Burt Lancaster brought Graham’s major-league experience to life in the movie version, Field of Dreams, in 1989:

“It was the last day of the season. Bottom of the eighth inning, we were way ahead. I had been up with the club about, oh about three weeks, but I hadn’t seen any action. Suddenly, old John McGraw points a bony finger in my direction and he says, ‘Right field.’ I jumped up like I was sittin’ on a spring. Grabbed by glove and ran out onto the field.”  

“Did you get to make a play?”

“Never hit the ball out of the infield. Game ended. The season was over. I knew they’d send me back down. I couldn’t bear the thought of another year in the minors. So, I decided to hang ’em up.”1

This version mixes fact with dramatic license; Graham spent three more seasons in the minors before retiring. Graham’s major-league game took place on June 29, 1905. The part about being way ahead was correct, though. The New-York Tribune called the Giants’ 11-1 victory over the Brooklyn Superbas a “batting feast at Brooklyn’s expense.”2 Giants ace Christy Mathewson kept Brooklyn to two hits and struck out seven before Claude Elliott relieved him in the fifth inning; shortstop Bill Dahlen went 3-for-4 and scored two runs; and right fielder George Browne went 1-for-3 and scored two runs before Graham replaced him. The New York Evening Telegram reported that “Archie Graham had two joyous innings in the right garden while George Browne hustled into his street clothes.”3

One of the hits against Mathewson came when he tried to beat a runner to first base after fielding the ball and “just missed touching him.”4 Elliott’s save was one of six he had in 1905, which led the major leagues.

The game was completed in a little less two hours, a usual length for the beginning of the twentieth century. Two thousand people showed up at Washington Park in Brooklyn to see this latest display of domination by Mathewson, who led the major leagues in 1905 with 31 victories. He struck out seven before manager John McGraw pulled him in the fifth inning.5

The game was business as usual for the Giants, who finished 1905 with a 105-48 record and a World Series championship over the Philadelphia Athletics. Brooklyn’s squad offered minimal competition. “Kid” Eason went 5-21 in 1905; New York pounded him for eight hits, six runs, two home runs, two triples, and a double. Jack Doscher’s relief was anything but valuable; the 1-5 pitcher in 1905 allowed five hits and five runs in the continual barrage. Brooklyn ended the season in eighth place with a 48-104 record — 56½ games behind the Giants.

Lineups

New York

George Browne, rf
    Archie Graham, rf
Mike Donlin, cf
Dan McGann, 1b
   Sammy Strang, 1b
Sam Mertes, lf
Bill Dahlen, ss
Art Devlin, 3b
Billy Gilbert, 2b
Frank Bowerman, c
   Boileryard Clarke, c
Christy Mathewson, p
   Claude Elliott, p

Brooklyn

John Dobbs, cf
Bob Hall, lf
Harry Lumley, rf
Emil Batch, 3b
Charlie Malay, 2b
Charlie Babb, ss
Fred Mitchell, 1b
Lew Ritter, c
Mal Eason, p
   Jack Doscher, p
   Bill Bergen, ph

The play-by-play occurred as follows:6

Top 1st:  McGann banged out a triple after Browne hit a pop fly to right field and Donlin banged one to left. Mertes was thrown out on a groundball to end the Giants’ first turn at bat.

Bottom 1st: Mathewson struck out Dobbs and then a 4-3 groundout by Hall made the second out. Lumley flied to McGann.

Top 2nd: Eason walked Dahlen, then tried to pick him off. An errant thrown gave second base to Dahlen, who tagged up to reach third base when Devlin flied out to Lumley. The slugger scored when Gilbert banged out a single to right field. A 6-4 grounder got Gilbert out, followed by Mathewson striking out when he got caught looking.

Bottom 2nd: Mathewson struck out Batch and Malay, walked Babb, and struck out Mitchell.

Top 3rd: The Giant’s lineup smacked Eason’s pitches at will, scoring six runs. The mauling began with Browne’s single to left, followed by Donlin singling to center when Dobbs couldn’t get a decent hold of the ball. Browne arrived safely at third. McGann crushed a pitch over the fence for a three-run blast. A grounder to third got Mertes out, then Dahlen got on safely with a single. Devlin’s fly ball made for the first out. Dahlen scored a stolen base, then Gilbert walked. Bowerman’s triple scored Dahlen and Gilbert. Mathewson showed some credentials at the plate when he singled and got an RBI from Bowerman coming home. The Giants batted around the order. Eason walked Browne and Donlin. With the bases loaded, McGann hit a fly ball to Babb. 

Bottom 3rd: Mathewson retired the opposition with ease. He caught a pop fly from Ritter, allowed a single to Dobbs, struck out Eason, and ended hopes for Brooklyn’s batsmen when Lumley hit into a 6-4 force play that got out Dobbs.

Top 4th: Eason headed to the bench, relieved by Doescher. Mertes grounded out to Malay, then Dahlen went to second base on what should have been a single. Hall “fumbled” the ball. Dahlen was tagged out on a stolen-base attempt. Devlin also was caught stealing after getting a walk.

Bottom 4th: Lumley grounded out on a 3-1 play, Batch struck out, and Malay grounded to Mathewson.

Top 5th: Gilbert got to first base on a bunt, but was caught stealing. Bowerman flied out to right and Mathewson ended the inning when Mitchell fielded his grounder for a putout.

Bottom 5th: Strang replaced McGann at first base. Mathewson walked Babb and gave up a single to Mitchell. Ritter could not capitalize; he grounded to third base, where Babb was forced. Doescher struck out and Dobbs flied out to left.

Top 6th: If the top of the third inning was difficult for Brooklyn, then the top of the sixth was downright miserable. Eason walked Browne and served up a fat pitch that Donlin smacked for a double. With runners at second and third, Strang’s groundout to shortstop was not in vain; Browne scored. Mertes walked, Dahlen singled to score Donlin, and Devlin followed with a walk. Then Mertes stole third, giving the Giants runners at the corners and allowing for McGraw’s boys to pull off a double steal. Mertes scored, and Gilbert grounded to third for a 5-3 play.

Bottom 6th: McGraw changed the battery, sending in Elliott to replace Mathewson and Clarke to replace Bowerman. Gilbert and Strang were the only other players needed on defense. Hall and Lumley each grounded to Gilbert and Batch flied out to the second baseman.

Top 7th: The Giants’ bats ebbed like a retreating tide. Clarke grounded out on a 6-4 play, Elliott flied out to Lumley, and Browne grounded out to Malay.

Bottom 7th: Malay struck out. Babb’s walk showed a glimmer of a threat, which was dampened by Mitchell’s fly to left and Ritter’s grounder to Strang.

Top 8th: Eason got two outs quickly, striking out Donlin and getting Strang out on a grounder to Babb. Mertes walked, but Dahlen left him stranded on a strikeout.

Bottom 8th: Here is where Moonlight Graham made his debut, replacing Browne in right field. It was three-up-three-down for the Brooklyn batsmen. Doescher struck out, Dobbs flied out to center field, and Hall struck out.

Top 9th: The Giants scored one run, though it was far from needed. Devlin flied to Babb and Gilbert struck out. Clarke bashed a solo home run. Elliott ended the opportunity for more runs when he flied out to Malay.

Bottom 9th: Brooklyn showed signs of life, escaping an 11-0 shutout. Lumley got to first base on an infield single and stole second. Batch struck out. The bases were soon filled. Malay singled, moving Lumley to third. Babb walked. Elliott might as well have been credited with an RBI; he walked Ritter, forcing Lumley home. Pinch-hitter Bergen struck out.

Notes

1 Field of Dreams, Universal Pictures (Universal City, California), 1989.

2 “The Giants Enjoy a Batting Feast at Brooklyn’s Expense,” New-York Tribune, June 30, 1905.

3 “Giants’ Bats Toll Brooklyn’s Knell,” New York Evening Telegram, June 29, 1905.

4 “Getting Out of the Rut,” New York Evening Post, June 30, 1905

5 Ibid.

6 “Giants’ Bats Toll Brooklyn’s Knell.”

In 1912, Pittsburgh spent the season chasing the New York Giants, who won the pennant by 10 games (but lost the World Series to the Boston Red Sox in eight games). The second-place Pirates entered this final contest, winners of eight of their last 11 games. Meanwhile, Cincinnati, who finished the season in fourth place in the National League, had lost eight of 11 (plus a tie).

In this season finale, “the Pirates were on a true rampage and could not be stopped.”1 Pittsburgh plated runs in six of their nine times at-bat, and “Every man on the team cut in with at least one bingle and several of them fattened their batting averages plethorically.”2 Honus Wagner hit his seventh home run of the season, a solo shot in the seventh inning. Howie Camnitz picked up his 22nd win of the season. The 5-feet, 9-inch right-hander “was powerful except in the one round [the fifth inning] when our boys got to him for six consecutive bingles, after two men were gone, winding up with a home run by Hobby [Dick Hoblitzell], which was good for a new suit of clothes for the Red first-sacker.”3 That gave Cincinnati a brief 6-5 lead, but Pittsburgh roared back in the sixth to score five times and added six more runs in the final three frames. Rube Benton was tagged with his 20th loss of the season. The Pirates raked Reds pitching for 19 hits, led by Dots Miller (4-for-5, four RBI), Wagner (3-for-5, four runs scored, five RBI), Alex McCarthy (3-for-4, two walks, four runs scored) and Max Carey (3-for-6, three runs scored). Wilson finished with two hits in five trips, but he did drive in three runs.

In his final at-bat, Wilson “tried for a home run in the ninth but was cut down at the plate.”4 That triple gave him 36 for the season. However, the Cincinnati Enquirer stated, “It was the thirty-seventh of that length,”5 and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told its readers, “Wilson closes the 1912 season with 37 three-baggers. The Chief tried to make it his thirteenth homer, but was out at the plate.”6 Had he been safe, Wilson would have joined teammate Wagner as the only visiting players to make a home run at Redland Field.7 Seven homers were hit by Cincinnati batters in their home ballpark in 1912, and the only round-tripper by a visiting player came in the last game of the season.

In the American League, Cleveland was closing its season in St. Louis. Unfortunately for the Browns, “a crowd of more than 10,000 came out to watch the last show of the A.L. campaign and were treated to some ragged baseball on the part of the Stovallized aggregation.”8 Why? “The pitching of Mack Allison and Earl Hamilton was poor, while the fielding, especially that of ‘Bunny’ Brief and Eddie Miller, was worse.”9 Allison was tagged for seven hits and five runs in only 4-1/3 innings pitched, and he was charged with an error. In his 2-2/3 innings, Hamilton offered up five hits and three runs. Only Buddy Napier seemed to be effective, blanking the Naps in his two frames of hurling. The Naps scored twice in the fourth inning and four times in the fifth, before adding solo runs in each of the sixth and seventh. For the visiting team, “the big left hander”10 Willie Mitchell had allowed a single run (in the fourth) until the bottom of the ninth, when the Browns mustered two more tallies. Cleveland earned its 75th victory of the season while handing the Browns their 101st loss. St. Louis batters only put together five hits in the game.

Although Jackson set a record, Nap Lajoie was the star of Cleveland’s day. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the team captain “went up five times and poled as many hits. Four of his hits were line drives.”11 The first five batters in the Naps’ lineup “cornered the hit market,”12 garnering all of their 13 hits. Jackson was 3-for-5, with a single, double and triple. He was a home run shy of hitting for the cycle and scored three times. Every time he got on base, Lajoie followed with a base hit. The local papers reminded the readers that two years previously, Cleveland had faced the Browns on the final day of the season, and in that game, Lajoie “was credited with making eight hits in a double-header with the Browns at Sportsman’s Park and caused a scandal that resulted in the discharge of Jack O’Connor as manager of the Browns.”13

Of the 16 teams in the major leagues, only the Browns and the Chicago White Sox (both in the American League) played the full 154-game schedule. Because they had three tie games, the Browns played 157 games, while the White Sox played 158 (due to four tie ballgames).

1912 was the first of three seasons in which Jackson led the American League in triples. The others were 1916 (21) and 1920 (20), when he played with the Chicago White Sox. The lefty batter finished his 13-year career with 168 triples. That still places him in the 26th position all-time.14

More than 100 years later, both of these league records still stand. Detroit’s Sam Crawford tied Jackson’s American League mark in 1914. Crawford played the final seven games of the season with an opportunity to break the record, but the best he could muster was two doubles in 26 at-bats.

Wilson hit his 26th triple on July 26th, and he is the only player after 1901 to break the 30-triple plateau. In a five-game stretch from June 17-20, he hit six triples. Heinie Reitz, playing for the 1894 Baltimore Orioles, hit 31 triples to lead the National League. Eight seasons earlier, Dave Orr also hit 31 triples, while playing for the New York Metropolitans in the American Association. Wilson never hit more than 14 triples in any of his other eight seasons in the major leagues.

Interestingly, Chief Wilson also accomplished a rare feat in 1912 by hitting more triples than doubles. Since 1871, a batter has had more triples than doubles in a season (with a minimum or 20 triples) only 25 times.15 Here is the list, ranked by the number of triples.

Harry Davis has the largest margin (signified by Δ). Wilson’s delta is 17. Crawford accomplished this feat three times. Since 1922, this phenomenon has happened only once, by Cleveland Indians outfielder Dale Mitchell (1949), and it has not happened since. Mitchell also led the American League in 1949 with 203 hits.

In 1912, Shoeless Joe Jackson had 44 doubles to accompany his 26 triples.

Sources

In addition to the sources mentioned in the notes, the author consulted baseball-reference.com and retrosheet.org. Special thanks to Sheldon Miller for fact-checking and suggestions.

Pirates-Reds:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN191210060.shtml

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1912/B10060CIN1912.htm

Naps-Browns:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLA/SLA191210060.shtml

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1912/B10060SLA1912.htm

Notes

1 Jack Ryder, “Pirates Landed in Second Place,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 7, 1912: 8.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 “Notes of the Game,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 7, 1912: 8.

5 Ibid.

6 James Jerpe, “On and Off the Field,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 7, 1912: 8.

7 “Notes of the Game,” Cincinnati Enquirer.

8 “10,000 Fans See Browns Lose to Naps in Windup,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 7, 1912: 14. According to both Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference, the attendance at Sportsman’s Park was only 3,500.

9 Ibid.

10 “Naps Corner Hit Market,” The Sun, (New York, New York), October 7, 1912: 10.

11 “Lajoie Nearly Equals Hit-Making Record of Last Season’s Wind-Up,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 7, 1912: 14.

12 “Watching the Scoreboard,” Fort Wayne News (Fort Wayne, Indiana), October 7, 1912: 3.

13 “Lajoie Nearly Equals Hit-Making Record of Last Season’s Wind-Up,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

14 https://baseball-reference.com/leaders/3B_career.shtml.

15 Thanks to SABR member Sheldon Miller for help with the table’s data.

Chicago Tribune 

A durable, yet often inconsistent hurler, Cicotte had flashed signs of brilliance since his first full season in 1908, with the Boston Red Sox, and his subsequent acquisition by the White Sox in July 1912. He finished second in the AL in ERA in 1913 (1.58) and again in 1916 (1.78) when he concluded the season on a tear, yielding just four earned runs in 48⅔ innings in September and winning all five of his decisions. With a 119-100 record in parts of 10 seasons, Cicotte’s success rested on a mesmerizing knuckleball and a series of trick pitches, especially the shine ball. Cicotte made only 19 starts among his 44 appearances in 1916, but Pale Hose skipper Pants Rowland looked to 5-feet-9 “Knuckles” to play a bigger role in 1917 — if there was a season.

The estimated 10,000 fans at Sportsman’s Park in the Gateway City on Saturday afternoon, April 14, 1917, for the final contest of the three-game season-opening series between the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox might have been confused when they saw players marching in unison with bats on their shoulders, led by a drill sergeant. Weeks earlier, AL President Ban Johnson had ordered all teams to practice military drills during spring training, as pressure mounted on the United States to enter World War I, which had ravaged Europe since 1914. On April 6, just days before the regular season began, the United States declared war on Germany. Former league MVP Eddie Collins of the White Sox praised the exercise regimen for preparing players physically for the season and instilling the discipline needed to succeed as a team.2 Baseball would go on despite calls that the season be suspended.

With temperatures hovering in the 40s and dark, ominous skies overhead, the White Sox came out swinging against 25-year-old Browns southpaw Earl Hamilton, who had also started the season opener just three days earlier, yielding only five hits and three runs (none earned) in 7⅓ innings in the Browns’ eventual 7-2 loss. After Collins drew a two-out walk and moved to third on Shoeless Joe Jackson’s double, he scored on Happy Felsch’s single. Cuban-born center fielder Armando Marsans made a running catch on Chick Gandil’s deep fly to save two more runs and end the inning.

In what proved to be the Browns’ only scoring chance of the game, Cicotte walked leadoff hitter Burt Shotton, who stole second when shortstop Swede Risberg dropped the catcher’s throw, but was stranded on third.3

The White Sox offense exploded in the second inning. Hamilton faced only two batters (hitting Buck Weaver and surrendering a double to Ray Schalk) before yielding to reliever Jim Park. “One would think that [Park] had desecrated the American flag,” wrote W.J. O’Connor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He got along with the enemy like percussion caps and dynamite. The explosion was terrific.”4 All four batters Park faced hit safely. Cicotte’s single knocked in two runs; Risberg followed Nemo Leibold’s single with a double to plate Cicotte; and Collins’s single increased Chicago’s lead to 5-0. With two men on, right-hander Tom Rogers made his big-league debut against Shoeless Joe. According to Sanborn, Rogers’s “first attempt was a wild throw,” permitting Risberg to score.5 Jackson ultimately walked; and he and Collins moved up a station on Felsch’s sacrifice bunt, the first out of the frame. After Gandil’s fly ball drove home Collins, and Weaver reached on first baseman George Sisler’s error (the first of five Brownie miscues), the Browns suffered the ultimate indignity when the White Sox executed a daring double steal.6 Jackson scored from third to make it 8-0, while Weaver rounded second and was thrown out going to third to end the inning.

The first two innings, noted the Tribune in utter amazement, lasted 40 minutes.7 The Post-Dispatch opined solemnly that “after the first six or eight runs nobody kept cases on the Chicago score.”8

Among the best control pitchers of the era, Cicotte “wobbled some” in the third, according to the Tribune, yielding consecutive two-out walks to Shotton and Ward Miller.9 But Risberg snared Sisler’s scorching liner to end the frame.

Rogers settled down enough after his baptism of fire to last seven innings, yielding just two hits but also walking four. The White Sox made it 9-0 in the fourth when Collins drew a free pass, moved to third on a hard-hit grounder by Jackson (which Sanborn noted was “scored as error to [shortstop Doc] Lavan by St. Louis’s blind official scorer”10), and subsequently raced home on Felsch’s out. After loading the bases with no outs in the sixth on a walk to Leibold, a single by Risberg, and a bunt single by Collins, Jackson and Felsch each drove in runs on outs for an 11-0 lead.

Staked to a seemingly insurmountable early-inning lead, Cicotte cruised through the Browns lineup. In the fifth he hit Lavan who was quickly erased in a 6-4-3 double play. The Browns’ most exciting play, and the game’s most controversial one, occurred with two outs in the seventh. Jimmy Austin hit what the Post-Dispatch called a “sizzling drive” straight to first sacker Chick Gandil. “Jimmy’s drive had whiskers like a German who was trapped for ten days on Vimy Ridge,” wrote O’Connor, making reference to the brutal battle between primarily Canadian and German troops on the Western Front that had concluded two days earlier with well over 10,000 casualties in four days of fighting. While the Tribune’s Sanborn suggested the ball “flitted through Gandil’s mitt,” O’Connor opined that “ordinarily this would have been scored a hit.” Casting doubt on the official scorer’s intention in the midst of Cicotte’s no-hitter, O’Connor added, “[T]here was ominous unanimity in the belief that … (the scoring decision) was an egregious error.”11

Despite the humiliating score, skipper Fielder Jones’s Brownies did not roll over, making up for their offensive woes with some excellent defensive stops. In the eighth, Collins and Jackson belted deep drives to center field. “The Cuban tore back and captured both of them brilliantly,” wrote Sanborn in a compliment to Marsans.12 O’Connor was even more effusive in his praise. “Marsans has only one peer as a defensive man,” he opined, naming the Cleveland Indians’ Tris Speaker as the standard-bearer at that position.13 In the ninth, right-hander Kewpie Pennington relieved Rogers, retiring three of the four batters he faced in his only big-league appearance. Third baseman Austin helped out his hurler by making what the Tribune called a “spectacular catch” of Weaver’s foul when “he slid under it to protect himself from hitting the grandstand.”14

Cicotte was at his “best at the finish,” gushed Sanborn.15 The Michigan native made quick work of the Browns in the ninth, retiring Miller, Sisler, and Del Pratt on infield popups to complete the no-hitter in 2 hours and 2 minutes to win with “apparent ease.”16 Cicotte fanned five and walked three in recording the sixth White Sox no-hitter in franchise history, and the first since teammate Joe Benz beat the Cleveland Naps, 6-1, on May 31, 1914. Future Hall of Famer Ray Schalk had also donned the tools of ignorance for that no-hitter, and would be behind the plate for the White Sox’ next one, too, on April 30, 1922, when Charlie Robertson tossed the first perfect game in team history (and fifth in big-league history) to beat the Detroit Tigers, 2-0.

The Browns exacted revenge of sorts against Cicotte on May 5 at Sportsman’s Park when Ernie Koob tossed the second no-hitter in Browns history, albeit a controversial one, defeating the Pale Hose, 1-0. The Tribune initially reported that Koob had tossed a one-hitter;17 but hours after the game, the official scorer, John B. Sheridan, a St. Louis sportswriter, changed Buck Weaver’s first-inning hit to an error on second baseman Ernie Johnson. The following day, the Browns’ Bob Groom tossed a no-hitter against Chicago in the second game of a doubleheader. It was the first time in big-league history that a team had thrown no-hitters on consecutive days.

Sanborn’s prediction that the White Sox would win the pennant was correct. They won 100 games, owing in large part to the emergence of Cicotte as the AL’s best pitcher. He led the league in wins (28), ERA (1.53), and innings (346⅔), while completing 29 of his 35 starts among 49 appearances. Cicotte defeated the New York Giants in Game One of the World Series. He made three appearances in Chicago’s Series victory, yielding just four earned runs in 23 innings in three appearances.

This article appears in “Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis: Home of the Browns and Cardinals at Grand and Dodier” (SABR, 2017), edited by Gregory H. Wolf. Click here to read more articles from this book online.

Photo Caption

Eddie Cicotte led the AL in wins (28), ERA (1.53), and innings pitched (346) in 1917 for the world champion Chicago White Sox. (Library of Congress)

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also accessed Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, the SABR Minor Leagues Database, accessed online at Baseball-Reference.com, SABR.org, and The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record.

Notes

1 I.E. Sanborn, “Sox Should Win Flag Unless Stars Are Hurt,” Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1917: A1.

2 Edward T. Collins, “Eddie Collins Tells Benefits of Army Drills,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1917: A1.

3 According to “Notes,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1917: A1, Shotton was credited with a stolen base; however, the box scores in Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org do not credit him with a stolen base.

4 W.J. O’Connor, “Browns Hitless Before Cicotte, Sox Go Over, 11-0,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 1917: 35.

5 According to I.E. Sanborn, “Cicotte Pitches No-Hit Game for Sox,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1917: A1, Rogers made a wild pitch; however, the box scores in Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org do not credit Rogers with a wild pitch.

6 Contemporary newspaper reports mentioned the stolen bases; however, the box scores in Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org do not credit Jackson or Weaver with one.

7 I.E. Sanborn “Cicotte Pitches No-Hit Game for Sox,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1917: A1.

8 O’Connor.

9 Sanborn, “Cicotte Pitches No-Hit Game for Sox.”

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 O’Connor.

14 “Notes,” Chicago Tribune.

15 Sanborn, “Cicotte Pitches No-Hit Game for Sox.”

16 Ibid.

17 I.E. Sanborn, “Koob Tames Sox in One Hit Game, 1-0,” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1917: 1.

Less than a week before Opening Day of the 1918 season, as the Chicago White Sox made their way north from spring training, Eddie Collins woke up feeling weak and ill in Wichita, Kansas. The captain of the defending World Series champions decided to play that afternoon’s exhibition game against the Wichita Jobbers of the Western League. He went 0-for-5, an uncharacteristically poor performance, and Wichita’s minor-leaguers defeated the powerful White Sox.1

Afterward, Collins summoned a doctor and fainted in his hotel room while he was being examined.2 It was just a cold, maybe a bout of tonsillitis, the doctor said.3 Collins thought he had picked it up in Mineral Wells, Texas, the White Sox’ spring-training home for the past month. The sleeper train that had transported them to Kansas had been “without heat of any kind,” with few blankets on board to keep the players warm at night.4 Manager Pants Rowland sent his star second baseman home to Chicago to rest up for the start of the season.

The White Sox were scheduled to play another game on Friday, April 12, at Camp Funston, a hastily built military base outside of Junction City, Kansas, that housed more than 40,000 US Army soldiers training to go overseas to fight in World War I.5 The Army’s 89th Division baseball team, which included several future major leaguers, had beaten the St. Louis Cardinals twice in the previous seven days.6 White Sox owner Charles Comiskey had booked this game, and several others against military teams during spring training, as a show of baseball’s support for the troops, to help boost morale and provide entertainment before they went off to face the carnage of war.

What Comiskey did not know — what almost no one knew at the time — was that the White Sox were heading into the epicenter of the most devastating public-health crisis of the twentieth century. A new and virulent strain of the H1N1 influenza virus was first noticed in February in the farming community of Haskell, Kansas. Soldiers from that town who were home on leave unknowingly carried the virus back to Camp Funston, where by mid-March more than 1,100 soldiers had been admitted to the base hospital and 38 of them had died.7

The influenza virus spread rapidly after that, as US soldiers were transferred from base to base, and then quickly shipped overseas to join the war in Europe. By the time the global pandemic finally ended in early 1920, upward of 500 million people had been infected — nearly one-third of the world’s population — leaving an estimated 50 million dead, including around 675,000 Americans.8

But in the spring of 1918, no one at Camp Funston knew of the deadly horror that was to come. The first wave of the influenza pandemic attracted little attention at the time, in part because while thousands of people became infected quickly, relatively few died from the virus at first. Soldiers dismissed their mild symptoms of the flu as a “three-day fever” and no precautions were taken to stop the spread.9

Eddie Collins may have felt the same way about his own illness as he traveled back home to Chicago, accompanied by the White Sox’ Opening Day starter, Eddie Cicotte.10 After a few days of rest, Collins’s symptoms seemed to clear up, rather than develop into pneumonia as the doctors had feared. The flu that was quietly sweeping around central Kansas was likely the furthest thing from his mind.

In the meantime, pitcher Red Faber and the rest of the White Sox team were still at Camp Funston, ready to play an exhibition game with 7,000 soldiers in attendance. The troops received special permission to take the rest of the day off and watch baseball from the base’s top commander, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, who had just returned from France and was the guest of honor with his wife, Louise.11 The 50-cent admission fee for everyone in attendance went toward the camp’s athletic equipment fund.

Faber had been the White Sox’s biggest star in the 1917 World Series, recording three wins over the New York Giants. The right-hander from Cascade, Iowa, expected to face little opposition against the 89th Division team, which included future St. Louis Browns outfielder Dutch Wetzel, future NFL football coach George “Potsy” Clark, and Philadelphia A’s pitcher Win Noyes.

Faber allowed just two hits against the Army team in five innings, while Noyes and a pair of relievers were knocked around by the White Sox’ powerful lineup. Happy Felsch delivered the big blow with a grand slam to left field in the fourth. Nemo Leibold also homered, while Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullin all had extra-base hits.12 The military newspaper Trench and Camp reported, “At no time did the division team look dangerous to the Comiskey players for they all seemed to be in the finest shape.”13

After the game the White Sox said goodbye to the soldiers and left for Kansas City to play their final exhibition series against the Kansas City Blues of the American Association. Despite their proximity to anyone at Camp Funston who may have been carrying the influenza virus, none of the White Sox players except Eddie Collins publicly reported any flu-like symptoms before their Opening Day game against the St. Louis Browns on April 16.

One day after the White Sox left Kansas, their crosstown rivals, the Chicago Cubs, learned that star pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander’s draft number had been called and he would miss most of the baseball season. He was ordered to report to military duty by the end of April — at Camp Funston.14

The dark cloud of war dominated headlines all summer long. In July the US government issued a “work or fight” order to all able-bodied men that shortened the baseball season and forced the World Series to be played in early September. By then, the second wave of the influenza pandemic was in full force and millions of people would die throughout the fall.

White Sox pitcher Red Faber, who had easily beaten the Camp Funston team in his final tune-up, was one of the baseball players who reportedly contracted the flu after the season ended. He recovered in time to report to spring training in 1919, but he had lost nearly 20 pounds by the time he arrived. His weakened state, combined with recurring ankle injuries, caused his performance to fall far below his usual Hall of Fame-caliber standard.

Although the White Sox won the American League pennant in 1919 for the second time in three years, Faber was left off the World Series roster and failed to make an appearance against the Cincinnati Reds. His absence in that fateful fall classic — which eight of his teammates conspired to lose in exchange for bribes from gamblers — was far more noticeable than Eddie Collins’s absence from a preseason exhibition game, played in the heart of a health crisis that rocked the entire world.

An earlier version of this story was published in the SABR Black Sox Scandal’s June 2021 committee newsletter.

Sources

No box score or full play-by-play for this game has been uncovered, but the most extensive coverage of the game and players involved was found in:

Fisher, H.E. “Sox Wallop Army,” Trench and Camp (Fort Riley, Kansas), April 20, 1918: 1.

Robbins, George S. “Gen. Wood Sees Sox Play His Camp Team,” Chicago Daily News, April 12, 1918: 2.

Sanborn, I.E. “10,000 Funston Boys Watch Sox Bombard Camp’s Team, 13 to 1,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1918: 9. (Note: The score in this headline does not match any other coverage of the game. Every other account has the White Sox winning 12-1.)

Baseball Reference.com

Retrosheet.org

Notes

1 “Wichita Pitcher Beats Champs,” Wichita Beacon, April 12, 1918: 7. The Jobbers’ team president was Frank Isbell, a White Sox hero in the 1906 World Series.

2 I.E. Sanborn, “Eddie Collins Forced to Quit Sox by Illness,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1918: 9.

3 George S. Robbins, “Gen. Wood Sees Sox Play His Camp Team,” Chicago Daily News, April 12, 1918: 2; “Collins Too Ill to Play,” Kansas City Star, April 12, 1918: 21.

4 Sanborn, “Eddie Collins.”

5 “Camp Funston,” Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society, accessed online at https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/camp-funston/16692 on May 31, 2021.

6 “Ball Season On,” Topeka State Journal, April 6, 1918: 1.

7 John M. Barry, “How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2017, accessed online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/ on May 31, 2021.

8 “1918 Pandemic (H1N1 Virus),” Centers for Disease Control and Protection, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html, accessed May 7, 2020.

9 Barry, “How the Horrific 1918 Flu.”

10 I.E. Sanborn, “10,000 Funston Boys Watch Sox Bombard Camp’s Team, 13 to 1,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1918: 9.

11 H.E. Fisher, “Sox Wallop Army,” Trench and Camp (Fort Riley, Kansas), April 20, 1918: 1.

12 Fisher, “Sox Wallop Army.”

13 Fisher, “Sox Wallop Army.

14 James Crusinberry, “Cubs’ Hopes Wrecked with Aleck Drafted,” Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1918: 17.

Charles Comiskey’s club had ended the previous season in a disappointing sixth place, following the loss of stars like Eddie Collins to the Marines and Shoeless Joe Jackson to the shipyards during World War I. The war had cast a dark pall over baseball as the US government instituted a “work or fight” order that forced players to enlist in the military or take essential defense-industry jobs, and also ended the 1918 season in early September. Fearful team owners, worried that fans wouldn’t return to the game, cut the 1919 schedule by two weeks and made other cost-saving moves, including the establishment of a short-lived salary cap.

But the entire starting lineup from Chicago’s World Series-winning squad of 1917 was now back on the roster and the same nine players who were on the field for Opening Day of that championship year were penciled in for the first game in 1919. The manager who wrote out the White Sox lineup, however, was different. In an offseason move that surprised the baseball world, Comiskey fired the skipper who had led his team to a title, Pants Rowland, and replaced him with William “Kid” Gleason.

The 52-year-old Gleason had spent more than three decades in the game as a player and coach, but he had never managed in the big leagues. He took over the reins after sitting out the 1918 season in a salary dispute with Comiskey, who persuaded him to sign on as manager after promising to re-sign Collins, Jackson, and the other players who had left the team during the war.2

Gleason was well respected throughout the American League, but few experts gave his White Sox a chance to win the pennant. “Unless he has a lot of luck developing new pitchers, [Gleason] is going to have a hard time keeping his team in the first division,” wrote Irving Sanborn of the Chicago Tribune.3 Pitching depth was a major problem for Chicago, with future Hall of Famer Red Faber sidelined by injury and a lingering bout of the flu.4 Rookies Dickey Kerr and John Sullivan and the 20-year-old prospect Frank Shellenback were still unproven, so the White Sox pitching staff relied almost exclusively on ace Eddie Cicotte and young Lefty Williams to carry the load.5  

Entering his fourth major-league season, Williams got the call to start on Opening Day, April 23, 1919, against the St. Louis Browns. The veteran Cicotte was held back because he superstitiously believed that the rest of his year was doomed if he pitched on Opening Day.6 It didn’t hurt that the Browns’ top hitters, George Sisler, Ken Williams, and Ray Demmitt, all batted from the left side against the southpaw Williams.

About 15,000 fans filed into Sportsman’s Park by the time the game began at 3:30 P.M. The White Sox broke out new road uniforms of “steel gray with blue trimmings and the traditional white stockings.”7 A pregame ceremony was held to honor Browns manager Jimmy Burke and fellow St. Louis natives Jack Tobin and Lefty Leifield. White Sox catcher Ray Schalk, who grew up about 50 miles north of St. Louis in Litchfield, Illinois, was also given a bouquet of flowers during the game.

Right-hander Dave Davenport took the mound for the Browns and was immediately handed a 2-0 lead when Demmitt’s line drive skipped past center fielder Happy Felsch for a two-run triple in the first inning. It was all downhill from there as the White Sox offense bombarded Browns pitchers for 13 runs and 21 hits over the next two hours.

Buck Weaver’s two-run triple and Joe Jackson’s RBI single in the third inning gave the White Sox the lead and drove Davenport from the game. Manager Burke said his pitcher’s control was “too good” — which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch translated to mean that Davenport threw everything over the middle of the plate “with regularity and certainty.”8

His replacement, Tom Rogers, fared no better, allowing four runs before recording three outs in the fourth inning. Weaver drove in two more runs with a one-out single, then Eddie Collins greeted reliever Lefty Leifield with an inside-the-park home run to center field, putting the White Sox ahead 8-3.

Chicago’s left-handed sluggers had no trouble with the Browns’ southpaw pitchers, Leifield and Ernie Koob, who allowed four runs in his two innings of work. The platoon “had about as much effect in stopping the Sox as a bartender’s wishes might have in stopping Prohibition,” one writer quipped.9

Even White Sox pitcher Lefty Williams (a right-handed batter) enjoyed some rare success at the plate, recording three hits and scoring three runs as the game reached blowout status by the final innings. Williams’s offensive highlight was a triple in the ninth inning to score Swede Risberg. Weaver brought him home with a single — his fourth hit and fifth RBI of the day. Jackson and Risberg also had three hits apiece, while Chick Gandil doubled, tripled, and scored twice.

It was an auspicious start for the White Sox — a team long known as the “Hitless Wonders” — who would go on to lead the American League in hits, runs scored, and stolen bases. Kid Gleason spent the rest of the season worrying about his pitching staff behind Williams and Cicotte, but his offensive attack was already back in championship form.

Sources

Play-by-play information was recorded in the following game recaps:

Bell, Floyd L. “Sothoron May Stop Sox in Second Game of Browns’ Series,” St. Louis Star, April 24, 1919: 19.

Sanborn, I.E. “White Sox Bombard Browns in Year’s First Battle, 13-4,” Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1919: 19.

Wray, John E. “Extra! Four Brown Pitchers Slaughtered on Hurling Hill; Nine White Sox Are Implicated,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 24, 1919: 28.

Box scores can be found at Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org:

baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLA/SLA191904230.shtml.

retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1919/B04230SLA1919.htm.

Notes

1   This problem would plague the notorious 1919 White Sox all season long … for different reasons.

2   James Crusinberry, “Kid Gleason Appointed Manager of the White Sox,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1919: 31. Comiskey was furious that some of his players chose to accept “unpatriotic” shipyard jobs over the military, including Jackson, Lefty Williams, and backup catcher Byrd Lynn. He threatened to blacklist them from baseball once the war ended, but relented when Gleason persuaded him to keep his championship team intact. For more on the Jackson shipyard controversy, see the author’s article, “1919 White Sox: Prologue,” at sabr.org/research/1919-white-sox-prologue-offseason-1918-19.

3   I.E. Sanborn, “Baseball Races Start on Wednesday,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1919: 17.

4   The influenza pandemic in 1918-19 was the deadliest disease outbreak in human history, killing more than 600,000 Americans and millions of people worldwide. John M. Barry, “How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2017, https://smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222.

5   Cicotte and Williams were up to the challenge, earning 52 of the White Sox’s 88 victories in 1919.

6   I.E. Sanborn, “Gleason’s Men All Ready for Pennant Drive,” Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1919: 19. Cicotte made only two Opening Day starts in his career, in 1910 for the Red Sox (7 IP, 9 H, 2 R in a 4-4 tie) and in 1918 for the White Sox (4⅓ IP, 11 H, 3 R in a 6-1 loss.)

7   “White Sox Notes,” Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1919: 19.

8   John E. Wray, “Extra! Four Brown Pitchers Slaughtered on Hurling Hill; Nine White Sox Are Implicated,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 24, 1919: 28.

9   Ibid.

The Reds had reason to be excited when they took the field against the Cardinals in a one-game matchup before beginning a 20-day Eastern swing the next day: They were playing their best baseball since joining the National League in 1890. After concluding the war-shortened 1918 season on a 20-5 tear, the Reds won their first seven games of the 1919 season for new manager Pat Moran. At 10-4, the Reds were in second place, a game behind Brooklyn. Moran was feeling confident, too. He had just released three players (Goldie Rapp, Mike Regan, and Wally Rehg) five days early to get to the required 21-player limit by May 15.3 The Cardinals, on the other hand, seemed in disarray and teetered on mutiny. The perpetual second-division team had won just three of its first 14 games for Branch Rickey, the former St. Louis Browns manager and GM who joined the Cardinals as both president and manager in 1919. However, rumors swirled that players detested him. On the day of the game against the Reds, Rickey was in New York for a league meeting and was trying to swing a deal for shortstop Doc Lavan of the Washington Senators. In his absence, the Cardinals issued a formal statement in the team hotel denying reports that players were dogging it for Rickey. The team is “individually and collectively, heart and soul” for its manager, reported the Post-Dispatch. Team captain Jack “Dots’ Miller served as temporary skipper for the Redbirds.4

Taking the mound for the Reds was their ace, 24-year-old Horace “Hod” Eller. In his third full campaign, Eller had emerged as a bona-fide star. He had led the club with 16 victories the previous season, and sported a 28-17 career record. His success can be traced to his mastery of the “shine ball.” As SABR member Stephen V. Rice noted in his biography of Eller, the shine ball made its appearance in the big leagues in 1917, with Eddie Cicotte and Dave Danforth of the Chicago White Sox as its most noteworthy practitioners.5 “Eller ‘shines’ the ball by a quick rub on his right trousers leg,” wrote the Washington Herald about the pitcher’s routine. “Sometimes the movement is barely perceptible. Then he gets away with a side arm motion. He has very little windup.”6 Like the emery ball and spitball, the shine ball was the pitcher’s way to manipulate the movement of his pitches. If controlled properly, those pitches were exceptionally effective — and legal at the time. Eller was anxious to take the mound against St. Louis. In his last outing, six days earlier against the Chicago Cubs, he experienced what the Enquirer called a “great blow-up” in the ninth inning, yielding six runs in an eventual Reds loss in extra innings.7

A Sunday afternoon of baseball attracted only 5,500 spectators to Redland Field, located on the west side of the Queen City. Nonetheless, the Enquirer considered that total “remarkable” considering the “chilly and forbidding day.”

After Eller mowed down the first three batters he faced, the Reds took their whacks against 23-year-old Cardinals left-hander Jakie May. Standing just 5-feet-8, May had a 6-7 record in parts of three seasons (including 1-1 thus far in 1919). The Reds “plugged at him rather severely from the start,” wrote the Enquirer, but May held the Reds scoreless through three innings.8In the third frame, he benefited from a “sensational catch” by right fielder Walton Cruise, who “robbed” Eller of a possible triple.9

Eller had faced the minimum 12 batters through four innings. His only blemish was a second-inning walk to Rogers Hornsby, who was immediately cut down trying to steal second base. Eller’s teammates provided some breathing room in the bottom of the fourth with what the Enquirer described as “fancy scoring” with two outs.10 May “does not exercise the hypnotic influence over our boys,” continued the paper, comparing May to veteran Hippo Vaughn of the Chicago Cubs, who had subdued the Reds, 4-3, the day before in Wrigley Field. After Sherry Magee and Jake Daubert were retired, Larry Kopf was hit by a pitch and moved to third on Manuel “Potato” Cueto’s single. The “little Cuban,” in the Enquirer’s insensitive parlance of the time, stole second.11 Up stepped one of the club’s hottest hitters, Bill Rariden, batting .357 with 15 hits in 42 at-bats this far in ’19. He belted a “nifty lofter” into left field, driving in both Kopf and Cueto for a two-run Reds lead.12

The Cardinals “went all to pieces” in the fifth inning, wrote the Enquirer, scoring four runs with two outs and effectively putting the game away.13 It was classic Deadball Era tactics with small ball and aggressive baserunning, combined with horrible defense by St. Louis. After Morrie Rath led off with a walk and moved to second on Heinie Groh’s one-out single, Daubert lined a single, driving in Rath for the Reds’ third run. The next sequence of events demonstrated why the Cardinals tied the Brooklyn Robins and Philadelphia Phillies for the league’s worst fielding percentage (.963) that season. With Kopf digging in, Groh stole third. Then he and Daubert pulled off a double steal. Groh swiped home and Daubert rounded second and ended up on third when catcher Frank Snyder “muffed the return throw.”14 Kopf walked, then stole second; second baseman Dots Miller’s error in catching Snyder’s throw permitted Daubert to score. Cueto followed with a routine grounder, but third baseman Milt Stock committed the Cardinals’ third error of the inning by throwing “madly” to first, enabling Kopf to score.15

“[Eller] showed wonderful class,” praised Reds beat writer Frank Ryder.16 Staked to a six-run lead, he breezed through the final three innings with a slight hiccup in the eighth. In that frame he issued consecutive one-out walks to Cruise and Joe Schultz. Sensing a scoring chance, the Cardinals bench became “slightly obstreperous,” reported the Enquirer, and was “severely called down” by home-plate umpire Hank O’Day.17 Eller quickly extinguished any glimmer of hope when he struck out Miller, and Cruise was gunned down trying to steal third. There was no drama in the final frame. Eller completed the no-hitter in 1 hour and 40 minutes when Burt Shotton “rolled an insignificant grounder” to second baseman Rath, who fired quickly to Daubert at first.18

Eller “hung the pall on the depressed visiting athletes a necklace of goose eggs about them,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.19 It was a resounding victory for the Indiana native. He fanned eight batters and walked three, but those figures barely tell the story of his complete dominance. The Cardinals hit only five balls to the outfield, and they were “gently floating lofters that the batboy could have corralled,” suggested Frank Ryder.20 An agile fielder, Eller also scooped up four grounders hit back to the box. (Eller had not yet committed an error in 80 big-league games.) He also singled, one of the Reds’ eight safeties.

May went the distance, walking six and striking out two in eight innings. He had a rough season with the Redbirds, finishing 3-12, and led the league in walks with 87 in just 125⅔ innings.

Eller’s gem was the fourth no-hitter in Reds history and the first since Noodles Hahn turned the trick on July 12, 1900, against the Philadelphia Phillies at League Park, the wood-framed stadium that served as the Reds home from 1884 through 1901. The first two also took place at League Park: Bumpus Jones in the last game of the 1892 season, on October 15, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-1, and Ted Breitenstein beating the Pirates 11-0 on April 22, 1898.

Eller was coming into his own at the time of his no-hitter. In his next outing, four days later, he matched his career high by tossing 13 innings and shutting out the Brooklyn Robins on five hits at Ebbets Field. He finished the season with a 19-9 record, and tossed two complete-game victories against the Chicago White Sox in the Reds’ World Series championship, forever tainted by scandal.

Despite his success in 1919, Eller’s career soon came to a drastic end. The big leagues outlawed all freak deliveries, such as the shine ball, emery ball, and spitball, beginning in the 1920 season; each team, however, was permitted to designate two pitchers would could legally throw spitters. Eller protested the new rule, but to no avail.21 He went 15-14 over the next two campaigns to finish his big-league career with a 60-40 record.

This article was published in “Cincinnati’s Crosley Field: A Gem in the Queen City” (SABR, 2019), edited by Gregory H. Wolf. To read more articles from this book at the SABR Games Project, click here.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also accessed Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, the SABR Minor Leagues Database, accessed online at Baseball-Reference.com, SABR.org, and The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record.

Notes

The Boston Red Sox, led by their young hitting and pitching star Babe Ruth, came to town with plenty of swagger, having won three of the past four World Series. The Chicago White Sox were the only team to break up their reign, when they captured the American League pennant in 1917 and won a fall classic overshadowed by America’s entry into World War I. The war forced the 1918 season to end early as major-league players were forced to choose between military service or defense-industry jobs. Chicago’s depleted roster fell to sixth place while Boston held onto its stars long enough to again win it all.

Now, with the war over and both teams back at full strength, the American League’s most intense rivalry was ready to resume. In Chicago, there was no question how much this series meant: Boston is “the team that has to be beaten to win the pennant,” White Sox beat writer I.E. Sanborn asserted.2 Red Sox players were less complimentary toward the other side: “[Manager Ed] Barrow’s players, almost to a man, figure that the club they will have to beat this year will be Cleveland. Several of the boys [said] Chicago is not regarded as a serious contender.”3

Under new manager Kid Gleason, the White Sox roared out to a 12-4 start and were in first place when Boston came to town. The Red Sox, 2½ games back, were playing their first game in six days; persistent rain and snow had postponed their entire weekend series at home against the Philadelphia A’s. A crowd of about 8,000 showed up for this highly anticipated matchup on a cold, drizzly Wednesday afternoon at Comiskey Park.

Both teams sent their aces to the mound: Eddie Cicotte for Chicago and Carl Mays for Boston. Cicotte had spent 4½ seasons with the Red Sox (1908-12), but had struggled against his former team4 since being traded to the White Sox. Mays, a submarine-style pitcher with a sour disposition, was “perhaps the most disliked player”5 in baseball but also one of its most formidable, having won 61 games over the previous three years, plus two more in the 1918 World Series.

The White Sox hitters could not figure out Mays’s peculiar delivery for the first five innings, scratching out only one hit — a single by Swede Risberg in the second — and a walk. Cicotte was just as dominant, allowing just a single to Wally Schang in the third. Schang was wiped out on a nifty double play that began when the shortstop Risberg charged in on a slow grounder by Mays and threw out the Boston pitcher. Schang never stopped running, but first baseman Chick Gandil threw a strike across the diamond to Buck Weaver to nab him for the third out.

In the fifth Babe Ruth came to the plate with a chance to break the scoreless tie. But the “celebrated home run hero was even more helpless than the rest of the team”6 against Cicotte’s knuckleballs, striking out to the delight of the Chicago fans. The spectators in the left-field bleachers caused “pandemonium” and “made life merry” for Ruth when he returned to his position.7

The Red Sox had their best scoring opportunity against Cicotte in the sixth. Everett Scott led off with a single, then Schang followed with a bunt down the third-base line. Weaver tried to throw out the lead runner, but heaved wildly into center field. Happy Felsch’s throw to third was strong enough to catch Scott, but pitcher Cicotte dropped the ball after tagging the runner for another error on the same play. Suddenly, Boston had two on with no outs and “you could have cut the gloom in the grandstand with a safety razor.”8 But Cicotte induced the next three hitters — Mays, Harry Hooper, and Jack Barry — to pop out and the threat expired almost as quickly as it had formed.

In the bottom of the sixth, the White Sox finally pushed across the game’s only run. After two quick outs, Eddie Collins sent a sharp grounder to Barry — his old double-play partner in the Philadelphia A’s “$100,000 Infield” — and reached base when the shortstop misplayed it. With new life, Shoeless Joe Jackson waited for Mays to throw one over the plate and smashed a double to deep left-center. The speedy Collins ran around the bases to score without a throw.

The game remained tense to the finish; there “wasn’t a man on either side who would not have broken a leg to win.”9 Barry singled with one out in the ninth to give Boston a fighting chance in its final at-bat, but Cicotte bore down and got Amos Strunk and Babe Ruth to fly out to end the game. “You will live a long time before you see another battle of slabmen to equal that,” Sanborn wrote in the Chicago Tribune.10

Eddie Cicotte allowed four hits, all singles, and didn’t walk a batter in his only career shutout against the Red Sox. The thrilling win improved his record to 5-1 and he followed it with shutouts against the Philadelphia A’s and the New York Yankees in his next two starts. His streak of 29⅔ consecutive scoreless innings11 finally ended on May 27 against the Washington Senators in the third inning, but he continued overpowering American League hitters on his way to a career-high 29 wins and a fateful trip to the World Series that culminated in the Black Sox Scandal.

Carl Mays, the loser in this dramatic pitching duel, also found himself embroiled in controversy in 1919. He became so frustrated by his poor run support that he walked off the mound after a game in July and never returned to the Red Sox. The New York Yankees agreed to acquire the embattled pitcher in a trade, but AL President Ban Johnson attempted to block the deal. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey rose up to challenge Johnson’s power and the Mays trade eventually went through. But the resulting legal battle paved the way for baseball’s owners to hire a new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to oversee the game in the wake of the World Series scandal.

Sources

Play-by-play information for this game was found in the following articles:

Sanborn, I.E. “Double by Joe Jackson Beats the Mighty Red Sox, 1 to 0,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1919: 19.

Whitman, Burt. “Jackson’s Double Pins Defeat on Champions,” Boston Herald, May 15, 1919: 16.

“Red Sox Shut Out by Eddie Cicotte,” Boston Globe, May 15, 1919: 10.

Box scores can be found at Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHA/CHA191905140.shtml.

retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1919/B05140CHA1919.htm.

Notes

1 Jack Dempsey launched his Hall of Fame boxing career by ending Jess Willard’s reign as heavyweight champion on July 4, 1919.

2 “White Sox Notes,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1919: 19.

3 Melville E. Webb Jr., “Some of Season’s Neatest Pitching,” Boston Globe, May 15, 1919: 14.

4 Cicotte entered this game with a 7-14 record in 23 starts against Boston. He finished his career at 13-20; no other American League team had a winning record against Cicotte.

5 Allan Wood, “Carl Mays,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproj/person/99ca7c89, accessed January 28, 2019.

6 I.E. Sanborn, “Double by Joe Jackson Beats the Mighty Red Sox, 1 to 0,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1919: 19.

7 Ibid.; Burt Whitman, “Jackson’s Double Pins Defeat on Champions,” Boston Herald, May 15, 1919: 16.

8 Sanborn.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 As of this writing, Retrosheet.org shows Cicotte with a streak of 29 consecutive scoreless innings instead of 29⅔. But play-by-play details for the May 27 game in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post both confirm that the Washington Senators’ run in the third inning to end Cicotte’s streak was scored with two outs.

In the months after the 1919 season wrapped up, both teams’ fortunes changed significantly. The White Sox became infamous as the “Black Sox” because eight of their players were banned for life for allegedly conspiring with gamblers to fix games in the World Series. The Red Sox sold their preeminent player – Babe Ruth – to the rival New York Yankees. As it happened, neither franchise won its next World Series championship until the twenty-first century. The Red Sox snapped their 86-season drought in 2004, and the White Sox ended their 88-season wait a season later in 2005.

In a Thursday afternoon game in May in Chicago, though, both still-unsullied teams went head-to-head. The Red Sox won – but only after Babe Ruth pitched 11 innings of relief.

Ruth had become a beloved star in Boston. He led the AL with nine shutouts and a 1.75 ERA in 1916 and had a 23-12 won-lost record. He was 24-13 in 1917. In 1918, when he began to play in the outfield and first base, he still went 13-7 as a pitcher. He was 3-0 in three World Series starts and had a combined ERA of 0.87. He could hit, too, leading the league in home runs in both 1918 and (as it transpired) in 1919.

Just the day before, on May 14, the White Sox had beaten the Red Sox, 1-0, a game that began a streak of three consecutive shutouts and 29 2/3 scoreless innings for Chicago’s Eddie Cicotte.1

Ruth wasn’t Boston’s starting pitcher in the May 15 game. That honor went to Bullet Joe Bush, who’d been 15-15 (with a 2.11 ERA) for the Red Sox in 1918, but was making his first appearance of the 1919 season, in Boston’s 13th game.

First-year White Sox manager Kid Gleason’s starter was Lefty Williams. He fell behind quickly after right fielder Harry Hooper’s leadoff double down the left-field line, a sacrifice by second baseman Jack Barry, an RBI double to left by center fielder Amos Strunk, and a run-scoring single through the box by Red Sox left fielder Del Gainer.2 The Red Sox had a chance to add to their 2-0 lead after first baseman Stuffy McInnis singled, but third baseman Ossie Vitt flied out to left, and McInnis, running on contact, was called out for neglecting to retouch second as he tried to return to first.3

In the bottom of the first, Bush faced three White Sox batters and retired all three. He grounded out to end Boston’s scoreless second inning, and then didn’t return to the mound – his right shoulder was not up to the task.

As the Boston Globe reported, Bush “found that his wing was in no shape to continue, and the game paused while Babe Ruth was hurried into action.”4 Indeed, Red Sox manager Ed Barrow brought Ruth into the game to take over pitching. Ruth, who had gone 0-for-4 with two strikeouts a day earlier against Cicotte while playing left field, had pitched only once so far in 1919: a complete-game win over the Yankees on May 3.

Ruth walked the first batter – Shoeless Joe Jackson – but got a fly-ball out and a double play to end the inning.

In the third, Barry reached on an infield single and then nearly scored – but was thrown out at the plate on what was scored a triple to right-center by Gainer. In the home half of the inning, Ruth again walked one batter – Williams – but the White Sox once more failed to score.

The Red Sox upped their lead to 4-0 in the top of the fourth. They loaded the bases with nobody out on a single by McInnis, a fielding error by Chicago shortstop Swede Risberg, and a bunt single toward third by Everett Scott. Gleason called on 25-year-old left-hander Dickey Kerr to relieve Williams. It was just Kerr’s fifth game in the majors.

Kerr hit the first batter he faced, catcher Wally Schang. That forced in a run. Babe Ruth was up with the bases loaded – but struck out. Hooper grounded out, short to first, and the fourth run scored. Kerr got Barry to ground out, too.

The White Sox began to rally in the bottom of the fourth. Third baseman Buck Weaver doubled to left to lead off the inning. Second baseman Eddie Collins singled to right and drove in Weaver. Jackson hit a ball right back to Ruth, who started a 1-6-3 double play.

There were no further runs in the fourth, but the White Sox tied it up, 4-4, by producing three more runs in the bottom of the fifth.

Ruth was not at his best. A base on balls, a single, and a walk to Kerr loaded the bases with nobody out. Shano Collins grounded out to McInnis, but a run scored. After Weaver flied out, Eddie Collins reached, squeezing out a run-producing infield single. With Jackson at the plate, the White Sox pulled off a double steal.5 Collins stole second, and Kerr stole home after reversing course when third baseman Scott could not handle catcher Schang’s throw. The game was tied.

The sixth was scoreless, but Boston regained the lead in the top of the seventh. Risberg committed his second error of the game, misplaying a ball hit by Ruth, who was advanced to second by Hooper’s sacrifice. Barry singled to center, but saw Ruth cut down at home plate by Happy Felsch’s throw. Barry took second on the throw home, then scored as Strunk singled to short left-center, making it a 5-4 game.

Ruth allowed a single in the seventh, and two more in the eighth, but he took the one-run lead to the ninth. Catcher Ray Schalk led off with a single. He was sacrificed to second by pinch-hitter Fred McMullin, batting for Kerr. Shano Collins made the second out, but Buck Weaver doubled to the left-field flagpole, tying the game, 5-5. Ruth retired Eddie Collins to send it to extra innings.

Frank Shellenback was Chicago’s new pitcher. Neither team scored in either the 10th or the 11th, though both teams saw two batters reach base in the 10th, the Red Sox got one man on in the 11th, and the White Sox got a single and double in the 11th, putting runners on second and third with just one out. Ruth got Eddie Collins to hit a foul popup and Jackson to fly out to left.

In the top of the 12th, Barry led off with a single. Strunk dutifully laid down a sacrifice. Gainer then hit the ball back to Shellenback, who threw to third to prevent Barry from advancing. Barry scooted back to second, but Gainer had kept running, and there were two Red Sox on second base. Gainer was ruled out.

But McInnis bailed out his teammates’ baserunning misadventure by swinging at the first pitch and doubled to right field. Barry scored, giving the Red Sox a 6-5 lead.

Ruth walked Felsch leading off the bottom of the 12th, but he retired the next three batters and got his second win of the season, despite giving up five runs. He hadn’t been at his best, walking eight White Sox batters and striking out none.

As Burt Whitman wrote in the Boston Herald, “He just barely managed to wobble through, but he had fairly good defence behind him in times of greatest stress. … Babe was not the best pitching Babe of other years. He was wild and he was not particularly fast and his curve ball did not behave … [y]et he won the game, even if he once had a lead of 4 to 0.”6

Ruth had been 0-for-4 at the plate – “very bad, the worst he has appeared this season. But everyone else on the team got at least one hit.”7 And his team had won. He had worked 11 innings of relief, tying the Red Sox team record set by Ted Lewis back on July 27. 1901, that one also in Chicago, and that time a win for the White Sox. It’s a record that still holds, more than a century later.8

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Larry DeFillipo and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Babe Ruth, Library of Congress.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHA/CHA191905150.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1919/B05150CHA1919.htm

Notes

1 See Jacob Pomrenke, “May 14, 1919: Chicago’s Eddie Cicotte begins scoreless streak by shutting out Red Sox, 1-0,” SABR Games Project at https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/may-14-1919-chicagos-eddie-cicotte-begins-scoreless-streak-shutting-out-red-sox-1-0 . All in the same homestand, Cicotte shut out Philadelphia on May 18, also 1-0, and then the Yankees on May 23, 5-0.

2 Gainer was playing left field instead of Ruth, who customarily played left in 1919. It had been something of a day off for Ruth – before he got called on to pitch.

3 I.E. Sanborn, “Sox Lose Most Spectacular Game in Years to Boston, 6 to 5,” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1919: 13.

4 “Red Sox Victors in 12-Inning Struggle,” Boston Globe, May 16, 1919: 9. Bush appeared in only one more game in 1919, on July 4, when he threw six innings but had to give up the attempt. He returned to baseball in 1920 and won 15 games for the Red Sox that year and 16 the next, but then was himself dealt to the Yankees. His 26-7 record led the league in winning percentage in 1921.

5 Chicago was fortunate to still have Jackson in the game, In the top of the fifth, he had collided hard with the wall to the bleachers, catching and holding onto Gainer’s drive, but at first seeming to have been knocked unconscious.

6 Burt Whitman, “Champions Whip Chisox in 12-Inning Classic,” Boston Herald, May 16, 1919: 16.

7 Whitman.

8 Ruth returned to the mound five days later, on May 20, and pitched a complete game to beat the St. Louis Browns. He also connected on his first of 16 career grand slams in that game. Ruth set a major-league record with 29 homers in 1919, while going 9-5 with a 2.97 ERA as a pitcher.

So it seemed almost inevitable that the two veterans would clash at some point during a bitter American League pennant race between Gandil’s Chicago White Sox and Speaker’s Cleveland Indians. When their long-simmering tension finally spilled over on May 31, 1919, at Comiskey Park, no one could have imagined how ferocious the fight would be:

“An old time fistfight such as probably hasn’t occurred on a big-league ball field in the last fifteen years or more broke loose at the White Sox park yesterday … it was a rough and tumble tiger battle with claws, spikes, fists, feet, and possibly even teeth before the two finally were dragged apart,” James Crusinberry of the Chicago Tribune reported.1

It all began when Gandil took exception to Speaker’s hard slide into first base in the eighth inning. They jawed at each other from afar until the third out was made. When Speaker ran out to take his defensive position in center field, Gandil unleashed “a torrent of vile abuse”2 and then took a swing at his old teammate.3 The blow to Speaker’s face “staggered” him and then he was “like a wildcat given its freedom,”4 knocking down Gandil at least three times in the ensuing onslaught. With a ring of players, umpires, fans, and police officers surrounding them, their tussle took them from first base to the pitcher’s mound and then toward second base before it was finally broken up.

When the dust settled, Gandil emerged with his White Sox jersey in tatters and blood dripping from his forehead and mouth, while Speaker was cut in the arm and in the leg. Both players were ejected from the game, which earned them five-game suspensions and a $50 fine from AL president Ban Johnson.5

Umpire Tommy Connolly had harsh words for Gandil afterward. “He had it coming to him,” Connolly said. “I don’t blame Speaker for what he did, but it was too bad it had to be upon the diamond in front of a large crowd.”6

The crowd was still buzzing when the game finally resumed in the bottom of the eighth inning, with Smoky Joe Wood taking Speaker’s place in center. Over in left field, Jack Graney became the new target of Chicago’s excited fans, who heaved dozens of glass soda bottles in his direction until White Sox manager Kid Gleason and a group of police officers came out to chastise the rioters and settle everyone down once and for all, until the White Sox could complete their 5-2 win over Cleveland.7

Graney drew the fans’ attention because it was his “numerous complaints against the doctoring of balls”8 by White Sox ace Eddie Cicotte that got the game off to such a chippy start in the first place. At age 35, Cicotte was having the season of his life, entering with an 8-1 record and an 0.89 ERA. The Indians came to town for this Memorial Day series just two games behind the first-place White Sox. But Red Faber and Lefty Williams swept Cleveland in a Friday doubleheader to open the series, doubling the White Sox’s lead in the standings. Cicotte and his infamous “shine ball” stood in Cleveland’s way for the Saturday afternoon game.

In the first inning, Graney came to the plate as the Indians’ leadoff hitter and twice asked umpire Dick Nallin to inspect the baseball9 after Cicotte’s pitches, causing the Chicago fans to howl. “The Cleveland boys always get mad when Cicotte pitches,” the Tribune reported.10

Cleveland manager Lee Fohl blamed Cicotte for everything that happened afterward. “It was that ‘shine’ ball that started the [Gandil-Speaker] row,” he said. “As long as things like that are permitted, there will be fights. My players simply got mad. … Cicotte repeatedly discolors [the ball.] We appeal to the umpires and they do nothing.”11  

The Indians weren’t the only team to complain about Cicotte’s trick pitches, but their hitters seemed to have particular trouble solving them. They jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead in the second inning after doubles by Larry Gardner and Doc Johnston and an RBI single by Steve O’Neill, but Cicotte held them to just four singles the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, the White Sox offense had no problems with Cleveland right-hander Tom Phillips, who was knocked out in the fourth inning as Chicago scored all five of the runs it needed for victory. Cicotte’s two-run single off reliever Guy Morton was the big blow after Happy Felsch tripled to score Shoeless Joe Jackson and Gandil brought in Felsch with an RBI single.

The game progressed uneventfully until the eighth inning, when Speaker grounded out to Gandil and lost a race to the first-base bag, setting off the fireworks between the two players. Even jaded observers were shocked by the excessive length12 and violence of their fight, leading to speculation from Cleveland writers that Gandil’s teammates had not intervened faster because they were “satisfied that he received his just deserts.”13 Later, Eliot Asinof repeated that claim — “they all wanted Gandil to get his lumps”14 — in his best-selling book, Eight Men Out, reinforcing the idea that the White Sox clubhouse was torn apart by dissension.15

But there is little contemporary evidence16 that Gandil had poor relations with his White Sox teammates or, as Asinof implied, that any clubhouse tension behind the scenes led to the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Just days before the fight with Speaker, Irving Sanborn of the Chicago Tribune wrote a glowing tribute to the first baseman in a syndicated column that appeared in many newspapers. “You could travel a year with the Gleason bunch and never guess that Gandil was not perfectly satisfied with his environment,” he wrote.17

Still, Cleveland writers continued to pile on with sensational rhetoric against Gandil in the days following the fight: “Any red-blooded man with an ounce of manhood in him would have done exactly what Speaker proceeded to do. It so happened that every ounce of Tris is made up of manhood,” wrote Ed Bang of the Cleveland News, suggesting that the Indians outfielder could be called on to help train boxers Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard in their upcoming heavyweight championship bout.18

Despite the outsized attention placed on the Gandil-Speaker fight as a symbol of the White Sox’s team chemistry, or lack thereof, it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on their play. Their six-game winning streak ended the following day with Gandil watching from the stands and they fell out of the AL lead briefly in late June. But Gandil hit .455 during the month of July and the Sox surged into first place for good, holding off Cleveland for the pennant by 3½ games. The World Series, however, would bring far more scrutiny to Gandil and the White Sox, and Speaker (who took over as manager of the Indians in July) would be watching closely as a correspondent for the Boston Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer.19

Sources

Play-by-play information was found in:

Edwards, Henry P. “Speaker and Gandil Stage Battle as Chicago Defeats Cleveland, 5 to 2,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 1, 1919: 23.

Box scores were accessed at Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHA/CHA191905310.shtml

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1919/B05310CHA1919.htm

Notes

1 James Crusinberry, “Gandil and Speaker Stage Fight as Sox Beat Injuns, 5-2,” Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1919: 19.

2 Henry P. Edwards, “Speaker and Gandil Stage Battle as Chicago Defeats Cleveland, 5 to 2,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 1, 1919: 23.

3 Gandil and Speaker played together for one season with Cleveland in 1916 before the Indians abruptly sold the first baseman to Chicago. Speaker’s biographer, Timothy M. Gay, has speculated that Speaker encouraged team officials to get rid of Gandil. See Gay, Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 178-179.

4 Henry P. Edwards, “Indians Pick White Sox as Team to Beat,” The Sporting News, June 5, 1919: 2.

5 “Speaker Back; He’s Fined $50,” The Evening Repository (Canton, Ohio), June 7, 1919: 3.

6 Edwards, Cleveland Plain Dealer.

7 Crusinberry, Chicago Tribune.

8 Edwards, The Sporting News.

9 Edwards, The Sporting News.

10  Crusinberry, Chicago Tribune.

11  “Ball Scrap Due to ‘Shine’ Ball,” Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1919: 19.

12  Crusinberry, Chicago Tribune. He wrote, “Baseball fights generally are stopped after about one exchange of blows. … Possibly, it did look dangerous to intercede. Anyway, nobody stopped them.” He repeated the phrase “Nobody stopped them” three times.

13  Ed Bang, “Tris Speaker is Ready to Assist Tex Rickard,” Washington Times, June 5, 1919: 18.

14  Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (New York: Owl Books, 1987), 166.

15  For more discussion of common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal in Eight Men Out, see SABR’s Eight Myths Out online project at SABR.org/eight-myths-out.

16  Near the end of his life, Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins began claiming that the White Sox had been riddled with dissension: “There were frequent arguments and open hostility,” he told The Sporting News in 1950, for example. But other White Sox players, including Hall of Famer Ray Schalk, contradicted those claims in other interviews. Most stories about the White Sox players not getting along seem to originate during and after the 1919 World Series betrayal.  

17  Salt Lake Tribune, June 8, 1919: 31.

18  Bang, Washington Times.

19  Bruce Allardice, “Something Phony About it All: Tris Speaker Covers the 1919 World Series,” SABR Black Sox Scandal Research Committee Newsletter, June 2015. Speaker publicly expressed concerns about the White Sox’s World Series play as early as Game One and reportedly passed along his suspicions about a fix to friends in Boston. Accessed online at SABR.org/research/black-sox-scandal-research-committee-newsletters.

The Wingfoot Air Express lands at Grant Park in Chicago during its maiden voyage on July 21, 1919. (Photo: Chicagology.com)

It’s usually a thrill to see a Goodyear blimp flying over a sporting event. For nearly 100 years, the iconic silver airship has been observed flying over the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and many other athletic venues around the world, providing fans with unique views from high above the playing field.

The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s original airship, the Wingfoot Air Express, could have become the first to pass over a baseball game when it made its maiden voyage on July 21, 1919, in Chicago. Instead, tragedy struck when the blimp exploded in midair and crashed into a crowded downtown bank, killing 13 people in America’s first civil aviation disaster. By the end of the week, however, the story had already disappeared from news pages as Chicago’s “Red Summer” erupted in a wave of death and destruction all across the city.

Before all that, the week began with a buzz as thousands of citizens flocked to the city center on a warm Monday morning to witness the strange, hydrogen-powered airship floating over their heads. The Wingfoot Express had spent all day making its way to and from Grant Park on the edge of Lake Michigan. Goodyear’s goal in sending up the blimp over one of the nation’s biggest cities was to promote what the company saw as the future of passenger air travel.

Four miles south at Comiskey Park, fans of the first-place Chicago White Sox must have been excited to see the Wingfoot Express as it began to make its way from the downtown Loop toward its final destination, the White City Amusement Park, a popular South Side entertainment center named after the 1893 world’s fair that had turned Chicago into a global entrepreneurial force.1 In 1903, a decade after the world’s fair, Wilbur and Orville Wright launched their first powered airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but aside from a handful of military pilots during World War I, few Americans had ever taken to the skies by 1919.

After being assembled at the White City aerodrome over the preceding weeks, the Wingfoot Express had taken its first two flights earlier in the day on July 21, short excursions with only the pilot, Captain Jack Boettner, and a handful of mechanics, government officials, and reporters on board for each trip. The sight of the 150-foot-long blimp overhead caused onlookers to gather on street corners across the city. At the Grant Park airstrip, thousands gathered to catch a close-up view of the Wingfoot after each landing. One final takeoff was scheduled at 4:50 p.m.; the airship was returning to its home base at White City for the night.2

By that time, 14,000 baseball fans on the South Side had seen their share of excitement from the home team, too. The White Sox rallied twice in the late innings of a doubleheader opener against their top rivals for the American League pennant, the New York Yankees, who entered the day 5½ games behind Chicago in the standings. The White Sox clinched the first game on Buck Weaver’s walk-off single in the ninth — his fourth hit –to score Nemo Leibold for a 7-6 victory. Pitcher Dickey Kerr picked up the win in relief of Lefty Williams; Kerr also started the White Sox’ winning rally by drawing a one-out walk in the ninth.3

White Sox fans in certain sections of Comiskey Park may have caught a glimpse in the distance of the Wingfoot Express on its second excursion around downtown, which lifted off about a half-hour after the game began at 2:00 p.m.4 Soon after the start of the second game, many more fans could see the blimp in the air as it began to make its way south toward the White City Amusement Park at 63rd Street. If it had finished its voyage, Goodyear’s airship likely would have passed directly over Comiskey Park around the fourth or fifth inning.

The second game finished in a similar fashion as the opener, with Shano Collins doing the honors this time with his own walk-off single in the 10th inning to score Ray Schalk for a 5-4 win. Kerr again helped out at the plate by sacrificing Schalk to second base before Collins drove him in. The rookie left-hander also picked up the victory in relief — his second of the day — thanks to two scoreless innings behind Red Faber. (Coincidentally, Faber had turned the same trick of winning two games in one day earlier that month, on July 9.)5

It was the White Sox’ third consecutive victory over the Yankees with a dramatic walk-off hit, after Shoeless Joe Jackson had ended Sunday’s series opener with a 10th-inning home run into the right-field bleachers to win it.6 The doubleheader sweep pushed the Yankees into third place, and although they avoided a sweep by winning the series finale on Tuesday, they never challenged the White Sox again as Chicago powered its way to the American League pennant and a fateful World Series.

But the mood at the end of Monday’s second game when Collins singled to beat the Yankees was decidedly downcast. Most of the crowd had left for home after witnessing a horrific tragedy in the middle of the third inning.7 As the Chicago Tribune’s James Crusinberry wrote:

“Nearly everyone at the Sox park witnessed the fate of the dirigible. The instant it caught fire, there was a scream from the fans. The game was stopped as all watched the catastrophe. It seemed the entire thing burned up in about a half minute. After that, there wasn’t much enjoyment felt over the ball games.”8

Photo from inside the Illinois Trust & Savings Bank after the Wingfoot Air Express crashed into the building, killing 13 and wounding 27 people. (Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1919)

Just minutes after takeoff, as Captain Boettner steered the Wingfoot Express one last time over the downtown Loop so the on-board photographer could take pictures of the city’s skyscrapers from above, he felt “a tremor in the fuselage, a shudder of the steel cables that held the gondola suspended beneath the blimp.”9 The airship had caught fire and was closing in on itself, rapidly descending 1,200 feet toward the ground. Boettner and the other four passengers attempted to eject with their parachutes, but only the pilot and mechanic Harry Wacker survived the fall.

The other mechanic, Carl “Buck” Weaver,10 crashed into the distinctive skylight of the Illinois Trust & Savings Bank, stunning employees working at their desks in the ornate central rotunda. The Daniel Burnham-designed building was on LaSalle Street, right in the heart of Chicago’s financial district and directly across the street from the busy Board of Trade building. Moments after Weaver’s body fell through the glass, the rest of the blimp followed, sending “fire raining down from the roof” and “an avalanche of shattered window panes and twisted iron” on everyone inside the bank.11 Ten people died and dozens more were injured by flames and debris.12

A crowd of nearly 20,000 gathered near the bank to witness the aftermath and offer help to the victims. The tragedy seemed unexplainable. As author Gary Krist wrote, “No one could quite take in the reality of what had happened. How had this experimental blimp — this enormous, floating firebomb — been allowed to fly over one of the most densely populated square miles on Earth?”13

The Wingfoot Express disaster led to sweeping changes in air safety. Within hours, Alderman Anton Cermak, Chicago’s future mayor, led an effort to pass the nation’s first air-traffic regulations, restricting flights over major population centers.14 The Grant Park airstrip was closed and Chicago began building a municipal airport — now known as Midway International Airport — just a few miles west of the White City Amusement Park. Goodyear refined its blimps to use helium instead of the more flammable hydrogen, and introduced the Pilgrim, the first modern non-rigid airship, in 1925.15 Twelve years later, the hydrogen-powered Hindenburg exploded in New Jersey and brought back memories of the Wingfoot Express.16

The White Sox concluded what had become a somber homestand at the end of the week with a loss to the St. Louis Browns on Sunday, July 27. That same day, an African-American teenager named Eugene Williams was stoned off a raft then drowned at the 29th Street Beach by an unruly mob that accused him of drifting across an invisible line in Lake Michigan that restricted black swimmers from the white-only area.17

Williams’s murder set off a week of riots, mostly instigated by roving gangs of young white men in the city’s Black Belt neighborhoods on the South Side.18 By the time the White Sox returned home in mid-August, many parts of the city were in ruins; in addition, 38 people died from the violence and more than 500 injuries were suffered in the Chicago race riots.

Sources

For an examination of Chicago’s “Red Summer” in 1919, see The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, available online at archive.org/details/negroinchicagost00chic. Also check out the Newberry Library’s initiative, “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots,” a yearlong project in 2019 to confront the legacy of the most violent week in Chicago history.

Additional sources not cited in the Notes include:

Chicagology.com. “Wingfoot Express.” chicagology.com/notorious-chicago/wingfootexpress

Mueller, Jim. “Blimp Has Its Ups and Downs in Early Days,” Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1997. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-10-26-9710260142-story.html

Rovang, Dana. “Wingfoot Express Airship Disaster, Chicago 1919,” ObscureHistories.com, 2015. obscurehistories.com/wingfoot-express-airship-disaster

Box scores for the baseball games can be found at Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org:

Game 1:

baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHA/CHA191907211.shtml

retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1919/B07211CHA1919.htm

Game 2:

baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHA/CHA191907212.shtml

retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1919/B07212CHA1919.htm

Notes

1 Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels: The Twelve Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 3. White City’s aerodrome had been leased by the US Navy during World War I, but it was the first hangar in the country to reopen for commercial enterprises.

2 Krist, 5-8.

3 James Crusinberry, “Sox Trounce Yanks Twice; Lead Flag Race by Six Laps,” Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1919: 15.

4 Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1919: 19.

5 “1919 Chicago White Sox Schedule,” Baseball-Reference.com. baseball-reference.com/teams/CHW/1919-schedule-scores.shtml.

6 James Crusinberry, “Jackson’s Homer Beats Yanks, 2-1, Before 30,000 Fans,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1919: 15.

7 “12 Killed, 25 Hurt When Blimp Bursts,” New York Daily News, July 22, 1919: 2.

8 “Notes,” Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1919: 15.

9 Krist, 11.

10 Carl Weaver’s nickname might have been in homage to the popular White Sox third baseman, but it’s impossible to know for sure. This author has never found a reasonable explanation for why the nickname “Buck” was attached to so many different people with the surname Weaver in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Buck” was also a common nickname for lively and high-spirited people, and the ballplayer certainly fit that description, too. See Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952).

11 Krist, 16-17.

12 Ibid. Weaver was the only member of the airship crew to die in the crash. Two passengers also died. The 10 fatalities on the ground brought the death total to 13.

13 Ibid.

14 Krist, 119.

15 GoodyearBlimp.com. Accessed at goodyearblimp.com/relive-history on July 19, 2019. The Wingfoot Air Express disaster is not mentioned anywhere on the Goodyear Blimp website as of this writing.

16 Gary Sarnoff, “May 6, 1937: The Hindenburg Game at Ebbets Field,” SABR Games Project, sabr.org/gamesproj/game/may-6-1937-hindenburg-game-ebbets-field.

17 “Bathing Beach Fight Spreads to Black Belt,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1919: 1.

18 “1919 Race Riots,” Chicagology.com, accessed online at chicagology.com/notorious-chicago/1919raceriots on July 19, 2019.