June 24, 1908: Honus Wagner begins surge to historic batting title with three hits in win over Reds

Even though Honus Wagner could stake his claim to the title of greatest hitter in baseball history in 1908, all indications suggested he would trade the national pastime for raising chickens and taking drives in his automobile.

As the two-time defending batting champion, the 34-year-old Wagner had a chance to become the first player ever to win three consecutive batting crowns, and doing so would give him the sixth of his career – thus breaking a record set by Dan Brouthers in 1892. But on March 15, the centerpiece story on Page 1 of the Pittsburgh Press confirmed rumors that had swirled among Pirates fans for weeks – Wagner had announced his retirement from baseball.1

“It is certainly hard for me to lay aside the uniform which I have been wearing since 1897 [his rookie season with the Louisville Colonels], but every dog has his day, and the sport has become too strenuous for me,” Wagner wrote in a letter to Barney Dreyfuss, the club’s president. “I can look back and see that I was lucky in landing with you in Louisville and that I made no mistake in staying with your Pittsburg team during war times.”2

Reportedly at the urging of Pittsburgh teammates, Wagner reconsidered retirement and signed a new contract on April 18, three days after the new season started.3 But Wagner did not hit like his usual self throughout April, May, and June.

For the first time since 1902, his average sat below .300 in the final week of June. After he went 1-for-7 in a doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds on June 23, Wagner’s average dropped to .294.

That same day, New York Giants outfielder Mike Donlin went 4-for-8 in a doubleheader against the Boston Doves to raise his average to .343. It appeared as if Donlin sat in the driver’s seat for his first batting title after falling short in three prior seasons.4

Wagner did not get the memo.

Wagner’s struggles began to evaporate the next day when he went 3-for-4 in a 5-3 victory over the Reds, jump-starting a brilliant 97-game stretch to close his season. Wagner had 49 multihit games in that span, lifting his average to .354 to rout Donlin by .021 and claim his historic batting crown. He fell two home runs shy of winning what later became known as the Triple Crown5 and led the league in stolen bases during a campaign that baseball historian Bill James dubbed “the greatest season of the 20th century.”6

“I really think that good batters have it born in them,” Wagner said in late July. “Very few bad batters at the start ever get to be good ones. I was a good hitter, if you’ll excuse me boosting myself, when I played on the town lots. In some way, I got the knack of hitting where I aimed when a kid, and that’s all there is to it. Of course, I am naturally strong in my shoulders and arms, and that has helped me out.”7

Under cloudy skies, a shade over 2,100 fans8 attended an afternoon home game at Exposition Park on June 24 to see if the Pirates could salvage a split of their four-game series with the Reds. Umpires declared a rain delay in the third inning, but precipitation ceased after only a few minutes, and while occasional sprinkles dotted the rest of the game, play continued uninterrupted, allowing the teams to make up a rained-out affair from April 30.

Wagner’s two-out, solo home run opened the scoring in the bottom of the fourth,9 and in the sixth, Pittsburgh took a 2-0 lead after Roy Thomas tucked a triple just inside the right-field foul line and scored on Tommy Leach’s fly ball to center. Unlike Wagner, Thomas was already amid a hot streak. In the series against Cincinnati, Thomas reached base 12 times in 17 plate appearances, and in nine games between June 18 and 24, he hit .529 and reached base at a .600 clip.

Pirates starter Vic Willis used “heaps of speed” to subdue the Reds for six innings,10 but Cincinnati touched him up for four straight two-out hits in the top of the seventh to produce three runs. Jake Weimer, Cincinnati’s pitcher, opened the rally with a single from the ninth spot in the batting order, and Miller Huggins beat out a bunt for his second hit of the game.

When John Kane poked up a single up the middle, Weimer scored, and a fumble on the relay throw by second baseman Ed Abbaticchio allowed Kane and Huggins to advance into scoring position. Hans Lobert capitalized on the mistake, sending a two-run single up the middle that gave the Reds their only lead of the game at 3-2.

Staked to a lead, Weimer hoped to earn his second victory of the series. “Tornado Jake” had pitched a shutout two days earlier, but because newly acquired Jack Doscher had yet to report to the Reds, Cincinnati had no other starting pitchers available to close the series.11

“Of course, a pitcher likes to get more than one day between his games, especially in such warm weather,” Weimer said the day before, “but if [manager John Ganzel] has no one else to work, I shall be glad to go in and do my best. If I can get going the way I did yesterday, I guess I can land another one all right.”12

Willis made up for his bad inning by leading off the bottom of the eighth and taming one of Weimer’s two-strike “vicious benders” for a single.13 Pinch-runner Danny Mueller circled the bases to tie the game after Thomas was hit on the wrist by Weimer’s final pitch of the afternoon, Leach dropped a sacrifice bunt up the first-base line against reliever Billy Campbell, and Fred Clarke singled. Wagner drove home the winning run with a single to center to finish his splendid hitting display, which also included a double.

Wagner took second on the throw into home, moved to third on a groundout, and made a daring steal of home as Campbell attempted a pickoff at first. Pittsburgh’s Nick Maddox – a starter who won 23 games for the Pirates in 1908 – pitched a one-two-three ninth.14

“Wagner had not been hitting up to his form lately,” noted Jack Ryder of the Cincinnati Enquirer, “but he got back to his stride today and made the Reds his victim.”15

With Wagner’s season back on track, the Pirates made a run at the National League pennant and earned their 10th straight winning season. After beating the Reds, Pittsburgh stood at 35-24 but trailed the first-place Chicago Cubs, who had won the last two NL pennants and the 1907 World Series, by only one game in the standings.

Over the remaining 96 games, Pittsburgh finished 63-32-1, leading the NL from July 15 to August 19 and again on October 2 and 3 in a wild three-team race with the Cubs and Giants. But the Pirates fell one win shy of claiming the pennant after losing to the Cubs in the final regular-season game. Cincinnati landed fifth in the standings at 73-81.

Wagner’s personal surge included his 2,000th career hit on June 27 and a 5-for-5 effort against Donlin and the Giants on July 25.16 Wagner failed to record a hit only 19 times in the final 97 games of the season and hit .388 in that span. When the National League office released official averages in November, Ryder praised Wagner as the “great big grizzly bear” of the NL.17

Wagner added a fourth straight batting title in 1909 and another in ’11. His hitting prowess lent credence to his inclusion with the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Stew Thornley and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com, and Retrosheet.org websites for pertinent materials and the box scores noted below. He also used information obtained from coverage by The Sporting News, the Pittsburgh Daily Post, the Pittsburgh Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Cincinnati Enquirer.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PIT/PIT190806240.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1908/B06240PIT1908.htm

Notes

1 “World Famous Ballplayer Quits Game,” Pittsburgh Press, March 15, 1908: 1.

2 “World Famous Ballplayer Quits Game,” 20.

3 Ed F. Balinger, “Hans Wagner’s Return to Baseball Is Hailed With Delight by Fans,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, April 19, 1908: 14.

4 In 1901 Donlin finished as the runner-up in the American League batting race after hitting .340, and he finished third in the National League races in 1903 (.351) and 1905 (.356).

5 Brooklyn’s Tim Jordan paced the National League with 12 home runs, spoiling Wagner’s best shot at a Triple Crown.

6 Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2001), 548. In making his claim, James cited Wagner’s 59 win shares, the highest total in baseball history. Additionally, James noted that the league-wide ERA in 1908 was a Dead Ball Era-low 2.35, but Wagner still led the league or finished second in most prominent statistical categories while playing half his schedule in a home park that suppressed offense by 16 percent.

7 “Hans Wagner Explains Secret of Batting,” Lincoln (Nebraska) Daily Star, August 9, 1908: 8.

8 Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference list the attendance at 2,127. The Pittsburgh Daily Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the attendance as 2,137.

9 Contemporary reports disagree on the nature of Wagner’s home run. According to Jack Ryder of the Cincinnati Enquirer, who reported from Pittsburgh, Wagner hit a “clean home run to the center field bleachers.” Reporting in the Pittsburgh Daily Post noted that Wagner’s fly landed just out of reach of center fielder Johnny Kane, who “made a fine throw from the fence, [but] Hans beat the ball home,” suggesting an inside-the-park home run. Neither the Pittsburgh Press nor Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported specific details about the home run.

10 “Buccaneers Are Given Bad Scare, but Reds Are Finally Conquered,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 25, 1908: 12.

11 Cincinnati acquired Doscher from the Harrisburg Senators of the Tri-State League on June 23, but he did not report to the Reds until four days later.

12 “Notes of the Game,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 24, 1901: 4.

13 “Buccaneers Are Given Bad Scare, But Reds Are Finally Conquered.”

14 Pittsburgh’s victory evened the season series at 6-6, but the Pirates took eight of the final 10 meetings, including a five-game sweep at Cincinnati August 31 through September 3. Maddox was retroactively credited with a save in this game, the first of his career. A day later, he served in a similar role pitching the ninth inning of a 4-3 win over the St. Louis Cardinals. Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference note the June 25 save in Maddox’s game logs, but not in his career totals.

15 Jack Ryder, “Rally Started by the Pirates,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 24, 1901: 4.

16 In that head-to-head meeting, Donlin went 0-for-4, but at that time, his .345 average still led Wagner’s .338 mark.

17 Jack Ryder, “Wagner: Main Guy in Old League,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 2, 1908: 3.