April 17, 1923: Reformer, rogue meet before Giants’ win on Opening Day in Boston

They made an odd couple on Opening Day 1923 at Braves Field – a scowling, upright Midwesterner who had sat behind a federal judge’s bench, and a beaming, roguish Boston Irishman who had stood before one.

Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the Midwesterner, had a cold personality and a reputation for probity. Since taking office in 1920, he’d banned eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox in connection with the Black Sox World Series game-fixing scandal, forced John McGraw and Charles A. Stoneham to sell interests in a racetrack in Havana, and cracked down on Babe Ruth and other players who willfully ignored restrictions on postseason barnstorming.

Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, the Irishman, cared more for popularity than propriety. Curley was partway through a six-decade political career that saw him hold several of Massachusetts’ most powerful elected positions1 – impeded only somewhat by two felony convictions2 and a celebrated fondness for graft and dirty tricks. (His reputation was such that an opponent once zinged him with the slogan, “Nothing Curley is straight.”3)

Strange bedfellows, but there they were, sharing a pregame skit to entertain 16,000 freezing fans.4 Massachusetts Governor Channing Cox5 threw out the first pitch; Curley, batting left-handed, pretended to hit it; and Landis donned a mask and played catcher. This bit of stage business finished, the reformer and the rogue left the field to the professionals.6

The teams facing each other were also mismatched, as the game pitted the two-time defending World Series champions against the National League’s incumbent cellar-dwellers. McGraw’s Giants had gone 93-61 with two ties in 1922, then beat the crosstown Yankees in the World Series. Fred Mitchell’s Braves finished the season with a record of 53-100 with one tie, 39½ games out of first. The Giants had won 14 of their 23 games against the Braves in 1922, with one game ending in a five-inning tie.

The odd-couple theme extended to the two-man umpiring crew, made up of a future Hall of Famer and a man who was working his first of just 28 big-league games. Behind the plate was Bill Klem, who spent 37 years as a major-league umpire and worked 18 World Series, including 1922’s. Working on the bases was Doll Derr, a Marylander who had umpired several years in the International League. An inability to get along with Klem reportedly doomed Derr’s major-league career. He worked his last NL game on May 18 and returned to the minors in June.7

Christy Mathewson was on hand and loudly cheered, too – but not in affiliation with the Giants, the team for which he won 372 games.8 The Braves’ new owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, had hired the beloved “Matty” as the Braves’ president in February 1923. The position marked Mathewson’s return to baseball after two years spent fighting tuberculosis.9 The New York Times reported that Landis joined the Opening Day festivities at Boston out of respect for Mathewson.10

McGraw initially named Art Nehf as his starter11 but made a late switch, choosing righty Hugh McQuillan. McQuillan had pitched parts of five seasons for the Braves before being traded to the Giants the previous July.12 In 15 appearances and 13 starts for New York, McQuillan won six, and added a complete-game win in Game Four of the World Series. He pitched twice against his old club in 1922 – once as a starter, once in relief – and the Braves beat him on September 5, scoring four runs off him in five-plus innings in their 4-2 victory.

Mitchell countered with a more-or-less local boy who had shown promise in his rookie year. Righty Tim McNamara was born in Millville, Massachusetts, on the border with Rhode Island,13 and had starred at Fordham University.14 In 1922, he’d worked in 24 games – mostly in relief – and gone 3-4 with a 2.42 ERA. His five starts included four complete games and two shutouts. In the first game of a doubleheader on the last day of the season, he’d spun a two-hit, 3-0 win against the Giants at the Polo Grounds.15

Most of the Giants’ other starters were holdovers from 1922, with one exception. Center fielder Jimmy O’Connell, acquired from the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals in 1921 for $75,000,16 was making his big-league debut. O’Connell played two seasons with New York before becoming another name on Commissioner Landis’s blacklist. Landis banned O’Connell and Giants coach Cozy Dolan from baseball over an alleged $500 bribe offered to the Philadelphia Phillies’ Heinie Sand late in the 1924 season.17

The Giants had scored in their last at-bats of 1922, notching three eighth-inning runs to clinch Game Five of the World Series. In the first inning of 1923, they picked up where they left off. With one out, Heinie Groh tripled to right-center field. Frankie Frisch’s windblown single to left field scored Groh for a 1-0 New York lead.18 Boston mustered only a single by Billy Southworth in the bottom half.

The top of the second brought a flurry of action, but only one run. Ross Youngs drew a leadoff walk and George “Highpockets” Kelly scored him with a double to left-center field.19 O’Connell grounded to first, and the Braves caught Kelly trying to advance; O’Connell moved to second while the Braves retired Kelly on a play in which all four Braves infielders touched the ball. Frank Snyder followed with a grounder on which history repeated: Snyder took second while the Braves were running down O’Connell at third. McQuillan ended the inning with a grounder to short.

A two-out rally in the third inning got the home team on the scoreboard. Ray Powell singled to left field and advanced to third when the ball rolled between the legs of New York’s Irish Meusel.20 (Meusel led NL left fielders in errors that season with 15.) Southworth grounded to Frisch, who misplayed the ball, allowing Powell to score an unearned run.

Both teams moved runners into scoring position in the fourth but couldn’t dent home plate. The Giants put runners on second and third with two out on a walk, a force out and a single, but McQuillan again ended the rally. The Braves’ Bill Bagwell, playing in his first major-league game, collected a double in the bottom half.

Another debutant for the Braves that day was second baseman Arthur “Jocko” Conlon,21 formerly captain of the Harvard University nine.22 He fumbled Groh’s grounder in the fifth for an error, but Groh moved no farther than second. The Giants got a scare in the bottom half when McQuillan, covering first on a grounder, was spiked by batter Mickey O’Neil. McQuillan was not seriously injured.23

The Giants’ clinching blow occurred in the seventh. McQuillan doubled with one out. McNamara struck out Dave Bancroft, but Groh drove an inside-the-park homer to the flagpole in right-center, more than 400 feet away.24 Frisch tripled to right field; Meusel’s fly stranded him. The Giants had a 4-1 lead.

McNamara appeared to be tiring25 but hung on through the eighth, stranding two more runners at first and third after surrendering a single and a walk. Again McQuillan provided the final out with men on base, this time with a foul pop.

Snake Henry26 hit for McNamara in the eighth and reached on Bancroft’s “error of judgment” when his grounder failed to bounce as expected.27 Two outs later, Tony Boeckel’s walk brought the tying run to the plate in the person of Stuffy McInnis, a spring-training pickup following his release by Cleveland. McInnis flied out.

Former Giant Rube Marquard relieved McNamara and allowed Giants runners to reach second and third with two out. Youngs struck out to end the frame.

In their last at-bats, the Braves gave the remaining fans a flicker of hope. Bagwell reached when Bancroft committed New York’s fourth error. McQuillan hit rookie Conlon with a pitch, bringing the tying run to the plate with none out. But McQuillan retired Hod Ford and pinch-hitters Walton Cruise and Frank Gibson to end the game in 1 hour and 56 minutes.

Yielding four hits, one walk and an unearned run, McQuillan earned his first of 15 wins that season. “Hugh McQuillan had the Boston boys at his mercy from start to finish,” one reporter wrote.28 McNamara took the first loss of an eventual 3-13 campaign.

The Giants won their third straight NL championship with a 95-58 record. The Giants and Yankees met again in the World Series, and this time the Yankees won, four games to two. After the Giants-Braves game, Landis caught a night train to New York, where he was scheduled to appear the next day at first-game dedication ceremonies for the new Yankee Stadium.29

The 1923 Braves improved from eighth place to seventh, but their record of 54-100 with one tie wasn’t a measurable step up. They owed their higher placing to the fact that the Philadelphia Phillies, at 50-104 with one tie, were even worse. It took the woebegone Braves another quarter-century to reach the World Series, in 1948. Boston’s mayor at that time? The autumnal but still audacious James Michael Curley, 73 years old, who’d been elected to his fourth and final nonconsecutive term in November 1945.30

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

Jack Beatty’s The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-1958) (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1992) served as a primary source for this article’s characterization of Curley, while Dan Busby’s SABR Biography Project article on Kenesaw Mountain Landis served the same purpose for baseball’s first commissioner.

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team and season data and the box scores for this game.

www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BSN/BSN192304170.shtml

www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1923/B04170BSN1923.htm

Photo of Channing Cox, James Michael Curley, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis from the April 18, 1923, edition of the Boston Post.

Notes

1 Between 1902 and 1950, Curley served four nonconsecutive terms as mayor of Boston, one term as governor of Massachusetts, and parts of three terms in the US House of Representatives, as well as terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and on Boston’s Board of Aldermen, the predecessor of today’s City Council. He remained an active political campaigner as late as 1955, when he lost in the primaries of Boston’s mayoral election.

2 Curley was convicted of fraud in 1904 for taking the federal civil service exam on behalf of another man, and for mail fraud in 1947 in relation to personal business dealings. President Harry Truman commuted Curley’s federal prison sentence after five months in the latter case, and pardoned Curley of both convictions in 1950.

3 Curley’s biographer Jack Beatty attributes the slogan to Dan Coakley, a longtime Massachusetts political operative whose career paralleled that of Curley and who was, at various times, an ally and an antagonist.

4 Contemporary news stories provided differing attendance figures, ranging all the way up to 20,000. Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference say 16,000.

5 Cox had served as the state’s lieutenant governor under Governor Calvin Coolidge, then ran for and won the governor’s seat after Coolidge accepted the nomination to run as Warren Harding’s vice presidential candidate in 1920. As of April 17, 1923, Coolidge was still vice president; he became president after Harding’s death that August.

6 A photo of Cox, Curley, and Landis appeared in the April 18, 1923, edition of the Boston Post. The first pitch was also described in James C. O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win,” Boston Globe, April 18, 1923: 1.

7 Fred Turbyville, “Doll Derr Back in International League,” Baltimore Evening Sun, May 30, 1923: 20. Derr, born Luther Derr Sahm, worked in the minor leagues through 1931, according to his Sporting News umpire card. In October 1970 he was murdered in a robbery attempt outside his home on St. Paul Street in Baltimore, about a mile from Memorial Stadium. George Hanst, “House Burglar Gets 10 Years,” Baltimore Evening Sun, April 29, 1972: 4.

8 While managing the 1916 Cincinnati Reds, Mathewson suited up for one last game against his old pitching nemesis, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. Neither man was in good form, but Mathewson outlasted Brown and earned his 373rd and final win in a 10-8 Reds victory. It was Mathewson’s only appearance, and only win, for a team other than the Giants.

9 Eddie Frierson, “Christy Mathewson,” SABR Biography Project, accessed December 10, 2022. Mathewson’s position with the Braves was his last job in baseball; he died of tuberculosis in October 1925.

10 “Baseball Season Will Begin Today,” New York Times, April 17, 1923: 17.

11 The front page of the April 17, 1923, Boston American ran pictures of Nehf and Tim McNamara under the headline “Rival Twirlers Today,” and the Boston Post’s coverage the following day included the headline “McGraw Is the Same Old Fox, Switching Pitchers at the 11th Hour.”

12 Full terms of the trade: McQuillan to New York; Larry Benton, Fred Toney, Harry Hulihan, and $100,000 to Boston.

13 As of the end of the 2022 season, McNamara was the only major-league player to be born in Millville. He is overshadowed in baseball history, though, by a transplant who grew up in the same small town: Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett was born in nearby Woonsocket, Rhode Island, but moved to Millville as a boy. Bill Johnson, “Gabby Hartnett,” SABR Biography Project, accessed December 10, 2022.

14 “Big Crowd Expected at Game in Boston,” New York Times, April 17, 1923: 17.

15 Although the Giants were looking ahead to the World Series at that point and might have been taking it easy, the lineup that McNamara shut out included most of the team’s regulars.

16 According to an online inflation calculator provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, $75,000 in December 1921 – when the Giants acquired O’Connell – equaled almost $1.3 million in October 2022.

17 “2 Giants Barred for Bribery,” New York Daily News, October 2, 1924: 1; “Jimmy O’Connell and Coach Dolan Fired by Landis,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2, 1924: 1.

18 O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win.”

19 O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win.”

20 Marshall Hunt, “Pomp and Ceremony No Help to Braves,” New York Daily News, April 18, 1923: 22.

21 Arthur “Jocko” Conlon, who played only one season in the majors, should not be confused with John “Jocko” Conlan, who played two seasons in the big leagues in the mid-1930s and then went on to a 26-season Hall of Fame career as an umpire. John “Jocko” Conlan’s SABR Biography Project biography, written by Rodney Johnson, suggests that the umpire was given his nickname by a sportswriter who remembered Arthur “Jocko” Conlon.

22 O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win.”

23 “Giants Beat Braves in Opening Contest,” New York Times, April 18, 1923: 17.

24 “Giants Beat Braves in Opening Contest.” According to the Seamheads.com ballpark database, right-center field at Braves Field measured 402 feet, while center field measured 461. A photo caption on the front page of the April 18, 1923, Boston Post described the hit as being made to “direct centre.”

25 O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win.” The observation of McNamara’s fatigue appears in a section of the article titled “Off with The Braves.”

26 A first baseman by trade, Henry had played in 18 games for the 1922 Braves. He played in 11 more in 1923, all as a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner.

27 O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win.”

28 James C. O’Leary, “Remarkable Crowd for So Cold a Day,” Boston Globe, April 18, 1923: 12.

29 O’Leary, “Braves Open Season with Big Time but Giants Win.” The information on Landis’s travel arrangements also appears in the section of the article titled “Off with The Braves.”

30 Curley was defeated in the November 1949 mayoral election by City Clerk John Hynes, who’d served as acting mayor during Curley’s imprisonment on his 1947 fraud conviction. Curley never again held elected office and died in November 1958.