1930: The Year of the Hitter

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).

 

Hitting has been on the rise in ba8eball the past decade or so, and there is talk that today’s ball, the Rawlings Rabbit, has more spring than any hare of seasons past. This is shortsighted history. Let me tell you, Sonny, about a time there was hitting in the major leagues.

The 1930 season is remembered for Hack Wilson’s 56 home runs and 191 runs batted in, and Bill Terry’s .401 batting average. Great as those achievements were, they stand out more in historical perspective than they did in their own day. In 1930, lusty hitting was a democratic activity, shared by all.

In 1984, the American League batted .264 and the National League hit .255. In 1930, the American League batted—including pitcher batting—.288 and the National League came in at .303. If the senior circuit had been a player-Nat League, 6-1, 190, throws right, switch-hits—it would have finished tenth in last season’s batting race.

In 1983 Lonnie Smith of the Cardinals missed the NL batting championship by only .002; if he had been warped back to 1930 with his .321 average, he would have found himself ranking seventh—not in the league, but on his own team. The 1930 Cardinals had twelve .300 hitters, only eight of whom could play at a time.

Wilson, of the Cubs, and Terry, of the Giants, had to hustle to stay on top. Wilson’s 56 homers stand as the National League record, but his mark of 191 runs batted in is considered more impressive, and often is listed among baseball’s few unbreakable records. It may be, but in 1930 Chuck Klein of the Phillies wasn’t far behind, with 170, and Lou Gehrig of the Yankees led the American League with 174. Six major leaguers drove in more than 150 runs each that season, and thirty-two had 100 or more.

For the batting championship, Terry edged Babe Herman of the Dodgers, who hit .393, and Klein, at .386. As any good fan knows, no National Leaguer has batted .400 since Terry. What’s more, no National Leaguer has hit .390 since Herman, either, or .386 since Klein.

Klein was the quintessential also-ran that season: second in the league in RBIs, second all-time; second to Terry in hits with 250, tied for third all-time; second to Wilson in slugging with .687, sixth best all-time. As for homers, Klein set the National League record just the year before, with 43, and lost it to Wilson in 1930. Strictly a spear-carrier, that Klein.

We could go on with these statistics. For example, count the .300 hitters: thirty-three in the National League, thirty-two in the American, a record. Trouble is, the figures understate the case, because they include only men who played in 100 games or more. In 1930, lots of .300 hitters couldn’t crack the lineup. Some of them were pitchers, like Red Ruffing of the Yankees (.374), Erv Brame of the Pirates (.353), Chad Kimsey of the St. Louis Browns (.343), Red Lucas of the Reds (.336), and Firpo Marberry of the Washington Senators (.329).

The hitters splattered the 1930 season all over the record books, but it was a remarkable baseball year in other ways, too. It was the first year of the Great Depression, and the first year of Babe Ruth’s $80,000 salary. Night baseball began in the minor leagues, was an immediate sensation, and was denounced by major league owners as a blight and a fad. Gabby Hartnett of the Cubs was caught by a photographer while chatting with Al Capone, and Babe Herman twice was caught and passed by teammates on the basepaths. The Yankees traded a star pitcher because of a detective’s report, and the Cardinals staged one of the greatest pennant drives in history, the more dramatic because of the disappearance—kidnapping?—of a star pitcher.

Baseball was such the dominant sport back then that its stars, like it or not, had to provide copy for the sports pages during the offseason as well as the summer. None filled the role as well as Ruth, who by then was a public idol of gargantuan proportions. Dour men like Rogers Hornsby made news only with their bats, but Ruth’s ebullient personality and hearty living habits enhanced his reputation.

Ruth was holding out for $85,000 that spring, and Jacob Ruppert, the Yankee owner, grumped at the figure. “Ruth has taken more money from the Yankees than I have,” he said. One venture fell through, Ruth’s Home Run Candy running afoul of the thirty-five-year-old copyright on the Baby Ruth bar, which had been named after the infant daughter of President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland. But no matter. Without playing another game of baseball or lending his name to another product, Ruth said, he was assured of a comfortable income for life.

But Ruth did not feel comfortable as a holdout, and during spring training he yielded, accepting $80,000 a year for two years. It was a stunning figure, forty times the wage of the average worker, and it brought out the prophet in Edward G. Barrow, business manager of the Yankees. “You will never hear of another ballplayer getting that kind of money,” Barrow said. Never? he was asked. “I’m sure there will never be another one on this ballclub,” Barrow replied.

Next to Ruth, other players paled. Lefty O’Doul of the Phils also held out that spring. O’Doul had led the National League in batting the season before at .398, with 32 homers and 122 runs batted in. He demanded—think of it!—$17,000. Too much, his boss said; O’Doul already was pulling down $8,000, more than any other Phillie, ever. O’Doul, like Ruth, had to compromise.

Edd Roush of the New York Giants would not compromise. A .324 hitter in 1929 and a future member of the Hall of Fame, Roush held out all spring, and all summer, too; he didn’t play a game. Al Simmons, the Philadelphia Athletics’ slugger, threatened to do the same, and Connie Mack announced that Spence Harris, a minor league lifer with an American League career average of .249, would take Simmons’ place. While the Athletics were warming up on opening day, Simmons signed. The fans at Shibe Park roared when he appeared in uniform, and roared again when he came to bat in the first inning, with a man on base, and homered off George Pipgras of the Yanks. So much for the value of spring training.

While Ruth’s physical dimensions were fully the match of his accomplishments on the field, Wilson supplied a contrast. With short legs, size 5 1/2 shoes, and a huge torso, Wilson looked dwarfish, almost deformed. He was only 5 feet 6 inches tall, but weighed 190. His arms were large and muscular, his hands small. Even his nicknames were degrading; he was referred to as a gorilla, a sawed-off Babe Ruth, the Hardest-Hitting Hydrant of All Time, the Squatty Outfielder, the Pugnacious Clouter, the Abbreviated One, the Boy with the Mountainous Chin, none of which did much for his ego.

While Ruth went into the 1930 season with the dramatic flourish of his record salary, Wilson carried the humiliation of a dreadful inning during the 1929 World Series. Trailing the Cubs 8-0 in the fourth game, the Athletics scored ten runs in the seventh inning. Wilson, the Cubs’ center fielder, lost two balls in the sun, one of them falling for a single and the other for a three-run homer. The A’s went on to win that game and the Series, four games to one.

Wilson was said to have been a pathetic figure following the Series. But he was a cheerful and likable man, and at spring training in 1930 Wilson was the life of the Cubs’ camp. Cub players shouted “Wilson!” when fungoes were hit into the sun. Lampooning his own misplays, Wilson pulled the window shade in the hotel dining room, and asked the maitre d’ to dim the light so he wouldn’t misjudge his soup. Perhaps wishing to share in the fun, Calvin Coolidge visited Catalina Island, California, where the Cubs trained. The former President had little to say, but posed for photographers with a macaw on his shoulder.

From the season’s beginning, the hitting in 1930 was extraordinary, and was recognized as such. Not that baseball had been a pitchers’ game in the 1920s—far from it; neither league had batted under .280 since 1920, and the number of home runs more than doubled between that decade’s first and last years. But in 1930 there was even more of what the club owners obviously considered a good thing, since attendance had increased with hitting.

Rallies were immense, and pitchers absorbed terrible punishment; it was not yet the custom to relieve short of disaster. On May 12, in Chicago, the Giants scored six runs in the second inning and seven in the third, helped by a home run by Mel Ott and two doubles by Fred Lindstrom. Larry Benton, the New York pitcher, carried a 14-0 lead into the fifth inning, and little seemed amiss when Cliff Heathcote homered for the Cubs; 14-1.

In the Cub sixth, Wilson and Gabby Hartnett walked, and Clyde Beck homered; 14-4. In the seventh, Heathcote led off with his second homer, and, after one out, Wilson homered to right. So did Charley Grimm. Les Bell flied out and Hartnett fanned for what would have been the third out, but Shanty Hogan, the Giant catcher, dropped the ball, and then threw it wildly, Hartnett reaching second. Beck homered again; 14-9. At this point John McGraw decided that Benton was weakening. McGraw brought in Joe Heving, who gave up six hits and three runs, but no homers. The Giants won 14-12, the Cubs having run out of time.

In late May, the Yankees and Athletics played three doubleheaders in four days, and the hitters gorged. Ninety-nine runs scored, and there were twenty-four home runs, eight of them by Ruth and three each by Gehrig and Philadelphia’s Jimmie Foxx. As if the sluggers were swinging a massive pendulum, all three doubleheaders were swept, and no game was close—15-7 and 4-1 for the A’s, 10-1 and 20-13 for the Yankees, 10-6 and 11-1, Yanks again.

In a devastating road swing in July, the Athletics scored ninety-seven runs in eight games, winning all of them while averaging twelve runs and fifteen hits a game. They scored ten runs in one inning at St. Louis, then, the next day, nine runs in the first three innings. In Chicago, Foxx hit a ball clear over the left field stands at Comiskey Park, the first player to do so.

The Senators, who had led the AL on Memorial Day, fell back, and so did the Yanks. Walter Johnson, the Washington manager, was appalled at the slugging and scolded his pitchers. Johnson was forty-four and hadn’t pitched for three years, but he thought he could do no worse than the younger men, and said he might pitch relief. Owner Clark Griffith talked him out of it. In truth, the Senators’ pitching staff was excellent, compared with others: Washington was the only team in baseball that yielded fewer than four earned runs per game that season.

Ruth was hitting so many home runs that he predicted he’d wind up with about 75. He might have, but on July 2 he jumped for a ball, caught a finger in the outfield screen, and lost the nail. The team doctor said the Babe would be out for a while, but he played the next day, his finger bandaged. Two days later, he hit his 32nd home run, putting him more than twenty games ahead of his pace in 1927, when he hit 60. But Ruth’s slugging tailed off; he finished with 49 homers.

The Yanks were managed in 1930 by Bob Shawkey, and were watched surreptitiously by a detective, who was hired by Ruppert and traveled with the team, socializing with the players without letting them know he was snitching on them. Waite Hoyt, a pitcher who enjoyed night life, was traded to Detroit early in the season after the detective reported he was staying out even the night before pitching assignments. The Yankees could have used Hoyt, even with a hangover; their pitching was dreadful, and they finished a distant third.

The Cubs were the pick of the National League, but Hornsby broke his ankle and the race was close. Everyone expected the Brooklyn Dodgers, 70-83 in 1929, to improve in 1930, but not to contend. They did both. These were the Daffiness Boys, the Robins of veteran manager Wilbert Robinson. The Dodgers made errors in horrendous clusters, and, led by Herman, tended to squelch rallies with baserunning blunders.

On May 30 Herman, leading off first base, stood and watched while Del Bissonette’s towering fly ball cleared the right-field screen at Ebbets Field. There was no chance that the ball would be caught, but Bissonette thought it might hit the screen and was running hard, as Herman should have been. Bissonette was declared out for passing a runner on the bases; his hit was registered as a single. On September 15 Herman did it again, this time depriving Glenn Wright of a home run.

On June 15, the Cardinals presented the Dodgers with three early runs on an outfield misplay. But the Dodgers fought back with five errors of their own, two of them by second baseman Mickey Finn, who fielded as if he had swallowed his name. Andy High, a Brooklyn castoff who was to haunt his old team all season, followed two of the errors with a triple, and a subsequent error with a home run. Dazzy Vance twice hit Taylor Douthit with pitches, but in the ninth decided to pitch to him, Dodger errors having placed two Cardinals on base. Douthit tripled, and the Cardinals won, 9-4.

Even while excelling, the Dodgers managed to err. At Pittsburgh on June 24, they managed to conclude the sixth inning with 10 straight hits, the last one a single to center on which Al Lopez was thrown out at the plate. Never mind; Brooklyn opened the seventh with a double by Wally Gilbert and a homer by Herman. That made twelve straight hits, a record even when done the Dodger way.

Perhaps aware that he could depend on the Dodgers to do themselves in, Pirate Manager Jewel Ens stuck through that awful sixth inning with his starter, the pitcher with the rhyming name, Heine Meine, who then departed, having yielded 14 runs and 19 hits, the last 10 of them in a row.

For hitting, no team was the superior of the Phillies, except whomever they were playing. In the nightcap of a doubleheader on July 23, the Phils attacked the Pirates with 27 hits, including two home runs by Don Hurst. Not enough; the Pirates won, 16-15, on a homer by Pie Traynor in the thirteenth inning. The Phils scored 15 runs the next day, too, against the visiting Cubs—who, alas, tallied 19.

An extraordinary number of high-scoring games were played that season on the home grounds of the Phillies, and it was no coincidence. The Phils played in Baker Bowl, a decaying museum of a stadium with a right field wall so close, according to Ray Benge, then a Phillie pitcher, that “standing on the mound it looked like you could reach back there and thump it.”

It was 280 feet to the right field corner, 300 feet in the right-center power alley. Today’s most inviting wall, the Green Monster in left field at Fenway Park, Boston, is distant by comparison at 315 feet—and short, too, at 37 feet, 2 inches. Baker Bowl was built in 1887, and whoever designed it should have invented the skyscraper instead. The stadium was rimmed with a high wall, and in right field a screen was put on top of that for a total height of 58 feet. Even the clubhouse, in center field, was two stories tall. The Phils dressed on the top floor, with a commanding view of the patchy green surface. “Down on the field it was like a hole,” Benge recalls.

Particularly for pitchers. “You just had one way to pitch,” according to Benge. “That was to the righthand side of the plate, outside to lefthanders, inside to righthanders. You wanted the righthanders to pull, but a lot of them wouldn’t do it. They’d punch the ball to right and ping it off the wall.”

One of the best pingers was Pinky Whitney, the Phils’ third baseman. “I hit a bunch of pop flies against it,” Whitney says. He batted .342, including 41 doubles, and batted in 117 runs.

On the Phils, that was good but not exceptional. The team scored an average of 6.13 runs a game, and batted .315. They had two strong lefthanded pull hitters in Klein and O’Doul, and both of them batted over.380. Together, Klein, Whitney, and O’Doul drove in 384 runs and scored 367. What would such a team do to the league?

The Phils’ answer, in 1930, was: bring up the rear. They won 52 games, lost 102, and never threatened seventh place. Phillie pitchers allowed a record 6.71 earned runs a game, about two more than a very bad pitching staff yields today, and Phillie fielders led the majors with 239 errors, 50 or so more than the most butterfingered of today’s teams.

Between the Phils and their opponents, the overall batting average at Baker Bowl that season was .350. Klein hit .439 at home, .332 away. The tall right field barrier was made for doubles, both live and by ground rule, the latter coming when balls punched through the rusty metal wall and rattled to the ground behind, lost forever. Klein hit 59 doubles himself, and, playing right field, stymied many an opposing batter by becoming a ricochet artist. He had 44 assists, enough to divide in two and lead the league twice.

The Phils started the 1930 season with high hopes. Les Sweetland and Claude Willoughby had pitched well the season before, and Sweetland pitched a shutout to open the Phillie season. But he soon foundered, and poor Willoughby never got started. “He had pretty good stuff,” Whitney recalls, “But when he had to pitch, he couldn’t pitch. It was all-day baseball.” Indeed, Sweetland and Willoughby held down so much combat duty on the mound that local sportswriters wove their names into a patriotic song:

My country, ’tis of thee
Sweetland and Will-ough-by
Of thee I sing.

For obvious reasons, sportswriters nicknamed Willoughby “Weeping Willie.” He won 4 games that season and lost 17, with a 7.58 ERA. Sweetland was 7-15, 7.71.

Baker Bowl, since torn down, was not the only stadium of that era to favor hitters. In addition, gloves were small and primitive by today’s standards, and pitching was less sophisticated. The slider was not in general use, and relief pitching was not used as effectively as it is today. Batting averages were boosted by a rule that counted as a sacrifice any fly ball that moved a runner up, and scoring by a rule that counted as a home run any drive that bounced into the stands.

Although these factors help explain the hitting of that era, they do not account for the extraordinary surge of 1930. Nor can it be said that major league hitters just had a hot year. Batting overwhelmed the minor leagues, too. Joe Hauser of Baltimore hit 63 home runs to establish an International League record that still stands, but it wasn’t enough to win him a promotion to the major leagues, or even to earn him recognition as the best first baseman in the league. That honor went to Rip Collins of Rochester, who had only 40 homers but batted .376 with 180 RBIs.

According to survivors, the fuel behind the hitting binge of 1930 was in the ball. The stitches were low, almost countersunk, which kept pitchers from getting a good grip. The insides had been gradually pepped up for a decade, and in 1930 they reached such superball resiliency that Ring Lardner called it “a leather-covered sphere stuffed with dynamite.”

Benge, the Phillie pitcher, first noticed that his infielders looked slow. They were, but the 1930 ball darted past even the fastest glovemen. Some were not so lucky. Fred Lindstrom of the Giants, a good enough third baseman to make the Hall of Fame, was knocked unconscious by a batted ball—not a line drive, but a grounder.

Lindstrom, too, noticed a difference early in the season, but from a happier perspective. He was hitting extraordinarily well, and so were his teammates. Indeed, Lindstrom batted .379 that season, far above his norm, and the Giants’ team average was .319.

Pitchers were intimidated. Joe Tinker, a star infielder for the Cubs a generation before, noted that many pitchers were not following through. “Pitchers are afraid to get off-balance for fear they’ll get killed when the ball comes back at them,” Tinker said. “Sakes alive,” recalls Benge, “that ball was so lively you’d throw it and look for a mole hole to get in.”

The hitting prompted a lively debate. Ruppert, of all people, wanted less of it, although he had benefited greatly from the lively ball as the owner of the Yankees and the employer of Ruth. “I should like to see the spitball restored and the emery ball, too,” Ruppert said, adding this scornful comment about a proposal designed to boost hitting even more: “Why, they have suggested someone hitting for the pitchers. Now, isn’t that rich?”

John J. McGraw, nearing the end of his long managerial career with the Giants, suggested that the ball be deadened and the pitching distance reduced by a couple of feet. Otherwise, he said, no one would want to pitch. “Youngsters in the amateur ranks and on the sandlots no longer have ambitions to become pitchers,” McGraw said. “They want to play some other position in which they can get by without being discouraged.”

On the status quo side of things was Joe McCarthy, the Cubs’ manager, who noted that the fans seemed to like high-scoring games. McCarthy, of course, had Wilson on his team.

The rabbit ball was not the only subject of controversy. Innovation comes hard to baseball, and in 1930 the major leagues grappled with all sorts of radical ideas. American League teams put numbers on the players’ backs, but the National League held out; true fans were supposed to recognize their heroes at a glance.

Broadcasting of baseball games had begun in 1927, but three years later most teams still spurned it, fearing that fans would not buy tickets if they could listen free at home. The St. Louis teams adopted a middle ground: Allow broadcasts, but keep them dull. As the price of admission—it had not yet occurred to club owners that they could charge radio stations for the privilege—St. Louis broadcasters agreed to give a straight play-by-play, with no commentary. “This should be mutually satisfactory to both the fans and the magnates, for there are some announcers prone to wander far from the actual occurrences on the field,” reported The Sporting News, which little knew how truly it spoke.

The most radical notion of all was night baseball, although it was not really a new idea. An amateur game was played under the lights in 1880, just a year after Edison invented the light bulb, and in 1896 Honus Wagner played a night game as a member of the Paterson, New jersey, team of the Atlantic League. The exhibition was staged by none other than Ed Barrow, by 1930 the dignified business manager of the Yankees and a staunch opponent of night baseball—a position to which he was still clinging fifteen years later with the same prescience he brought to the subject of baseball salaries.

Legend has it that the first night game in Organized Baseball was played on May 2, 1930, at Des Moines, Iowa. In fact, Des Moines, of the Class A Western League, was beaten to the punch by Independence, Kansas, of the Class C Western Association. On April 28, the illuminated Independence Producers beat Muskogee, 12-2. Four days later, Des Moines played under what a local sportswriter called “33,000 candle power of mellow light,” and scored 11 runs in the first inning en route to a 13-6 drubbing of Wichita. The game was attended by Cy Slapnicka, a Cleveland scout, who reported that he “did not see a man flinch from a ball, either batted or thrown.”

The fans certainly did not flinch; more than 10,000 attended. The minor leagues, which had resisted night baseball for so long, now rushed to embrace it. By the end of May, twenty teams had lights or were installing them. Attendance doubled and tripled; it was a financial boost that the minors badly needed.

Cities that continued to hold out were scorned. Four of the six teams in the Piedmont League had lights by mid-July. The two that did not, Henderson and Raleigh, were not drawing as well at home, and asked for a visitors’ cut of the gate receipts while on the road. The other four teams not only refused, but told Henderson and Raleigh to install lights or get out of the league. So much for tradition.

But the majors held fast. The only owner who favored night ball was Sam Breadon of the Cardinals, and his trial balloon was popped by Phil Ball, owner of the Browns and of the stadium where both teams played. The Browns could have used a boost; they drew barely a million fans that decade. But Ball was not alone. In the face of declining attendance during the Depression, this astonishing denial of self-interest was sustained by all sixteen teams until 1935, when the Reds installed lights and played the first major league night game.

Of course, the major leagues did not intentionally discourage fans. Teams were attracting thousands of new patrons with Ladies’ Days, a promotion so successful that the Chicago Cubs, for one, had to cut it back. One day in the heat of the 1930 race Wrigley Field was virtually taken over by 31,000 ladies, all admitted free. But the owners, then as now, feared that change would alienate the “true fan,” whoever he might be.

In 1930, the Cubs’ true fans included men prominent in Chicago’s flashiest business, bootlegging. Al Capone was a Cubs fan, and so was his rival, Bugs Moran. The Cubs used to put on an entertaining pregame show, with fancy fungo hitting and a razzmatazz infield drill, and the gangsters came early to see it. “They used to come out and watch us practice,” recalls Charley Grimm, the Cub first baseman. “They’d sit right behind our bench, and there was never a peep out of them.”

One day, however, Capone peeped at Gabby Hartnett, the Cubs’ catcher, and Hartnett walked over to Capone’s box to autograph a ball. A newspaper photographer happened to catch them, and the picture—the Cubs’ star catcher smiling alongside the country’s most notorious gangster—appeared in newspapers throughout the U.S. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was outraged; he summoned Hartnett for a scolding and ordered the league presidents to forbid any conversation between players and spectators. Landis also told the teams to stop announcing the next day’s starting pitchers, since that information was useful to gamblers, but sportswriters successfully protested that stricture, pointing out that if the judge really wanted to keep gamblers in the dark he should keep the schedule a secret, too.

There was plenty to gamble on. The National League was enjoying a tight race among the Dodgers, Cubs, and Giants, and in August the Cardinals crowded in. They had improved their pitching by trading for Burleigh Grimes, who frightened batters by throwing at them and got them out with a spitball, mean but legal. The spitter had been banned in 1920, but seventeen pitchers who already used it in the majors were given a grandfather clause. By 1930, only four were left; Grimes, at thirty-six, was the youngest.

The Cardinal hitting was fearsome. George Watkins hit .373, a record that still stands for rookies, but he was platooned in right field with veteran Ray Blades, who hit .396. Landis made the Cards keep a young catcher, Gus Mancuso, who had run out of options, and injuries to Jimmie Wilson, the regular catcher, forced them to use him. Mancuso merely hit .366.

These players, however, were not the Cardinal stars. Frankie Frisch, Chick Hafey, Jim Bottomley, and Taylor Douthit combined to drive in 411 runs.

But the Cardinals were somewhat undisciplined. They returned home in early August from a discouraging and raucous road trip, Manager Gabby Street having fined several players for what The Sporting News called “indiscrepancies,” and seemed out of contention. On August 9 they were twelve games out, in fourth place. But they took a home series from the Dodgers and took heart for the stretch drive with Brooklyn, the Cubs, and the Giants.

Zigging and zagging, the Dodgers lost nineteen of twenty-seven games, falling to fourth place, and then won eleven straight to regain the lead in September. All four contenders were thundering. With ten games to play the Cards crept to within a game of the Dodgers, and came into Brooklyn for three games. The Cubs, only a game and a halfback, meantime tangled at the Polo Grounds with the Giants, who trailed by five and a half.

The Dodgers had the home crowd and the momentum of their winning streak, while the Cardinals suffered the sudden disappearance of one pitcher and a freak accident to another. The vanishing pitcher was Flint Rhem, of Rhems, South Carolina, a hard enough thrower to have won 20 games in 1926 and a hard enough drinker to have been farmed out in 1929. The Cardinals restored him to grace in 1930, and Rhem went into the Brooklyn series with six straight wins.

Rhem did not return to his hotel room the night before the first game, did not show up at the ballpark the next day, and became an object of concern. He reappeared a day later, and immediately was pressed by newsmen as to his whereabouts.

“He was befuddled,” recalls his roommate, Bill Hallahan. But Rhem was not without imagination, and he seized upon a newsman’s chance question to spin a tale appropriate to the era:

I was idling outside the hotel, went Rhem’s tale, when this big, black limousine pulled up. A fellow beckoned me over, and when I came alongside these guys pulled guns and forced me into the car. They drove me to a secret hideaway and forced cups of raw whiskey down my throat.

Oh cruel fate. “Imagine kidnapping Flint Rhem,” says Hallahan, “and making him take a drink!”

The same night that Rhem disappeared, Hallahan caught two fingers of his right hand in a taxi door. The injury was to his glove hand, and the next day, as Hallahan puts it, “I had the catcher throw the ball lightly.” Hallahan threw the ball hard enough himself to have a no-hitter for 6 2/3 innings. But the Cards had as much trouble with Dazzy Vance, who fanned 11. The game was a tare classic of pitching and defense, with Dodger bumbles thrown in.

Herman stopped a Cardinal rally in the fourth with a brilliant catch. With two out in the Cardinal sixth, Sparky Adams was perched on third. He dashed for home and had it stolen, but Vance cut short his windup and fired the ball at Hafey, who was batting. It hit him: Dead ball, batter to first, runner back to third. Watkins, the next batter, fouled out.

In the Dodger eighth, batter Finn missed a hit-and-run sign: the runner, Harvey Hendrick, was out at second. Finn then singled, tried to stretch it and crashed into Charlie Gelbert, the Cardinal shortstop. Gelbert was knocked cold; Finn was safe but woozy. He tottered off second base and Hallahan picked up the loose ball and tagged him out.

With runners on first and second and none out in the home ninth, the Dodgers worked the right combination: a bunt, followed by a single. Trouble is, the bunt was popped to catcher Mancuso, who doubled the runner off second, and the single was wasted.

The Cardinals broke the scoreless tie in the tenth as pinch-hitter High doubled, went to third on Hallahan’s bunt, and scored on a single by Douthit. In the home half, Brooklyn loaded the bases with one out; Lopez grounded hard to the left of Adams, who was then playing short. Adams knocked the ball down, picked it up and flipped it to Frisch, who made a lightning pivot and barely nipped Lopez at first. Ebbets Field,recalls Hallahan, lapsed into sudden silence. The race was tied. The Giants meantime shoved the Cubs back, 7-0, on a three-hitter by Carl Hubbell.

The Cards won the next two with the Dodgers, and now had a two-game lead with seven to play. They won six of them, one a smooth 9-3 effort by Rhem at Baker Bowl. The Dodgers kept losing and finished fourth, behind the Cubs and Giants.

Pitching had largely decided the final games, and it dominated the World Series as well. Lefty Grove and George Earnshaw of the Athletics won the first two games, yielding only three St. Louis runs; the Cards’ Hallahan and Jesse Haines won the next two, the A’s scoring only once. Neither team scored in the fifth game until Foxx homered off Grimes in the ninth. Earnshaw, having pitched seven innings of that game, came back to pitch all nine innings of the sixth and final contest, won by the A’s, 7 to 1. The team batting averages were among the lowest on record—.197 for Philadelphia, .200 for St. Louis.

But who can blame the lumbermen if, after a long season of unprecedented exploits, their arms at last grew weary and their bats slow? Put October out of your mind; 1930 was The Year of the Hitter.