Zane Grey and the Mystery of ‘The Winning Ball’

Before finding enormous success as an author of Western novels—more than 100 million copies sold, more than 110 cowboy movies spawned—Zane Grey, son of a Zanesville, Ohio, dentist, wrote a number of stories about his first love, baseball. Grey himself had played at the University of Pennsylvania and had kicked around low-level professional circuits like the Iron and Oil League before taking up a writing career.

Borrowing on his own experiences and those of his brother, Romer “Reddy” Grey, an Eastern League stalwart and a one-game major leaguer with the 1903 Pirates, Grey spun a Lardneresque series of tales later collected in The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories (1920). One of them, “The Winning Ball,” first published in Popular Magazine in May 1910, is an account of a hastily arranged exhibition game, on what was supposed to have been an offday, between the top team in the Eastern League and an amateur team in Guelph played before a comical assortment of “Indians, half-breeds, French-Canadians [and] huge, hulking, bearded farmers or traders, or trappers, whatever they were.”

“We had never heard of Guelph,” grouses Grey’s narrator, Reddy, a fictionalized version of his brother.1 “We did not care anything about rube baseball teams. Baseball was not play to us, it was the hardest kind of work and of all things an exhibition game was an abomination.”

The jaded pros slip a juiced ball into the game when they’re batting. (It is the first known occurrence of “rabbit” ball in print.) The ruse backfires: The pros are unable to recapture the rabbit. The rubes knock it all over the park en route to an upset victory.

There has long been speculation whether events described in “The Winning Ball” have any basis in reality or whether they are strictly the product of Grey’s imagination.

Historian William Humber, for one, believes the story was inspired by the Boston-Guelph match of August 22, 1873. In support of his theory, Humber leans heavily on a contemporary newspaper account which notes “that the ball seemed a great deal more lively than the ‘dead ball’ generally used. Are we right or not? For an analysis of the game see the score. …”2

If, as Humber surmises, the Bostons snuck a “rabbit” into the game—never mind the clearly superior Red Stockings’ lack of impetus to do so—it would seem they had more success than Grey’s fictional Rochesters did in retrieving it. Not only did the putative cheaters win the game, they won by a score, 27-8, that’s remarkably consistent with the results of the other Boston-Guelph contests of those years. In other words, the alleged lively ball apparently had no discernible impact on the outcome of the game. That does little to buttress a presumption that talk of such an incident floated around the baseball ozone for almost four decades before Grey put it to paper.

No cigar

But what if we consider “The Winning Ball” not as an echo of an event many years in the past but as something much more simultaneous with its writing? What if we consider the elements of the story more or less at face value?

Grey’s narrator, Reddy, identifies himself as a member of the “Rochester club, leader in the Eastern League.” The month is July, the year unspecified.

The real-life Reddy Grey did play for the Rochester Bronchos of the Eastern League for part of 1901 season and all of 1902. If we accept the premise that “Reddy’s” teammates in the story are thinly disguised versions of actual Bronchos—that the fictional Gillinger is indeed the real-life Ed “Battleship” Gremminger; that “Deerfoot” Browning is “Deerfoot” Barclay; that Lake is Billy Lush; that “Crab” Bane is Joe Bean, and so on—that would pinpoint the setting as 1901, because all these players are gone from the club by 1902. Could, then, the game described in “The Winning Ball” actually have occurred in July 1901, as a literal reading of Grey would suggest?

Alas, no cigar. I can find no mention (there are, problematically, some gaps in the microfilm record) of an exhibition game between Rochester and Guelph in July, or in any other month, of 1901.

But there is a pretty close match. On August 3, 1899, Rochester, then “leader in the Eastern League,” traveled to Guelph to take on the Maple Leafs, then the last-place club in the “amateur” Canadian League.3 And, sure enough, on that day the rubes upset the pros. The surviving game accounts are sketchy, but there is no mention of a livelier-than-usual ball. And the score, 8-5, would hardly suggest one.

Rabbits, skyrockets, and punks

With no particular game to tap with confidence as inspiration for “The Winning Ball,”4 we are perhaps left with a broader notion that double-dealing baseballs might have been part of the game’s roomy bag of tricks from the start. Indeed, that seems to be the case.

In the game’s formative, less financially flush years, the home club was responsible for supplying the game ball, and would, naturally, offer up one best suited to its style of play. “Ball selection was a key strategy and a critical benefit of home-field advantage. Visiting teams with big hitters would, more often than not, find themselves playing with a ‘dead’ ball.”5

Of course, the impulse to get a leg up on one’s opponent didn’t end there. The game evolved a whole set of ball dodges, common-enough occurrences, it would seem, to have spawned their own vocabulary. There was the “rabbit” and the “skyrocket,” but there was also the “punk,” “a ball that defies being hit solidly; one that is soft and flabby.”6 The practice of switching balls, as circumstances warranted, even had its own verbs, “to work in” or “to ring in,” as in: “They rung in a lively ball on us, and when they were at bat our fielders sat on the fence, so they could get the ball quicker when it went over.”7

The Sporting News dubbed this sort of chicanery the “double-ball racket,” and pointed to the 1876 St. Louis Brown Stockings as accomplished practitioners of the art. As evidence, TSN cited the three consecutive shutouts—the final being the NL’s first-ever no-hitter—thrown by the Brown Stockings’ George “Grin” Bradley against the Hartford Dark Blues between July 11 and 15. “… It had a very demoralizing effect on the team, and did more than anything else to keep the Hartfords from winning the championship of that year.”8

Partly in an attempt to defuse this ruse, the National League adopted an official ball in the fall of 1876. But as long as the home team controlled the ball supply, there was still plenty of opportunity for underhandedness. (It wasn’t until the early 1900s that umpires took charge of game balls, a measure that eliminated much, but certainly not all, of the tampering.) In 1878 the Chicago Tribune reported that the company supplying offical balls to the International Association was surreptitiously providing punks or rabbits according to the customer’s preferences.9

Of course, shenanigans of this sort always carry with them the tantalizing possibility of comeuppance. In 1891 Sporting Life ran a story about an American Association meeting in Philadelphia between the Athletics and the eventual pennant winners, the Boston Reds. In the top of the seventh, with his team down 8-4 (the Athletics had chosen to bat first), Philadelphia manager Bill Sharsig “rang in” a lively ball—in this case, a Keefe & Becannon10 model left over from the more offensive-minded Players League of 1890.11

“But,” as Sporting Life reminds us, “man proposes and God disposes.”12 Athletics first baseman Henry Larkin immediately fouled the rabbit over the grandstand, and the regulation Reach ball was tossed back into the game. However, leading off the bottom of the inning, Boston second baseman “Cub” Stricker knocked the Reach ball out of play, and the rabbit returned.

“Then followed a fusillade of doubles, triples and home runs, such as is seldom witnessed, and when the inning was ended the Bostons had scored ten runs. It was one of the greatest batting exhibitions ever given.”13 The final score was 22-7. “There have been some heavy batting games so far this season,” pondered Sporting Life. “Has the trick been worked before?”14

No doubt before, and no doubt for many years after. An unidentified player told The Sporting News in 1893 that “whenever a new ball was thrown out last season and we were in the field it was tossed to the pitcher, who would put his private mark on the same, so the visitors could not change the ball.”15

In 1899 Washington Senators manager Arthur Irwin singled out John S. Barnes, manager of the Western League Minnesota Minnies in the mid-1890s, as one who kept a “stack of springy balls on tap in his ice chest. The refrigerator warped the rubber in the sphere and when it met the bat, it sputtered feebly into the hands of an infielder like the last dying kick of a Fourth of Juy skyrocket.” Irwin also claimed another team’s captain would drop “half a dozen balls into a flour sack and pounded them with an ax” to deaden them.16

In 1906 several managers in the Southern Association complained publicly about New Orleans Pelicans manager Charlie Frank, who allegedly kept a supply of balls for all occasions—old and new ones, doornail-dead and extremely lively ones—in a closely guarded valise beside him during home games.17

According to longtime player, coach, and umpire Arlie Latham, Frank would deaden balls by hanging them in a “dry refrigerator” for a few days, after which “you could slam them on the ground with all your might and they wouldn’t bounce half an inch. …” When Frank needed runs, said Latham, he “worked another ball. He generally had one of those rubber skyrockets on tap. … Crack! When a batter hit one of those things he sent it into the next county.”18

Montgomery manager Dominic Mullaney claimed to have cut open one of the latter and found “a wrapped rubber mixture about five times the size of the ordinary rubber [center] used in a Reach ball. The yarn inclosing the rubber is not more than a fourth as thick as the yarn in the Reach ball.”19

Official league balls were supposed to remain in sealed boxes until introduced into a game, but Frank was a master at distracting umpires and opponents from the fact that the seals on some of the containers—and the balls in them—had been breached.

Such discussion could hardly have escaped a baseball-savvy writer like Zane Grey. It is highly improbable he would have had to dig back to 1873 for inspiration for “The Winning Ball” (or “The Manager of Madden’s Hill”). It was there, in the sports section of the daily paper.

But Guelph? Why then did he choose to set “The Winning Ball” in Guelph? Perhaps it’s no more complicated than Grey seizing on this oddly named outpost somewhere in the Canadian hinterland as the most rube-sounding baseball destination he could think of.

DAVID McDONALD is a writer, filmmaker, and broadcaster, who grew up in Toronto and now lives in Ottawa. His writing about baseball has appeared in the The National Pastime, The Baseball Research Journal, The Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen, and in the Canadian baseball anthologies All I Thought About Was Baseball (University of Toronto Press) and Dominionball: Baseball Above the 49th (SABR). He has been a member of SABR for more than 20 years.

 

Notes

1 The real Reddy Grey, having spent three seasons with the Toronto Canucks/Maple Leafs of the Eastern League and a couple more in Buffalo, would certainly have heard of Guelph and might even have played there once or twice.

2 From an undated newspaper clipping in the files of William Humber.

3 Bronchos skipper Al Buckenberger had more than a passing familiarity with Guelph, having managed and played there in 1886. Buckenberger’s boss was George Sleeman, who was also one of the backers of the 1873 club. Thus, there are only three degrees of separation between Zane Grey—Reddy Grey-Buckenberger-Sleeman—and the 1873 lively-ball game, which might be seen as evidence, however faint and circumstantial, in support of Humber’s theory.

4 Or for another of Grey’s Redheaded Outfield stories, the often overlooked “The Manager of Madden’s Hill,” which also relies on a lively-ball twist. As the titular manager tells his team at a crucial point: “This game ain’t over yet. … Last innin’ Bo’s umpire switched balls on us. That ball was lively. An’ they tried to switch back on me. But nix! We’re goin’ to git a chanst to hit that lively ball. An’ they’re goin’ to git a dose of their own medicine.”

5 Jimmy Stamp, “A Brief History of the Baseball,” Smithsonian.com, June 28, 2013.

6 Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 676.

7 Cumminsville (Ohio) Blue Stockings second baseman Alec Voss, in describing an 1876 game between his team and the NL Hartford Dark Blues; quoted by Ren Mulford Jr., “Cincinnati Chips,” Sporting Life, February 15, 1888: 8.

8 “… They would have a lively ball to bat, but when their opponents were at the bat a dead ball would be worked in on them. This ball the club had made especially for its own use.” “Tricks of the Game,” The Sporting News, March 10, 1888: 1.

9 Chicago Tribune, September 1, 1878, quoted in Peter Morris, A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 328.

10 Made by a company founded by New York Giant Tim Keefe and former New York Metropolitan “Buck” Becannon. Even Keefe, a 33-year-old pitcher, found his own ball “too lively.” Charlie Bevis, “Tim Keefe,” Society for American Baseball Research, at sabr.org/bioproj/person/6f1dd1b1.

11 In 1890 the PL recorded a .274/.351/.378/.729 slash line, compared with the NL’s .254/.329/.342/.671 and the AA’s .253/.330/.332/.662. How much of the difference in offense was due to the ball is, of course, impossible to ascertain.

12 “A Trick Which Plagued the Inventor,” Sporting Life, May 9, 1891: 9.

13 “Athletics vs. Boston at Philadelphia April 30,” Sporting Life, May 1, 1891: 4.

14 Op. cit., Sporting Life, May 9, 1891: 9.

15 The Sporting News, January 21, 1893, quoted in Morris, 328.

16 Gerard S. Petrone, When Baseball Was Young: The Good Old Days (San Diego: Musty Attic Archives, 1994), 118.

17 “Baseball Was Full of Rubber: More Evidence of the Unfair Methods of Southern League Manager,” Pittsburgh Press, June 27, 1906: 14.

18 Quoted by John Thorn, “Over the Plate: Arlie Latham’s Own Baseball Stories, No. 2,” Our Game, August 24, 2015, ourgame.mlblogs.com/2015/08/. Latham also identified Hall of Famer Buck Ewing, Cincinnati’s manager from 1894 to 1899, as a devoted baseball tamperer.

19 Pittsburgh Press, June 27, 1906: 14.