pitch had gotten away from him; however, he also claimed that he was prepared to fight, something for which Davis was in no condition as he collapsed and was taken to a hospital.

The split opinion among baseball observers as to whether Clemens merely pitched inside or was a headhunter mirrors the split in opinion about his character in general. Few players thought poorly of Don Drysdale or Nolan Ryan for pitching close inside, but these two pitchers were held in high regard while Clemens was often considered arrogant. Clemens fanned the flames of this negative reputation by both his actions and his words, never more infamously so than after winning the 1986 American League MVP Award. When informed that no less a luminary than Hank Aaron had asserted that pitchers should not receive the MVP, he retorted, “I wish he was still playing. I’d probably crack his head open to show him how valuable I was.”9

After his debacle-marred gem, Clemens was promoted to the New Britain (Connecticut) Red Sox of the Double-A Eastern League and amassed a 4-1 record with a 1.38 ERA in seven starts, but he also continued to draw controversy. In the team’s first-round playoff series, Reading Phillies manager Bill Dancy protested that Clemens was using a glove that had writing all over it and claimed that it was distracting. The home-plate umpire ordered Clemens to use a different glove – an order the pitcher complied with – but he began to curse at Clemens due to the grief he was getting from New Britain’s bench. Clemens charged the umpire but stopped short of any physical contact. Instead, he calmed down, borrowed a teammate’s glove, and proceeded to dominate Reading. Charging umpires became another Clemens trait as his career progressed, but calming down did not. As he accumulated successes, his “winner or failure” mentality and its resultant insecurity morphed into hypercompetitive intensity on and off the mound.

New Britain dispatched the Phillies and faced the Lynn Sailors for the championship, which they won when Clemens pitched a 10-strikeout shutout in Game Four. After he had breezed through two levels of the minor leagues and won his second championship in three months, Clemens’ baseball future looked bright. His personal life became equally so when he began to date Debra Lynn Godfrey, whom he had known in passing at Spring Woods High School, in the offseason. Godfrey was a fellow fitness fanatic who twice auditioned for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders squad, and the two of them worked out together regularly. They became engaged in May 1984 and were married in November of that year.

Before his engagement to Godfrey, Clemens made one final stop on his way to Boston. He took part in spring training with the parent club in the familiar surroundings of Winter Haven, Florida, but ended up being assigned to Pawtucket of the Triple-A International League to begin the season after posting a 6.60 ERA in Grapefruit League games. Clemens did not allow his disappointment to keep him from excelling at yet another level as he posted a 1.93 ERA in 46⅔ innings for Pawtucket. Enough was enough and, on May 11, 1984, Roger Clemens was officially called up by the Boston Red Sox.

On Tuesday, May 15, 1984, Clemens made his major-league debut against the Indians before a mere 4,004 fans at chilly Cleveland Stadium and learned that minor-league success does not always carry over instantly to the majors. He received no decision after surrendering 11 hits, three walks, and five runs (four earned) in 5⅔ innings, but what was alarming was that Indians baserunners had swiped six bases against him because, in the words of his catcher, Gary Allenson, “(a)t that point, he had no real concept of keeping opposing runners in check.”10 In his next start, against the Minnesota Twins on May 20, he pitched seven strong innings to earn his first major-league victory.

The remainder of Clemens’ rookie season was not as memorable as the one put together by his National League counterpart, Dwight Gooden of the New York Mets, who finished with a 17-9 record and easily won the NL Rookie of the Year award. Clemens was up and down from start to start and later conceded that some people were beginning to question whether he might fall into the same category as David Clyde, the 1970s poster boy for young pitchers who had been rushed to the major leagues too quickly. That fear was put to rest by a 15-strikeout performance against the Kansas City Royals on August 21, but soon a new specter – that of injury – arrived to haunt the Red Sox and their fans. In his final start of the season, on August 31 against the Indians, Clemens registered seven of 11 outs by strikeout and then exited the game with a strained tendon in his right forearm. Though the injury was minor, Clemens was shut down for the year and finished a solid but unspectacular rookie campaign at 9-4 with a 4.32 ERA.

Clemens endured nagging injuries on his way to a 7-5/3.29 sophomore campaign in 1985. The low point of his season came on July 7 when he could not make his scheduled start against the California Angels due to what he described as “[. . .] an intensely sharp pain, as if someone stuck a knife in the back of my shoulder.”11 Clemens’ early-career insecurity came to the fore again as he engaged in a clubhouse meltdown in Anaheim that day, and his fear of failure caused him to break down in tears while repeatedly asking, “Why me?” The next day he was placed on the 15-day disabled list due to shoulder inflammation and, though he returned to the rotation, he never recovered fully that year. On August 30 surgeon James Andrews removed a small piece of cartilage from Clemens’ right shoulder in a 20-minute procedure. Clemens spent the offseason learning new exercises to strengthen his shoulder and waited for the 1986 season to come around.

The Red Sox started out slowly in 1986, but Clemens overcame his spring-training fears about his rehabilitated shoulder and charged out to a 3-0 record with a 1.85 ERA. His fourth start provided the harbinger of things to come as April 29, 1986, became the night on which Roger Clemens vaulted himself to stardom. Facing a free-swinging Seattle Mariners team that had struck out 166 times in 19 games, he turned in a record-setting performance by striking out 20 batters in a nine-inning, complete-game effort at Fenway Park. Clemens began the game in form by brushing back his former college teammate and role model Spike Owen with his second and third pitches of the night. Afterward, he denied throwing at Owen, but a conflicting account exists in which former Longhorns teammate Mike Capel dared him to plunk Owen on the day before the game.

Whatever the truth about Clemens’ intent, the tone for the game was set and the Mariners were baffled for all but one pitch. Gorman Thomas launched Clemens’ lone mistake for a solo home run and a 1-0 Mariners lead in the top of the seventh inning and, for a moment, it looked as though Clemens’ brilliance might be for naught. Fortunately for Clemens and the Red Sox, Dwight Evans hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the inning for the final 3-1 margin of victory. From that point on, Clemens struck out four more batters to reach the record-breaking total of 20. He became an instant superstar and fulfilled a dream he claimed to have had when he was 12 by making the cover of Sports Illustrated’s May 12, 1986 issue, which carried the headline “Lord of the K’s.”12

After an 11-strikeout victory at Baltimore on June 27, Clemens was only the fifth pitcher in major-league history to start a season 14-0. He suffered his first loss on July 2 against the Toronto Blue Jays, but his 15-2 first-half record led Kansas City manager Dick Howser to name him the American League’s starter in the All-Star Game, which would be held in his adopted hometown of Houston. The Red Sox, meanwhile, were in first place in the AL East with a 56-31 record and a seven-game lead at the break.

There was, however, a downside that accompanied all of this success, and it involved his relationship with the media and its burgeoning demands on his time. According to Clemens, “The attention I enjoyed and appreciated at first after breaking the strikeout record soon became stressful.” He claimed that the press did not realize “how I needed to stay on my program and work.”13 For their part, the reporters began to perceive Clemens as alternately aloof or difficult, depending upon whether or not they could get any worthwhile quotes from the new star. Clemens correctly conceded that this period was “the first time I experienced some problems with the media,”14 but it would not be the last.

The media crush of an All-Star Game that matched Clemens and fellow fireballer Dwight Gooden as the starters did not deter him from turning the event into yet another showcase for his talents. While Gooden surrendered two runs in three innings of work, Clemens retired all nine NL batters he faced, struck out two, and did not allow a single baserunner, a performance that earned him the game’s MVP award. His newfound stardom also birthed a new arrogance that surfaced in the second half of the 1986 season.

In his July 30 start against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park, Clemens had a new manner of meltdown after first-base umpire Greg Kosc made a disputed call that went against him. With two outs in the fifth inning, Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner had flipped a Harold Baines grounder to Clemens, who thought he had beaten the runner to the bag. Instead, Kosc ruled that Clemens had missed first base and called Baines safe, which allowed what ended up being the winning run to score for the White Sox. Clemens charged at Kosc to argue the call and made incidental contact with the umpire, which resulted in his automatic ejection. Now he came completely unglued – he claimed to have hyperventilated twice during his rampage – and eventually was carried off the field by teammates Jim Rice and Don Baylor. Clemens was suspended for two games and fined, but his outlook on his punishment was revealing: In his autobiography, he stated, “As it turned out, all I lost was a day’s pay – little more than $1,000 – and $250” [for paying his teammates’ (Bruce Hurst and Al Nipper) minor fines].15 A fine was no great consequence to Clemens and, from this point on, he often alternated feats with fits over the course of his career.

The 1986 Red Sox rolled into the playoffs, with Clemens winning his last seven decisions, but Clemens’ own postseason hopes seemed jeopardized when John Stefero’s line drive hit his pitching elbow in his final regular season start, against Baltimore on October 1. X-rays were negative and the swelling went down in time for Clemens to make his Game One start in the ALCS against the California Angels at Fenway. Clemens made three starts in Boston’s hard-fought seven-game series against the Angels: Game One was forgettable as he surrendered eight runs (seven earned) in 7⅓ innings and Game Four resulted in a no-decision in 8⅓ innings during Boston’s extra-inning loss, but in the clinching Game Seven he dominated the Angels and allowed only one run in seven innings to help send the Red Sox to the World Series for the first time since 1975.

World Series Game Two was a Clemens-versus-Gooden rematch, but neither pitcher lasted longer than five innings; a flu-ridden Clemens gave up four walks and three runs in 4⅓ innings of a game that Boston won 9-3. His second start came in Game Six, with the Red Sox holding a 3-2 edge in games, and he struck out eight while surrendering only two runs (one earned) in seven innings. The Red Sox had a 3-2 lead when Clemens was lifted from the game for a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning, but there was controversy over the timing of his exit. Clemens had torn open a blister and had begun bleeding, and manager John McNamara later claimed that Clemens had asked out of the game as a result, a contention that Clemens and several of his teammates denied. Game Six went down in Red Sox infamy as Calvin Schiraldi combined with Bob Stanley, Bill Buckner, and fate to lose to the Mets 6-5 in 10 innings. The Mets’ 8-5 victory in Game Seven kept Clemens from putting the ultimate jewel in the crown of his 1986 season, a campaign during which he went 24-4 with a league-leading 2.48 ERA and became the first player to win the Cy Young Award, American League MVP Award, and All-Star Game MVP Award in the same season.

In addition to all of his on-field success, Roger and Debbie Clemens welcomed their first son, Koby, into the world on December 4, 1986. In what became a theme, Clemens gave all four of his sons names that begin with the letter “K” – Kory, Kacy, and Kody followed Koby – since it is the baseball scoring abbreviation for a strikeout.

The relationship between Clemens and the Red Sox took a downturn when Clemens walked out in the middle of spring training over a contract dispute. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth eventually negotiated an agreement between the team and its star, but the incident did not bode well for the future. The Red Sox had a miserable 1987 season, finishing at 78-84, though Clemens won his second consecutive Cy Young Award with a 20-9 record, 2.97 ERA, and seven shutouts.

In 1988 Clemens created a minor stir by deciding to pitch against the Angels in Anaheim rather than return to Houston for the birth of his second son, Kory. He earned a complete-game victory in that May 30 game on his way to an 18-12, 2.93, eight-shutout season. The Red Sox rebounded to win the AL East in 1988 but were swept in the ALCS by the Oakland Athletics, though Clemens pitched adequately in his Game Two start.

The biggest firestorm Clemens ignited that year came on December 5 when he gave an interview to a Boston television station in which he attacked anyone and everyone associated with the Red Sox, from management to teammates to fans. His complaint, “Travel, road trips and carrying your own luggage around isn’t all that fun and glory,”16 propagated the stereotype of the spoiled, pampered athlete and cast him in a negative light to fans.

Clemens did play for the Red Sox through the 1996 season, winning his third Cy Young in 1991 and leading the AL in ERA from 1990 to 1992, but he continued to be antagonistic with the media and, in turn, both the media and fans emphasized his shortcomings – real and perceived – more than his accomplishments.

One highly scrutinized event was a tantrum in Game Four of the 1990 ALCS in which the Athletics again swept the Red Sox. Clemens had pitched six shutout innings in Game One, but Boston had lost, and things were not going well at the outset of Game Four. With Oakland leading 1-0 and two outs in the second inning, Clemens began cursing from the mound at home-plate umpire Terry Cooney over balls and strikes and was ejected from the game. When Clemens realized that he had been tossed, he charged Cooney and pushed right-field umpire Jim Evans aside, an offense for which he was fined $10,000 and suspended for the first five games of the 1991 season.

Rather than lie low after such an ignominious end to the season, Clemens gained additional notoriety off the field when he and older brother Randy were arrested at a Houston nightclub on January 18, 1991. Randy had become involved in an altercation, and Roger was arrested for hindering the security guard – an off-duty police officer – who was attempting to arrest his brother. He was found “not guilty” of the charge, but his fame was now increasing for the wrong reasons.

In 1992 Clemens further strained his relationship with the Red Sox when he reported eight days late for spring training; however, he still registered another stellar campaign on the mound, finishing 18-11. After he posted his first losing record in 1993 – 11-14 with a 4.46 ERA – speculation renewed about how much longer Clemens would last. He pitched well in strike-shortened 1994, but in 1995 he had a bloated 4.18 ERA and again came up short in the postseason, though he received no decision in the Red Sox’ ALDS Game One extra-inning loss to the Cleveland Indians.

While Clemens was in an up-and-down phase of his career on the mound and was in the process of alienating Boston fans and management, he was still popular enough with fans nationwide that he made several guest appearances as himself on different television shows. Clemens even showed a sense of humor by taking a role in the animated The Simpsons episode titled “Homer at the Bat.” In the course of the story, Clemens – as himself – is hypnotized into thinking that he is a chicken and spends much of the episode squawking and clucking. His acting exploits also included the big screen, for which his most notable role was as an unnamed flamethrower who pitches to Ty Cobb in the 1994 film Cobb, based on Al Stump’s biography of the Georgia Peach.

In 1996 Clemens posted his second losing record, 10-13, but had a more respectable 3.63 ERA and led the AL with 257 strikeouts. He momentarily turned back the clock 10 years by registering his second career 20-strikeout game, against Detroit at Tiger Stadium on September 18; it was also his 192nd victory, which tied him with Cy Young atop the Red Sox’ all-time list. Nonetheless, Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette considered his 40-39 record for the team from 1993 through 1996 and questioned whether Clemens might be in the “twilight” of his career; he apparently did not see him as a player around whom to rebuild the team into a perennial contender. Clemens spurned Boston’s contract offer and signed for three years and $24.75 million with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Toronto was far removed from its consecutive World Series victories of 1992-1993 and was not a contender during Clemens’ stint with the team, but “Rocket” was not finished yet after all. Quite the contrary, the brief Blue Jays era of 1997-1998 was Clemens at his dominant best as he went a combined 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA and 563 strikeouts, winning the pitching Triple Crown – wins, ERA, strikeouts – in both years as well as his fourth and fifth Cy Young Awards. He also exacted revenge against the Red Sox in his first start as a Blue Jay at Fenway Park on July 12, 1997, when he pitched eight innings of one-run ball and struck out 16 batters.

In time, a cloud of suspicion gathered over this mid-30s pitching renaissance for two reasons: 1) The prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in baseball by this time, and 2) the hiring of Brian McNamee as Toronto’s strength and conditioning coach after the 1997 season. Baseball was in the midst of its PED era and – as was the case with most players – no public accusations were made against Clemens at the time; however, McNamee later claimed that he injected Clemens with the steroid Winstrol in 1998.

Clemens longed to pitch for a contender again and his trade request was granted on February 18, 1999, when Toronto traded him to the New York Yankees – an old adversary with whom he had engaged in numerous beanball wars – for starter David Wells, reliever Graeme Lloyd, and second baseman Homer Bush. As a Yankee, Clemens was back in the center of the baseball universe, but that was a mixed blessing as he turned in an inconsistent 14-10, 4.60 campaign.

The 1999 postseason began promisingly as Clemens pitched seven scoreless innings in the ALDS-clinching Game Three against the Texas Rangers, but the ALCS was another matter altogether as Clemens fizzled in his return to Fenway in a Game Three marquee matchup against Boston’s new ace, Pedro Martinez. While Martinez pitched seven shutout innings and struck out 12, Clemens suffered the Yankees’ only loss of the series and was battered for five runs in only two innings. As he left the mound in the bottom of the third, Boston fans taunted him by chanting “Where is Rog-er?” That game became a distant memory for Clemens after he won World Series Game Four against the Atlanta Braves with a 7⅔-inning, one-run performance that capped a Yankees sweep. The one prize, a World Series ring, that had eluded Clemens for his entire career was now his: “Tonight, I know what it’s like to be a Yankee. I am blessed,” he exulted.17

Prior to Game Two of the World Series at Atlanta’s Turner Field, Clemens had been named – along with 29 other players – as a member of the All-Century Team. The 100 nominees for the team had been chosen by a panel of experts and had been presented at that year’s All-Star Game, but it was the fans who had voted for the players. Clemens was the only active pitcher – and one of only four active players – voted onto the team, joining Cal Ripken Jr., Ken Griffey Jr., and Mark McGwire. This accolade and his first World Series championship appeared to validate Clemens’ tunnel-vision tenacity in pursuit of his goals.

On the heels of reaching the pinnacle of professional success, Clemens experienced one of the lowest points in his personal life. In May 2000 his ex-sister-in-law Kathy, who had been married to his brother Randy and had been like a mother to him when he had first moved to Texas, was murdered in a home-invasion robbery in Houston. Kathy’s son Marcus had adopted his father Randy’s drug habit, and the robbery was tied to money and drugs. Roger blamed Randy’s substance-abuse addiction for the couple’s divorce, his nephew’s drug addiction, and Kathy’s murder, and he became alienated from the brother who had exerted such tremendous influence on his life, his outlook on the world, and his early career.

On the mound in 2000, Clemens posted a pedestrian 13-8 record and lost his two starts against Oakland in the ALDS, but he experienced a reversal of fortune from the previous year’s ALCS in Boston in his Game Four start against the Seattle Mariners. In a game as dominant as any he had ever pitched, he set an ALCS record by striking out 15 batters in a one-hit shutout. It was an amazing performance for a 38-year old power pitcher that also served as an endorsement for Clemens’ now-legendary workout regimen – one that players half his age were unwilling to attempt – which again fell under the auspices of Brian McNamee, who had joined the Yankees as an assistant strength coach in 2000.

Clemens turned in another eight shutout innings in World Series Game Two against the crosstown Mets, a Series the Yankees won in five games. The focus of the game, though, was a bizarre incident that occurred in the top of the first inning. Mets catcher Mike Piazza, whom Clemens had hit in the head with a pitch in a regular-season game on July 8, shattered his bat hitting a soft liner that squibbed foul into the Yankees dugout. Clemens picked up the barrel piece of the bat and threw it in Piazza’s direction as he ran up the baseline. The shard almost hit Piazza, who was angered and exchanged words with Clemens as both benches emptied. Clemens was not ejected for his action and dominated the Mets with eight innings of shutout ball in which he allowed only two hits and no walks and struck out nine. After the game, Clemens offered the implausible excuse that he had thought he had the ball, rather than the barrel of Piazza’s bat, which still did not explain why he threw it toward Piazza rather than first baseman Tino Martinez. Nobody believed Clemens, and he was fined $50,000 for the incident.

In 2001, a season in which McNamee has claimed he injected Clemens with the steroids Sustanon 250 and Deca-Durabolin, Clemens raced out to a 12-1 record that garnered him his second career All-Star Game start. He took his record to 19-1 before his first attempt at win number 20 was placed on hold by the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. After America regrouped, and MLB resumed play on September 17 at the behest of President George W. Bush, Clemens finished the season 20-3 with a 3.51 ERA and earned his sixth Cy Young Award. The Yankees again made it to the World Series, and Clemens registered a 1.35 ERA over 13⅓ innings in two starts against the Arizona Diamondbacks. In Game Three, he scattered three hits in seven innings in a 2-1 win. He engaged in a Game Seven duel against Curt Schilling that the Yankees lost when Luis Gonzalez looped an RBI single off Mariano Rivera to win the game in the bottom of the ninth inning.

Clemens was solid, though no longer spectacular, with the Yankees in 2002-03. He did reach both the 300-win and 4,000-strikeout milestones in a 5-2 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals at Yankee Stadium on June 13, 2003, becoming the first pitcher to hit both landmarks in the same game. He had said repeatedly that he was retiring after the 2003 season, so when he walked off the mound of Miami’s Pro Player Stadium after pitching seven innings of three-run ball in World Series Game Four on October 22, 2003, everyone assumed it was his swan song. There was no fairytale ending to his story, though, as the Yankees fell to the Florida Marlins in six games.

Clemens’ retirement lasted little more than 2½ months. Shortly after Yankees free agent, friend, and fellow Houstonian Andy Pettitte signed to play for the Houston Astros, Clemens joined him and the pair set Houston abuzz with the hope that they could help franchise icons Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio reach the promised land of the World Series before they too reached retirement age.

Although 2004 was his first year in the National League, Clemens registered the same results he had through most of his career: He posted an 18-4 record, 2.98 ERA, and 218 strikeouts for which he won his record-extending seventh Cy Young Award, joining Gaylord Perry, Randy Johnson, and Pedro Martinez as the only pitchers to win the award in both leagues. He also started his third All-Star Game – this time for the NL – in his adopted hometown of Houston, where he had started his first All-Star Game for the AL 18 years earlier.

The Astros were the NL wild-card team in 2004, and Clemens started the franchise toward its first-ever postseason-series victory in 43 seasons of existence by winning NLDS Game One against the Atlanta Braves. Against the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS, he won Game Three but lost the decisive Game Seven; however, he received none of the criticism he had often endured in Boston and New York when he had fallen short in the postseason. He could do no wrong in his hometown and was becoming a Texas legend on a par with his boyhood idol Nolan Ryan.

Clemens returned to the Astros in 2005 and added to his increasingly larger-than-life exploits. At the age of 43, he led the majors with a 1.87 ERA and might have won an eighth Cy Young Award had he received more run support to improve his 13-8 record. On September 14, in a decision reminiscent of his choice to pitch on the day of his son Kory’s birth, Clemens defeated the Florida Marlins after his mother, Bess, died that morning. In response to those who questioned his decision, Clemens replied that his mother had made him promise to pitch and that the game was important to the Astros’ playoff hopes. It was clear that he was still as driven to win as he had always been.

The Astros were the NL wild-card entry again in 2005 and faced the Atlanta Braves once more. Clemens lost Game Two, but for Houston fans his status grew to mythological proportions three days later in Game Four. On October 9, after the Astros had exhausted their bullpen by the 15th inning of their marathon contest against the Braves, Clemens came to the rescue and pitched three scoreless innings. He earned the win when Chris Burke ended the game with a solo homer in the bottom of the 18th, and the Astros advanced to the NLCS. As if pitching on short rest were not enough, Clemens had also demonstrated a bit of batting acumen when he laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt in the bottom of the 15th.

In the NLCS, the Astros met another familiar opponent – the Cardinals – whom they defeated in six games to reach their first World Series, with Clemens contributing a victory in Game Three. The magic ran out in the World Series, though, as he exited Game One with a sore hamstring after allowing three runs in only two innings. The Chicago White Sox swept the Astros, and Clemens seemed likely to retire permanently.

Alas, he could not stay away from the game, and he lost much of the goodwill he had engendered in 2005 by appearing willing to sell himself to the highest bidder as he engaged in talks with numerous teams. The so-called “family-friendly” clause that had allowed Clemens to remain home for road trips during which he was not scheduled to pitch – and which he insisted upon to the end of his career – now had some people questioning whether his true motive was team success or money. In the end, he signed with the Astros on May 31 and still posted a 2.30 ERA in 113⅓ innings over 19 starts, but the team failed to make the playoffs.

Clemens played the same “Will he or won’t he pitch?” game at the start of the 2007 season before announcing his return to the New York Yankees from owner George Steinbrenner’s luxury box during the seventh-inning stretch of a Yankees-Mariners game on May 6. He posted a mediocre 6-6, 4.18 line over 99 innings before limping off the Yankee Stadium mound with yet another hamstring injury in the Yankees’ October 7 ALDS game against Cleveland.

Once his career was finally over, the countdown to Clemens’ Hall of Fame induction began. Whether media members and fans liked him or not – and there were plenty of people in both camps – his statistics pointed to him being one of the best pitchers ever to play the game. Even so, the voters who cast ballots for players to gain entry into the National Baseball Hall of Fame are told to take a player’s character into account, and all sorts of skeletons fell out of Clemens’ closet upon the release of the Mitchell Report.

First, there were Brian McNamee’s allegations of steroid use. Clemens vehemently denied McNamee’s accusations and, under the advice and guidance of his lawyer Rusty Hardin, went on the offensive. On January 6, 2008, Clemens filed a defamation suit against McNamee. Though Clemens eventually dropped his suit, McNamee filed his own defamation suit against Clemens in 2008, which dragged on for almost seven years before McNamee received an out-of-court settlement to be paid by Clemens’ insurer – not Clemens himself – in March 2015.

The same day that Clemens filed his lawsuit in Houston, CBS-TV’s investigative news show 60 Minutes aired a Mike Wallace interview of Clemens. In the interview Clemens claimed that McNamee had only injected him with vitamin B12 and the painkiller Lidocaine, an assertion that was dubious to many viewers and which made him the butt of countless pain-in-the-butt jokes.

The next day Clemens and Hardin held a press conference in Houston and played a recording of a recent phone conversation between Clemens and McNamee that was to prove Clemens’ innocence. The tape proved nothing as McNamee sounded both too desperate and too cautious to say anything that might incriminate him. Clemens fielded questions from the media, but grew increasingly aggravated and angry as the conference continued. When asked if he thought McNamee’s allegations would affect his chances at being elected to the Hall of Fame, his retort, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Hall of Fame,”18 was another statement no one believed, and he soon stormed out of his own press conference.

On February 13, 2008, Clemens was called to testify before a congressional committee in Washington, where he continued to profess his innocence. Some of his testimony contradicted a sworn statement made by Andy Pettitte, who claimed Clemens had told him that McNamee injected him with human growth hormone (HGH). Clemens responded that Pettitte had “misremembered” [sic] their conversation and that he had told Pettitte it was his wife, Debbie, whom McNamee had injected with HGH. There were enough inconsistencies in Clemens’ testimony that a drawn-out legal process resulted in an August 19, 2010, grand-jury indictment for making false statements to Congress. His first trial, in July 2011, quickly resulted in a mistrial, while his second trial ended with his acquittal on June 18, 2012.

Along with the steroid allegations and their attendant legal troubles, Clemens was also accused of having extramarital affairs with numerous women. The two most notable names were those of the late country singer Mindy McCready and pro golfer John Daly’s ex-wife Paulette. Clemens denied these accusations as well, but McCready and Paulette Daly neither confirmed nor denied them, which gave them implicit affirmation in many people’s minds.

All of this dirty laundry was aired in the media in the immediate aftermath of the Mitchell Report, but two books contributed further to the decline of Clemens’ reputation: Jeff Pearlman’s unauthorized biography The Rocket That Fell to Earth, and New York Daily News’ Sports Investigative Team’s American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime. Pearlman’s book portrays Clemens in such a consistently negative light that it is easy to dismiss it as one-sided, but the Daily News team’s research into McNamee’s claims casts serious doubt on Clemens’ assertion of innocence. The facts remain, however, that Roger Clemens never tested positive for PEDs and that he was acquitted of all charges of lying to Congress.

Nonetheless, the repercussions of the allegations have resulted in a lack of support for Clemens’ Hall of Fame candidacy. If he is ultimately enshrined, it is entirely possible that a Veterans Committee will have determined his fate after his initial 10-year period of eligibility has passed. His new road to baseball immortality involves rehabilitation of his former reputation as a hard-working star, which will be an arduous process since everything he does now is greeted with suspicion and cynicism, a circumstance that was in evidence when he pitched two games with the independent Atlantic League’s Sugar Land Skeeters in 2012.

Sugar Land, where Clemens lived when he first moved to Texas, received a national publicity boost during the Skeeters’ inaugural season when Clemens pitched in two games in August and September 2012. His motive for doing so was suspect, however, as he had just been acquitted of lying to Congress in June and needed positive publicity during his first time on the Hall of Fame ballot. Some media members believed that Clemens was attempting a late-season MLB comeback to push back his Hall of Fame eligibility by five years in the hope his legal troubles would blow over and that he would be a first-ballot selectee. Clemens denied such claims, but his comment – “I probably overextended myself a little bit. I wanted to see where I was at”19 – after his August 25 start for the Skeeters was interpreted to mean that he was gauging his comeback status.

By his second start, on September 7, the Skeeters had signed Clemens’ oldest son, Koby, a catcher, and father and son formed the battery against the Long Island Ducks. This time, the 50-year-old Clemens clearly left open the possibility of a major-league comeback attempt when he said, “I would have to get ready. It would be fun. There’s no reason why I couldn’t do it next year.”20 Though he had pitched well in both games – and no doubt enjoyed being the center of attention for his pitching rather than his court appearances – this was unaffiliated minor-league ball and his fastball had topped out at 88 MPH, which was hardly the dominant stuff he had once had in his prime.

In the end, Clemens chose to go out as a hometown hero and a winner after his appearances for the Skeeters rather than to risk going out as a failure in one last major-league stint. As of 2015, he and Debbie reside in Houston, where they work to benefit children through the Roger Clemens Foundation and where he also serves as a special assistant to the Astros’ general manager.

Clemens’ work with the Astros and his induction into the Red Sox Hall of Fame at Fenway Park on August 14, 2014, prior to Boston’s game against the Astros, show that there is still a place for him in baseball. The March 2015 settlement in the McNamee case may eventually allow Clemens to move past constant discussion of the steroid allegations against him, though the court of public opinion is unlikely to change its judgment. Clemens did not attend the McNamee settlement, saying, “I was not present, nor would have I participated in paying one dime. Everyone knows my stance on the subject.”21 The fact that he had been named on only 37.5 percent of the Hall of Fame ballots in January 2015 demonstrated that the Hall of Fame voters have not changed their stance in regard to Clemens either.

Last revised: November 16, 2015

A version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. For more information, click here.

Sources

Baseballhall.org

Baseball-Reference.com

Boston Globe

CBC Sports

Chicago Tribune

Clemens, Roger, with Peter Gammons. Rocket Man (Lexington, Massachusetts: The Stephen Greene Press, 1987).

ESPN.com

Hartford Courant

Houston.astros.mlb.com

Houston Chronicle

Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader

New York Daily News

New York Times

Pearlman, Jeff. The Rocket That Fell to Earth (New York: Harper, 2009).

Riceowls.com

The Sporting News

Sports Illustrated

Sugarlandskeeters.com

Texassports.com

Thompson, Teri, et al. American Icon (New York: Knopf, 2009).

Yankeeography: Pinstripe Legends, “Roger Clemens,” (2011, A&E Home Video), DVD.

Notes

The 1850s did produce some pitchers who tried to deceive batters with “headwork”- which meant changing arcs and speeds, and sometimes bowling wide ones until the frustrated batter lunged at a pitch. (The latter tactic produced such incredible, documented pitch totals as that in the second Atlantic-Excelsior game of 1860, when the Atlantics’ Matty O’Brien threw 325 pitches in nine innings, Creighton 280 in seven.) On balance, however, the pioneer pitcher and batter were collaborators in putting the ball in play rather than the mortal adversaries they have been ever since Creighton added an illegal but imperceptible wrist snap to his swooping low release.

Known to few fans today and an unlikely, if deserving, candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Jim Creighton was a remarkable embodiment of transecting trends in America and in baseball: cricket vs. baseball, amateur vs. professional, North vs. South, playing by the rules or playing with them. The legion of baseball players followed along the path that Creighton blazed. In life he was a star performer, but it was his startling death that transformed his life into legend.

Born to James and Jane Creighton on April 15, 1841, in Manhattan, Jim moved to Brooklyn with his widowed father in February 1858, when he was age 17. Indeed, his baseball precocity may have secured for him and his father a fine income.1 By the age of 16, his abilities in cricket and baseball had become evident, particularly with the bat. He and some neighborhood youths started a junior baseball club, which they called Young America. It played a handful of games in 1857, and then disbanded. Jim then joined the fledgling Niagaras of Brooklyn, for whom he claimed second base. Playing shortstop was George Flanley, another accomplished young player.

In 1859 the Niagaras challenged the Star Club, then the crack junior team. In the fifth inning of the game, with the Niagaras trailing badly, their regular pitcher, Shields, was replaced by Creighton. Peter O’Brien, captain of the Atlantics, witnessed this game, and “when Creighton got to work,” he observed, “something new was seen in base ball—a low, swift delivery, the ball rising from the ground past the shoulder to the catcher. The Stars soon saw that they would not be able to cope with such pitching. Their captain, after consulting other base ball players present, sent in his wildest pitcher. They, by these tactics, were enabled to win the game, which resulted in the breaking up of the Niagara Club, and Creighton and Flanley at once joined the Stars. The next year he with Flanley joined the Excelsior Club.” 2

How to explain all this movement? That old snake in the garden: money. In the 1860s such restlessness came to be termed revolving; today it would be called free agency. According to the sporting press, Creighton was a high-principled, unassuming youth whose gentlemanly manner and temperate habits were ideal attributes for the amateur age of baseball; all the same, he became (at the same time as Flanley) baseball’s first professional, through under-the-table “emoluments” from the Excelsiors, who were hungry to surpass the rival Atlantics. Just as he changed the game forever more by breaking the rule against the wrist snap, so did he assure that skilled baseball players could never again be content with field exercise followed by groaning banquets.

In 1860 the Excelsiors embarked on the first tour by any baseball club, with stops in Albany, Buffalo, Canada, Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore, among others. That year, in 20 match games, Creighton scored 47 runs while being retired only 56 times. Not once did he strike out. He also started baseball’s first recorded triple play, on September 22, and threw baseball’s first recorded shutout, on November 8.

But the best was to be saved for last. After another championship campaign in 1861, Creighton went through the 1862 season as not only the game’s peerless pitcher but also its top batsman, being retired only four times, either in plate appearances or on the basepaths.

At the same time that Creighton was extending the frontier in baseball he was also a prominent member of the cricketing fraternity. The national sport of England and its boyish variants like wicket had been played in America since the Colonial period, and the first formal American cricket club had taken shape in Boston in 1809 (the Union Club of Philadelphia followed in 1832, and the St. George of New York in 1838). When the all-England team crossed the Atlantic to play against (and drub) selected American clubs at the Elysian Fields and elsewhere, Creighton took part in the contests. In a match of 11 Englishmen against 16 Americans, Creighton clean bowled five wickets out of six successive balls. English Cricketer John Lillywhite, on seeing Creighton pitch a baseball, instantly saw the dilemma that overmatched American batsmen faced: “Why, that man is not bowling, he is throwing underhand. It is the best disguised underhand throwing I ever saw, and might readily be taken for a fair delivery.”3

Cricket continued to be a source of pleasure and profit for Creighton through the next two years, during which he and the Excelsiors were proving themselves to be the top baseball team in the land. Coincidentally, several other Excelsiors were good enough at cricket to play for established clubs – John Whiting, A. T. Pearsall, John Holder, and Asa Brainard, later to become famous as Creighton’s successor with the Excelsiors and as the pitcher for the undefeated Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869. Creighton performed for the American Cricket Club in both 1861 and 1862, joined by Brainard in both years but with John “Death to Flying Things” Chapman of the Atlantics taking the place of the Virginian Pearsall in 1862; he had returned to Richmond when hostilities broke out to enlist in the Confederacy.

In 1861 Brainard and Creighton had jumped the gentlemanly Excelsiors for the working-class Atlantics, no doubt lured once again by covert lucre. After three weeks, without having played a game in the hated rivals’ uniforms, the pair sheepishly returned to the fold.

On October 14, 1862, in a match against the tough Unions of Morrisania, Creighton played the field while Brainard pitched the first five innings. In four trips to the plate, he hit four doubles. In the sixth he came in to pitch, and then in the next inning something happened. John Chapman later wrote: “I was present at the game between the Excelsiors and the Unions of Morrisania at which Jim Creighton injured himself. He did it in hitting out a home run. When he had crossed the [plate] he turned to George Flanley and said, ‘I must have snapped my belt,’ and George said, ‘I guess not.’ It turned out that he had suffered a fatal injury. Nothing could be done for him, and baseball met with a severe loss. He had wonderful speed, and, with it, splendid command. He was fairly unhittable.” 4

Creighton had swung so mighty a blow – in the manner of the day, with hands separated on the bat, little or no turn of the wrists, and incredible torque applied by the twisting motion of the upper body – that it was reported he ruptured his bladder. (Later review of the circumstances, aided by modern medical understanding, pointed to a ruptured inguinal hernia.) After four days of hemorrhaging and agony at his home at 307 Henry Street, Jim Creighton passed away on October 18, at the age of 21 years and 6 months, having given his all to baseball in a final epic blast that Roy Hobbs (the cinematic one, that is) might have envied.

But is that the way it really happened? Creighton’s last run home instantly ascended to the realm of myth, giving baseball its martyred saint. Obsequies included such syrupy statements as: “He was very modest, and never severe in his criticisms of the play of others. He did not care to talk about his own playing, was gentlemanly in his deportment, and very correct in his habits, and to sum up all, was a model player in our National Games [understood here not as a typo, but signifying baseball and cricket]. His death was a loss not only to his club but to the whole base ball community, which needed such as he as a standard of honorable play and ability.”5 Rule-breaking, revolving, sub rosa professionalism, all were now to be dismissed. Icon-making was in full production.

Creighton’s Excelsior teammates mourned his loss at their black-draped clubhouse at 133 Clinton Street and subscribed toward a fine monument over his remains, in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. (Both the clubhouse and the monument are still standing, and represent two of baseball’s oldest and greatest shrines; if you go to Greenwood to pay homage to Creighton, as I did, stop at Henry Chadwick‘s gravesite, too. I signed baseballs to each and placed them on top of their tombs; you’ll know what to do.) But the Excelsiors were not at all sure that it was a good thing for baseball to take the blame for Creighton’s death; this might not promote the healthful properties of the new game. What if his injury had been sustained a day or two earlier, say, at a cricket match?

According to a contemporary account, at the National Association convention of 1862, the Excelsior president, Dr. Jones, “briefly made allusion to the death of Creighton, and paid high tribute to his memory; in doing which he availed himself of the opportunity to correct a mis-statement that has found its way into print in reference to his death being caused by injuries sustained in a baseball match. This, he said, was not so; the injury he received in a cricket match.”6

The battle for the nation’s sporting allegiance was at a crucial point. Cricket had been the favored sport until only recently, when the Excelsior tour and Creighton’s exploits had created a mania for baseball and had elevated it into parity. Now, with Creighton gone and the Excelsiors falling back into the pack, might the British import be restored to primacy? These fears may have been running through the minds of some in the baseball community, already concerned with the new game’s incipient professionalism, and thus may have moved them to propagandize for baseball’s spotlessness, as well as Creighton’s. Jim had carried the game to new heights; in death he would prove even more useful.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
— A. E. Housman

Creighton preserved, even enhanced, his purity by dying young. Celebrated though he was, at the time of his demise he was not the game’s greatest player – by general acclamation the laurels went to his catcher, Joseph B. Leggett. Who hears of him today? (I know, who hears of Creighton – well, at least a thousand for every one that recognizes Leggett’s name.) Creighton died when he was all potential – no possibility of loss through aging, change, even growth. He became a plaster saint onto whom one could project whatever social or moral values one wished to promote in the population at large. Cut off in his prime, he joined other such deified national figures – mostly martial ones like Nathan Hale or Davy Crockett. Those golden boys who die young, from Arthur Rimbaud to Harry Agganis, from Charlie Ferguson to Buddy Holly, from Ernie Davis to Lyman Bostock, are forever young in the land of might have been, safe.

A Johnny Appleseed of baseball through his role in the grand tour of 1860, Creighton won far-flung fame. His death, coming as it did “in action” and at a time when the nation was preoccupied with the destruction of a generation, became emblematic of the losses of the Civil War. At the end of all the carnage, the lamented pitcher even became a symbol of national reconciliation.

On July 5, 1866, the Nationals of Washington visited the Excelsiors, reciprocating the favor of their visit six years earlier. The Brooklyn team gave them a warm reception, capped by a visit to Creighton’s monument (according to the New York Times report, “a silent tear was dropped to the memory of the lamented James Creighton, whose beautiful monument is a prominent feature of the city of the dead.”)7 Two years later, a team in Norfolk, Virginia took the name “Creightons.” And in 1872 a Creighton club was formed in Washington, D.C. Oddly, on this team named in homage to the fallen hero – whose appetite for money had given rise to professionalism and, even in his lifetime, gambling – was a young player named Albert Nichols who in 1877 would be one of the four Louisville players expelled from baseball for game-fixing.

In death Creighton’s real accomplishments rapidly took on an accretion of myth, much as his death itself may have. Baseball, today universally recognized as a vibrant anachronism, was not always a backward-looking game in which the plays and players of yore set unsurpassable standards of excellence. In the 1850s and ’60s, baseball was new, and strictly a “go ahead” business, in the watchword of the day. Creighton’s death implanted the game with nostalgia. More than 20 years after his passing, veteran observers might say without fear of challenge that Keefe and Radbourn were fine pitchers, sure, but they “warn’t no Creighton.” 

Sources

Most of my research into the exploits of baseball’s first great pitcher was conducted at the New York Public Library, where I found news clippings among the Chadwick and Spalding scrapbooks. Odd bits –Clipper and Mercury notes, as well as Will Rankin columns from the Charles Mears Collection at the Cleveland Public Library were also helpful. Retrospective notes about the late lamented Creighton were plentiful in the decade after his death, and beyond. The National Chronicle, The Ball Players’ Chronicle, and the Beadle Guides supplied good material, as did The Spirit of the Times and the Baltimore Sun

Secondary sources provided some additional data, but these are potential land mines for the researcher, as even the basic facts of Creighton’s death were in dispute before the body was laid to rest. Tom Shieber’s excellent reconstruction of the medical facts underlying Creighton’s fatal injury was valuable.

In 1983, if memory serves correctly, Mark Rucker and I were scouring the photo archives of the Northeast, public and private, looking for images of nineteenth century baseball to fill our upcoming “special issue” of The National Pastime. At the Culver Studio in New York City, we came upon several great finds, one of them a unique carte de visite of Jim Creighton posed in the backswing of his pitching motion. Glued to the back of the card was a tattered and torn biographical note, likely issued three or four years after his death and as such a testament to his already legendary status.

Here is the text of that note, transcribed as the fragments permitted; gaps are noted with an ellipsis:

“It would be useless to attempt to do justice to the many qualities that rendered James Creighton so popular a member of the baseball and cricket fraternity. His is a record that […] may well be proud of, and although he was taken away … age of … in his brief career, made such a clear […] has a […] dear to every base ball player in …. [other gaps in paragraph indecipherable].

“James Creighton was born in New York city … a child his parents removed him to Brooklyn, where they […] resided. When base ball was first introduced in this [city?] Creighton took a great interest in the game, and with the assistance of several others, started a little club which was known as the Young America, which, however, lasted but a brief season. He next assisted in starting the Niagara Club, for whom he played second base, George Flanley, now captain of the Excelsior club (18__) [1864?] playing short stop.

“They played many matches in which they were successful, which gave them such a confidence in their prowess that they resolved to play the Star Club, then the crack Junior Club, and it was in this match that Creighton gave evidence of those qualities that afterwards made him so renouned [sic]. On the fifth inning of this game, when the Stars were a number of runs ahead of the Niagara the pitcher of the latter was changed, Jimmy taking that position. Peter O’Brien witnessed this game, and when Creighton got to work something news [sic] was seen in base ball — a low, swift delivery, the ball rising from the ground past the shoulder to the catcher. The Stars soon saw that they would not be able to cope with such pitching. Their captain, after consulting [other?] base ball players present, sent in his wildest pitcher. They, by these tactics, were enabled to win the game, which resulted in the breaking up of the Niagara Club, and Creighton and Flanley at once joined the Stars. The next year he with Flanley joined the Excelsior Club. He was very modest, and never severe in his criticisms of the play of others. He did not care to talk about his own playing, was gentlemanly in his deportment, and very correct in his habits, and to sum up all, was a model player in our national Games. His death was a loss not only to his club but to the whole base ball community, which needed such as he as a standard of honorable play and ability. The Excelsior Club erected a fine monument over his remains, in Greenwood. Members of other clubs attended his funeral, and at times even [wept over?] the grave where poor “Jim” lies. His age at the time of [his death?] was twenty-one years and six months.”

A version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. For more information, click here.

Notes

It wouldn’t be long after the mortar had dried that Griffey would leave for what he had hoped would be a storybook return to his hometown of Cincinnati. But frequent trips to the disabled list stifled the talents of one of the greatest center fielders to play the game, and Griffey’s carefree attitude seemed to dissipate along with his playing time. Still, although it is tempting to contemplate what could have been were it not for those injuries, it is still gratifying to marvel at what was. Griffey’s effortless home-run swings, dazzling center-field catches, and 1,000-watt smile lit up the game for an entire generation of baseball fans, and few would dispute that he saved baseball in Seattle.

George Kenneth Griffey Jr. was born on November 21, 1969, in Donora, Pennsylvania to parents George Kenneth Sr. and Alberta, better known as Birdie. He shared a birthday and a birthplace with Stan Musial, who was born exactly 49 years earlier in Donora, a former steel town 20 miles south of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. Griffey was followed 18 months later by a younger brother, Craig, as well as a sister, Lathesia, two years after Craig.

With Griffey Sr., a baseball star himself, the younger Ken Griffey grew up in major-league clubhouses, often spotted in a miniature Reds uniform at Riverfront Stadium surrounded by stars like Pete Rose and Johnny Bench. For the Griffeys, it was about family time. “My dad didn’t care if we watched him play baseball,” said Junior. “He cared about spending quality time with us.”1

Junior’s time in the clubhouse with his dad would also influence his own eventual path in the major leagues. When Griffey Sr. was with the Yankees, manager Billy Martin requested through one of his coaches that Griffey’s kids be removed from the clubhouse after they’d been playing in the stadium corridors with the other players’ kids before and after a blowout loss. Though 14 kids had joined them, Martin allegedly only wanted the Griffeys gone.2 From that moment, Griffey Jr. had distaste for the Yankees and ultimately vowed never to play for them. “I don’t forget things like that,” he said. “And I never will.”3

It wasn’t long before the standout high-school athlete piqued the interest of major-league scouts. One such scout was Tom Mooney. Mariners’ owner George Argyros had directed general manager Hal Keller to promote his then-chauffeur Mooney to the scouting staff in 1984, and Mooney went on to cover Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana for the Mariners. After an abysmal last-place finish in 1986, the Mariners had the first pick in the 1987 draft, and their selection was still very much in the air. In the spring of 1987 Mariners director of scouting Roger Jongewaard joined Mooney to watch Griffey’s Moeller High School team play in a new community park in Cincinnati. The park had a grove of trees roughly 20 yards beyond the outfield fence. In his second at-bat, Griffey lobbed one high into right field and well over the fence. “Which tree did it hit?” Jongewaard asked. “Roger,” said Mooney, “it went over the trees.”4 High-profile baseball names were also taking note. “I saw Ken Griffey Jr. in high school at Moeller High in Cincinnati and he was the best prospect I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Bobby Cox, then general manager of the Atlanta Braves. `”There was nobody even close to him; he was outstanding.”5

Still, Mariners ownership was hesitant to take on another high schooler after their 1986 first-round pick, Pat Lennon, had flopped. Also, Griffey had failed a psychological test that baseball teams used to forecast a player’s behavior and character. In fact, his test result was the worst the Mariners had ever seen.6 While Griffey was averse to retaking the test, he desperately wanted to be the number one pick in the draft. “The thing in our favor was that he knew everyone would remember who the No. 1 pick was,” Mooney recalled. “He was very proud of that and wanted to show his dad.”7 So Mooney re-administered the test one afternoon at the Griffey house. This time Griffey had an average result. More importantly, though, Mooney saw firsthand in Griffey’s home how he interacted with his mother, grandmother, brother, and friends. He declared him a normal kid, and the endorsement trickled up to the front office. Argyros remained skeptical, but he reluctantly agreed to selecting Griffey after Griffey and his agent agreed to sign for just $160,000. When agent Brian Goldberg told Griffey he might be leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table, Griffey replied, “I’ll make up for that later. Let’s be No. 1.”8

In spite of a seemingly bright future, Griffey struggled with turmoil in his teenage years. “It seemed like everyone was yelling at me in baseball, then I came home and everyone was yelling at me there,” said Griffey. “I got depressed. I got angry. I didn’t want to live.”9 In the summer of 1987, Griffey was playing for the Bellingham Mariners of the short-season Class-A Northwest League. While on the team bus one day, Griffey got into a dispute with the teenage sons of the bus driver. One of them had reportedly expressed racial epithets toward Griffey, while another allegedly threatened him with a gun. Griffey recalled, “Growing up back home I never had to deal with anything like that.”10 When he returned home to Ohio that fall, he was regularly staying out until the early-morning hours, often worrying his mother. Griffey Sr. decided that his son should either pay rent or get his own place. Griffey Jr. recalled, “I was confused. I was hurting and I wanted to cause some hurt for others.” He had contemplated suicide many times, and on one fateful day in January 1988 he followed his thoughts with action. A 17-year-old Griffey ingested 277 aspirin and wound up in an intensive-care unit in Mount Airy, Ohio. Shortly thereafter, a frightened and angry Griffey Sr. arrived at the hospital and a fight commenced. Though Birdie was distressed, she knew the primary source of conflict and angst for Junior originated with Senior and opted to stay out of the fray. Eventually Griffey Jr. moved into his own condo. While the arguments continued between father and son, an increased understanding began to develop between the two of them.

Griffey quickly ascended the minor leagues. His first hit with the Bellingham team in 1987 was a home run, and he finished his first professional season in Low A, batting .313 in 54 games. In 1988, after he clubbed 74 hits in just 58 games for San Bernardino of the Class-A California League, the team retired his jersey. He was promoted to Vermont of the Double-A Eastern League later that season, and the mere 17 games there would be his last as a full-time minor leaguer.

Griffey joined the big-league club in Tempe, Arizona, for spring training in 1989, and it didn’t take long for him to make a splash in the Cactus League. He hit .359 that spring and compiled a 15-game hitting streak. He also set Mariners preseason records in three categories with 32 hits, 49 total bases, and 20 RBIs.11 He had extra incentive to make the Opening Day squad, as his father told him, “This could be my last season, so you had better make the team.”12 The baseball world quickly took note. Prior to the 1989 season, Baseball America ranked Griffey the best number one draft pick since the draft’s inception in 1966. While an Opening Day roster spot seemed like a foregone conclusion, manager Jim Lefebvre couldn’t resist giving Griffey a hard time. “At the end of spring training, he called me into his office,” Griffey recalled. “He goes through, like, five minutes of stuff like ‘These decisions are so tough,’ ‘You know, we’ve got a lot of veterans that have earned their chance,’ then at the end, he sticks out his hand from across his desk and says, ‘You’re my starting center fielder.’ … And he had managed to keep a straight face the whole time.”13

Like Lefebvre, Griffey’s teammates also couldn’t help but give the rookie a razzing about his big promotion. The Mariners had one last exhibition game in Las Vegas prior to the season opener in Oakland, and it happened to fall on April Fools’ Day. “I walk into the clubhouse, and everyone’s talking about a big trade we just made for Dale Murphy. Which would mean he’s our new center fielder, not me,” remembered Griffey. “So, I make that long walk to Lefebvre’s office, and he says, ‘I guess you’ve heard about the big trade we made?’ And again, he goes on and on, then finally he says, ‘Do you know today’s date?’” 14

Griffey made his major-league debut on April 3, 1989, at the Oakland Coliseum, facing Athletics ace Dave Stewart. “We got to Oakland, and man, I’m nervous,” Griffey recalled. “Dave Stewart’s on the mound, and he could have rolled the ball up there, I would have swung.”15 In spite of his nerves, Griffey hammered a 375-foot double to left-center in his first at-bat on the second pitch he saw. “He was scary all night long,” remarked Oakland manager Tony La Russa. “The young man has a world of talent. … He’s going to be something to contend with.”16 One week later, in his home debut at the Kingdome, Griffey hit his first major-league home run, launching the first pitch he saw from White Sox pitcher Eric King into the left-field seats.17 Griffey’s quick success led to a near-instantaneous fan following in Seattle. Just over a month after his debut, a Seattle-area trading-card company launched a Ken Griffey Jr. candy bar. Demand quickly soared, and ultimately nearly one million bars were purchased.18 Ironically, Griffey was allergic to chocolate.19

By late July, Griffey was a leading candidate for the American League Rookie of the Year award, batting .287 with 13 homers and 45 RBIs. But on July 25 he suffered a fracture in his right hand, purportedly after falling while coming out of the shower in his Chicago hotel room.20 However, club officials later admitted that the injury occurred when Griffey slammed his hand in anger against a hotel-room wall during an argument with a girlfriend.21 The incident suggested to Mariners management that Griffey still had a lot of maturing to do. Griffey, who was raised by his mother and grandmother, often struggled with homesickness. “He was the only player I’ve ever dealt with where I’d have to call his mother,” said Mariners GM Woody Woodward.22 He missed nearly a month of playing time as he healed. After returning to the lineup on August 20, Griffey finished out the year with an additional three home runs and 16 RBIs and ended the season batting .264. He finished third in AL Rookie of the Year voting. He did receive one first-place vote, presumably from Bob Finnigan of the Seattle Times, who wrote, “I will vote for Ken Griffey Jr. … He has brought to the Mariners an exuberance long missing. … Seeing Griffey play almost every day, there is no way I cannot vote for him.”23

As the 1989 season came to a close, Griffey’s future in Seattle seemed bright. He pondered the possibility of his father joining him in Seattle. “Nothing would make him happier than to be in one game with me,” said Griffey.24

While Griffey had become known for his swing, he was also increasingly becoming known for his glove. On April 26, 1990, with Randy Johnson on the mound, Yankees right fielder Jesse Barfield, having homered off Johnson in his first at-bat, was aiming for a repeat, and with a loud crack of the bat he launched Johnson’s offering deep to left-center. Griffey ran to the fence, gave it a quick glance, and dug a spike into the soft padding, hoisting his shoulders above the 7-foot-3 wall at Yankee Stadium. With his perfectly timed leap, he robbed Barfield of what would have been his 200th home run. Griffey’s wide grin could be seen even before he landed. His father, who was seated next to Barfield’s wife in the stands, commented, “I think (the smile) was for me.”25

Though the Griffeys had already made history in 1989, becoming the first father-son combination to play in the major leagues in the same season, that storyline was eclipsed in 1990. Griffey Sr. was released by the Reds on August 18 and was picked up by the Mariners on the 29th, a move the Mariners hoped would help the younger Griffey mature. “A big reason we signed his father was so he would be with him,” said Jongewaard.26

On August 31 the two Griffeys became the first father and son tandem in major-league history to play in a game on the same team, with Griffey Sr. in left and Griffey Jr. in center. That evening the two hit back-to-back singles in the bottom of the first. “I wanted to cry or something,” said Junior after the game. “It just seemed like a father-son game, like we were out playing catch in the backyard. But we were actually playing a real game.”27

The fairytale culminated two weeks later on September 14 in a game against the California Angels in Anaheim. In the first inning, Griffey Sr., facing Angels starter Kirk McCaskill, hammered an 0-and-2 pitch 402 feet over the center-field wall. He was greeted at home plate by his son. “I felt for him then,” said Senior. “I knew he would be thinking home run. I could see it in his eyes when I crossed the plate.”28 What Senior saw in Junior’s eyes soon became reality. Junior came to the plate and ran the count to 3-and-0. He was given the green light by third-base coach Bill Plummer and followed his dad’s lead with a 388-foot shot over the left-field wall. Senior reacted with a quiet clap of his hands in the dugout and waited for his son by the bat rack while his teammates climbed the dugout steps for high fives. Junior looked for his father in the dugout, and the two shared a smile and an embrace. “It’s about time,” Griffey Sr. told his son.29 The father-son duo played 51 games together before Senior retired the following year. Many credited Senior’s presence for a change in Junior’s demeanor. One clubhouse aide noted, “He toned down when Senior got there. He went from a brash and outspoken kid to someone more respectful of elders. He really quieted down a lot.”30

Griffey Jr. wrapped up the 1990 season batting .300 with 22 homers and 80 RBIs. He was named to the American League All-Star squad and earned his first Gold Glove. The future appeared bright for the young phenom.

In 1991 Griffey continued to dazzle. He was elected to the American League All-Star squad as the top vote-getter in the junior circuit. Griffey was still finding his way, however, and often struggled with the high expectations set for him and criticism by fans and the media. Just before the All-Star break, Seattle Times columnist Steve Kelley published an open letter to Griffey criticizing him for not giving his all. He accused Griffey of playing to be a multimillionaire rather than a Hall of Famer, not running out groundballs and taking a lackadaisical approach in the outfield. Kelley drew talent comparisons to Willie Mays, citing Mays as a player who always strived to reach his full potential and condemning Griffey as one who squandered his talents.31 Griffey fired back the next day. “People have no idea why I play,” he said. “My thing is I don’t like to be criticized. I hate for people to say I don’t do this right or that right. How do they know?” To fans’ sky-high expectations, Griffey responded, “I’m still learning what I can do. I’m driven. … I’ll never hit 40 home runs in a year. … Numbers are not everything, only if they help the team win.” Griffey was also grappling with the impending reality of his father’s retirement. “That’s why I’ve been struggling, because I don’t want him to go.”32

Griffey silenced his critics in the second half, batting .373 with 13 home runs and 64 RBIs, and he had much more fun doing it. He credited teammate Harold Reynolds with his turnaround. “We were in Toronto right before the break and Harold sat me down,” Griffey said. “He told me I wasn’t having any fun. He was right.”33 Griffey took home another Gold Glove as well as the American League Silver Slugger award that season after batting .327. For the first time in franchise history, the Mariners finished with a winning record. Griffey was having more fun off the field as well. After the season he appeared, in animated form, on an episode of The Simpsons titled “Homer at the Bat.” He also collaborated with Seattle-area rapper Kid Sensation to co-write and record a rap song titled “The Way I Swing.”

By 1992 there was little doubt as to who was the centerpiece of the Mariners. Third baseman Mike Blowers noted, “There was a lot of pressure on him, not just fans, but from veterans in the clubhouse.”34 The pressures of big-league stardom coupled with a tumultuous ownership group constantly threatening to sell or relocate the team were difficult for a sensitive Griffey. Still, he managed another stellar season, hitting .308 with 27 homers and 103 RBIs, and winning another Gold Glove. He was also the MVP of the All-Star game, ending a triple short of a cycle. Opposing NL manager Bobby Cox marveled, “He doesn’t have a ceiling that I can see.”35

After the season finished, Griffey married his girlfriend of three years, Melissa Gay, a Seattle-area native, in a ceremony in Kirkland, Washington.

In 1993 Griffey’s power began to take center stage. He clubbed his 100th homer on June 15, becoming the sixth-youngest player to reach that milestone. After being named to his fourth consecutive All-Star team, he became the first player to homer off the B&O warehouse in Baltimore’s Camden Yards, hitting a 445-foot shot during the Home Run Derby.36 On July 28 he tied the major-league record for consecutive home-run games, homering for an eighth consecutive day, this time into the third deck of the Kingdome. Griffey finished the season leading the American League in total bases (359), winning his second Silver Slugger Award, and finishing fifth in MVP voting. He added a fourth Gold Glove to his trophy case.

In January 1994 Griffey became a father when Melissa gave birth to a baby boy, Trey Kenneth Griffey, at a Seattle-area hospital. “He has a full head of hair,” said a proud Griffey. “I mean, he came out with an Afro.”37 Those around him noted the calming influence Griffey’s family had on him, and his family became the center of his world. “They’re the two most important things in my life,” Griffey said of Melissa and Trey.38

Griffey’s power streak continued in 1994. He clubbed his 30th home run of the season into the Kauffman Stadium fountains in Kansas City on June 17, tying Babe Ruth’s record for home runs before July 1. “That’s one of the hardest hit balls I’ve ever seen,” remarked Seattle manager Lou Piniella.39 Griffey went on to surpass Ruth’s record with home runs on June 22 and June 24. He was named to his fifth consecutive All-Star squad, shattering Rod Carew’s record for All-Star votes (4,292,740 in 1977) with a staggering 6,079,688-vote tally.40 True to form, Griffey credited his father for the votes. “To have his name. … It was a little bit easier for people to look at me and recognize what my dad has done.”41 Then the players’ strike put an end to Griffey’s stellar season. As baseball shut its doors on August 11, Griffey finished with 40 home runs, the highest tally in the AL. He added another Gold Glove and Silver Slugger to his résumé and finished second in AL MVP voting. He also bolstered his acting résumé, making cameos in the movie Little Big League and the hit TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Griffey ventured into the video-game business, partnering with Mariners owner Nintendo to develop a series of video games bearing his name.

After baseball resumed in 1995, the Mariners went on to have a season permanently etched in franchise lore, and Griffey played a central role. On May 26, in a game against Baltimore in the Kingdome, he made a catch that would feature in highlight reels for decades to come, scaling the center-field wall to make a backhanded grab of a Kevin Bass bid for an extra-base hit. The dazzling play would ultimately become known as the “Spiderman” catch. However, Griffey suffered a broken left wrist on the play and missed 73 games. He returned to the roster on August 15, and on August 24 he delivered one of the most crucial home runs of the season. The Mariners were in the heat of the wild card race and were trailing the Yankees 7-6 in the bottom of the ninth. After Joey Cora hit a single to tie it, Griffey strode to the plate with two outs and clubbed a two-run homer off closer John Wetteland. From there, the Mariners went on a tear through late August and September, securing their first-ever AL West division championship.42

The 1995 ALDS pitted the Mariners against the wild-card champion Yankees. The Mariners had home-field advantage, meaning they would open the series in the Bronx (prior to 1998, the ALDS had a 2-3 rather than a 2-2-1 format). Game One went to the men in pinstripes, though Griffey gave a solid effort, going 3-for-5 with two home runs. The Mariners fell to the Yankees again in Game Two in a heartbreaking 15-inning marathon, losing 7-5 in spite of Griffey’s clubbing another home run, going 2-for-6. The series headed back to Seattle, with the Yankees needing just one win for the series victory. Back on their home Astroturf, the Mariners battled back, winning the next two games and forcing a decisive Game Five.

The Yankees’ Game One victor David Cone held the Mariners to two runs through seven innings, leaving them trailing, 4-2. Griffey faced Cone with one out in the eighth, sending a fastball into the second deck of the Kingdome, for his fifth homer of the series – a division series record. The Yankees’ lead was cut to 4-3, and Seattle tied the tense contest to send Cone to the showers before the inning ended. After dramatic relief appearances by the Yankees’ Jack McDowell and the Mariners’ Randy Johnson, the Mariners fell behind 5-4in the 11th. In the bottom of the inning a confident Griffey came to the plate with Joey Cora on base. He ripped a McDowell fastball into center for a single, advancing Cora to third. Edgar Martinez came to the plate and bashed a fastball into the left-field corner. Cora scored easily to tie the game, and all 57,411 eyes in the Kingdome turned to Griffey, who represented the winning run. “I saw that (Gerald) Williams was playing toward left-center,” Griffey said. “When I saw the ball land near the line, I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could. When I got to third, Sammy (Perlozzo) said, ‘Keep going!’ So I did.”43 Griffey slid home safely and was quickly dogpiled by his teammates as they took home the Mariners first-ever division series championship. Griffey’s smile was so bright that it could be seen from the Kingdome rafters. The Mariners went on to lose to the Indians in six games during the ALCS, but their division championship remains etched in fans’ memories as the quintessential Mariners moment.

The excitement continued that offseason for Griffey when he and Melissa added a daughter to their family. When Taryn Kennedy Griffey was born, her father noted, “We’ve added a track star to the family,” he said. “I can tell.”44

On January 31, 1996, Griffey became baseball’s highest-paid player when he signed a four-year, $34 million deal. He clubbed his 200th homer on May 21 at just 26 years old. He enjoyed a huge game against the Yankees on May 24, hitting three homers, scoring five runs, and driving in six. He finished the 1996 season fourth in AL MVP voting, adding another All Star selection (7), Gold Glove (7), and Silver Slugger (4) to his résumé. His popularity soared, and a Nike campaign promoting Griffey as a presidential candidate was ubiquitous. “Griffey in ’96” began appearing on TV commercials, T-shirts, and even bumper stickers.45

In 1997 construction began on a new Mariners ballpark. Before ground had even been broken, the stadium was being billed as “The House That Griffey Built.” By design, Griffey was the only player to fly up for the groundbreaking ceremony during spring training. “It was the right thing for me,” he said. “I thought it was important that I go.”46

Griffey led the Mariners to their second American League West Division championship in the 1997 season. He scored an American League-leading 125 runs and bashed a staggering 56 home runs, while leading the majors with 147 RBIs. In addition to garnering what was becoming his standard All-Star-Gold Glove-Silver Slugger trifecta, he was named the unanimous MVP of the American League, snagging all 28 first-place votes. For Griffey, the award was vindication against his toughest critics. “All my life in professional baseball, people said, ‘He could be better,’” Griffey said. “This award means a lot.”47

On April 13, 1998, Griffey hit his 300th homer. Only Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx had reached this milestone at a younger age. That same season, he left Foxx in the dust, hitting his 350th home run on September 25 and reaching that plateau at nearly a year younger than Foxx was at the time he achieved it. Griffey was named to his ninth All-Star team in July, this time at the hitter-friendly Coors Field in Denver, and disappointed fans when he opted not to participate in the Home Run Derby. He cited a plethora of reasons, including the Mariners’ travel schedule, a sore wrist, and a poor performance in the prior year’s derby. Yet after the boos rained down over him as he stepped out for American League batting practice, Griffey was taken aback. “I don’t like to get booed,” he said.48 Minutes later, Griffey re-emerged from the clubhouse with his signature backwards cap and a bat in his hand, ready to participate. “If they want to see me in the home-run competition, the fans, there’s 4 million reasons why I did it, for them.”49 Griffey made it worth their while, hitting eight homers in the first round, eight more in the second, then beating Jim Thome in the final round, securing the Home Run Derby crown. Griffey finished the 1998 season by matching his prior-season home run total of 56. He finished fourth in AL MVP voting.

The 1999 season marked the end of an era in Seattle, in what would turn out to be more ways than one. In July the Mariners moved out of the Kingdome – their home since the franchise’s inception in 1977. Griffey hit the last home run ever to be hit in the Kingdome, on June 27. He tallied 198 home runs in the Kingdome, more than any other player. He was selected to his 10th All-Star Game in July, and won his second straight Home Run Derby title, this time at Fenway Park. He moved into his new home, Safeco Field, two days later. Many were concerned that Griffey’s offense would be stifled in the new, larger outdoor stadium, and that Griffey – whose contract was set to expire after the following season – would flee to more hitter-friendly pastures. In his 42 games at Safeco that summer, Griffey hit .278 with 14 homers.

Griffey was one of 100 players nominated as potential vote-getters for the All-Century team in July. During the 1999 World Series, it was announced that Griffey was one of 30 players selected to the team.

In November the Mariners announced that Griffey had turned down an eight-year deal worth in excess of $135 million, and had requested to be traded to a team closer to his hometown of Orlando, Florida. Griffey, a 10-and-5 player with 10 years of major-league service and five with the same team, had the power to reject any trade the Mariners proposed. In December Griffey announced that his short list had narrowed to just one team: the Cincinnati Reds.

On February 10, 2000, Griffey’s day of reckoning had arrived. He was traded to the Reds for pitcher Brett Tomko, outfielder Mike Cameron, infielder Antonio Perez, and minor-league pitcher Jake Meyer. The Reds signed Griffey to a nine-year, $112.5 million contract. “Well, I’m finally home,” Griffey said in his first press conference at Cinergy Field. As he had in the past, Griffey left money on the table for what he felt was the right decision. “This is my hometown. I grew up here. It doesn’t matter how much money you make; it’s where you feel happy. Cincinnati is the place where I thought I would be happy.”

In Griffey’s first season with the Reds, he hit 40 home runs and drove in 118 runs. He also reached the 400-homer milestone on April 10, his father’s 50th birthday. While few would have expected it, 2000 would turn out to be his best Reds season. Later in the season, during a confrontation with broadcaster Marty Brennaman, Griffey admitted to having played hurt all year with a sore hamstring.50 It was a harbinger of things to come.

On Opening Day 2001, Griffey sat out for the first opener in his career with a sore hamstring. He went on the disabled list on April 29. In July Griffey’s former teammate and then-ESPN analyst Harold Reynolds criticized the Reds’ decision to play a recovering Griffey when they were out of contention. “They gave me the green light to play,” Griffey retorted. “If I blow out, I blow out. But I am going to do it under my own terms.”51

Six games into the 2002 season, the Reds were facing the Expos at home when Griffey was caught in a rundown between third and home. He slipped and twisted his right knee, tearing his patella. Season-ending surgery was contemplated, but Griffey decided to rehab instead. He played 70 games that season, hitting .264 with eight home runs.

One bright spot for Griffey that season was the welcoming of adopted son Tevin Kendall in May. Since Melissa had been adopted, the Griffeys always wanted to adopt a child into their family. It was challenging finding the right match, as prospective birth parents were trying to extract favors from the Griffeys once they discovered their identities. However, this time it worked out perfectly, and the Griffeys became a family of five, with all three children sharing the same initials.52

Ugly rumors plagued Griffey the following offseason, with reports that Reds GM Jim Bowden and manager Bob Boone were conspiring to trade Griffey, considering his acquisition a flop. Griffey, always sensitive to criticism, responded with a combination of the silent treatment and dismissive defiance: “I don’t play for a GM, I don’t play for a manager. I don’t play for an owner. I love playing baseball because I love playing baseball.”53

Griffey’s bad luck continued in 2003; on July 17 he suffered a season-ending injury rounding first base on a double. He underwent surgery to repair a ruptured ankle tendon. It was the latest in a laundry list of injuries that year that included a dislocated shoulder, which would be surgically repaired in August, tears to both hamstrings, and the aggravation of his previously torn patella.54

Griffey returned in 2004, and on Father’s Day, with both his parents in attendance, he hit his 500th home run, against the Cardinals in St. Louis.55 On August 4 Griffey tore his hamstring while making a sliding play in the outfield. He had season-ending surgery on August 16.

Griffey bounced back in 2005, hitting 35 home runs with 92 RBIs. He was ultimately sidelined by an ankle injury in September, but won the National League Comeback Player of the Year Award, voted in by the fans. “This award is one I’ll cherish forever,” he said.56

As the 2007 season commenced, Griffey asked Commissioner Bud Selig for permission to wear Jackie Robinson’s retired number 42, 60 years to the day after Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. He had also sought the approval of Robinson’s widow, Rachel. Ten years earlier, Griffey had worn number 42 with the encouragement of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, to honor Robinson on the day his number was retired by all of baseball. Selig agreed, and extended the opportunity to all other major leaguers as well. “This is a wonderful gesture on Ken’s part and a fitting tribute to the great Jackie Robinson,” said Selig.57 Several other players followed suit, and the practice soon became a tradition for players, coaches, and umpires around the league each April 15, Jackie Robinson Day in baseball. The idea originated with Griffey, who said, “It’s just my way of giving that man his due respect.”58

In June, Griffey returned to Safeco Field for the first time since his trade. He was ambivalent about his return, fearing he might be greeted with a chorus of boos.59 On June 23 the Mariners held a pregame ceremony to welcome back Griffey and his family. A sellout crowd greeted him with a four-minute standing ovation; there wasn’t a boo heard in the house. The normally stoic Griffey let his guard down during his speech, and appeared to choke back tears. “Never could I imagine it would be like this coming back,” he said in his speech. “I met my beautiful wife here. Two out of my three kids were born here. This place will be home. I didn’t realize how much I missed being in Seattle.”60 After a sentimental weekend, the wheels were put in motion for a Seattle return.

Before that, though, Griffey would make a pit stop with the Chicago White Sox. After hitting his 600th home run on June 9, 2008, with the Reds, Griffey was dealt to the White Sox at the July 31 trade deadline with cash for pitcher Nick Masset and infielder Danny Richar. The White Sox made the playoffs that year, partly due to a spectacular defensive play Griffey made during a tie-breaking 163rd game on September 30 against the Minnesota Twins at US Cellular Field. Griffey threw a strike from center to home in the fifth inning and the Twins’ Michael Cuddyer was out at the plate. The White Sox won, 1-0, advancing to the Division Series, which they lost to the Tampa Bay Rays in four games.

A free agent after the 2008 season, Griffey was agonizing over his choice between joining the Braves and the Mariners. Though initially leaning towards Atlanta, which was closer to his Orlando home, ultimately, he chose Seattle. He was reportedly persuaded by Willie Mays, the man who was the reason he wore number 24 with the Mariners. Mays emphasized Griffey’s legacy with the Mariners franchise, as did Griffey’s daughter Taryn, who urged him to go to the Mariners and never have any regrets about how he finished his career.61

Griffey made a strong impact on the Mariners’ clubhouse in 2009, and his lighthearted antics were reminiscent of his younger self. He could be found playing pranks on teammates during road trips or teasing and tickling a normally composed Ichiro Suzuki during batting practice. “His humor and presence is something I feel only he can do,” Ichiro said. “Everybody considers him to be a genius as a player, but he’s a genius in that respect as well.”62

Though his bat was fairly quiet in 2009 – he hit just .214 – the Mariners brought Griffey back in 2010 largely for his clubhouse influence. On May 10 a report surfaced that Griffey had missed an at-bat because he was asleep in the clubhouse.63 Manager Don Wakamatsu had also been limiting Griffey’s playing time due to poor performance. The storybook return began to appear tarnished. On June 2, in the midst of a four-game set at home versus the Twins, Griffey quietly packed up and left in the middle of the night, driving cross-country back to his home in Orlando. He issued a statement through the team, “While I feel I am still able to make a contribution on the field … I will never allow myself to become a distraction.”64 With that, Griffey had played his last major-league game.

Griffey finished his career with 2,781 hits, including 630 home runs. He was a 13-time All-Star and garnered 10 Gold Gloves, seven Silver Sluggers, and one AL MVP Award. He would later be inducted into both the Mariners’ and Reds’ Halls of Fame. While Griffey’s on-field accolades speak for themselves, he considered his proudest accomplishment in life being a good father. He could often be seen at the University of Arizona cheering on his son Trey, a football star, and Taryn, a basketball standout. Griffey is also a pilot and a photography enthusiast. As former teammate Harold Reynolds explained, “I have always believed that Junior’s No. 1 goal in life was to be a dad like his dad. That’s what he wanted to do, more than hitting all the home runs and more than going to the Hall of Fame. Junior loves his kids.”65

Last revised: November 9, 2015

A version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. For more information, click here.

Notes

Although his play at times achieved the spectacular, Hooper eschewed flamboyance for simplicity, exaggeration for modesty. Possessing neither the crafted appeal of Christy Mathewson nor the raw excitement of Babe Ruth, Hooper practiced his profession quietly, skillfully, and confidently. More Everyman than Superman, he is a mirror of the game and its human touches in ways that his myth-encrusted contemporaries never can be. Though he never led the American League in any major statistical category, Hooper crafted a solid statistical resume that included 2,466 hits, 1,429 runs, and 1,136 career walks, good for a lifetime .281 batting average and .368 on-base percentage. In 92 career World Series at-bats, Hooper batted a solid .293; in the 1915 Fall Classic he batted .350 with two home runs.

Harry Bartholomew Hooper was born on August 24, 1887 in California’s Santa Clara Valley, the fourth and youngest child of Joseph and Mary Katherine Keller Hooper. In 1876, Joseph had left Canada’s Prince Edward Island, slowly working his way westward through a series of jobs before landing in California, where he met Mary Keller, a German immigrant working as a housekeeper, and married her in 1878. Growing up on the family ranch, Harry first honed his athletic skills by tossing fresh eggs against the side of the family’s barn. This merited little reaction from his parents, and Harry spent more time throwing various objects, challenging himself in distance and accuracy.

His first formal exposure to nine-man-a-side baseball came during a trip East with his mother. While visiting her family in Central Pennsylvania, Harry watched with great interest the Lock Haven team play. He capped the trip with a visit to relatives living in New York City, and a chance to see his first Major League game. The Brooklyn Bridegrooms played the Louisville Colonels, and although the home team lost, Hooper’s dedication and love of the game solidified. Just before he and his mother began the long journey back to California, he received from his uncle something he later called “the best of all” his boyhood treasures: a bat, ball, and well-worn fielder’s glove.

Harry Hooper’s formal baseball career began when he left the family’s farm in August, 1902, for the high school attached to Saint Mary’s College of California, then located in Oakland. Although Hooper originally arrived for a two-year secondary program, the Christian Brothers who ran the school quickly recognized his mathematical aptitude, and encouraged his parents to consider allowing him to complete the full baccalaureate program, which would stretch his time at the school from two years to five. Consistent with the emerging sense of education as a means to economic opportunity, Harry’s parents agreed to the school’s request. At roughly the same time, he earned a place on the secondary school’s new baseball team.

Working his way up through the four teams at the school, Hooper earned a place as a starting pitcher on the junior varsity as a collegiate sophomore, but his stature—he stood slightly over five feet tall at the time—and pitching velocity limited his chance to earn a spot on the varsity squad. The top team’s head coach suggested a switch to an outfield position, which Hooper accepted. It assured him the starting left-field spot on the College’s varsity nine at the start of the 1907 season, a team regarded by many as one of collegiate baseball’s finest in the pre-World War I era. With a roster that contained five future big leaguers, Hooper played alongside catcher Eddie Burns, infielder Ed Hallinan, pitcher Harry Krause, and outfielder Charlie Enwright, on a team that completed a 27-game season with a record of 26 wins and one tie.

Among that year’s victims were Stanford University, the University of California, a Pacific Coast League all-star team, and the Chicago White Sox who the Phoenix faced in an exhibition game prior to the start of the major-league season.

Hitting for a .371 average during his senior season, Hooper drew the attention of several organized ball representatives, and signed his first contract—for 10 days—to play with the Alameda Grays club of the independent California League, where he teamed with outfielder Duffy Lewis for the first time; the two had been schoolmates but not teammates at St. Mary’s. Ironically, the short length of the contract was Hooper’s idea. Focused primarily on his engineering career, he agreed to play only for the time between the end of the Phoenix’s season and his graduation date. His strong play during the short stretch earned Hooper a 1908 contract with the Sacramento Senators, also of the California League, which he agreed to accept with the proviso that Sacramento’s owner arrange a surveying position for him, which was done.

Late in the 1908 season, after hitting .347, scoring 39 runs, and stealing 34 bases in 68 games, Hooper earned the tag, “Ty Cobb of the State League,” and an offer from his manager, Charlie Graham, who also served as a scout for the Boston Red Sox. Initially when approached about the possibility Hooper recalled saying he thought baseball “was a sideline to engineering to make enough money for a living.” Graham persisted and Hooper agreed to meet with Red Sox owner John Taylor, who soon would be in the area to observe several prospects for his team. At their meeting at a Sacramento saloon, the two agreed to a contract that would pay the 21-year-old Hooper $2,800 for the 1909 season, approximately $1,000 more than he would have made combined through his California baseball play and his job with the Western Pacific Railroad.

Hooper’s career with the Boston Red Sox began on March 4, 1909, when he arrived in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the team’s training camp. The Red Sox of 1909 represented a team in transition. Following the demise of the championship clubs of 1903 and 1904, owner Taylor aspired to build a pennant contender with young pitchers, power hitting, and speed on the bases. The rotation included Smoky Joe Wood, Eddie Cicotte, and Frank Arellanes. Other than Heinie Wagner (shortstop), no member of the squad had two complete seasons with the team.

Hooper’s major-league debut came on April 16, in Washington, D.C., during the team’s second series of the season. Called upon to start in left field and bat seventh, Hooper lined a single in his first at-bat that also notched his first RBI. That day he went 2-for-3 at the plate, with “a clever steal in the ninth,” three flies caught including “a superb running back catch” that saved a triple, and one assist when he threw out Gabby Street at home. During the first month of the season, he played occasionally, always fielding well.

A natural right-handed hitter and fielder while at St. Mary’s, the 5-feet-10, 168-pound Hooper experimented with switch hitting. Playing in an era when manufacturing runs one at a time mattered more than sheer power, Hooper decided to take advantage of his abilities and reduce one step from the batter’s box to first base by making the move to full-time left-handed hitting. His hard work and dependable play, especially in the field, made personnel decisions easier for the club’s management. By the season’s midpoint, Hooper firmly held the fourth outfield position, and often entered games in the late innings because of his defensive skills. The squad finished the year in third place, 9½ games behind the Detroit Tigers, but also 25 games over .500. Hooper recorded a .282 average in 81 games, while completing the transition from one side of the plate to the other.

The Red Sox that assembled in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in March, 1910 had reason to be optimistic about the coming season. Most of the lineup returned, with Hooper virtually assured one outfield spot. With Tris Speaker secure in center, the only question was whether it would be right or left on a day-to-day basis. The arrival of another veteran of the St. Mary’s Phoenix in camp, George “Duffy” Lewis, largely settled the issue. The outfield trio of Tris Speaker, Harry Hooper in right, and Duffy Lewis in left made its debut on April 27. Through the course of that season—when they hit a combined .296—and the next five, the “Million Dollar Outfield” played more than 90 percent of Boston’s games. After batting .267 in 1910, Hooper improved to an impressive .311 average in 1911, scored 93 runs, and posted a .399 on-base percentage. The club, however, failed to finish better than fourth in either season.

Despite his .242 batting average, Hooper was an integral piece of the 1912 pennant-winners, ranking second on the team with 98 runs scored, 66 walks, 29 stolen bases, and 12 triples (tied with Speaker). In that year’s World Series against the New York Giants, Hooper elevated his play, batting .290 for the Series and making several crucial plays at bat and in the field. In Game One, Hooper rapped a game-tying double in the seventh inning to secure a 4-3 Boston victory. After taking a three-games-to-one lead in the Series, the Red Sox saw the Giants even things at three games each. There was one tie game.

Despite numerous baserunners for both teams, the Giants held a slim 1-0 lead in the seventh inning of the deciding Game Eight at Fenway Park, which would have been greater if not for Hooper’s catch of Larry Doyle’s fifth-inning drive to the right-field fence, robbing him of a home run. The game was tied 1-1 after nine and the Giants scored a run in the top of the 10th. In the bottom half, after pinch-hitter Clyde Engle reached second when Fred Snodgrass muffed a fly ball, Hooper followed with “a sure triple” that Snodgrass caught, but it advanced Engle to third. After a walk to Steve Yerkes, Speaker, after receiving new life when his foul pop-up near first base was allowed to drop, singled in Engle with the tying run. Yerkes took third on the play, Speaker took second on the throw home. After an intentional walk to Lewis, Larry Gardner‘s sacrifice fly won the World Series for the Red Sox.

Hooper’s “paralyzing catch” in the final game earned him accolades in the press, but John McGraw paid an even higher compliment when he labeled the Californian, “one of the most dangerous hitters in a pinch the game has ever known.” In the next day’s Boston Globe, Speaker called Hooper’s catch “the greatest, I believe, that I ever saw.”

Coming off the championship year, Hooper married Esther Henchy, a 20-year-old banker’s daughter from nearby Capitola, California, but remained dedicated to his offseason training. Although the Red Sox struggled as a team in 1913 and finished second in 1914, Hooper personally improved his offensive output, hitting .288 in 1913 and scoring 100 runs, and batting .258 with 85 runs scored in 1914. On May 30, 1913, Hooper hit home runs to lead off both games of a double-header, a feat not equaled until Rickey Henderson did it 80 years later.

In 1915 the Red Sox returned to championship form and began a stretch of success where the team played the best, and most consistent, baseball in the major leagues. Between 1914 and 1917, the team won at least 90 games each season, and likely would have done so again in 1918 if World War I had not shortened the season to end in early September. The successes came through the team’s effective use of the strategies of the era. Rather than power hitting and home runs, the Red Sox won by manufacturing runs, playing strong defense, and, most of all, getting solid pitching. In fact, during the four-year stretch, the team never featured more than one hitter with an average of .300 or higher. As Hooper wrote, “With the best pitching staff and the best defensive outfield…we played for one run—tried to get on the scoreboard first and then increase our lead.”

In 1915, Hooper’s average dipped to .235, but he compensated by collecting 89 walks, fifth best in the league, and posting a respectable .342 on-base percentage. Once again, he saved his best work for the World Series, when he helped Boston finish off the Philadelphia Phillies in five games with a .350 batting average and two home runs, both of which came in the final game of the Series, making Hooper only the second player in World Series history to homer twice in the same game. (Both homers bounced into Baker Bowl’s temporary stands; today they would be considered ground-rule doubles.)

After another world championship in 1916, and a disappointing second-place finish nine games behind the Chicago White Sox the following year, Hooper’s Red Sox entered the 1918 season in a tenuous position. Although Boston’s roster suffered fewer losses to the military and war-related industries than other teams, the lineup managed a woeful team average of .249, the third-worst in the American League; Hooper posted a .289 batting average and a .405 slugging percentage (second on the team to Babe Ruth in both categories). He also helped the team to another pennant in a war-shortened season (126 games) that ended with a dramatic labor challenge during the World Series.

During the Fall Classic against the Chicago Cubs, Hooper demonstrated his clear thinking and effective leadership, representing his fellow players’ concerns in a manner that preserved the integrity of baseball, while also exposing some of the inherent weaknesses of baseball’s ruling system. Due to wartime travel restrictions, the teams played the Series in a 3-4 format, with the first games in Chicago (ironically at Comiskey Park). The rest of the games took place at Fenway Park. The Red Sox returned home enjoying a 2-1 lead, but all was not well. For several war-related reasons, attendance and gate receipts during the regular season and World Series in 1918 fell well below pre-war levels. However, at this time the players’ postseason bonuses came from gate receipts and the owners would not guarantee a minimum payment. The two teams, traveling on the same train, appointed four representatives, including Hooper, to speak to the governing National Commission and press their case. Specifically, the teams sought a guarantee of $2,600 each for the winners and $1,400 for the losers, with 10% going as a donation to the Red Cross. The National Commission begrudgingly listened, and agreed to consider the matter, but made no promises.

With Boston leading three games to one, the players delayed the start of the fifth game by more than one hour in an attempt to secure concessions from the Commission. Although Hooper negotiated an end to the strike, and secured a verbal promise from Ban Johnson of no reprisals, he forever regretted not securing the guarantee in writing. After Boston won the Series 4-2, its last for 86 years, the players received the smallest financial awards in World Series history ($1,108.45 for each Red Sox player and $574.62 for each Cub). In December the Boston players all received letters from John A. Heydler, acting president of the National League and a Commission member. It informed them that, “Owing to the disgraceful conduct of the players in the strike during the Series…(the players) would be fined the World Series emblems that were traditionally awarded to the winners.” Although a modest symbol, the emblems—really lapel pins—became a symbol of the lack of respect accorded the players in the years before a strong players union and free agency.

After a .312 season in 1920, Harry Hooper’s career with the Boston Red Sox ended on March 4, 1921, when Boston owner Harry Frazee thwarted a holdout by trading him to the Chicago White Sox for outfielder/first-baseman Shano Collins and outfielder Nemo Leibold. Hooper posted some of the best offensive seasons of his career during his five years with the White Sox. In 1921 he batted .327; the following year he notched career highs in runs scored (111), home runs (11) and RBIs (80). In 1924, he posted a career-best .328 batting average and .413 on-base percentage. In 1925, his last major-league season, Hooper batted .265. Playing in his final major league game on October 4, 1925, Hooper went 1-for-4 with a double.

Upon his retirement, Hooper returned to California and worked in real estate for one year before accepting a job as player-manager with Mission (San Francisco) Bells in the Class-AA Pacific Coast League. Hooper lasted one year with the club, batting .282 in 81 games and guiding the Missions to a disappointing 86-110 record. Let go after the season, Hooper returned to the real estate business for a few years while also playing minor league baseball in nearby Marysville and Santa Cruz, then became coach of the Princeton baseball team in September, 1930. Hooper stayed at the post for two years, posting a 21-30-1 record before Depression-era finances forced the college to cut back on Hooper’s salary, leading to his resignation. He once again returned to the real estate business in California, survived the Depression, and became wealthy in his old age. He also served as postmaster of Capitola for over 20 years. His greatest honor came in 1971, when the Veteran’s Committee elected him to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hooper was also one of the inaugural inductees when the St. Mary’s College Athletic Hall of Fame was established in 1973; his son John, a center fielder during the 1940s, was inducted four years later. Harry Hooper died at the age of 87 on December 18, 1974, following a stroke. He was laid to rest in an above-ground crypt in the center of in Aptos, California. He was survived by two sons and a daughter. 

An updated version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. It originally appeared “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac, 2006), edited by David Jones.

Sources

This biography is drawn from Paul Zingg’s book Harry Hooper: An American Baseball Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

Unfortunately, after Cleveland traded him to the Chicago White Sox, Jackson’s career ended ignominiously because of his involvement in the infamous Black Sox Scandal of 1919. He was expelled from the game in his prime, and for that reason he has never received a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown.

Joseph W. Jackson was born on July 16, 1887, in rural Pickens County, South Carolina.2 His father, George, was a laborer who settled in nearby Greenville soon after Joe’s birth and found employment at Brandon Mill, a textile factory that paid $1.25 a day. Brandon Mill stood on the west side of Greenville, and there George Jackson and his wife, Martha, set up a household in one of the small, company-owned houses. Joe, the oldest of eight children, began working at the mill at age 6 or 7. He never attended school, but he did learn to play baseball. Brandon Mill sponsored a team that faced squads from other mills and factories, and Joe earned a spot in the lineup when he was 13 years old. He had his father’s unusually long arms and he excelled at throwing and hitting a ball. He soon became renowned throughout the Carolinas as an outfielder, pitcher, and home-run hitter, which were known throughout the mill league as “Saturday Specials.”

A local fan named Charlie Ferguson made bats in his spare time, and he chose a four-by-four beam from the north side of a particularly strong hickory tree to make one for young Joe Jackson. It measured 36 inches long and weighed about 48 ounces. Ferguson darkened the bat with tobacco juice; Joe called it “Black Betsy” and eventually took it to the major leagues.

Joe played for factory teams and semipro clubs until 1908, when Greenville obtained a franchise in the Carolina Association, a new Class D league on the lowest level of Organized Baseball. He signed a contract with the Greenville Spinners for $75 a month. Jackson, who was making about $45 a month between working at the mill and playing ball, reportedly told manager Tom Stouch, “I’ll play my head off for $75 a month.”3 Although Jackson later learned to trace his own name, he signed his first professional contract with an “X.”

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

The strong, agile 20-year-old quickly became the biggest star in the Carolina Association, leading the league with a .346 average, making phenomenal throws and catches in center field, and serving as mop-up pitcher. A reporter for the Greenville News tagged him with his nickname that season, when Joe played a game in his stocking feet because his new baseball shoes were not yet broken in. For the rest of his life he was known as Shoeless Joe Jackson. He didn’t like his nickname and later told Atlanta reporter Furman Bisher, “I’ve read and heard every kind of yarn imaginable on how I got the name. … I never played the outfield barefoot, and that was the only day I ever played in my stockinged feet, but it stuck with me.”4

He also gained a wife that year, marrying 15-year-old Katie Wynn on July 19, 1908. She had brown hair and brown eyes, and some education, since she could read and write. She remained married to Joe for 43 years, and until the day Joe died she wrote his letters, managed his money, and read his contracts in and out of baseball.

In August 1908 Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack bought Jackson’s contract for a reported $900.5 Joe was reluctant to go north, and Greenville manager Stouch accompanied him on the train ride to Philadelphia. Joe made his first major-league appearance on August 25, and singled in his first trip to the plate. However, Joe was homesick, and three days later he boarded a train back to Greenville. He returned in early September, but Philadelphia, a city of two million people, was frightening to the illiterate country boy. Jackson jumped the team once more before the 1908 season ended, finishing his first major-league stint with three hits in 23 at-bats.

Jackson bounced between Philadelphia and the minors for the next two years. He won batting titles at Savannah in 1909 and at New Orleans in 1910, but did not hit well in Philadelphia in a 1909 late-season call-up. Joe admired manager Connie Mack (“a mighty fine man [who] taught me more baseball than any other manager I had”6) but he did not get along with his A’s teammates, many of whom teased him mercilessly about his illiteracy, which he tried to hide, and lack of polish. Mack reluctantly decided that Joe would never succeed in Philadelphia, and traded him to the Cleveland Naps for outfielder Bris Lord and $6,000 in July 1910. In mid-September, at the conclusion of New Orleans’ season, Joe reported to Cleveland.

Cleveland was a smaller city than Philadelphia. Many of Jackson’s new teammates were either Southerners or had played in the South, so Joe fit in well. Playing in right field and center field, Joe batted .387 in the final month of the 1910 season and claimed a permanent place in the Cleveland lineup.

In 1911 he made a major leap to stardom, battering American League pitching for 233 hits, 45 doubles, 19 triples, and a .408 batting average. He did not win the batting title (Detroit’s Ty Cobb batted .420), but he set Cleveland team records for hits, average, and outfield assists (32) that still stand (as of 2021). His torrid hitting helped lift the Naps to a third-place finish. Cobb paid tribute to Jackson as the season ended. “Joe is a grand ball player, and one who will get better and better. There is no denying that he is a better ball player his first year in the big league than anyone ever was.”7

Jackson swung the bat harder than most of his contemporaries, and players swore that his line drives sounded different from anyone else’s. Many other players held their hands apart on the bat and punched at the ball, but Joe put his hands together near the bottom of the handle and took a full swing. “I used to draw a line three inches from the plate every time I came to bat,” Jackson said many years later. “I drew a right angle line at the end of it, right next to the catcher, and put my left foot on it exactly three inches from home plate.”8 He stood in the box, feet close together, then took one long step into the pitch and ripped at it with his left-handed swing. “I copied my swing after Joe Jackson’s,” Babe Ruth told Grantland Rice in 1919. “His is the perfectest.”9

Though the Naps fell from third place to fifth in 1912, Jackson batted .395, with 121 runs scored, 226 hits, and 30 outfield assists. He also set a new American League record with 26 triples, a mark that was tied by Sam Crawford in 1914 but has never been surpassed. However, Joe once again finished second in the batting race to Cobb, who batted .409 for the Tigers. “What a hell of a league this is,” Jackson wailed to a reporter. “I hit .387, .408, and .395 the last three years and I ain’t won nothing yet!”10

Jackson displayed his power on June 4, 1913, when he belted a fastball from the Yankees’ Russ Ford; the hit bounced off the roof of the right-field grandstand at the Polo Grounds and into the street beyond. The newspapers claimed that the blast traveled more than 500 feet. Jackson’s .373 average that year trailed Cobb once again, but he led the league in hits (197), doubles (39) and slugging (.551), finishing second in the Chalmers Award balloting. His total of walks also increased sharply, from 54 to 80.

Joe turned down offers from the new Federal League in early 1914, though two Cleveland pitchers joined the new circuit and left the Naps shorthanded on the mound. Federal League raids and the sudden decline of Nap Lajoie caused the Naps to drop from contention, and injuries to Jackson and shortstop Ray Chapman doomed them to last place for the first time in their history. Forced by a broken leg to miss 35 games, Joe saw his average dip to .338 with only 61 runs scored and 53 runs batted in, and he posted new career lows in the speed-dependent categories of triples and stolen bases.

Controversy swirled around Jackson during the 1915 season. He had spent the winter months headlining a vaudeville show that drew curious crowds throughout the South. Joe enjoyed the theatrical life so much that he refused to report for spring training, threatening to quit baseball and begin a new career on the stage. Katie Jackson reacted poorly to that idea, and filed for divorce that March (though she and Joe soon reconciled). In May, team owner Charles Somers ordered manager Joe Birmingham to move Jackson to first base to make room for rookie Elmer Smith in the outfield. Joe played 30 games at first, but the experiment ended when Joe left the lineup with a sore arm. Somers became incensed when Birmingham blamed the position switch for Jackson’s injury, and the team owner soon fired Birmingham, appointing coach Lee Fohl to succeed him.

In 1915 Somers, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, decided that he could not afford to keep his two best players, Jackson and Chapman. He needed to trade one and rebuild the ballclub (which was renamed the Indians after the team sold Lajoie to Philadelphia that spring) around the other. Somers’ mind was made up when the newspapers reported that the Federal League had offered Jackson a multiple-year contract at a salary of $10,000 per year. Somers feared that Jackson would bolt for the new circuit, leaving the Indians with nothing in exchange, so the Cleveland owner solicited offers for his cleanup hitter.

Jackson, who at the time was in the second season of a three-year contract for $6,000 a year, was not opposed to a trade. “I think I am in a rut here in Cleveland,” he told local sportswriter Henry Edwards, “and would play better somewhere else.”11 Indeed, Jackson’s batting average had now declined for four consecutive years. The Washington Senators offered a package of players for Jackson, but Somers rejected the bid to await a better one, which soon came from the Chicago White Sox. Owner Charles Comiskey coveted Jackson, and sent his secretary, Harry Grabiner, to Cleveland with a blank check. “Go to Cleveland,” Comiskey ordered, “watch the bidding for Jackson, [and] raise the highest one made by any club until they all drop out.”12

On August 21, 1915, Grabiner and Somers reached an agreement. Somers signed Joe to a three-year contract extension at his previous salary, then sent him to Chicago for $31,500 in cash and three players (outfielders Bobby Roth and Larry Chappell and pitcher Ed Klepfer) who collectively had cost the White Sox $34,000 to acquire. In terms of the total value of cash and players, this $65,500 transaction was the most expensive deal ever made in baseball up to that time.

Joe’s five-year stay in Cleveland ended with some sniping from the sports pages. Henry Edwards of the Plain Dealer criticized Jackson on his way out of town. “While he does not admit it, he was becoming … a purely individual player who sacrificed team work for Joe Jackson. … If he were still the Jackson of 1911, 1912, and 1913, the team would not have let him get away.”13

Jackson joined a contending team, one that featured four future Hall of Famers (second baseman Eddie Collins, catcher Ray Schalk, and pitchers Red Faber and Ed Walsh). Jackson hit poorly (for him) in the last six weeks of the 1915 season, and some observers believed that Joe’s career was on the downslide. However, he rebounded in 1916, batting .341 with a league-leading 21 triples as the White Sox challenged Boston for the league lead. Chicago finished second that season, but roared to the pennant with a 100-win season in 1917 despite a subpar performance by Jackson, who was hobbled all year after he sprained an ankle in spring training. Joe’s average dipped to .277 in early September, but he finished with a flurry of hits that lifted his final mark to .301.

With the pennant safely clinched, the White Sox sent Jackson and Buck Weaver to Boston for an all-star game to benefit the family of the popular player-turned-sportswriter Tim Murnane, who had died in February. Before the game, Jackson won a distance-throwing competition by heaving a ball 396 feet, 8 inches, which was said to be a modern record for a big leaguer.14 The all-stars, with an outfield of Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Jackson, and Walter Johnson on the mound, lost 2-0 to Babe Ruth and the Red Sox.

During the World Series New York Giants manager John McGraw used left-handed starting pitchers in four of the six games in a bid to neutralize the hitting of Collins and Jackson, but Joe batted .304 and saved the first game with a circus catch in left field. Red Faber won three decisions as the White Sox defeated the Giants four games to two for their second World Series championship, and the last one they would win for more than eight decades. Joe celebrated the victory, and the $3,669.32 winning share that went along with it, by purchasing a new Oldsmobile Pacemaker from a dealership in his new home of Savannah, Georgia, where he and Katie had moved to after his trade to the White Sox.

The White Sox were rocked by the entry of the United States into World War I. Several Chicago players enlisted in the military, while others were drafted in the early months of 1918. Joe, as a married man, was granted a deferment by his hometown draft board in Greenville, but after he played 17 games with the White Sox the board reversed its decision and ordered him to report for induction.15 Instead, Jackson found employment at a Delaware shipyard, where he helped build battleships and played ball in a hastily assembled factory circuit, the Bethlehem Steel League. Jackson was the first prominent player to avoid the draft by opting for war work, for which he was severely criticized in the sporting press, especially in Chicago.

When two of Jackson’s close friends, pitcher Lefty Williams and reserve catcher Byrd Lynn, followed him into the shipyards, owner Charles Comiskey swore he would not let any of them return to his team. “There is no room on my club for players who wish to evade the army draft by entering the employ of ship concerns!” he fumed.16 But after a sixth-place finish and the war’s end, he changed his tune. Jackson won the factory league batting title with a .393 average and helped lead the Harlan & Hollingsworth team to the championship among shipyards on the Atlantic coast, but the controversy permanently damaged his relationships with the Chicago sportswriters.

With little leverage, Jackson signed a new one-year contract for $6,000 — the same salary he had been receiving since 1914 — and returned to the White Sox. He was healthy again, and led the club in batting as the White Sox grabbed first place and held it for most of the 1919 season. Joe finished fourth in the league in batting with a .351 mark, his best average since 1913, with 181 hits and 96 runs batted in. Faber, Chicago’s leading pitcher, was sidelined late in the season with a sore arm, but Eddie Cicotte (29-7) and Lefty Williams (23-11) picked up the slack and pitched the White Sox into a comfortable lead in the standings. On September 24 Jackson drove home the winning run in the pennant-clinching game against the St. Louis Browns.

The White Sox were considered the most talented team in baseball, but they were also one of the unhappiest. The biggest problem facing the team was the same one that had been festering for several years. Eddie Collins, Red Faber, and Ray Schalk made up one clique, while Chick Gandil, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, and Buck Weaver made up an opposing faction. The two groups sniped at each other all season long. “The wonderful (Philadelphia) Athletic teams I played for believed in teamwork and cooperation,” Collins said many years later. “I always thought you couldn’t win without those virtues until I joined the White Sox.”17 A third group, including Jackson, Happy Felsch, and Lefty Williams, rarely spoke to the college-educated Collins and Faber, less out of animosity than out of a lack of common interests.

Late in the season, first baseman Chick Gandil, the leader of the first group, concocted a plan to fix the coming World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Jackson, according to his own later admissions, rebuffed Gandil’s first offer to throw the Series for $10,000 but he later agreed to participate after Gandil upped the offer to $20,000 — an amount more than three times his annual salary.18 Jackson had nothing to do with the planning of the fix; unlike Gandil, he had no contacts in the netherworld of gambling and nightlife. Joe’s participation consisted solely of trusting Gandil, a stunning amount of faith in a man whom he didn’t know very well. It was an incredible lapse of judgment, as well as a failure of character, on Jackson’s part.

Jackson, who ultimately received only $5,000, batted .375 against the Reds but failed to drive in a run in the first five games, four of which the White Sox lost (it was a best-of-nine Series that year). Chicago won the sixth and seventh games, but fell behind quickly in the eighth contest. Jackson belted a homer, the only one of the Series, and drove in three runs in Game Eight, but his production came too late. Cincinnati defeated the favored White Sox by a 10-5 score and won its first World Series title. Jackson tied a record with his 12 hits in the Series, but eight of the 12 came during the four games the White Sox tried to win. In Chicago’s first four losses, Jackson went 4-for-16.

Before going home for the winter, Jackson went to Comiskey’s office in the ballpark and waited to see the Old Roman. Jackson wanted to tell Comiskey about the fix and possibly to return the money he had received. He stayed for several hours, but Comiskey holed up in his office and Jackson eventually left without talking to the White Sox owner.

In February 1920 team secretary Harry Grabiner traveled to Jackson’s home in Savannah and signed him to a substantial raise, a three-year deal for $8,000 per year. Jackson operated a successful poolroom there and a dry-cleaning business that employed more than 20 people. He and Katie used the money he had received for fixing the World Series to pay for his ill sister Gertrude’s hospital bills.

Despite the cloud of suspicion that hovered over him and several of his teammates. Jackson gave one of his finest performances in 1920, with a .382 average, a career-best 121 runs batted in, and a league-leading 20 triples. However, amid growing rumors that the White Sox were continuing to throw games in the 1920 season, Jackson felt alienated from most of the other Series conspirators. His evenings on the road consisted of going to the movies or bars with Lefty Williams, his best friend on the team.

With the White Sox fighting for a pennant entering the season’s final week, Jackson’s season ended abruptly on September 28, a day after a Philadelphia newspaper published allegations by gambler Billy Maharg claiming that eight members of the White Sox had helped him and other gamblers fix the World Series. Later that day, on the advice of White Sox team counsel Alfred Austrian, Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams appeared before a Cook County grand jury investigating the matter and testified about their involvement. Comiskey immediately suspended Jackson and the six other accused players who were still with the team.

Jackson’s appearance before the grand jury on September 28 was responsible for one of the most enduring legends in sports. As reported by Charley Owens of the Chicago Daily News, a small child is said to have looked at Jackson exiting the court building and begged, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Jackson and many others denied that the incident ever happened. “There wasn’t a bit of truth in it,” Jackson told reporter Furman Bisher in 1949. “When I came out of the building, this deputy asked me where I was going, and I told him to the South Side. … There was a big crowd hanging around the front of the building, but nobody else said anything to me. It just didn’t happen, that’s all. Charley Owens just made up a good story and wrote it.”19

Despite being acquitted by a trial jury, all eight accused players, including the retired Gandil, were eventually expelled from baseball for life by new Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The scandal brought a sad and untimely end to Joe Jackson’s brilliant baseball career.

Jackson, whose lifetime batting average of .356 is the third highest in the game’s history, played semipro and “unorganized” ball, mostly in the South, for many years thereafter. Wherever he went, his cannon arm and effortless swing drew attention. In 1923 he signed with a team from Americus, Georgia, in the outlaw South Georgia League, and helped lead them to a championship. There was some controversy because the league did not want its younger players to be penalized or banned from Organized Baseball for playing with him. However, he batted well over .400, made incredible catches and throws, and drew large crowds throughout the season.

In 1923 Jackson hired a Milwaukee-based attorney, Ray Cannon, and sued the White Sox for back pay he felt was owed to him after his acquittal in the Black Sox trial. Joe believed that Harry Grabiner had taken advantage of his illiteracy in obtaining his signature on a contract that included the hated “reserve clause,” which effectively allowed teams to control their players in perpetuity. A jury sided with Jackson and awarded him more than $16,000 in back pay, but Jackson’s deposition about his involvement in the World Series scandal clashed so much with his 1920 grand jury testimony that the judge threw out the verdict and charged Jackson with perjury. Jackson settled with Comiskey for an undisclosed amount and went back home to Georgia.20

For the next several years, Jackson played ball in the South, where folks regarded him with kindness and still stood in awe of his ability. He sported a sizable paunch around his midsection, but he could still knock the stuffing out of a baseball until he was nearly 50 years old. He gave a few newspaper interviews in which he made his case for reinstatement, but mostly stayed out the public eye during the last three decades of his life.

“All the big sportswriters seemed to enjoy writing about me as an ignorant cotton-mill boy with nothing but lint where my brains ought to be,” Jackson said in 1949. “That was all right with me. I was able to fool a lot of pitchers and managers and club owners I wouldn’t have been able to fool if they’d thought I was smarter.”21

Jackson eventually moved back to his old neighborhood in Greenville, near the Brandon Mill textile factory, where he operated a successful restaurant and a liquor store for many years. He spent a great deal of time teaching baseball to the local youngsters and organizing impromptu games, even as he suffered from diabetes and liver and heart problems in his later years. In September 1951 Cleveland Indians fans honored him by voting him into the team’s Hall of Fame and, in the ensuing publicity blitz, Jackson agreed to travel to New York to appear on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” television show. However, just two weeks before his scheduled appearance, Jackson suffered a heart attack and he died at home, at the age of 64, on December 5, 1951. He was buried in Woodlawn Memorial Park in Greenville.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Notes

But he was even more memorable in the batter’s box, where the right-hander captured four (or five) batting titles, including a modern-era record .426 mark for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901, won the first Triple Crown in American League history, and finished with a lifetime .338 batting average. An expert bunter who was capable of hitting the ball to all fields, Lajoie was nonetheless completely undisciplined at the plate, regularly swinging at pitches down at his ankles or up at his eyebrows, and occasionally thwarting attempts to intentionally walk him by reaching out for those pitches, too. For years the conventional wisdom among American League pitchers was to try to upset Lajoie’s timing with off-speed stuff, but Francis Richter thought this strategy ineffective, noting that no pitch could fool Lajoie for long. “Good Old Ed Delahanty could clout the horsehide some,” Hugh Duffy once observed, “but [Lajoie] seemed to be just as powerful, if not more so.” Indeed, Lajoie swung so hard and met the ball with such force, that on three separate occasions in 1899 he managed to literally tear the cover off the ball.

Napoleon Lajoie (typically pronounced LAJ-way, though Nap himself is supposed to have preferred the French pronunciation, Lah-ZHWA) was born on September 5, 1874, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, the youngest of eight surviving children of Jean Baptiste and Celina Guertin Lajoie. The Lajoie clan traced its origins to Auxerres, France, though Jean Baptiste was born in Canada, and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1866, initially settling in Rutland, Vermont before moving to Woonsocket. During Napoleon’s early years, Jean worked as a teamster and a laborer, but his premature death in 1881 forced his children to find employment as soon as they were physically able. After attending school for only eight months, Napoleon was obliged to forsake his formal education in 1885, when he found work as a card-room sweeper in a local textile mill.

About the same time the young lad was seized by the baseball craze sweeping the country. His mother did not approve of his ball playing and so his teammates gave the dark-haired Lajoie the nickname Sandy to hide his presence on the diamond. By 1894 Lajoie was clerking for an auctioneer named C.F. Hixon and playing part time with the semi-pro Woonsockets. As word of his ability spread, Lajoie discovered that other semi-pro teams wanted him to play for them in critical games. He obliged them all and his rate of pay ranged from $2 to $5 per game, plus round-trip carfare. Off the diamond, Nap followed in his father’s footsteps and became a teamster. He drove a hack out of the Consolidated Livery Stable, providing him with the nickname The Slugging Cabby. In 1896 Lajoie joined the Fall River (Massachusetts) club in the Class B New England League, which offered him $500 for the five-month-long season. Lajoie was making $7.50 per week as a cabby and his words of acceptance served as his slogan for his entire career: “I’m out for the stuff.”

Lajoie’s career with Fall River lasted only until August 9, when he and teammate Phil Geier were purchased by the Philadelphia Phillies. With his .429 batting average and .726 slugging percentage, Fall River had no trouble soliciting offers for Lajoie, but Philadelphia was the only franchise that agreed to the asking price of $1,500. During his abbreviated minor league career, Lajoie had played mostly center field, but when he joined the Phillies, manager Billy Nash installed the rookie at first base, which had been manned on an emergency basis by Ed Delahanty. This allowed Del to return to his best position, left field. In 1898 Phils manager George Stallings made several sweeping defensive changes. The most important was shifting Lajoie to second base, where he would achieve his enduring fame. Stallings later explained this move by saying, “He’d have made good no matter where I positioned him.”

Over his final three seasons with Philadelphia, Lajoie matured into one of the game’s best second basemen, using his excellent speed, quick reflexes, and soft hands to adeptly handle all the position’s tasks. “He plays so naturally and so easily it looks like lack of effort,” Connie Mack would later observe. “Larry’s reach is so long and he’s fast as lightning, and to throw to at second base he is ideal. All the catchers who’ve played with him say he is the easiest man to throw to in the game today. High, low, wide – he is sure of everything.” Unlike his contemporaries, Lajoie preferred to break in a new fielding mitt each season, and he also parted from accepted practice by cutting the wrist strap off his glove, providing his large hands with added flexibility and control.

At the plate, Lajoie wasted little time demonstrating that his gaudy minor league numbers had been no fluke. From 1896 to 1900 he never batted lower than .324, and he led the league in slugging percentage in 1897 and doubles and RBI in 1898. He posted a .378 batting average in 1899, though an injury following a collision with Harry Steinfeldt limited him to just 77 games played. It was the first of several seasons in which Nap would miss significant playing time, though the causes of his absences from the starting lineup were rarely typical. In 1900 Lajoie lost five weeks after breaking his thumb in a fistfight with teammate Elmer Flick. Two years later, legal squabbles between the American and National Leagues cut into his playing time, and in 1905, Nap’s leg nearly had to be amputated after the blue dye in his socks poisoned a spike wound. The leg recovered, but the incident led to a new rule requiring teams to use sanitary white socks.

During his career, Lajoie also had some famous run-ins with umpires. In 1904 he was suspended for throwing chewing tobacco into umpire Frank Dwyer‘s eye. After one ejection, Lajoie, who stubbornly refused to leave the bench, had to be escorted from the park by police. And in 1903, Nap became so infuriated by an umpire’s decision to use a blackened ball that he picked up the sphere and threw it over the grandstand, resulting in a forfeit.

But Lajoie’s most famous battle came off the field, when he jumped his contract with the Phillies to join the insurgent American League in 1901. Prior to the 1900 season, Lajoie had been assured by Philadelphia owner John Rogers that he and teammate Ed Delahanty would receive equal pay. After the season began, however, Lajoie discovered that his salary of $2,600 was actually $400 less than Delahanty’s pay. As Lajoie later explained, “I saw the checks.” Incensed, Lajoie exacted his revenge on Rogers in the off-season, when he jumped to Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics of the upstart American League.

When he abandoned the National League in favor of the new organization, Lajoie almost single-handedly legitimatized the AL’s claim to major league status. Rogers, however, immediately moved to block the deal, suing for the return of his “property.” While the case worked its way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Lajoie, a major star at the peak of his powers, capitalized on the golden opportunity of playing in a newly formed league with a diluted talent pool by putting together one of the most impressive seasons in major league history. Nap punished the American League’s overmatched pitchers in 1901, becoming just the third triple crown winner in baseball history with a .426 batting average (the highest posted by any player in the twentieth century), 14 home runs, and 125 RBI. Lajoie also led the league in hits (232), doubles (48), runs scored (145), on-base percentage (.463), and slugging percentage (.643). Despite those figures, the Athletics could only finish in fourth place.

Ironically, Connie Mack’s team would win the pennant the following year, but they would do so without Lajoie, who moved to the Cleveland franchise after Rogers succeeded in getting an injunction from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which prevented Nap from playing ball in the state for any team other than the Phillies. Lajoie was able to circumvent the ruling by signing with Cleveland, and skipping all of the club’s games in Philadelphia. (The fact that the A’s never had to face the league’s best hitter in their home park undoubtedly helped them capture the pennant; indeed, the .339 difference between Philadelphia’s home and road winning percentages in 1902 remains the second-highest differential in baseball history.) In the peace agreement brokered between the two leagues following the 1902 season, Rogers dropped his claim on Lajoie, and Nap remained with Cleveland through the 1914 season. During his 13 years with the club, Lajoie became such a powerful symbol of the franchise that the press soon took to calling the team the Naps, thus making Lajoie the only active player in baseball history to have his team named after him.

With his legal status secured, in 1903 and 1904 Lajoie solidified his reputation as the league’s best hitter, winning his third and fourth consecutive batting titles. In 1904 he batted .376, led the league in on-base percentage (.413), slugging percentage (.552), hits (208), and RBI (102). Despite that performance, and despite the considerable offensive contributions of teammates Bill Bradley and Elmer Flick, the Naps finished a disappointing fourth, and in September manager Bill Armour tendered his resignation. After the end of the season, Lajoie formally accepted the position as field manager.

Though he would finish his managerial career with a .550 winning percentage, Lajoie was not a successful manager. When he assumed control of the team in late 1904, Lajoie inherited one of the league’s most talented rosters. In addition to himself, the Naps featured several promising players under the age of 30: Bradley, Flick, shortstop Terry Turner, and center fielder Harry Bay. Their pitching rotation was anchored by a trio of young pitchers, none of whom were older than 25: Addie Joss, Earl Moore (who had won 52 games in his first three seasons), and Bob Rhoads, who would post a record of 38-19 for the Naps in 1905 and 1906.

Despite this assortment of talent, under Lajoie’s leadership the Naps only twice challenged for the American League pennant, losing out to the White Sox by five games in 1906 and the Detroit Tigers by .004 in 1908. Lajoie blamed himself for the team’s second-place finish in 1908, as he batted just .289 for the season and failed in the clutch in two critical games down the stretch. In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that Lajoie’s managerial responsibilities detracted from his on-field performance. After winning four consecutive batting titles from 1901 to 1904, Lajoie put together only one comparable season during his managerial career, posting a .355 batting average in 1906. In both 1907 and 1908, Lajoie failed to clear the .300 barrier.

As manager, Lajoie was criticized for his rudimentary method of relaying signals to the outfielders. He had a way of wiggling his finger behind his back as notice to his outfield when his pitcher was going to throw a fastball, and wiggling two fingers for a curve. Enemy pitchers in the bullpen often could read Nap’s signals, and they were never a mystery to Connie Mack. One contemporary observed of Lajoie, “The great player-artist rather disdained the subtleties of the game and responsibility sat heavily upon him. He failed to lift up lesser players to the batting and fielding heights that he had attained so easily. He knew how to do a thing, but to impart to another how it should be done eluded him.”

Midway through the 1909 season, with the team once again languishing in the standings, Lajoie resigned as manager. Free to once again focus exclusively on his on-field performance, Nap batted over .300 every year from 1909 to 1913. From 1910 to 1912 he batted better than .360 every season, with his .384 mark in 1910 finishing second–or first, depending on your point of view–in the American League batting race.

In one of the most famous episodes of the Deadball Era, Lajoie and Ty Cobb entered the closing days of the season neck-and-neck for the American League batting crown, with the winner set to receive a brand new Chalmers automobile, one of the finest makes of the day in a time when automobiles were still rare commodities. On the season’s final day, the Naps faced the St. Louis Browns in a doubleheader, with Lajoie trailing Cobb and needing a base hit in virtually every at-bat to secure the batting crown. The Browns manager, Jack O’Connor, no fan of the ill-tempered Georgia Peach, ordered rookie third baseman Red Corriden to play deep, well behind the bag throughout both games. Seizing the opportunity, Lajoie dropped seven straight bunts down the third base line for hits, though an eighth bunt was recorded as a sacrifice. His eighth and final hit was a triple belted over the center fielder’s head. O’Connor was fired for his actions, and Lajoie received a congratulatory telegram from eight of Cobb’s teammates, but one week later American League president Ban Johnson declared Cobb the batting title winner, by a margin of .000860. (Subsequent research would determine that Cobb had been erroneously credited with two extra hits, and when this clerical error was corrected, Cobb’s average dropped to .383, giving Lajoie the higher batting average. Nonetheless, in 1981 Commissioner Bowie Kuhn rejected an appeal to declare Lajoie the true 1910 batting champion.) The Chalmers company reacted to the controversy by giving both players free automobiles, but according to Lajoie’s nephew, Nap “didn’t want to accept it,” though his wife insisted that he do so. “He just thought that he, not Cobb, had won that championship and was angry that Cobb had been ruled the winner.”

In 1914 Lajoie struggled to a .258 batting average, as bad eyesight gradually diminished his effectiveness. Following the 1914 season, Lajoie’s contract was purchased by the Philadelphia Athletics, and Nap was reunited with his old friend and manager, Connie Mack. Unfortunately, Nap arrived one year too late to get his first shot at winning a pennant. In 1915 and 1916, Lajoie played out the string as Eddie Collins‘s replacement at second base, posting batting averages of .280 and .246, respectively, while the A’s plummeted into the American League cellar. Following Philadelphia’s dismal 36-117 performance in 1916, Lajoie announced his retirement from the majors. On January 15, 1917, he signed as playing manager of the International League’s Toronto Maple Leafs. Toronto won the pennant and Lajoie captured the batting title with a resounding .380 mark. The following year he signed as player-manager for Indianapolis of the American Association, batting .282 and leading the Indians to a third-place finish in the war-shortened campaign. One month away from his 44th birthday, Lajoie offered his services to his draft board. They declined, with thanks.

Lajoie had married the former Myrtle I. Smith, a divorcée, on October 11, 1906. They purchased a small farm of about twenty acres in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid and this remained their residence until they moved to a smaller home in Mentor, Ohio in 1939. Long popular in Cleveland, Lajoie was put up as the Republican candidate for sheriff of Cuyahoga County. Failing election, he was named commissioner of the old Ohio and Pennsylvania League. He also dabbled around in a rubber company, sold truck tires, and finally set up a small brass manufacturing company. These businesses were merely diversions to occupy his time. Lajoie had been careful with his money and he and Myrtle lived a comfortable life.

In 1943 the Lajoies made a permanent move to Florida and finally settled in the Daytona Beach area. Myrtle passed away of cancer in 1954. Nap died on February 7, 1959, of pneumonia. The couple had no children.

An updated version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. It originally appeared “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006), edited by David Jones. 

Sources

For this biography, the author used a number of contemporary sources, especially those found in the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.