Indeed, since the game had tested the Knickerbocker Rules at Hoboken’s Elysian Field in 1846, it had quickly spread the 100 miles up the Hudson, and by 1860 Saugerties was rooting for its first organized baseball club, the Ulsters. Yet despite having a history here, the intense diamond activity in the Summer of ’74 was such as to inspire Edward Jernegan, editor of the Saugerties Telegraph, to pen an editorial in the September 18, 1874, issue which cloaked the diamond sport with a virtual quasi-reli­gious aura. The emotional prose went like this:

The game of baseball has been a rage in Saugerties during the past season as, indeed, it has been throughout the country. During the day time, in the.fierce July and August suns, our middle-aged men, our young men and boys of tender years have practiced the manly game; and at even-tide when, in a village like ours, the laboring man, the man of business and the professor assemble in sociable knots on the streets, the favorite subject for discussion has been the base ball game. It is a grand old sport, savoring of the athletic games of Ancient Greece. It does a good thing for our middle-aged men, bringing back fresh to their memo­ries the days of youth, making them young again and lifting for a time, if not permanently, the cares which necessarily attend their business or profession. It does a better thing for our young men, making them strong and manly, and taking from them the desire to prac­tice other games which, with their associations, tend to weaken their intellects, destroy their bodies and waste their souls.

It took, however, little time to become quite clear that the editor’s view of “the grand old game” (of 28 years’ vintage) was not shared by all of the township’s residents. That revelation came about when a group came together in October of ’74 to organize a new and superior ball club to represent the town. These were obviously baseball purists who preferred quality to quantity, their goal being a “first class ball club” in the tradition of teams of the past which had been recognized as “Champions of the Hudson River” by no less than the baseball Bible of the time, the New York Clipper. It would seem implicit in their planning that they were not at all impressed with the past summer’s “quantity” of ten ball teams in town, the best of which being endowed with dubious diamond skills.

The innovators christened their creation with the storied name of past glories, that of both the 1860 Ulsters and a later organization of the same name that came into existence in 1869, filling the baseball void brought about by the Civil War. The new group agreed at their very first meeting that a “first class base ball club” required “a ground suitable for playing on.” Thus, a committee of three was appointed for the pur­pose of solving this need and went about their assignment with both speed and vigor. It was, however, the contacts made in this pursuit that brought to light the fact that not everyone embraced The Game with the same ardor as the newspaper editor. The committee’s report was published in the Telegraph’s December 4, 1874, issue and, permeated with chagrin, read:

To the Chairman, Saugerties B.B.C.:

Sir, Having been appointed a committee to pro­ cure suitable grounds for the use of a Baseball Club, we submit the following report, via: We have applied to different persons with unvarying (lack of) success. We found a number of suitable grounds but no disposition on the part of the owners to hire them on any consideration whatsoever, although they were offered more than their land was worth to them for farming purposes. We were told that baseball playing was wicked, hence we conclude that the spirit of the age is too moral for the game, or that when men grow old they out-grow an appreci­ation for the manly games of their youth, when they are no longer able to participate in them. Although our efforts have been in part a failure, we think our wants might be laid before the public by advertis­ing, as it is not generally known that we boys have been trying for more than ten years to beg the privi­lege of playing ball on somebody’s old worn out pas­ture field and paying well for it at that; we therefore suggest that the Association advertise in the Saugerties Telegraph for a man with public spirit enough to furnish the five hundred ball players of Saugerties with a ball ground at a reasonable price.

s. Mynderse Freligh
Frank Pidgeon, Jr.
John C. Davis

Despite the committee’s discouraging experience, the playing field problem was solved by the spring of 1875. Ironically, that was largely due to the apparent failure of a harness racing facility on the southeast edge of town named the Glasco Driving Park. Newly constructed and commencing business with its Fall Meeting on October 10, 1874, after this initial compe­tition, racing results never again gained mention in the Telegraph. Instead, for the next couple years, the Ulsters and other local ball clubs were reported as playing their matches on the site. It appears likely, however, that by 1877 the driving park owner had put his land to another use, as for the next eight years the ballgames were reported as taking place at a variety of locations, all of which seemed to be makeshift.

But at long last the problem with which the 1874 Ulsters committee had wrestled, and which they bemoaned had existed for a decade prior, was solved in the fall of 1884. The September 11, 1884, issue of the Telegraph reported an enthusiastic organizational meeting at which the Saugerties Driving Park Association was founded with the goal of securing grounds for a “trotting course, base ball park, fair grounds, etc.” The very next edition told of speedy progress, namely the leasing of a 15-acre “piece of ground from Captain Finger” on the northeast edge of town. Just a week later came news of the “dire speed” with which the half-mile track was being constructed, and by the second week in November the Telegraph announced that “people are pleasure-driving” on the track.

In the midst of the construction a prophetic line appeared in the newspaper which stated, “The owners anticipate a great deal of pleasure to our people in dif­ferent ways on their park in the next season.” By the spring of 1885, the old committee of Freligh, Pidgeon, and Davis must have been wearing broad smiles as the first baseball game took place on the site.

As the years passed by, trotting races disappeared, the plot underwent changes of ownership, and its name evolved from the Driving Park to Shults’ Park to the Athletic Field, but the ball games continued and newer sports utilized the grounds. There was even professional baseball on the site from 1903 thru 1905 as Saugerties had an entry in the Class C Hudson River League. By 1934 it was owned by the father and son duo of Martin and Holley Cantine. Both had been catchers in their youth, and Martin had played on the very first ball club to use the grounds. Their paper mill was a major employer in the town, and as early as 1911, Martin had been described in a publication as “one of the most public-spirited men of our village.” This rep­utation was surely reinforced when, in impressive cer­emonies in November 1934, they deeded and donated to the town what was then officially called Cantine Memorial Field.

There were ceremonies also on May 8, 1938, to cele­brate considerable improvements to the facility result­ing from a WPA project. In 1967, the town purchased a large field adjoining it on the west, thereby doubling the park’s size. As time went on and athletic programs multiplied, dedicated volunteers added additional facilities, and yet another ceremony was held on May 13, 1979, to mark further enhancements to the grounds, accomplished by $200,000 in government grants. In 1991, the town took out of its checkbook once again and acquired a sizable plot adjoining it on the north. The result was another doubling of the park’s acreage.

One cannot view the present facilities without thinking of the Messieurs Freligh, Pidgeon and Davis and their search for just “somebody’s old worn out pasture” in order to allow Saugerties’ 500 ballplayers to do their thing. The trio would now be viewing a complex that could and often does accommodate 500 athletes all cavorting at the same time. And then there was the Driving Park Association’s thought that their venture would afford “great pleasure to our people in different ways.” The ways in which the people of Saugerties now derive pleasure at the expanded grounds of the Driving Park are via 11 baseball, softball, and Little League diamonds (five lighted), four soccer fields (one lighted), four lighted tennis courts, three basketball courts, four pavilions, three playgrounds with a children’s pool at one, a band stage, two sets of horseshoe pits, and the latest addi­tion, an indoor ice arena that accommodates both youth and adult hockey leagues as well as open peri­ods for public use. Nor has the “fair grounds” aspect vanished. Thousands visit the grounds for the annual 4th of July celebration, and some 30,000 attend the Annual Garlic Festival on the last weekend in September.

It would indeed appear that the negative attitude toward sports encountered by the 1874 Ulsters ball­ field committee has mellowed with the passage of the decades. It might, in fact, be near impossible to find a soul in Saugerties these days who would assert “that base ball playing was wicked.”

JACK KEELEY, a retired parole supervisor, is one of three Cub fans in Saugerties, New York. He dotes on local baseball history and those bygone years when the Cubs won games.

This event, while long a matter of speculation since the Robinson signing, barely rated a mention in the mainstream newspapers, and wasn’t covered in any great depth among the black media. The continued poor perform­ance of the bottom-dwelling Senators, plus Paula’s sta­tus as a Cuban national, contributed to the lack of cov­erage, as the Senators had a long history of using Latin American players.

Still, the integration of the national pastime in the nation’s capital deserves study. In order to understand the historic significance of this event, I will argue that the debut of Paula with the Washington Senators, while symbolically an act of integration, was in fact consistent with the team’s long-standing tradition of using Latin American play­ers. Furthermore, this act of integration was lost in the long period of time between Jackie Robinson’s 1947 appearance and the Red Sox 1959 integration and by Paula’s mediocre talents and the half-hearted manner in which his debut took place.

The history of the integration of major league base­ ball up until 1954 shows that the hiring of black ball players by individual teams was largely a matter of the personality and the philosophy of the individual owners. These owners obviously responded to larger shifts in the league and in society in regards to inte­gration. Major league clubs sharing the same city often had very different patterns of hiring black play­ers. In New York, for example, the Brooklyn Dodgers were the first and most aggressive in signing blacks, while the vaunted Yankees were one of the last teams to integrate.

The Senators had a poor record in the long process of integration. Clark Calvin Griffith dom­inated the history of the original Washington Senators that played in the nation’s capital from 1901-1960. Born in Clear Creek, Missouri, in 1869, Griffith was a first-rate pitcher who won 240 games as a major league hurler and won 24 games in the inaugural American League season of 1901 as a member of the Chicago White Sox. Griffith came to the Senators in 1912 as a player-manager and in 1920 bought a con­trolling interest in the team. He stayed with the Senators until his death in 1955 and was succeeded by his adopted son Calvin Griffith. Under Clark Griffith’s tutelage, the Washington Senators earned the most famous epithet in baseball history: “Washington—first in war, first in peace and last in the American League.”

With the possible exception of Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics, no team in baseball more clearly reflected the image of one man than that of the Senators and Clark Griffith. He was certainly not alone in keeping blacks off his team in the first decades of the twentieth century, but he did play the paramount part in keeping blacks off the Senators after the Brooklyn Dodgers had integrated.

However, the history of the racial makeup of the Washington Senators is decidedly not an all-white affair. Part of the problem in dealing with the Senators’ late accept­ance of black ball players was their long history of association with Latinos. This characteristic of the Senators served as an irritant to both black and white sportswriters who followed the team, and was also part of the reason why Carlos Paula’s premiere brought so little attention.

The Senators were among the first teams to mine the untapped talent pool of the Caribbean and Central and South America. There was no gentlemen’s agree­ment about barring these players, and as long as they were considered white, they were able to ply their trade in the big leagues. In 1935, a full twelve years before Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers, the Senators put Bobby Estalella, a Cuban national, in the outfield at Griffith Stadium. Indeed, many D.C. fans of the time viewed Estalella as black. Next in line was Mel Almada, a Mexican, who was a full-time center fielder and batted .309 in 1937 in 100 games with the Senators. A Venezuelan, Alex Carrasquel, also widely perceived as being black, joined the Senators pitching staff in 1939.

There were other notable Latino players during the 1940s and 1950s. Cuba produced pitcher Rene Monteagudo and infielders Gil Torres, Pedro Gomez and Mike Guerra. Two Cuban brothers roamed the outfield for the Senators: Roberto Ortiz and Baby Ortiz. Mexico sent infielder Chile Gomez. Clearly, not all the Washington Senators players hailed from the breadbasket of the U.S.A.

There were two main reasons for this influx of for­eigners, especially during the 1940s and 1950s. The first of these was that non-U.S. citizens could not be drafted. Both before and during the war the appeal to Griffith of these foreigners was obvious: He would not lose the core of his team to the armed forces, while his competitors who relied on native-born talent would.

This strategy had mixed results, as the Senators fin­ished last and next to last in 1942 and 1944, but they did manage to finish second twice, in 1943 and 1945. Any Senators finish in the first division was an aberra­tion and was probably due to the fact that other

American League teams lost more talented players to the armed forces than the Senators. The second rea­son for Griffith signing so many foreign-born players was financial. Griffith was always in financial difficulty, and like their black counterparts a few years later, Latino players made less money than whites. In short, they were a good source of cheap labor. These immi­grant workers also served to point out the glaring absence of American blacks during this time.

Shirley Povich, the longtime sportswriter of the Washington Post, declared in 1953, “Mr. Griffith would give Washington fans dark players from other lands, but never an American Negro.” Povich was also an outspoken critic of other segregated professional teams in Washington. Writing on the Redskins, Povich declared, “The Redskins colors are burgundy, gold and Caucasian.” In a famous piece of Washington lore Povich wrote, “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”

Based on Povich’s writings, it is clear that most of the Washington, D.C., area’s sports fans were aware of the team’s exclusion of blacks and the moral and practical problems associated with this. Shirley Povich was no radical rabble-rouser and was writing for a mainstream newspaper. In fairness, Griffith was clearly not a leader in integrating major league base­ ball, but neither was he all that different from other owners of the time.

Povich was not alone among sportswriters in his condemnation of the racial practices of Clark Griffith. Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1943, Wendell Smith declared that Clark Griffith “is one of the big league owners who prefers to go outside of the borders of these United States and bring in players, rather than hire American citizens of color.”

Both the mainstream and black press were critical of Griffith’s refusal to hire black players. As in so many aspects in American history, World War II played a key role in the fight to integrate Major League Baseball. With so many of its players lost to the draft, this era provided the ideal opportunity to hire black players to take their place. The fact that this did not happen speaks vol­umes about the “gentlemen’s agreement” about not hiring blacks. In the aftermath of the war, public protest against this exclusionary policy was evident at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., as well as other ballparks around the country.

According to Jules Tygiel, author of Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, protes­tors showed up sporadically at Senators home games during the early 1950s calling for integration and were dismissed by Griffith as a “committee of Commies”: As late as 1953 Griffith was unwilling to put a black play­er on the field. In April of that year he declared, “Nobody is going to stampede me into signing Negro players merely for the sake of satisfying certain pres­sure groups.”

At this point, Paula was playing at the Senators AAA affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, and while not tagged as a sure-fire major leaguer, Griffith certainly knew of his existence and the possi­bility that he would play for the Senators.

According to David Wiggins, Clark Griffith was not shy about letting people know how much he was against black players in the major leagues. There is no doubt that Griffith received much needed income from rent of his stadium to the Homestead Grays, and perhaps the diminishing talent pool of the Negro Leagues and the subsequent loss of income to Griffith were motivating reasons why he elevated Paula to the big leagues late in the 1954 season.

Three years before Carlos Paula played for the Senators, owner Clark Griffith said that the first black player on each team, “would have to be a great one.” Carlos Paula was a mediocre prospect who put up modest numbers even in the minors. At the time of his call-up in September, 1954, Paula was hitting .290 with the Senators’ Sally League affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina. Why, then, was Paula the pick to become the first black player for the Senators?

Clearly, Griffith did not want a lot of press attention in this matter, for Paula was a late-season call-up for a seventh-place team some forty games out of first. Paula was slipped in during the first game of a mean­ingless doubleheader between two cellar-dwelling teams. The fact that Paula was not a hot prospect would also lead people to have low expectations of him. This was not a future all-star stepping on the field, but a role player whose shortcomings would soon become apparent.

Finally, the fact that Paula was a Cuban is most significant. The Senators had an almost 20-year history of employing Latino ballplayers. Paula would be just one more spice in the Latin flavor of the Washington Senators. Washington’s two biggest mainstream newspapers treated this historic event as a footnote in the sports section. The Washington Post first mentioned Paula in the third paragraph of an article detailing a doubleheader between the two worst teams in the American League. Commenting on the many new faces brought up from Charlotte, reporter Bob Addie wrote, “Carlos Paula, Jim Lemon, Steve Korcheck and Jesse Levan com­prised the Charlotte delegation in the second game and it’s sad to report that the quartet didn’t get a hit.”

In dealing with the historic aspect of this game the Post reported, “Paula, first Negro ever to play a regular game for the Nats [Senators], played in the first game too, and did contribute two hits including a two-run double.” In his column, “The Baseball Beat,” sports­ writer Burton Hawkins added this bit of perspective: ”Add historical notes: Carlos Paula became the first Negro to play in a regular game for Washington in the first game of yesterday’s double header.” In-depth social or political commentary is not to be expected on reporting of a baseball game; however, the fact that this event didn’t merit mention elsewhere in the paper is indicative that the Post did not consider it a big story.

Washington’s other major paper, the Washington Star, reported the event in much the same way as its competitor, although it was given slightly greater space. Paula at least rated a mention in the opening paragraph of the story. Again, ignoring any social implication whatsoever, the Star declared, “The Senators’ swarm of Charlotte graduates general­ly has touched off little whooping and hollering among the most devoted followers of the club, in strong-backed Carlos Paula and towering Jim Lemon they’ve sensed possible future help.” The paper also reported, “Paula, muscular Cuban Negro, whacked a 400-foot double and a single in the first game with the Philadelphia.”

In commenting further on Paula’s performance, it was reported, “He met three other pitches on the nose, although going hitless in the sec­ond game, which the Senators dropped 3-2. He also handles left field—a brutal sunfield—adequately.” Focusing solely on the baseball significance of Paula’s debut, the Star continued: “Paula will be tested more thoroughly by more adept pitching than he was stacked against yesterday. Carlos seemingly stands a half block from the plate and would appear to be at a loss against pitches nicking the outside of the plate. He got by in the Sally League with that stance, but major league pitchers may force him to alter it.”

The reporter, Burt Hawkins, had prescience about Paula’s batting style which would become a major cause of the demise of his major league career (along with his fielding), but by ignoring any social ramifica­tions of his appearance, the Star was reflecting the unconcern of the mainstream press, and by implica­tion the reading public. Interestingly, the black press, while more complimentary toward Paula, gave the event just slightly more coverage. The Washington Afro-American was the only local paper to print a pic­ture of Paula, although they, too, made little of the social significance of his premiere. Under a picture of Paula in the dugout, the Afro-American called his debut “impressive.”

The paper declared: “The first col­ored player in history to wear a Washington Senator uniform in a regular season game, Carlos Paula made an auspicious bow in the Labor Day double-header against Philadelphia at Griffith Stadium. The 25-year old, 6-foot, 3-inch Cuban outfielder collected two hits, one a double, and drove in two runs in the nightcap. Defensively, he had six putouts, one a spectacular leaping stab of a drive against the left field stands by Jim Finigan.”

It is again evident that baseball took precedence over any social significance. While being more compli­mentary with such words as “auspicious” and “spectacular,” and printing a picture of him, even the local black press downplayed the event. The Afro-American points out that Paula was a Cuban, and this seems to be a point of contention to many people, particularly American-born blacks. It is impossible to tell what would have happened if the first black Washington Senator had been native-born, but the fact that all papers pointed out that he was Cuban leads one to suspect that an American black may have received more press coverage.

Sam Lacy, writing in the Baltimore Afro-American, offered one of the few social criticisms of Paula’s debut with the Senators. Lacy was critical of Senators’ manager Bucky Harris not playing Paula against the New York Yankees the weekend before his actual premiere. Harris claimed that he was reluctant to play too many rookies against the Yankees for fear of drawing criti­cism by the league-leading Indians that the Senators were going soft on New York.

Lacy wrote, “This depart­ment thinks very highly of Bucky and appreciates the explanation . . . Otherwise, it might have been tempted to suspect that Paula was being spared the pressure of breaking in against a club so obviously anti [black].” This criticism was obviously a blast first at the New York Yankees and second at Bucky Harris. Both criti­cisms were unfair. First, while it is true that the Yankees were still an all-white team, they had in fact played against integrated teams with no apparent incidents. Second, the Senators were far out of the pennant race and it is tradition in baseball not to appear to be “giving up” by filling a lineup with rook­ies. That said, Lacy did have the courage to move beyond the baseball diamond in looking at the barrier the Senators were passing.

Lacy also offered an interesting economic incentive to Paula’s appearance. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Lacy declared that he “wouldn’t dare conclude that the tan Cuban was being eyed hopefully by the front office as a sort of a prop for a holiday gate that had the misfortune to draw the bedraggled Philadelphia Athletics as a lure.”

This criticism was interesting on two fronts. First, the economic argu­ment is hard to accept. While Griffith was always strapped for cash and no doubt would have liked to draw a big holiday crowd, Paula’s appearance was not announced in advance. Second, the use of the words “tan Cuban” again reflect the mixed feelings of American blacks toward Paula. Lacy, to be fair, at least was able to view the larger context of the event, even if his criticisms were unfair. Paula played in a total of nine games during the 1954 season. He played a full season in 1955, participating in 115 games and hitting a commendable .299.

His shortcomings, however, were becoming apparent. For a man of his size he lacked power, hitting a paltry six home runs, an unac­ceptable number for an outfielder. Even Shirley Povich, an early supporter of integration, mocked Paula as hitting “destructive singles.” Along with his lack of power, it was his fielding that ultimately did in Paula. Baseball historian Peter Bjarkman wrote of Paula that his “abilities to smash a baseball never came near to compensating for his seemingly total inability to field one cleanly in the outfield.”

Even Povich had to admit that Paula was, “something of a crudity in the field.” He led all American League out­ fielders in errors during the 1955 campaign. Paula played in only 33 games for the Senators in 1956 and was sent to the minors for good at the start of the 1957 season.

George Will has called Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers “the most important event in the emancipation of black Americans since the Civil War.” While this may be overstated, it does reflect the drama and importance that many placed on Jackie Robinson. Carlos Paula, by comparison, received little attention or credit.

There are a few reasons for this. The first had to do with timing. 1954 was a critical year in the growing civil rights movement. The Brown decision had huge ramifications on a very personal level. White Washingtonians were faced with the prospect of integrating their public schools. Carlos Paula took the field the day before most of the area’s schools opened. It is easy to see why many people did not pay attention.

Second, Paula’s nationality was a factor in the limited press coverage he received and the lukewarm fan reaction toward him. Many white writers viewed him as another in a long line of Latino players to wear a Senators uniform. Many black writ­ers were resentful of the fact that a native-born man of color wasn’t the first to play for Washington.

Finally, the fact that Paula wasn’t a top prospect probably played the key role in the lack of attention given his debut. A .290 hitter in the minors, who lacked power and was a mediocre fielder at best, was not going to rivet the attention of even hard-core fans. The overall history of the original Washington Senators was large­ly one of mediocrity. One World Series triumph and three pennants in sixty years are testimony to this fact. The Senators continually displayed substandard per­formances; it is not surprising that their first dip into the interracial pool had similar results. 

DAVID EVANS was born in Washington, DC and attended Senators games at RFK Stadium with his father. He now lives in Charlestown, West Virginia.

In a Europe that seemed far away to most Americans, ominous events were already in the mak­ing. Still a little known soap box agitator, Adolf Hitler was haranguing small gatherings in Germany, draw­ing more flies than people. Inside the dark labyrinths of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was checkmating his hated rival, Leon Trotsky, at every move.

The month in question was hardly the most success­ful in Chicago Cubs annals—that had occurred in August of 1906, when they went 26-3. By contrast, they finished 15-10 in May of ’27, good but hardly earth-shattering. Yet, the latter month was easily the most unusual in the team’s history. It was weird, excit­ing, historic, and at times hilarious. A brief review of the events that transpired will explain why.

On May 1, a crowd of 33,000 squeezed into Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs draw swords with the Pirates. In the seventh inning, Chuck Tolson, a second-string utility man, connected off Ray Kramer for the first pinch-hit grand slam home run in Cub history. Pittsburgh won the game, however, 7-6.

After a rainout the following day, the Cubs took the Reds 4-3 on May 3 and 13-9 the next afternoon. The May 4 contest witnessed an eight-run Cub uprising in the third inning, highlighted by right fielder Earl Webb’s double and three-run homer. Four years later, as a member of the Red Sox, Webb would set the major league record for doubles in one season with 67. There was no game May 5, as the Cubs took a train to New York for a series with the Giants. What was supposed to be a four-game set ended up as two, thanks to rain on May 6 and 9. In between cloud­ bursts, the Cubs beat the Giants, 6-4, after which New York edged Chicago, 5-4, in contests that saw nothing out of the ordinary.

By May 10, Chicago’s North Side heroes were in Philadelphia for another four-game series. The Cubs took the first match, 6-3, on four baggers by Riggs Stephenson, Hack Wilson, and Gabby Hartnett. Hardly intimidated, the Phillies came back to kick the Cubs, 5-2, the next day.

On May 12, a drunken fan was ejected from the staid Baker Bowl bleachers while Phillies catcher Jimmy Wilson was tossed from the game for protesting a close safe call at home plate. The Cubs won, 4-1, but the undaunted Philadelphians bounced back to win by the same score on the 13th.

Saturday, May 14, saw the Cubs in Boston to play the hapless Braves. It would turn out to be a long day, as after 17 innings the score was knotted up at two apiece. Finally, in the top of the 18th, Chicago broke loose for five runs, going on to win,7-2. Cub starter Guy Bush went the distance for a well-earned victory. Charlie Robertson, who five years earlier had pitched a perfect game for the Chicago White Sox, hurled the first 17½ innings for the Braves.

Due to Boston’s Sunday blue laws, no baseball was performed the following day, giving both teams a much needed rest. On Monday, Mother Nature rather than the Boston Brahmins intervened, awarding them another day of recuperation.

But baseball is a game of unbelievable oddities, and never was this more evident than on May 17. This time, the Braves Field fans—such as they were, after a while—sat through 22 innings, only to see their favorites fall, 4-3, when Cub first baseman Charlie Grimm drove home Hack Wilson in the top of the last frame for the eventual winning run. Despite the mod­est score, Chicago had collected 20 hits during the game while Boston amassed 15. Loser Bob Smith, later a Cub, pitched the entire game for Beantown while winner Bob Osborn threw the last 14 for Al Capone’s turf. This was the longest game, inning-wise, in Cub history, yet the clock time was “only” four hours and 13 minutes. Today, many a nine-inning contest will take almost as long. Moreover, it had taken Chicago and Boston a whole 40 innings to play two games. This remains the record for most innings played by the same teams in two successive matches.

After the Boston marathons, the Cubs were on their way to Brooklyn, always an adventure. On May 18, the Cubs took the Dodgers, or Robins as they were then more commonly called, 7-4. This was followed by­ you guessed it—another rainout.

By the time the showers ceased on May 20, the natives of Ebbets Field were restless as they heaved several pop bottles and one whiskey bottle at plate umpire Peter McLaughlin over one of his calls. Ignoring the soda containers, McLaughlin picked up the whiskey bottle but discarded it when he discov­ered that it was empty. In the meantime, the Cubs out­ lasted the Robins, 7-5, despite two home runs by Brooklyn idol/clown Floyd “Babe” Herman, a fun-lov­ing character whose personality was a cross between that of Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean.

On May 21, Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris before a crowd that was so frenzied he was not sure whether he was being welcomed or lynched. Back in Brooklyn the locals had lost the morning game of a doubleheader, 6-4, but held a 6-2 lead over the Cubs in game two as the top of the ninth began. It looked as if the Dodgers would at last salvage a game.

Darkness was already encroaching the ballpark as bleacherites poured onto the field, angry at plate ump Frank Wilson for not calling the game. But Wilson ignored them, ordering that the contest be continued. Batting for catcher Mike Gonzales, Cub flychaser Cliff Heathcote led off with a walk off Dodger starter Bill Doak. Floyd Scott then pinch hit for third baseman Clyde Beck, beating out an infield hit. Up came the third consecutive Chicago pinch-hitter, Chuck Tolson, in place of pitcher Sheriff Blake. Tolson doubled down the right-field line, and Heathcote and Scott crossed the plate to make it 6-4.

At that point, Dodger manager Wilbert Robinson yanked Doak and replaced him with Rube Ehrhardt. With Woody English pinch-running for pinch-hitter Tolson, Earl “Sparky” Adams grounded to Robin third baseman Johnny Butler for the first out. Then Jimmy Cooney singled and Earl Webb walked, filling the bases for the most dreaded man in the Cub lineup, Hack Wilson. Normally a slow runner, Wilson this time legged out a bases-clearing triple to give his teammates a 7-6 lead.

When Riggs Stephenson walked, Jumbo Elliott replaced the befuddled Ehrhardt on the mound. Proving no more effective than his predecessor, Elliott walked Charlie Grimm to fill the bags once more. Gabby Hartnett then batted for previous pinch-hitter Heathcote, running out an infield single as Wilson scored for an 8-6 margin. Floyd Scott, making his sec­ond pinch appearance of the inning, sent the ball bouncing into the left-field stands for a ground-rule double. Stephenson and Grimm were allowed to score, but Hartnett was held at third as the Bruins expanded their lead to 10-6.

Jumbo Elliott was then sent to the dugout as Guy Cantrell came in to pitch. Howie Freigau, the fifth and final Cub pinch-hitter of the inning, drew a walk to fill the bases again. This led to Cantrell’s immediate replacement by Norman Plitt, the fifth Brooklyn pitcher of this dream that had become a nightmare. Plitt promptly gave Sparky Adams a base on balls, forcing Hartnett home to put the Cubs further ahead, 11-6. Mercifully, Jimmy Cooney hit into a double play to end the carnage. In collecting four pinch hits and two pinch walks in the same inning, the Cubs had set a unique record that stands to this day.

Pitching in relief, Charlie Root put down the humil­iated Robins in order, turning defeat into victory for Sheriff Blake. In time-honored Flatbush tradition, Dodger coach Otto Miller led an angry mob of fans after umpire Wilson. The police, however, escorted him to safety.

Having made bums out of the Dodgers in four straight, the Cubs met their match in Cincinnati when the Reds clipped them, 8-4, during a one-day stand on May 22. The following afternoon was an off day as the Cubs headed back to Chicago for a two-game set with the defending world champion Cardinals.

But on the 24th, the Cubs sat through their sixth rainout of the month (whether or not this is a record is for a more ambitious researcher than the pres­ent one to determine), necessitating a twin bill the following day. Former Cub Grover Alexander bested his ex-teammates, 8-5, in the opener, but Chicago came back to take the nightcap, 8-4. In game one, Earl Webb hit an inside-the-park home run—getting rare since the advent of the lively ball seven years earlier­—in a losing cause.

The Reds were in town on May 26 as the Cubs won their easiest game of the month. Buoyed by a six-run fifth, they coasted to an 11-2 laugher. The next day, they again beat Cincinnati, but this time, it took them 11 innings to do it. 

Charlie Root, who had gone the distance only 24 hours before, came on in relief to get his second victo­ry in as many days. To make it even more satisfying, Root drove in Gabby Hartnett with the winning run in a 3-2 thriller. For Charlie, it was his ninth career win over the Reds against only one loss. However, the Reds got even the following day with an 8-0 shellacking.

The morning game of the Memorial Day double­header at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field began in auspi­ciously enough. In the bottom of the fourth, the Pirates had Lloyd Waner on second base and Clyde Barnhart on first as Lloyd’s brother Paul came to bat. At shortstop for the Cubs was Jimmy Cooney.

Sunday, May 29, saw the Pirates sail into Lake Michigan to clip the Cubs, 8-5, for their 11th consecu­tive victory despite Hack Wilson’s eighth home run of the season. As soon as the game was completed, both teams packed their bags to travel to the Steel City for the remainder of the series. The reason for this was that Pennsylvania, like Massachusetts, still banned Sunday baseball at that time.

The morning game of the Memorial Day double­ header at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field began inauspi­ciously enough. In the bottom of the fourth, the Pirates had Lloyd Waner on second base and Clyde Barnhart on first as Lloyd’s brother Paul came to bat. At shortstop for the Cubs was Jimmy Cooney.

With the hit-and-run on, Cooney snagged the elder Waner’s line drive, stepped on second to double Lloyd, then tagged Barnhart coming down the line for an unassisted triple play. It was all over in seconds. The Cubs went on to win the game, 7-6, in 10 innings, snapping the Bucs’ winning streak. Not disheartened, the Pirates won the afternoon contest, 6-5, also in 10.

Cooney had become one of only ten players in his­tory (including those since) to pull off an unas­sisted triple killing. To make the story even more unbelievable, Johnny Neun of the Tigers did it against the Indians the very next day.

After that, the feat was not duplicated until July 20, 1968, when the Senators’  Ron Hansen scalped three Indians again. Cooney’s remained the last in the National League until Mickey Morandini of the Phillies tripled up the Pirates on September 20, 1992. For a touch of irony, Cooney while a member of the Cardinals in 1925 had been one of the victims of an unassisted triple play himself when Pittsburgh’s Glenn Wright had turned the trick.

As for the Cubs on May 31, they fell to Pittsburgh again, 10-9, blowing leads of 4-0, 6-1, 7-5, and 9-6. The month had ended in embarrassment.

Just eight days after his history making feat, Jimmy Cooney was traded to the Phillies for pitcher Hal Carlson. The Cubs had 20-year-old Woody English waiting in the wings for the shortstop job, so the 33-year-old Cooney was an unneeded commodity. Thanks largely to a 12-game winning streak in June, the Cubs soared into first place, a position they held as late as September 1. Unfortunately, a 12-18 log during the final month dropped them to fourth place as the Pirates copped the flag. So, who says the “September swoon” started in 1969? It was already a long-stand­ing Cub tradition.

A SABR member since 1971, ART AHRENS has co-authored five books on Cubs history with fellow SABR member Eddie Gold, and has written many articles on baseball history.

Television was still in its infancy at that time. There were not many channels or programs to choose from. One of the weekly shows aired on the ABC network was a prime time half-hour game show, The Name’s The Same. A celebrity panel tried to guess the identities of guest contestants who had the same name as famous people, famous places, or famous objects. Each pan­elist could ask up to ten yes or no questions of the guests. All panelists who could not identify the guest had to pay him or her twenty-five dollars.

Each week, the show featured a celebrity guest in a segment called, ”I’d Like to Be.” If that celebrity guest could be anyone else other than himself, that name was revealed to the audience and the panel would try to guess that name. The celebrity guest would donate their winnings to their favorite charity.

The panel consisted of Meredeth Willson, an author, conductor, and composer of The Music Man. Joan Alexander was a radio and television actress. Carl Reiner was a comedian on the popular television program Show of Shows. The host and moderator was Robert Q. Lewis. I was invited to appear on this pro­gram as a contestant because I had what was then a famous name, Tommy Manville.

The famous bearer of this name was a multi-mil­lionaire playboy who was heir to the Johns Manville asbestos fortune. He was married thirteen times to eleven women. He described himself as “a retired business man.” After one of his frequent divorces, he was quoted as saying, “she cried and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.” Although we shared the same name, we were not related.

My dad drove my mom, my older brother Bill, and myself to New York City. We had never been there, nor had I ever been that far from home. I was going to appear on a national television program and meet some famous people. It would prove to be a very spe­cial evening for a young baseball fan.

When we arrived at the television studio, my dad and brother were seated in the audience. My mom was seated backstage with me. All of the contestants with famous names were introduced to each other except for the celebrity guest, who had not yet arrived. I met Dorothy Lamour, A.(rlene) Stork, and Henry Clay. The show was about to begin, and we were asked to be as quiet as possible. This was live television and a monitor was placed in front of us to view the show.

Dorothy Lamour, a New York City housewife, was the first contestant. While she was being questioned by the panel, a young man arrived backstage and was seated next to my mom. He looked familiar to me. I really could not concentrate on him because I was thinking that soon I would be seen by millions of view­ers. After a series of questions by Carl Reiner and Joan Alexander, Dorothy Lamour’s name was correctly guessed by Meredith Willson.

The next contestant was a 15-year-old high school student from Brigatine, New Jersey, A. Stork. After determining that her namesake delivered something, the panelist asked her if it involved a mailbox, a coal chute, or something with a ladder, a long hose, and painted red. Meredith Willson asked, “Does it haul away garbage?” Joan Alexander finally guessed the name of A. Stork. Now it was time for the celebrity guest to appear in the ”I’d Like to Be” seg­ment.

The young man next to my mom rose from his chair and walked toward the stage. Robert Q. Lewis introduced him with these words: “Here is one of the greatest young guys in organized baseball that I ever had the pleasure of meeting, Mr. Mickey Mantle.” To say that I was surprised would be an understatement. This was not someone with the same name as Mickey Mantle. This was the real Mickey Mantle–the Mick. The tele­vision monitor now had my complete undivided atten­tion.

Evidently, the Yankees had played an extra-inning game the previous night. Mr. Lewis remarked to Mickey, “I had a very pleasant twelve hours watching you play last night. Do you guys get paid for a double­ header?” Mickey replied, “No, but next year they are going to sign us by the hour.” Now it was time to reveal, to the audience, the name of the person that Mickey Mantle would want to be. It was Prince Philip of England. (I had hoped that Mickey, now in his third year as a Yankee, would want to be my hero, Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox.) Mr. Lewis reminded everyone that all of Mickey’s winnings would be donated to his favorite charity. Joan Alexander evoked some laughter when she said that Mickey’s favorite charity was the Dodgers, no doubt.

The questioning began with Meredith Willson, who wanted to know the distance of the long home run that Mickey had recently hit. That home run is gener­ally regarded as the longest ever hit in the major leagues. He hit it off the Washington Senators’ Chuck Stobbs, on April 17, 1953, at Griffith Stadium. Mr. Willson wanted to know if it was 562 or 563 feet. Mickey modestly replied, “562 feet, I think.” Through a series of questions by Mr. Willson, the panel learned that the per­son Mickey would want to be was a living man and not an American.

It was now Carl Reiner’s turn to ask questions. Mr. Reiner immediately commented, “Most people want to be Mickey Mantle. Why you want to be anyone else, I don’t know.” Mickey’s answers to Mr. Reiner’s questions determined that the person was a European who spoke English and not a sports figure.

An amusing verbal exchange was started by Joan Alexander. She asked if the person was from England or in England now. Mickey answered yes. She then asked if he is a young and handsome man. Mr. Lewis asked her to clarify what she considered “young.” Her reply was, “Oh, about Meredith’s age.” This response prompted Meredith Willson to kiss Joan Alexander on the cheek. Mr. Lewis then looked at his fingernails, brushed his hair, smiled, and asked, “What do you mean by … handsome?” Miss Alexander imme­diately replied, “Someone who looks like Mickey Mantle.”

With a few more questions it was established that the person was indirectly involved in politics, connect­ed with royalty, and originally from Greece. Referring to Princess Elizabeth, Miss Alexander asked Mickey, “Is he married to a very beautiful lady who will be a star in a ceremony very soon?” Mickey said, “Yes.” Her final question was, “Would you like to be Prince Philip?” Again, Mickey replied, “Yes.” Mr. Lewis thanked Mickey for being a contestant, and in parting, commented, “Mickey, you don’t have to be anybody in the whole world except one of the best Yankees there has ever been.” Mickey walked over to the panelists, said good night, and collected his winnings to give to his favorite charity.

Presumably, the Brooklyn Dodgers were fifty dollars richer.

It was now my turn to be a contestant. I was led to one end of the stage while Mickey exited at the other end. I did not want to appear nervous, and was hoping to get through this as quickly as possible. I wanted to return backstage and talk to Mickey about baseball. I walked onto the stage, and Mr. Lewis placed a Manhattan ­telephone directory on my chair so that I could see over the desk. It was a thrill to be on this television stage with these famous people. I was asked a series of questions by the panel in an attempt to determine the occupation of my namesake, Tommy Manville. He really did not have an occupation. After the panel discovered he was wealthy, and had inherited his fortune, Joan Alexander asked me if he had been married many times. I answered, “Yes.” Her final question to me was, ”Are you Tommy Manville?” Again, I replied, “Yes.” The audience applauded and Mr. Lewis thanked me for being a contestant. I walked over to the panel, shook hands, and collected two twenty-five dollar checks. I returned backstage, sat down, and looked around for Mickey Mantle.

The final contestant was Henry Clay, a service tech­nician from Long Island, New York. Upon questioning Mr. Clay, the panel learned that his namesake was not living and was involved in politics. Joan Alexander was trying to pinpoint the time frame that the person was in politics. Mr. Lewis had to stop the questioning at that point because time was running out for the show. Mr. Clay collected his winnings, and the host and panelists said good night to the audience.

Henry Clay rejoined his fellow contestants backstage and we were invited to return to the stage to have our photographs taken with Robert Q. Lewis. I had to stand on a chair for my photo because Mr. Lewis was tall and I was not. After the photo, I asked one of the stage personnel if Mickey Mantle was still in the theater, and he said Mickey had to leave because of another engagement. I was a little disappointed that I did not get to talk to Mickey about baseball.

On the very bright side, I did get to go to New York City. I did appear on a national television show and meet some famous people. As a contestant, I was in the same  lineup as Mickey Mantle. I now have a video of that program and I am able to relive my wonderful experience. For a nine­ year-old baseball fan, it was, indeed, a very special evening.

TOMMY MANVILLE lives in Tiverton, Rhode Island, and is a life­long Boston Red Sox fan.

When I looked inside the large, heavy cardboard suitcase from the 1930s and saw that it was crammed with undated newspaper clippings, my old man’s wis­dom slammed home like a fastball in the ribs.

In 1994, I was asked to write an article about the Lane Field Padres for The Journal of San Diego History to complement the Pacific Coast League exhi­bition, “Runs, Hits, and an Era” that would open at the San Diego Historical Society Museum in April 1995. Along with fellow SABR member James D. Smith III, we resolved to search and interview original Padres for our journal article.

Jack Graham was on a pace to hit 80 home runs for the Padres in 1948. By July 25th, he had already launched 46 roundtrippers. But Jack was beaned that day when he lost sight of a pitch thrown by Angels hurler Red Adams in the late afternoon shadows of Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. Graham returned from the head injury late in the season, added two more homers to his total, and was selected as the Most Valuable Player of the Pacific Coast League.

When I interviewed Jack in January 1995, he gave me a battered box from his garage that contained a stack of yellowed newspapers. He said, “You can have these. This stuff should help with your project.” Although Graham was a famous minor league slugger, he didn’t have a scrapbook. His filing system was sim­ple. Toss everything in a box.

I made copy negatives from photographs that he had nonchalantly piled in another neglected box. I cut out the newspaper articles and glued them into a scrap­ book. After making copies for my records, I gave the new scrapbook to Jack. He loved it. Henceforth, when people would ask about his baseball career, it was much easier for him to show them the scrapbook. Jack would just laugh because, admittedly, he was starting to forget some of the details of his storied past.

Pete Coscarart learned about Jack’s scrapbook and asked if I would be willing to make a scrapbook for him. “Of course” was the answer of the fool who is still haunted by the sight of Pete’s large cardboard suitcase from the 1930s. It took exactly one second to realize that I had made a huge mistake by volunteering to tackle this project.

Coscarart’s professional career started in 1934 with the PCL Portland Beavers and St. Joseph (Missouri) Saints of the Western League. His nine years in the big leagues began with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938. By this time he was married. His wife, June, was too busy caring for her young family to work on a scrapbook. Besides, Pete just wasn’t the kind of guy to gather sto­ries about himself. That the cardboard luggage and clippings survived after all these years is a miracle.

My Big Apple buddies, Bronx native Bob Dreher and Brooklyn-born Bill Dunne, offered to help “date” the clippings. Armed with copies of the Baseball Encyclopedia,it took us three full days just to separate them by year. We soon realized that if Zeke Bonura appeared in a New York Giants box score, the year was 1939. Vito Tamulis, Johnny Hudson, and Van Lingle Mungo soon became key indicators for dating the numerous Dodger articles. (One of our favorites had nothing to do with Pete. It was titled “The Ballplayer and the Ladies” and dealt with Van Lingle Mungo’s escapades during the Dodgers spring training trip to Havana in 1941. I would love to make his scrapbooks.) Eventually the piles of clippings were fine-tuned and placed in chronological order.

In the end, it took four months of cut and paste to complete the 277 double­-sided pages that became the Coscarart scrapbook. Among the highlights of Pete’s career was Johnny Vander Meer’s second consecutive no-hit game pitched on June 15, 1938. Early in the game, Coscarart almost spoiled the historic perfecta when he pressed Reds outfielder Wally Berger against the wall to catch a ball that seemed headed for the seats. The suitcase produced a ticket stub from that game, which also happened to be the first major-league night game at Ebbets Field.

An article by Tommy Holmes stated, “Coscarart, incidentally, is winning recognition as the outstanding second baseman in the league. Bill Terry called him that after his great all-around performance at the Polo Grounds last Sunday. In Cincinnati, Bill McKechnie seconded the motion.”

Pete’s three-run home run was all the offense Tex Carleton needed on April 30, 1940 to no-hit the National League champion Cincinnati Reds, 3-0. Later that summer, the “Bounding Basque” was named to the National League All-Star team. How many ballplayers can say they were struck out by Bob Feller in an All-Star game?

A picture of Pete sleeping in his bed, mouth agape (snoring, too?), was used in an advertisement head­ lined, “Early to Bed, Early to Rise and He Eats Wheaties … Pete Coscarart is Wise!” Other pictures in the ad show wife June selecting a box of Wheaties off the grocery shelf and Pete eating a spoonful of “the Breakfast of Champions” with baby daughter Carol at the family table in Flatbush.

Nineteen double-sided pages of the scrapbooks are devoted to articles from nine New York dailies about the 1941 Dodgers cinching their first pennant in 21 years. The jubilant Brooklyn celebration was front-page headlines for eight of the city’s major newspa­pers, but the staid New York Times carried only a brief story sans photos about “Gaffers and Urchins Set Up Din” in “Pennant Victory Paean.” (Now, how many feckless Dodgertown gaffers and urchins would know the difference between a paean and a paean?) ” … men and women stared vacantly at each other in sheer hap­piness. They walked into traffic stanchions and head­ on at trolley cars (as opposed to dodging them). Urchins raced in roadways, screeching the victory cry, and oldsters hoarsely echoed it…. Brooklyn, in short, went nuts.”

Game Four of the ’41 World Series would provide one of baseball’s indelible memories. Brooklyn took a 4-3 lead into the ninth inning and, with two outs, Hugh Casey slipped strike three past Tommy Henrich. The plate umpire raised his right arm and the Bums had seemingly tied the series. But the ball bounced off dependable Mickey Owen’s catcher’s mitt and started to roll. Coscarart went to back up Dolph Camilli at first base as Henrich raced down the line. The ball rolled…and rolled…and rolled. Henrich was safe at first. The Yankees rallied to win, 7-4. They claimed the next two games to capture an anticlimatic world championship from the shell-shocked Dodgers.

According to Pete and June, nothing was compara­ble to being part of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Not withstanding, Coscarart was traded during that off-season to Pittsburgh where he played until 1946. Following an abortive attempt by labor lawyer Bob Murphy to unionize the Pirates, Coscarart, an outspo­ken Baseball Guild supporter, was sold to the PCL Padres. He contemplated jumping to the Mexican League, but decided to report to San Diego, which is near his hometown of Escondido. Three years later, Coscarart was traded to Sacramento. He hung up his glove for the last time following the 1950 season with Yakima of the Western International League.

After reading his completed scrapbooks, in typical Coscarart understatement, Pete said, “I guess I was a pretty good player.” We joked about the day he first showed me his suitcase. At last count, I think I have made over twenty Xerox copies of the scrapbooks for his friends and family members.

Dolores Glynn made scrapbooks for her husband, Cleveland first baseman Bill Glynn, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. With the passage of time, the books began to fall apart. Dolores wanted to rework the contents into a larger, modern scrapbook. This didn’t seem like a big job (always a stupid assessment).

As luck would have it, I found an Indians fan at a local commercial lamination plant who agreed to seal the oversized pages for a very reasonable fee.

The transfer and lamination of the 14″x 17″ pages proceeded with relative ease, but the difficulty was punching 34 uniform holes for proper alignment with the fancy 34 spine clamps. To make matters worse, not all of the clamps shut properly. My friend Rich Nelson spent several evenings forcing surgical “IV” tubing over each clamp so the pages would turn smoothly.

Glynn came up through the Philadelphia Phillies farm system that produced the 1950 “Whiz Kids.” In 1946, his first year in organized baseball, Bill hit .328 to lead Americus to a Georgia-Florida League pen­nant. This headline from an early clipping was a con­fidence boost, “Rookie is Compared to Gehrig in His Early Days.” There was a story of young Glynn sitting on first base eating his sandwich and drinking milk during lunch because he did not want to relinquish the sack to any challengers.

Moving up to the Class A Eastern League with Utica in 1947, Billy Glynn joined Richie Ashburn, Granny Hamner, and Stan Lopata as the Blue Sox claimed the league championship. Glynn continued to develop as a power hitter and advanced to the International League with Toronto and Baltimore.

In 1952, he was traded to the Sacramento Salons in the Pacific Coast League. Manager Joe Gordon insist­ed on two changes for his young slugger: “He was working out for two or three hours and then stopping off at a corner drive-in and drinking not only one milkshake but two.” Gordon also taught Glynn to hit through the pitcher’s mound and run like hell, “Anyone with Bill’s speed and his natural ability to bunt and drag the ball should never settle for a batting average under .290.”

Glynn was soon leading the PCL in hitting, and the Cleveland Indians purchased him to back up Luke Easter at first base. They liked his defense and speed. He stuck with the Tribe and was featured in their 1953 Home Schedule sliding past a diving Yogi Berra.

Lou “The Clocker ” Miller was one of the pioneers in the use of a stopwatch to time runners out of the bat­ters box to first base. In his February 4, 1953, Sporting News article, Mickey Mantle was proclaimed the fastest man in baseball. He covered the distance in 3.1 seconds. Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants led the National League at 3.3 seconds. Washington Senators outfielders Gil Coan and Jim Busby were tied for second in the AL at 3.4 seconds. In a seven-way tie for fourth at 3.6 seconds were Mantle’s New York teammates Phil Rizzuto, Gil McDougal, Irv Noren and Gene Woodling along with Philadelphia’s Dave Philley and Cleveland’s Larry Doby and Bill Glynn.

Bill mistakenly confided to a Cleveland sportswriter that he wished he was as good as Philadelphia Athletics first baseman Ferris Fain. The story came out as, “I’m another Ferris Fain, don’t you think?” A fan wrote Glynn a letter: “Ferris Fain, my ass! You couldn’t hit an elephant in the ass with an oar paddle!” Injured by the misunderstanding, Bill turned to Bob Feller. The future Hall of Famer, who was nearing the end of his career, shared one of his letters: ‘Tm a mechanic and if I fixed cars like you pitched, I’d be out of business.”

One of Bill’s favorite articles is from the August 30, 1986, Toronto Star: “(Joe) Carter, who also singled twice, drove in four runs. He became the first Cleveland player to hit three home runs in a game since George Hendrick on June 19, 1973 and first to accomplish the feat on the road since Bill Glynn on July 5, 1954.” He remembers his teammates greeted him after his first two home runs, but they acted like nothing had happened after the third. “Then, about 30 seconds later, they all jumped up and cheered. They we’re all in on it and, you know, ballplayers have a sense of humor.”

One favorite page in the Glynn scrapbook is a bright yellow flyer announcing the grand opening of a Cleveland Gulf Service station on May 22nd and 23rd, 1953. To entice customers, the station was offering premiums with the purchase of seven gallons of gaso­line, “Your choice of 6 glasses or a whisk broom autographed by Bill Glynn.” Bill can’t remember if the motorists preferred the personalized whisk broom to a set of glasses.

In 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, Johnny Ritchey became the first African-American player in the Pacific Coast League. While Robinson was making history in Brooklyn, John Ritchey was leading the Negro American League with a .381 average for the Chicago American Giants in 1947. His reward was a contract with the San Diego Padres, where he was already a high school, American Legion, and college baseball legend.

When San Diego Post 6 won the American Legion Junior World Series in 1938, Johnny Ritchey was a 15-year-old substitute.Two years later, he was the star of the team that again made the finals from a field of over 1,300 teams. However, Post 6 would be facing an all­ white team from Albemarle, North Carolina—in Albemarle. John and Nelson Manuel were not allowed to participate in the games, and San Diego lost the series.

The team returned to a heroes welcome and this excerpt from Tom Akers’ column: “Let us honor John Ritchey and Nelson Manuel for the manly grit they have shown and help them, if we can, to forget their degradation, their humiliation and suffering. At least we can do that much toward these two members of a race which has been downtrodden, abused and dis­criminated against down through the years since a presidential proclamation freed them from bondage and declared them ‘free and equal’ of all men.”

Johnny’s scrapbook was a classic woodshop project with a folding plywood cover and leather thong hold­ing the pages inside. Like many old scrapbooks, the pages were breaking up and falling out. Fixing the pages required a double backing for the left edge and new holes. New hinges were added and the leather was replaced with album screws. This was the easiest of all the scrapbooks that I repaired. It was also one of the most historically significant.

Clippings about the Negro Leagues are few. John was busy playing baseball and not collecting articles. It is puzzling to see all the various averages posted in different newspapers after Ritchey won the batting crown. The range is .369 to ”better than .400.” Best known of the black sportswriters was Wendell Smith, sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, who credited Johnny with a .386 average. Nat Low, a surprisingly well-informed sportswriter for the American Communist Party’s Daily Worker, wrote glowingly of Ritchey’s .378 batting average. The Chicago papers listed his league best as .369 and .382. San Diego papers also used the .369 figure and Law’s .378. Interestingly, it appears .381 was the most likely bat­ ting average that Johnny achieved in 1947.

As an aside, Smith reported that after winning the batting title, Ritchey “worked out at Wrigley Field today before a group of Cub officials and scouts.” A rumor that the White Sox were interested in the young catcher prompted the Padres to quickly sign him to a contract. J. B. Martin, owner of the American Giants, immediately sent a protest to baseball commissioner A.B. “Happy” Chandler. Wendell Smith described Negro baseball business operations as “slip-shod.” “When Brooklyn signed Jackie Robinson and sent him to Montreal, J. L. Wilkinson of the Kansas City Monarchs hollered ‘robber; too. But like Martin, he was unable to produce a bonafide contract with Robinson’s name on it. That, too, we’ ll call a slight oversight. In fact, that’s all you can call it. But in each instance that ‘slight oversight’ cost there respective own­ers many a good dollar.”

Bucky Walter of the San Francisco Examiner wrote, “It doesn’t take many minutes to capsule Ritchey. He’s a shy, gentlemanly and intelligent youngster who only asks to be considered as ‘another ball player.” ‘That’s impossible right now, I realize; he rationalizes. I’m unique and for that reason, it’s only natural you fellows want to interview me. But the newness should wear off in time. I’ll be grateful for that, because honestly, I don’t want any publicity except that I’m able to earn on the ballfield.”

At the end of the ’48 season, Herman Hill was com­plementary, “Ritchey is the first athlete of his race to play in the Coast League. He has proven himself to be a brilliant prospect, a gentleman both on and off the field, popular with his teammates and a great com­petitor. He batted .323 in his first year in organized baseball and drove in a flock of runs. John was espe­cially formidable at the plate with men on base.”

It was always Johnny’s dream to make the big leagues, but that was not to be. In addition to San Diego, he played with Coast League teams in Sacramento, Portland, and San Francisco, where he finished his career in 1955.

Rudy Regalado asked if I could get his scrapbooks laminated. His mother and wife had done a fine job filling several scrapbooks with baseball and basketball articles going back to his days as a high school star in Glendale, California. As a youth, Regalado narrowly missed being selected as the first team All-California Interscholastic Federation shortstop for three consec­utive years from 1945 through 1947.

Rudy’s wife, Marilyn, employed a favorite scrapbook technique perfected by my mother. If there is a blank space on a page, glue a contemporary item alongside the old articles. For example, on the same page with a clipping from the late 1940s about the All-CIF team beating the Los Angeles All-City team, 2 -1, the results of a recent Saint Patrick’s Day Twilight golf tourna­ment, won by Rudy and Marilyn Regalado, was glued into place.

He played in a schoolboy series at the Polo Grounds billed as the U.S. Stars vs. N.Y. Stars. One of his U.S. teammates was a kid from Chicago named Bill Skowron. Rudy was a freshman when his USC team won the NCAA baseball championship in 1948. A teammate was Bill Sharman, who was also a pretty fair basketball player and coach. Regalado would go on to lead the Trojans in batting and sign with the Cleveland Indians in 1953.

Although unlisted on the Indians 1954 spring train­ing roster, he was an instant success. “Regalado, an infielder who was with Reading in the Eastern League and Indianapolis in the American Association last season, has smashed nine home runs in Cleveland’s 17 exhibition games to steal the thunder from such estab­lished home-hitters as Ed Matthews, Duke Snider, Al Rosen and Ted Kluszewski. In addition to his nine home runs, Regalado has hit three triples and ranks behind (Don) Lenhardt and (Jim) Findley with a .481 Grapefruit League batting average.”

L.A. sportswriter Braven Dyer opined, “If Cleveland doesn’t open the season with their rookie slugging sensation, ex-Trojan Rudy Regalado, in the lineup, it’ll prove what a lot of die-hard Indians fans have long suspected — that the club is run by numbskulls.”

When Rudy got his chance, it set off a bizarre chain of events. On April 24, 1954, Cleveland first baseman Bill Glynn was second among American League hit­ters with a .419 average. Despite this, manager Al Lopez benched Glynn, switched 1953 AL Most Valuable Player Al Rosen from third to first and had Regalado assume the hot corner. “Lopez said he was making the switch in an effort to shake the Indians from the doldrums. The Tribe is in last place.”

Although the experiment proved temporary, Cleveland emerged from the doldrums to register a record 111 victories to pry the pennant from the five­-time consecutive world champion New York Yankees. Regalado was percolating at .321 in June, but slumped to finish his rookie season with a .250 batting average.

Like his good friend Bill Glynn, Rudy’s scrapbook memories of the 1954 World Series are bittersweet. The Indians and New York Giants knew each other well. Both teams scrimmaged in Arizona and did, in effect, conclude their spring training brainstorming by rail as they zigzagged back into the Midwest. Willie Mays, Dusty Rhodes, and the Giants would stun Cleveland with a four-game sweep.

Whereas the unknown Regalado had been a sur­prise slugger in March, an unheralded Dusty Rhodes would become one of October’s most unlikely heroes. And 1954, of course, is remembered for Willie Mays’s signature catch of Vic Wertz’s drive into the depths of the Polo Grounds.

Rudy would primarily spend the next two years on the Cleveland bench. In 1957, he was farmed out to the Padres. He responded with a fine season that earned him an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show as the Outstanding Third Baseman in the minor leagues. Regalado longed to return to the majors, but it did not happen. He was outstanding for San Diego, but there are only two Padre articles in his scrapbook. The final pages are devoted to reunions, golf, and old friends.

Cedric Durst called himself “Babe Ruth’s caddy.” An original Lane Field Padre and later the most success­ful manager in Padre history, Durst’s major league career was spent in the shadow of two Hall of Famers, George Sisler in St. Louis and Babe Ruth in New York. Babe was known to imbibe and would sometimes “take ill.” At such time Durst would fill in. What are you suppose to do when subbing for the Sultan of Swat? On June 2, 1929, Durst hit a home run.

In the fourth and final game of the Yankees’ sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1928 World Series, Babe Ruth hit three home runs while Lou Gehrig and Cedric Durst each added one for a single-game team record five home runs. This records stands today.

Ced Durst was born in Austin, Texas, on August 23, 1896. Around that time his family started a scrapbook by pasting news articles over handwritten entries in an ancient business ledger. By the 1910s, most of the clippings were about young Cedric’s prowess on the baseball diamond. When Durst died in 1971, the book was full and falling apart. By the 1990s, his daughter, Autumn Keltner, was keeping it in a plastic bag. Whenever the book was removed for the grandkids to view, tiny bits of paper covered the kitchen table and floor like snowflakes. Autumn was concerned that the old scrapbook was beyond repair.

My first step was to remove all of the pages and rein­force the left edges with carefully measured strips made from blank ledger pages. The lamination company was understandably reluctant to accept the job and required a statement that they would not be held liable for any resulting damage from handling the brittle pages. They did a beautiful job of sealing all the old memories for posterity.

There are Christmas cards from Ruth and Gehrig. A cover from the 1927 World Series program featuring oval portraits of rival managers Miller Huggins and Owen J. Bush was pasted onto one page. “When my mother was putting these items in the scrapbook, there was no thought given to their value. She was just chronicling Dad’s baseball career,” says Autumn, who is grateful the scrapbook had been saved.

The Durst scrapbook covers San Diego baseball in depth from 1936 through 1943 and include clippings from 1933-35 when the Hollywood Stars were struggling to cover rent at Wrigley Field. The following year, an exasperated Bill “Hardrock” Lane pulled up stakes and moved his beleaguered franchise to San Diego. Many predicted he would go broke in this sleepy border town. The doubters were wrong. The Padres were a solid hit, and Durst would play a promi­nent role during the team’s formative years. Although he turned 40 during the first year in San Diego, Ced Durst would play and later manage for six seasons with the Padres and accumulate a .297 composite bat­ting average.

An article from the Los Angeles Examiner is highly complementary of the former Hollywood MVP. “It’s a pity that every baseball fan in San Diego doesn’t know Cedric Durst, Padre center fielder, personally. One thing which specially recommends Durst to me is his attitude toward the youngsters, the ‘rookies.’ He does everything he can to help them, to show them their faults and how to remedy them. I honestly believe that he would help a young player better his game even if he knew the kid was in line for his job. A great guy.”

The Padres won the league playoff championship in 1937. Ted Williams batted .291 and hit 23 home runs. Four San Diego pitchers (Manuel Salvo, Wally Hebert, Dick Ward, and Tiny Chaplin) each hurled a pair of complete games as the Padres swept Sacramento and Portland in the Shaughnessey playoffs.

Venerable Bay Area sportswriter Jack McDonald writing in the San Francisco News Call Bulletin on March 4, 1965, about Giants pitching coach and orig­inal San Diego Padres skipper Frank Shellenback stat­ed, ”As manager of the Padres, he started Ted Williams on his career. ‘Ted came to us out of a San Diego high school as a pitcher,” he was saying. “His arm wasn’t strong, but he looked like a natural hitter to me, if a pitcher can judge such things. I turned him over to Cedric Durst, to convert Ted into an outfielder.”

After San Diego failed to qualify for the playoffs in 1938, Durst replaced Shellenback as manager of the Padres. During his 4½ year tenure, San Diego would record a .506 winning percentage. Alex Shults, writing for the Seattle Times in 1942, noted, “Durst has had amazing success with recent Padre teams, battling for the lead with aggregations the experts tabbed for the cellar.” After Durst was forced to resign in 1943, respected PCL scribe Morton Moss wrote, “The fact is that Durst, who by some strange magical miracle landed out of the first division once during his tenure, ranked in many minds as the most able skipper in the Coast League. Time after time, he refuted the axiom which asserts that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Cedric did it with the Padres. He was a magician.”

Nobody wore the Padre flannels longer than Al Olsen, a San Diego native who in 1939 joined the Padres upon graduation from San Diego High School and was immediately hailed as “another Freddie Hutchinson.”

Although Olsen did not make it to the majors, his uniform did. For years the Baseball Encyclopedia credited him with a walk and stolen base for the Boston Red Sox during the 1943 season. Subsequent research revealed that an unknown base thief was wearing the same uniform assigned to Olsen during spring training that year.

In his Nevada State Journal column, “Inside Stuff,” Ty Cobb wrote, “Al ‘Lefty’ Olsen, who used to pitch for Smith Valley in the Sierra Nevada League, thence to San Diego Padres and Boston Red Sox, is still mowing them down. He’s on the mound staff of Red Ruffing’s Sixth Ferrying Group and Friday stuck out 12 U.S.C. batters … ” This was during World War II, when Airman Olsen pitched his Army Air Forces team to the Far West Championship. His teammates included Nanny Fernandez, Max West, Harry Danning, and Chuck Stevens.

On June 15, 1946, in response to “irate subscriber” requests for appreciation of out-of-town players, San Francisco Examiner sportswriter Will Connolly wrote, ” … they waited a decent interval of two or three days after Al Olsen, San Diego pitcher, lost a 16-inning heartbreaker to the Seals last Friday night and still nothing in the paper about Hero Olsen.” Connolly penned a tongue-in-cheek biography that included Al’s favorite movie stars from a team questionnaire and described the lanky six foot one, 175-pound south­paw as “slatty.” He concluded his masterpiece with, “He is a competent, consistent and conscientious workman, as scions of Scandinavian blood almost invari­ably are.”

Following baseball, Olsen went into coaching and eventually became athletic director at San Diego State College. He is remembered for hiring an unknown football coach named Don Coryell who led the Aztecs to national gridiron prominence. Al died in 1994. His wife and high school sweetheart, Mary, asked me to fix and laminate their scrapbooks. One of the best was made by 11-year-old Al Olsen Jr., while his father was wrapping up his pitching career for Oklahoma City in 1953 after eleven seasons with the Padres.

My last baseball project involved the repair, update, and lamination of scrapbooks for the family of Wally “Preacher” Hebert, who died in December 1999 at age 92. As one might expect from a collection which starts during the 1920s, many of these books were falling apart. The earliest scrapbooks were made by Bobbie Hebert, Preacher’s wife of 67 years, who as a young teenager began pasting clippings about her beau over her schoolwork in sturdy composition folders.

It was important to the family that the originals be laminated, but I had lost my source for doing large page lamination. I suggested completely redoing the scrapbooks by removing the old articles and gluing them onto 8 x 11 pages. I had to steam several articles glued on back pages to preserve them. My friend Chris Schuehle lended his lamination machine to seal 127 double-sided pages. This project took over two months to complete.

In 1932, the “19-year-old southpaw rookie from Lake Charles, La.” made his first major league start against the powerful Philadelphia Athletics. The reigning American League champs “got near worst beating at the hands of ‘Preacher’ Hebert.” Although the rookie was actually 24 years old, he limited the heart of the A’s batting order (Jimmy Dykes, Mule Haas, Al Simmons, Jimmie Foxx) to a feeble single by Jimmie Foxx as the lowly St. Louis Browns triumphed, 8-2.

Hebert followed this with a 4-2 victory over Red Ruffing, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and the New York Yankees. It was Preacher’s “trenchant if not especially powerful bat” that drove in two runs which would prove to be the margin of victory. The game was attended by “various inmates of the Passaic Orphanage in New Jersey,” who were rewarded by an audience with Babe Ruth after they had heroically “flagged an express train with 500 passengers aboard just before it neared a probably tragic disaster in the form of a washout.”

The heart of the Hebert scrapbooks highlight his seven wonderful years with the Padres from 1936 through 1942. During that period he was a 20-game winner three times and posted a 126-95 record. According to a 1937 article, “The second game saw Wally Hebert, brilliant Padre southpaw hurler, and Ted Williams combine their talents to embarrass the (Portland) Beavers no little. Hebert held them to six scattered hits and no earned runs while Williams drove in four runs, three of them with another homer over the right field wall, making it five for the series.

“Wally Hebert Day” was celebrated at Lane Field on September 19, 1941. Teammates took up a col­lection and gave the lanky Cajun a dollar ($104) to represent every victory he had hurled since the old Hollywood Stars moved to San Diego in 1936. Fans presented Hebert with a live chicken and a Louisiana catfish, since Mrs. Hebert’s Southern cooking and hospitality were widely known and appreciated.

On August 16, 1998, the New Orleans Times­-Picayune carried a feature story, “The Babe in The Big Easy.” The article commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Ruth’s death and recalled his visit to New Orleans on March 10, 1922. “When the motorman of a Tulane belt streetcar passed Heinemann Park yesterday around high noon, and saw a baseball come floating over the center field fence, he remarked, ‘Gee, nobody but Babe could have sloughed that ball.'”

Ninety-one-year-old Preacher Hebert was contacted by the reporter and asked to recall his memories of pitching to the Babe. ” … he was swinging with everything he had. I threw him a slow curve, and he hit a little squibber to second base. Grounded into a double play. As he was running back to the dugout, he looked at me and yelled, ‘You can stick that slow curve right up your ass’.”

Whitey Wietelmann celebrated his 83rd birthday on March 15, 2002. He died on March 26, 2002. Whitey played for the Pacific Coast League Lane Field Padres from 1949 until 1953 and coached for the PCL Westgate Padres from 1960 to 1966. When San Diego became a National League expansion team in 1969, Wietelmann returned as a member of manager Preston Gomez’s coaching staff and remained in that capacity through a series of managerial changes until the 1980 season. Over the next fourteen years he served the team in a variety of functions and is remembered for his chili, his acerbic humor, and his cherubic grin. Whitey was known by the fans as “Mr. San Diego Baseball.” The Padres simply called him “Mr. Indispensable.”

Not many people outside baseball realize that Whitey created a series of scrapbooks which contained every Padres box score for twenty-five years, from 1969 through the 1993 season. I doubt that any major league team has every box score of every game they ever played. Although the scrapbooks were Whitey’s prize possession, he stopped making them after his retirement from the Padres. They were boxed up in his garage and would fall apart when opened. Years ago, I had offered to laminate the pages, but Whitey only growled, “Nobody cares. They just collect dust.”

Following his death, the family offered the collection to the San Diego Padres, but they declined to accept it. The San Diego Hall of Champions did not have space for a large box of unmatched binders and loose papers. Though I had previously vowed to never make another baseball scrapbook, I volunteered to preserve this legacy. As of August 2002, I have survived the mold, laminated over 1,000 pages and made twenty-eight matching binders with covers.

All of the baseball groups and organizations in San Diego were invited to participate in the completion of this project, which became focused on locating the missing Padres box scores from 1994 through 2001.

The San Diego Ted Williams SABR chapter has been the most responsive. Thanks are extended to Bob Dreher, Tom Larwin, Bob Diaz, Andy Aguinaldo, Art Kaliel, Tim Scheidt, Tom Maggard, Chris Schuehle, Phil White, Jon Wietelmann (Whitey’s nephew), and Doc Mattei. Special recognition is given to Bob Boynton, who made photocopies of all the box scores for the 1994, 1996, and 1997 seasons.

It has primarily been through the generous contributions of individuals and former Padres players like John Curtis and Randy Jones that the restoration process began in earnest. Both of these pitchers remember watching Whitey in the clubhouse cutting and taping box scores onto the pages of his scrapbooks.

I am making the 2002 box score scrapbook and hope to find an organization that will continue to maintain the “Wietelmann Scrapbooks” in the future as a part of the Padres living history. When completed, the collection will be donated to the San Diego SABR Baseball Research Center at the downtown San Diego Library.

Interestingly, the only reference that I found about Whitey himself is a handwritten caption beneath a newspaper photograph of beloved Padres owner Ray Kroc throwing the first pitch at the 1978 All-Star game in San Diego. Whitey wrote, “I caught it.”

BILL SWANK is the author of Echoes from Lane Field, A History of the San Diego Padres, 1936-1957. His scale model of Lane Field is on display at the San Diego Hall of Champions. Swank also makes baseball scrapbooks in his spare time.

Headlines centered around AL President Ban Johnson’s eventual agreement to enforce the standing NL foul rule, counting foul balls as strikes one and two. Johnson’s spin claimed the change was supposed to speed up the game and prevent the best willow han­dlers from prolonging an at-bat to boring lengths while waiting for a perfect pitch to whack. Fans and sportswriters heatedly debated the move’s pros and cons. Minus the strike penalty, the upstart ALers out­ hit their rivals by .010 in 1901 and .015 in 1902. On an even playing field in 1903, league stats readjusted and the NL hit .269 to the AL’s .255, indicating that many AL bats were perhaps as overrated as the Senior Circuit often charged.

Manager/LF Fred Clarke’s (.351) Pittsburgh Pirates had simply demolished the NL in 1902 with a 103-36 record. Wins (91) were to be only slightly more difficult for them in 1903. In 1902, the Reds finished 70-70 with Sam Crawford as their top batter (.333 in 1902). Crawford jumped to AL Detroit in 1903 while Pittsburgh lost its ’02 mound ace Jack Chesbro (28-6) to the new AL franchise in New York. Manager/utility man Joe Kelley’s Reds opened against the Pirates and Charles “Deacon” Phillippe. The gallant Phillippe (25-9) also would pitch Pittsburgh’s last game that year, the final October contest of the first World Series, which he lost 3-0 in Boston. The nine-game event (one tie) gave Phillippe a probably never-to-be­ broken single Series mark of 3 wins and 2 losses.

Deacon started his year off masterfully in Cincy, two-hitting the hosts, 7-1 in under two hours. Unfortunately, gloomy, drizzly weather blotted out the beautiful new stands at the spruced-up Palace of the Fans. Still, 12,000 cranks showed up and watched the Pirates rap out 11 hits off Jack Harper (6-8). Rookie C Ed Phelps (.282) had three hits, while CF Clarence “Ginger” Beaumont (.341, 1903 NL hit leader, run leader, and 1902 bat champ) and Phillippe (no hits) each scored twice. Batting champ of ’03, SS Honus Wagner (.355) had two singles. Slugging CF Cy Seymour (.342) and vet SS Tommy Corcoran (.246) managed the Cincy safeties. Cy’s bunt hit and Deacon’s wild throw allowed Seymour to score on a subsequent groundout in the seventh. Manager Kelley (.316) did not play in his team’s opener.

After a one-day rain postponement out in St. Louis, only 4,500 people populated the Robison Field (also called League Park) stands on Vandeventer Avenue to witness a 2-1 victory by the locals. In a pitcher’s dual, Cardinal Clarence Currie (5-14) bested Chicago Colt Jack “Brakeman” Taylor (21-14), a 22-11, 1.33, 8- shutout hurler in 1902. Leadoff Card 2B Johnny Farrell (.272) got three singles, an RBI, and scored, while rookie SS Otto Williams (single) came home with the other run.

For Frank Selee’s Chicagoans rook­ie 2B Johnny Evers (.293) and 3B Joe Tinker (.291, two errors) slashed out three of the four (or five) Colt hits. Tinker singled and scored in the eighth inning when Currie committed a fielding error, botching his own shutout, according to one news account. However, the Chicago Tribune claimed 1B Bill Hanlon (played just eight ML games, .095) knocked Tinker home on a ”lucky” bounce hit, but neglected to give Bill credit for the scratch in its box score. Cardinal manager/RF Patsy Donovan, who guided his club to a cellar finish of 43-94, went hitless, but his fly ball plated Farrell. Tinker and C Johnny Kling botched a simple rundown play at third base that gave Farrell an extra life. Canadian Currie was 15-23 in his two-year career.

In 1986 SABR voters retroactively selected Iowa native “Tornado Jake” Weimer (20-9) as NL rookie of the year for 1903. He started the next day for Chicago, but blew a 6-0 lead to his hosts. Chicago won in the tenth, 7-6 as Jock Menefee (8-8), beginning his last season of a nine-year career, picked up the relief victory. Left fielder Jimmy Slagle (.298) had three hits and scored twice for the Colts. Farrell smacked two dou­bles and scored twice, but made three errors for St. Louis. Weimer, who in 1902 won 25 games and topped the Western League with 209 Ks for champi­on Kansas City under manager “Kid” Nichols (27-7), led the NL in 1903 in allowing the fewest hits per nine innings, was third in ERA at 2.30 and fifth in whiffs. Jake, already 29, was one of only a handful of south­ paws in the league in that year.

Games scheduled in New York and Philadelphia were postponed due to rain and cold.

On Friday, the other four NL squads opened as Boston visited Philadelphia and New York’s borough rivals battled at the Polo Grounds. Vic Willis, the NL workhorse of 1902 (27-20, 410 innings) toed the slab for Boston. In the third frame he started the winning rally with a double and soon scored. It was the first of 5 runs leading to an 8-3 win over Chick Fraser (12-17) before a crowd of 8,250 on a cool, clear afternoon at the Huntingdon Grounds (later Baker Bowl). Willis (12-18) had two hits as did his catcher, Mal Kittridge (.213, two RBI, and a run that day). Left fielder Duff Cooley (.289) had three singles and knocked in the first run. Manager Al Buckenberger’s Beaneater star 1B, Fred Tenney (.313), scored twice.

Phils’ LF Bill “Wagon Tongue” Keister (.320), playing in his last of seven seasons, drove out two hits and got two RBI. Strangely, Bill never played for the same team in con­secutive years but also never played for a different ML team other than the one he started with in any year. Rookie lefty Fred Burchell (0-3) relieved Fraser and got the Quakers’ third RBI. He played most of his short (13-15) career later with the Red Sox. In 1903 Chief Zimmer caught his final 37 games (.220) as the Phils’ skipper.

A clear and mild day brought out 20,000 Polo Grounds spectators, who were treated to an offensive explosion as both the Giants and Brooklyn scored four runs in the first inning, but the Superbas prevailed, 9-7. The wife of Giants president John T. Brush threw out the first pitch, and from the grandstand the Seventh Regiment Band entertained the throng. In attendance was “the father of baseball” and first score­ keeper, Henry Chadwick. Yells of “Harrah for Muggsey” came from everywhere for New York manager John McGraw, who some papers had listed as a possible Opening Day starter. In reality, retired legend McGraw played only a handful of games from 1903 to 1906, mostly necessitated by player injuries. Umpire Hank O’Day shouted, “Play ball” at 4:05 p.m.

A century’s worth of hindsight shows the pitching matchup to have been an odd classic. Christy Mathewson (30-13), who would have a 17-year Hall of Fame career, faced Texan Henry Schmidt (22-13), in what was Henry’s only ML campaign. Ned Hanlon’s men got nine hits off Christy, but Mathewson’s five walks, two wild pitches, and six Giant errors really sealed the home club’s tomb that day. Much traveled veteran 1B “Dirty” Jack Doyle (.313) had three of Brooklyn’s hits. Left fielder Jimmy Sheckard (.332, NL leader with nine home runs) had two singles, scored three runs, and swiped three bases. Playing in his only ML season, RF Walt McCreedie (.324 in 56 games) also touched home thrice. Sub CF Ed Householder, who played just 12 ML games (.209), had a hit and scored twice.

For New York, city native 3B Billy Lauder (.281) began his final of five ML campaigns with three hits of the Giants 11 and had three RBI. Schmidt first faced RF/leadoff man George Browne, who immediately smashed his first of 18 career home runs over the right-field fence. Star CF George Van Haltren (.257) tripled, doubled, and scored twice. Van Haltren would end his 17-year career (.316) in 1903, and his first hit on Opening Day was the last of his 162 three-baggers.

Sam Mertes (.280), a vet of both Chicago franchises, belted the first of his NL-top 32 doubles, but didn’t drive home any of his NL-high 104 RBI. Sam did score twice. Rookie SS Charlie Babb (.248) had two singles and scored for the losers. Babb played his other two years for Brooklyn. 1B Dan McGann smacked a double, had an RBI, scored once, and swiped two pillows. Playing in his first full Giants season, Roger Bresnahan (.350) sat out the Opener. He patrolled the pastures mostly in 1903, catching only 11 times.

When Brooklyn opened at its Washington Park home four days later, Matty and Henry dueled again. Some 17,000 roaring fans saw Schmidt pitch much better, but this time Christy had his Cooperstown stuff, winning 2-1, on a three-hitter. Crackpistol shot 3B Sammy Strang walked and scored in the first inning off Matty, but then “Big Six” slammed the run door shut. Browne and McGann (two hits) later toured the basepaths for the Giants to nip Schmidt’s eight-hit effort.

Thirty-year-old rookie Schmidt is one of the most interesting characters of 1903. The Brownsville-born righty remains the lone hurler to win 20-plus games in the only season he ever pitched in the majors. In 1902, Henry (35-20) was in the outlaw Independent California League with the pennant-winning Oakland Clamdiggers (108 wins). Only Los Angeles workhorse Oscar Jones (36-25) had more decisions and wins. Batters hit less than .200 against both of the two pitchers. Brooklyn also signed Jones for the 1903 cam­paign (19-14) to make up for the loss of moundsman Frank Kitson (19-13 in 1902) and Wild Bill Donovan (17-15) to AL Detroit.

After his battles with Mathewson, Schmidt shut out Philadelphia, Boston, and Philly again (on 17 total hits) before losing to Boston. Henry ended his cam­paign with a great flourish, going 7-0-1 in mid­ August/September. Matty beat him 3-1 on August 10, on a five-hitter and George Browne scoring twice. Then, Henry began his streak. After one win he defeat­ed rookie Cub Weimer 6-2 as each gave up seven hits and scored a run. Chicago’s six errors and four walks by Tornado Jake gave host Brooklyn the win on the day super horse “Dan Patch” set a world pacing record at nearby Brighton Beach track. Schmidt did get whacked around once, but the Superbas won 11-10 anyway.

In September, Henry erased Boston 5-0 on two hits, beat New York ace Joe McGinnity, 3-0 at the Polo Grounds behind Sheckard’s bat, edged Colt (aka Cub) Currie 3-2 in Chi-town, tied St. Louis and nipped pennant winner Pittsburgh, 5-4 in 10 innings after blowing a lead in the ninth. Opposing Cardinal pitcher Jim Hackett (1-7 career, usually a IB) ruined Schmidt’s perfect month with three hits (2 runs, 2 RBI) in their 5-5 tie. Pittsburgh manager Clarke came off the bench to pinch hit a home run to tie Schmidt in the ninth. If another Pirate had been on base or Brooklyn had scored one less run, Clarke’s blast would have ended the game and Henry’s season the way it started, by serving up a rare round tripper.

Unknown to anyone, that was the last of Schmidt in the majors. Though the Texan’s arm kept the mediocre Superbas above .500, Schmidt returned his 1904 contract unsigned, saying he simply did not like living in the East. Henry toiled in the reorganized Pacific Coast League through 1908, going 26-28 for Oakland in 1904.

Giant McGinnity (born McGinty), arguably base­ball’s best flinger from 1899 to 1904, topped the NL in wins with a tireless 31-20 record (434 innings) in 1903. McGraw’s “Iron Man” ace won his first and sec­ond starts by beating Brooklyn, 6-1 and 7-2, on April 19 and 22. He left the NL his calling card on April 19, gaining the first Giant win with a one-hitter. Dirty Doyle managed the hit while LF Sheckard toured the bags on an E-wp-E sandwich for Brooklyn. Catcher Bresnahan singled and homered (2 RBI, 2 runs) to beat vagabond hurler Roy Evans (4-12), who had been arrested in February in Butte, Montana, for passing bad checks. Joe was the pennant-winning Superbas’ big winner in 1900 at 29-9. He then moved to AL Baltimore with McGraw for that town’s 1901 inaugu­ral campaign where he was 26-20.

BAN JOHNSON’S BOYS COMMENCE HOSTILITIES

It was not until Monday, April 20, that the American League got under way in 1903, and it did so with a huge bang. It was Patriots’ Day in Boston and New England’s Hub was in a sports and holiday fren­zy. There were home doubleheaders slated for both the AL’s Huntington Avenue Grounds and the South End Grounds of the NL, located just across some railroad tracks.

But those events had to share a grand spring day with the seventh annual Boston Athletic Association marathon (31 of 56 runners finished), a major horse show, a boxing match, the city of Revere and Charles River Park cycle races, an auto hill-climb­ing contest, Tufts College facing the “strong”amateur Wellington club (6-4 Tufts) in baseball, the city’s North End Park athletic games, and the area’s annual Revolutionary War hoopla at Lexington Green and Concord’s famed Old North Bridge, “where embattled farmers stood.” Another veterans event was also held in nearby Arlington. Tuesday’s Boston Globe newspa­per estimated that more than 360,000 persons attended all these events, with 200,000 of them lining the 26-mile marathon route.

The AL’s morning and afternoon contests drew 27,660 persons to the NL’s 5,700. As baseball some­times goes, however, the marquee pitchers in both games were shelled like British redcoats. Connie Mack’s 1902 AL champs split with manager/3B Jimmy Collins’ 1903 pennant winners. Visiting Athletics’ lefty ace, Rube Waddell (21-16, 302 K) lost the morning tilt, 9-4 to George Winter (9-8), while Cy Young (AL win high 28-9) blew an apparent easy win over Eddie Plank (23-16, 336 innings), by losing 10-7 in the afternoon. Waddell fanned the first four Pilgrims he faced, but when ahead 2-0 gave up dou­bles to 1B Candy LaChance (2 RBI, 2 runs) and mound foe Winter (2 RBI) in the five-run fourth frame. Second baseman Hobe Ferris had two hits, scored twice, and knocked one home for Winter. Right-fielder Buck Freeman singled and scored (AL tops with 13 home runs and 104 RBI).

For Philly, SS Monte Cross, CF Ollie Pickering, and 2B Danny Murphy (run) each had two hits. Seventeen-year veteran, 3B Lave Cross, doubled and scored, as did gentleman 1B Harry Davis. Newspapers reported that fans lustily booed each foul strike call by the umpire.

In the afternoon encore, the script was reversed. When the Pilgrims’ seventh inning began they were hitless, and Boston had pounded Plank for a 6-0 lead. Of 16 Pilgrim safeties, both Freeman and SS Fred Parent (.304) had accumulated a single, double, and triple each (2 runs and an RBI for Buck and 2 RBI for Fred). LaChance scored twice and Young had an RBI. But it all evaporated in the seventh when Philadelphia clob­bered Cy’s suddenly docile throws for 6 runs. Pickering’s 2-RBI triple and run were key. Ollie had another RBI in the eighth and Lave finished the job with his own two-run triple in the ninth.

Right fielder “Socks” Seybold, Lave, and Davis each scored twice for Philly. Shortstop Monte had an RBI single and scored. Mack’s boys smashed 12 hits over their final three frames. “Long Tom”Hughes (20-7) relieved Young in the ninth and allowed the last three Philly scores. Boston managed only a lone tally in their final turn at the dish.

Albert Charles Bender, half Chippewa and a Carlisle Indian School star, took over for “Gettysburg Eddie” in the fifth. It was the Minnesota reservation-born rook­ie’s first ML game. SABR folks elected Mack’s cele­brated Chief as the AL’s top 1903 freshman. Bender (17-13) swatted his first hit and scored, helping his own cause in the Opening Day comeback victory.

Also of note in the second game was the Pilgrims’ touching tribute to 16-year catcher Charley “Duke” Farrell. In the second inning, he was presented with an expensive diamond ring by his baseball buddies. Bay State native Farrell played only one year for any Boston club before 1903 (17 games, .404). It was for the 1891 Boston Reds, winners of the final American Association pennant. Duke (3B-C) hit .302 and led the circuit with 12 home runs and ll0 RBI. Farrell caught both ’03 Opening Day games, collected three hits, scored, and knocked home a couple of mates. A week later Farrell broke his leg trying to steal against Washington. He hit .212 in 1904 and retired after seven games in 1905.

Across the tracks the NL Boston-Philadelphia matchup was also a split decision, Boston winning the morning game 4-3, as Togie Pittinger (top NL loser at 19-23) tasted victory. In the afternoon, the Phillies defeated their host Beantowners 10-7, behind Fred Mitchell (ll-15). Willis, Boston’s Opening Day victor, took the loss despite getting three hits off Mitchell, who made two himself and scored twice.

It wasn’t until April 22 that the other AL teams played their first games of 1903. In Detroit, a record crowd of 16,482 piled into Corktown’s Bennett Park on a cold, raw day to see the Tigers edge Cleveland 4-2. It was an early matchup between (then sophomore) phenoms George Mullin (19-15) and Addie Joss (18-13), a twosome worth seeing even in bad weather. Five hundred Elks were on hand and the mayor made the first ceremonial toss.

Leadoff/CF Harry “Deerfoot” Bay singled (.292, 45 steals) and scored on 1B Charlie “Piano Legs” Hickman’s (.330, 12 homers, 97 RBI) two-out base hit in the initial frame. In the third inning, 3B Bill Bradley reached on a Mullin bobble and scored on a double play attempt after a Nap Lajoie single (’03 batting title champ with .355). Hickman and star RF Elmer Flick (.299) each had two hits.

Detroit tied the score in the fifth, when ex-NL Clevelander, Lewis “Sport” McAllister (C), playing in his final season, doubled. With one out Bay dropped CF Jimmy Barrett’s fly (.315), and both came home on 2B George “Heinie” Smith’s double. Joss lost the game to Ed Barrow’s boys in the eighth as AL newcomer and triples leader (25), LF Sam Crawford (.335) walked, SS Norm “Tabasco Kid” Elberfeld singled, and rookie RF Harry “Doc” Gessler doubled into the crowd.

Bill Armour’s Naps had no rally left in them. Smith, in his final season, Elberfeld and Gessler each had two hits of Detroit’s seven. Mullin was a happy victor, since it was only two and half months since he surrendered to the Wayne County, Indiana, sheriff because he was wanted for perjury in a case concerning his finances.

Win Mercer, who was 15-18 for Detroit in 1902, was supposed to manage this Bengal edition, but he com­mitted suicide by inhaling gas in San Francisco in mid-January.

At Sportsman’s Park, 3,800 Brownie fans in over­ coats and earmuffs saw their team pummeled by Charles Comiskey’s White Sox, 14-4. Left fielder Bill H. Hallman scored four times with only one hit. Manager Nixey Callahan started Patsy Flaherty (11-25) for Chicago. Jimmy McAleer countered with Francis “Red” Donahue (15-16, 8-7 with the Browns), who gave up 16 hits. For Chicago, CF Fielder Jones, 3B Frank Isbell (two doubles, usually played 1B), and C Ed McFarland (.209) each had three hits. Four Sox scored twice and only hurler Flaherty didn’t make a hit.

For St. Louis, star leadoff/LF Jesse Burkett had two hits (including a home run) as did SS Bobby Wallace. First baseman/cleanup hitter John Anderson stroked three (one triple) and scored once. Browns captain/2B Dick Padden (.202/29 games) was injured, so outfielder Bill Friel played in his spot and made three early, costly errors. It was Friel’s last of three ML seasons. At campaign’s end, however, St. Louis had five more wins than Chicago, and Flaherty topped the AL in defeats.

Not in the Comiskey-Callahan Chicago lineup was primo club jumper (SS) George Davis, who hit .299 in 1902. His checkerboard leaps from the NL Giants to AL Chicago and back were daily headlines, while ongoing judicial rulings fell like rain. Except for a handful of games with New York, George missed the entire season. The courts gave him back to Comiskey for 1904.

Ban Johnson’s popular circuit dumped Baltimore in exchange for New York before its third season. The new “Highlanders” were managed by Clark Griffith, who bossed Chicago in 1902. A bleak, raw day greeted 12,000 onlookers packed in at Washington’s National Park, leaving several thousand more latecomers at vantage points outside the ballyard. Al Orth (10-22) pitched for Tom Loftus’s hosts while NL jumper from Pittsburgh, Jack Chesbro (21-15), hurled for New York.

The New York Daily Tribune sometimes referred to the club as the New York Americans, but usually called them the “Invaders.” Though RF Willie Keeler scored in the first frame, “Curveless Wonder” Orth took the contest, 3-1, for the cellar-ending Senators. His 22 defeats tied mate Casey Patten for the league’s high.

Keeler, from NL Brooklyn (1902), walked with one out and CF Dave Fultz (from AL ’02 Philly) singled him to third. Second baseman (from 1902 Baltimore) Jimmy Williams got Willie home on a grounder. Washington tied it in the fourth when 1902’s top AL hitter, LF Ed Delahanty (. 376) walked and was sacri­ficed to second. George “Scoops” Carey (.202) singled him to third, but out-of-condition Ed was nailed in a rundown when the next batter grounded back to Chesbro. Carey scored when 2B Gene DeMontreville doubled. “DeMont”only played 12 games (and four in 1904) in ending his career.

In the fifth, Senator rookie SS Bill “Rabbit” Robinson singled, as did RF Kip Selbach. Delahanty sent Robinson home with a third single off Chesbro. Selbach then scored on Carey’s muffed grounder to SS Herman Long, 13-year Boston vet playing in his final season, except for a solo 1904 game. Though Robinson made two errors (and Orth one), he also had seven assists and dazzled the crowd with his basepath sprints. Each team got six safeties, and Fultz was the only player with two. For New York, 3B William “Wid” Conroy (from Pittsburgh) had a single while Senator CF Jimmy Ryan, a 2,000-hit getter with NL Chicago, went hitless in what would be his last ML Opening Day. He had played more than 100 games in 15 of his 18 solid seasons. Orth and Chesbro became New York teammates in July 1904, the season Jack would set the franchise and AL record for most wins with 41.

New York won 7-2 the next day as their ballpark in Manhattan was still being readied for their arrival. Soon known as just Hilltop Park, The New York Times on the day of the inaugural game said it would be called “the American League Park at Washington Heights.” Chesbro beat Senator Jack Townsend (2-11), 6-2 on April 30.

As May 1 dawned, Delahanty was still swinging mightily. His decision to jump the Washington club while traveling home from Detroit by train and subse­quent mysterious fatal plunge at Niagara Falls on July 2, the most notable tragedy of 1903, was still two months away. But for now, every team still had a sporting chance at the pennant.

Boston park ranger DIXIE TOURANGEAU supplies SABRites with box seats and scorecards for classic Openers most of us missed.

A small, very dusty, grit­ covered trunk was hauled out of the barn and opened, probably for the first time in a half century. Attendees (antique dealers, collectors, bargain hunters, plain curious folk) watched as the man in charge pulled out one item after another. An old pair of heavy woolen baseball pants, some undershirts, a small peaked cap, some old postcards, a belt, a couple woolen baseball shirts with names of cities across the fronts, a tiny baseball glove, 22 old letters, frayed newspapers, base­ ball shoes, towels. One lady eventually observed, “Somebody in this family must have liked baseball.”

Soon the trunk was empty. All the items were sold but to five or six different purchasers including both antique dealers and collectors. The contents went in different local geographic directions—some here, some there.

Eventually most of the contents were consolidated in one location. After a brief perusal of the letters and newspaper clippings, it was apparent that the “some­ body” was a Walter Hammersley. But who was Walter Hammersley and how did all these cloth, leather, and paper items get into the trunk? And how were these items related to the lately deceased Edna Crotty?

Some of the letters ultimately answered the second question, since there were letters from a wife Edna to a husband Walter and vice versa. Edna lived in the Waterford area and Walter played in the Greensboro, North Carolina, area. The letters were dated either 1909 or 1910, so examination of the old Reach and Spalding Baseball Guides proved very helpful. A tiny “Hammersley, Greensboro” line appeared a couple times in the batting, fielding, and pitching statistics of the Carolina Association, a Class D league situated in the western regions of North and South Carolina.

Old National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (minor leagues) contract records located in the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown as well as occasional mentions in The Sporting Life and The Sporting News led to “leads” and more bits of use­ful information about Hammersley’s baseball career. The old tattered newspapers from the trunk con­firmed much of what the baseball guides and official contracts indicated and added one surprising develop­ment.

Meanwhile, research in the Waterford area led to a small Waterford Historical Museum and some crucial facts. The museum had a town history written by a Colonel Sidney E. Hammersley, which was dedicated to his three daughters. One daughter, then Frances Hammersley Child, was Walter’s niece and still living. She readily solved many of the puzzling gaps in the story.

Walter was born in England, was one of eleven chil­dren, “was a vivid redhead,” married Edna Shufelt, was “after baseball” a lock operator on the state barge canal in Waterford, and died young in October 1921 at age 37 of pulmonary tuberculosis. Edna had married a William Crotty sometime after Walter’s death, which explained the different name at the estate sale. Mrs. Child identified the single gravestone in the local cemetery where Walter, Edna, and William’s names appear next to each other. The obituary in the nearby Troy Record verified much of the above and said Hammersley ”had considerable of a baseball career.”

Yes, Hammersley had “considerable of a baseball career.” After learning the pitching craft in local ama­teur and semiprofessional outings, he made the ultimate step into professional baseball in the spring of 1908. At age 24, he went south for a tryout with the Norfolk, Virginia, team. They released him, but he soon hooked up with Greensboro, which had the Class D team in the Carolina Association. It was a six-team league composed of Charlotte (population 34,014) and five smaller towns. Greensboro’s population totaled 15,895.

Hammersley had a fabulous 1908 season as he helped pitch the Greensboro Patriots to the league title with a 22-8 win-loss record. He led the league in both wins and innings pitched. The Patriots clinched the pennant with victories in an exciting season-end­ing series against second-place Greenville, South Carolina, whose featured player was none other than the legendary 19-year-old Shoeless Joe Jackson.

“Shoeless Joe” from Pickens County, South Carolina, acclaimed by many to be the greatest natural hitter of all time, led the league with a .346 batting average. Nevertheless, one newspaper clipping from the “trunk” documents that Hammersley held Jackson hitless in five plate appearances in a brilliant mid-season game described in the local press as “the best contest ever seen on the local diamond.” Greensboro won that contest, a 12-inning 1-0 complete game, five-hit masterpiece by Hammersley before 800 fans in one hour and 55 min­utes.

In another clipping, he won both games of a dou­bleheader 2-1 and 4-1. It was an “iron man” feat, as both were complete games. Hammersley, who had a spitball in his repertoire, pitched more than 200 innings that year. Of course, it was the “dead ball” era, which was to his advantage. Extra-base hits were few, batting averages and game scores were low. There was, however, no doubt that Walter was a hero in the then­ small Carolina town.

The first and only 1909 “trunk letter” was written by Walter in Greensboro to Edna in upstate New York on April 9, 1909. Written to“My dearest little Girl,” he is about to leave on a ten-day spring training road trip to three Virginia towns—Danville, Lynchburg, and Roanoke. Despite a remarkable passing comment, “I beat Boston [National League Pilgrims] here today 7-0. That is good for a kid don’t you think so,” he is more concerned with Edna’s absence. “I want you to write me and tell me in your next letter all about your leaving. The board will cost us the same as last year.” Two more times, he repeats his wish and ends, ”Be sure to come down and do what I say. With love, kisses from your own boy. XXXXX.”

Hammersley was back on the mound at wooden Cone Athletic Park in Greensboro when the official 1909 season started, and the Patriots (now called “the Champs”) again won the Carolina Association pen­nant, edging Anderson, South Carolina, by three games. His win-loss record, however, declined to 14- 15, although he again pitched over 200 innings. He lost a 16-inning 1-0 complete game in Greenville. Then there was a 12-inning scoreless tie game with Winston-Salem. Again he completed both games of a double-header, winning the opener 3-1 before drop­ping the nightcap to Anderson.

With a roster of only 12-13 players (and no Sunday games), these teams usually had three-man pitching rotations. Even the local paper commented, “Hammersley meant well, but 10 innings straight is too much for any pitcher.” (There was also one 1909 canceled July postcard from Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the trunk from an outfielder and 1908 teammate Cogswell to Walter. The message read, ”Hello Kid, I am leading the League in hitting and fielding. How are you and the Bunch?” Cogswell’s claim has been verified.)

The Greensboro Patriots had a disappointing season in 1910 under a new manager. It was also a bad year for Walter Hammersley, if judged by his won-lost record. The team finished the season in last place, in part because it had a team batting average of .208 and also fielded poorly. The batting and fielding did not help Hammersley, who left Greensboro at the end of July with a 4-12 record. It was during this season that most of the revealing “trunk letters” and newspaper clippings from Walter and Edna Hammersley give a little insight to the obscure pitcher on the obscure Class D team. 

Two high points of any minor leaguer would be to pitch against major league teams. Walter had done that in 1908 and repeated the same task in early April during two exhibition games against the New York National League Giants and the New York American League Highlanders. (Both were second-place finish­ers in 1910.) Hammersley pitched three innings against the mostly Giant regulars, allowing two runs as his team lost 9-2. The Highlanders won 11-3 with Hammersley allowing eight runs in four innings. Four errors did not help his cause. If nothing else, excite­ment and two capacity crowds benefited the Patriots’ financial situation.

Two days later, Walter wrote, ”My dear Edna,” from Roanoke. He was pitching the next day and comment­ed, “There is lots of money up on the game.” Then ”Most of our team was drunk tonight. This is a wet town and they all took advantage of it and got piped up. Pug Hicks (a shortstop) and Eldridge (a pitcher) near had a fight.” Unlike Roanoke, he wrote, “Greensboro is all locked up on Sundays. You cant bye a cocola on sunday nor any candy. Just amagine me going all day Sunday with out a drink or a little candy. They even locked a man up for putting up bills advertising a show because it had girls dressed in short clothes. The town has gone to the bad.”

Three days later in Danville, still on the exhibition trip, he got mad when told no mail had been forward­ed from Greensboro. “for I knew you had wrote me one letter at least. Then Bentley came in from some pool room with two one from you and one from Mother.” Later, he reports, “This has been a very hot day and all the dirt seemed to stick to me,” which led to an hour in the hotel bathtub. Before ending he said, ”I got so lonesome on Sunday afternoons, I don’t know what to do or where to look. I near go crazy. Well it wont be very long before you will be here to cheer me up.”

A week later, he wrote that he was “getting along fine,” but “tomorrow is Sunday and it will be another lonesome day. I wont hear any music and see you or any of my folks, but will cheer up for I see you soon.” He also recorded, “There was a nigger game here this afternoon and they played five innings and got in a fight and quit and went home. The A and M team and the Orangeburg team from South Carolina.” (The daily Greensboro newspaper verified this Negro college game and event between visiting Claflin College and local North Caroline Agricultural and Mechanic College.) To add to his woes, ”Mr. Collins don’t let us in to his show anymore. He has a sign up, ‘no free list here,’ so we are strung up then.”

Next day, he wrote, ”My dear little Neddie” that he had pitched five innings on a very cold (“almost too cold to play ball”) day. ”My arm is quite sore and weak and it gets tired when I write.” But he “got a hit with two men on base and scored them both. Then I scored.” “Some doctor took me in and fixed me up (with Turkish bath).” He ends, ”I wish I had you here to go to bed with me to night and you can imagine how I feel while I am writing this to you.” “Be sure and be good and I’ll be the same. I send you lots of love and lots of kisses. I am, as ever, your own boy. XXXXXX.”

Walter is really angry a week later when Edna has still not left upstate New York. ”I think you had better stay in one place and quit your running around so you can get my mail and do as I say. And I wrote and told you I would be gone away after April 30, and asked you as nice as any one could ask you to be here before I went away. Well, suit yourself. Come when you please.” He signs off, ”I am still your true Walt.”

The season opened on April 28. A second champi­onship flag was raised after “a parade in auto mobiles and the minister threw the.first ball over the plate.” He pitched the opening game and lost 6-3. “Well, that won’t be the only game I will lose. I wish it was, but I’ll lose more than that.” However, most of the letter still discusses Edna’s absence without the anger that appeared in the previous letter. This letter ends with, “goodbye, with lots of love, I am ever your boy. XX. I hurt my finger and can’t write goodbye. Come soon. XXXXX.”

He is pleased the following night, having received a card from Edna. The team lost to Winston-Salem and already had many injuries. ”I have a boil on my arm, my right one at that.” He expects her to arrive by May 14. “And if you are not here, I don’t know what I’ll do. I might come after you.” He closes with two thoughts, “They are just ordering me a new suit, so they must intend to keep me. Well, goodbye my little wife and hope you have not talked to any men, even though, I have women.”

Edna finally arrived in Greensboro, and Walter’s only problems are now baseball-oriented. Naturally, the teams play “on the road” half the time, so Walter and Edna still write each other. His very tired team arrived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at 12:40 p.m., woke to an intermittent rain, but “not enough for to stop us playing.” Later, he stumbled during pre-game practice in the outfield and “hit my left shoulder and it hurt very bad.” The Patriots then lost a 2-1 extra inning game on a ”bad” umpire decision at the plate. One player says, “Those Northern umpires always give the southern managers the worst end of the deal.” Greensboro manager C. Beusse was a Southerner. It was not the best of days for Walter.

Edna got another pessimistic letter the following day. The Patriots lost 4-3. Walter’s left shoulder is still troublesome. “I tell you, it is just as bad as my right one was. But I am going to try and pitch tomorrow’s game.” He then confides to Edna, “I can’t see where we have any chance of winning with the club we have here now. All they think of is to go out and get the game over with.” Two days later from Greenville, “Your poor old boy lost his fourth game.” (He pitched a four-hitter. His win-loss record dropped to 1-4.) He had to end the letter quickly as the train was about to leave for Anderson.

There were three letters from Edna to Walter in the trunk. Walter received the first letter when he arrived in Anderson. It opened “Dearest Walter,” and ended ”So, will close with lots of love from your own kid. XXXXXX.” Edna was “awfully sorry to hear that you lost again,” and then told what she had done that day. “We all set up last night until 12 o’clock, but didn’t see anything of the comet.” Edna, Mrs. Morris, and Miss Beasley “went to prayer meeting. Mrs. Morris treated us to a drink and I took Pepsi-Cola and they each took Coca-Cola and the clerk spilt some on my white skirt.” Walter received the second letter the following day.

Edna told how “eight of us went to the graduating exercises last night up to the Opera house. The music was good, but I got awfully tired listening to the long address.” Edna seemed to have lots of friends in both New York and North Carolina. Other letters to Edna from friends in upstate New York and to Walter from his mother were newsy while featuring comments about farm animals, Methodist church attendance, constant hard work, and family illness. Naive Edna also had one question, which concerned all baseball players. “The paper said that Smith saved himself from getting the pink slip, maybe you know what that means.” The third letter contained a short three-lined Christian prayer to be copied and mailed to a friend over nine days. Failing to do so would lead to misfortune. Instructions ended with “do not break chain.” The letter is unsigned, but clearly in Edna’s handwriting.

The Patriots made six errors a week later as Hammersley lost a ragged 4-2 home game to Greenville, whose outstanding player was catcher Ivy Wingo, a Georgian bound to spend 17 years in the National League. A local paper used the adjective “miserable” to describe the fielding. Hammersley scribbled in pencil on that sports page “can’t win with this bunch behind me.” In his final “trunk letter” from Spartanburg, he told Edna they had a rare 5-0 win that day while praising specific teammates who had made crucial defensive plays. “Does that sound like a pitcher?” He continued, “I am going to pitch tomor­row’s game and hope they make five runs for me and I know I’ll win my game.” Getting personal, he told Edna, “I saw a nice pair of Dorothy red slippers here,” but “I lost your size,” and ended, “Well, be a good girl and I’ll be good.”

The trunk did contain a five-inch ster­ling silver hat pin with an attractive three-quarter­ inch baseball on one end, no doubt, a gift to Edna at one time. Money issues are seldom mentioned in the letters, although Class D player salaries were very low in 1910. Few of these players could afford to bring their wives to a distant city, yet neither Edna nor Walter appear to have come from great wealth.

The final “trunk letter” was mailed to ”My dear Edna” from Greenville. Walter told of damp beds in the hotel, how a teammate”got some fellow to take us out on a fine ride in an auto,” an unusual victory before 198 fans, and how the local authorities “are not going to allow them to show the pictures of Jeffries and Johnson fight.” (Jeffries of course was the “great white hope” brought out of retirement to fight champion Negro Jack Johnson, who defended his heavyweight title with a 15th-round KO.) The team must leave town at 8 p.m. for Charlotte. Evidently, he and Edna had a spat. He wrote, “Well Edna, let us try and get along together without fighting. There is nothing in rangling with each other.” He ended, “I am as ever your boy. XX.”

Something happened shortly after this letter. Hammersley left last-place Greensboro and returned north. It appeared that his season was completed. But it was not. Newspapers and clippings in the trunk cover some August and September 1910 dates. The common factor in all these paper items is a pitcher for Utica, New York, in the higher-classification New York State League named “Harding.” In reality, “Hammersley” and “Harding” were the same person. Eventually, in 1913, the ruse was discovered in anoth­er league, an unaffiliated league at that, when he again assumed the “Harding” moniker. (Official minor league baseball records have him “reserved” by Greensboro on October 21, 1910 [for the next season], but then “released” on March 14, 1911.) Anyway, illegal “Harding” pitched a shutout in his first game at Utica, then hurried back to Troy for his father’s funeral (which may have been the reason he left Greensboro), and finished the season with four more losses, although three were well-pitched games against Binghamton, Syracuse, and Wilkes-Barre.

The Waterford righthander spent the 1911 summer pitching semi-pro games in the Troy-Albany area. Based on his 1911 showing, Hammersley spent all of 1912 in the New York State League. He started with Albany, lost all four decisions (including a 1-0 defeat), was released but quickly signed with Troy. He won at least six games including two shutouts for the Trojans, but lost at least ten games. He was a hard-luck twirler, losing many 1-0, 2-1, 3-0 games. He even had an 11- inning 1-1 no-decision game. The local press often referred to him as the “Waterford curver,” the “Waterford spitballer,” “the Waterford boy,” although he was now 29. Nevertheless, he also hurled two com­plete exhibition games against the Chicago Cubs, whose main attraction was local hero Johnny Evers. Hammersley was pounded in an 11-3 loss at Green Island but won 5-2 in Albany.

Hammersley opened the 1913 season with Troy win­ning at least one 2-1 game before joining Pittsfield, Massachusetts, of the Class B Eastern Association, where he won six of 14 decisions. He seemed to have the misfortune to play for second-division teams after the initial two Greensboro years. Near season’s end, he, as “Harding” again, was winning games for Bellows Falls, Vermont, in the unaffiliated Twin States League. The ruse was discovered by the Greenfield team. The local paper reported, “Harding is Hammersley, who recently traveled with the Pittsfield Eastern Association team.”

Two 1913 Bellows Falls team photo postcards show­ing him as a member were in the trunk, as was one postcard of the Keene, New Hampshire baseball field. The Keene postcard was mailed to Edna. Its message read, ”Hello Neddie. I am all right. I am playing out­field and pitching for the rest of the season. Will write soon. Will be home next Sunday for good. Hammy”

Hammersley’s professional career was almost over. During the winter he tried to hook up with Binghamton, but received a pleasant typewriter rejec­tion from J.C. Calhoun, the Binghamton manager. It was the last correspondence in the trunk. He did start the 1914 season with York, Pennsylvania in the Class B Tri-state League, where he won at least two games before the team folded and moved to Lancaster. He ended with Northampton, New Hampshire, back in the unaffiliated Tri-State League as “Hammersley” this time, where he won at least seven games, all veri­fied in the final newspaper clippings in the trunk. Two of the wins were in another iron-man doubleheader effort, 7-2 and 9-0. Perhaps illustrative of human nature, Hammersley saved accounts of only his well­ pitched games—victories or tough losses. Seven years later, he was dead.

The letters give a brief glimpse of a serious full-time ballplayer’s life during a losing season as well as that of the player’s wife. These mostly 1910 letters were often negative in scope, partly reflecting a 4-12 win-loss record on a last-place team. (Letters written in 1908 would probably differ, since they would have reflected a 22-8 record on a pennant winner.) There was daily effort in 1910, but less opportunity for the exuberance that only a hit, a catch, a pitch, a win can bring.

His was a competitive, sometimes injury-prone experi­ence with players coming and going based on per­formance. There was often sweltering heat, boredom, constant travel, and frequent loneliness with few “to lean on.” These letters sure contrast with those in ”You Know Me Al” written by Ring Lardner in 1914.

(Hammersley appears in many of the “trunk photo­graphs” usually as a team member but also in a couple photos wearing a formal bowler hat as well as a swim­ming suit. He seems to be a bit smaller in height and heft than most of his teammates. And yes, like most of those teammates, he can be seen on black-and-white 1909 Contentea and red-bordered 1910 Old Mill ciga­rette baseball cards.)

FRANK KEETZ joined SABR in 1980, the same year that the Hammersly trunk was discovered. It took him twenty-two years to research and complete this, his seventh SABR article.

During what turned out to be the All-American League’s final season in 1954, Peppas hurled 13 games and posted a 6-4 record with a 3.32 ERA. She also batted .333, her team’s best average and the league’s fifth highest mark for qualified players. When Kalamazoo played the Fort Wayne Daisies for the league title, June came through big time.

“Pitcher June Peppas, a former Daisy player,” the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (all game stories for this arti­cle came from the Journal-Gazette) reported about the final playoff game, “was the villain of the piece. In addition to holding the Daisies to five safeties, she slammed out three hits in five trips to the plate and batted in four runs.”

Leading her club to the 1954 league title, the south­ paw batted .450 and won twice in the five-game series­, including the 8-5 finale in the AAGPBL’s last-ever game.

When the All-American (as the league was often called) disbanded after the season, June Peppas, who worked in printing during the off-seasons in Kalamazoo, began working full-time at the trade. After earning Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo during the late 1960s, June taught vocational education graphic arts. Later, she operated her own printing business, retiring in 1988.

Today she’s best known for her part in reviving the All-American League. In 1980, June and a few friends began assembling a list of names and addresses of for­mer players. Her work turned into a newsletter and resulted in the AAGPBL’s first-ever reunion at Chicago’s Wrigley Field in 1982. A Players Association was formed in 1987, and most former All-Americans continue to enjoy reunions—which became annual events in 1998.

Peppas should be remembered for many contribu­tions to the All-American League. The daughter of George and Edna Peppas, she was born on June 16, 1929, in Kansas City, Missouri. The family soon moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where she grew up playing sandlot sports, notably fast-pitch softball. June graduated from Elmhurst High in 1947.

June’s baseball career, which spanned the years 1948 through 1954, reflects the experiences of many women who played in the All-American’s era of overhand pitching. In 1943 the AAGPBL began by playing fast­ pitch softball-featuring an underhand delivery. The pitching motion was switched to a modified sidearm in 1946, to sidearm in 1947, and to overhand in 1948. During those years the league’s ball decreased in size. Beginning with a 12-inch diameter softball in 1943, the AAGPBL used an 11.5-inch ball in 1944 and 1945, an 11-inch ball in 1946 and 1947, and a 10 3/8-inch ball in 1948—the first overhand season. Midway through the 1949 season, the league introduced a 10-inch ball. In the final season of 1954, the AAGPBL’s ball switched to the size of a regulation major league baseball.

Likewise, the league gradu­ally lengthened the basepaths and the pitching distance from the mound to the batter’s box. For example, batters faced a 40-foot pitching distance and ran 65-foot basepaths in 1943. But in 1948 players adjusted to a 50-foot pitching distance, the overhand delivery, and 72-foot basepaths. In 1954 the pitcher stood 60 feet away from home plate and the runners hustled around 85-foot basepaths, both just short of the men’s distances.

For women like Peppas who began after the 1947 season, therefore, competing in the All-American meant playing a tough brand of baseball that continued to grow closer to the men’s professional game.

A child of the Depression, she shared her memories in a 1998 interview: “I was truly a stubborn left­-hander. I liked baseball, softball, any sport, when I was growing up.­”

“My folks were in the restaurant business, so we were good friends of Harold Greiner, owner of the Bob-Inn Restaurant in Fort Wayne. Harold fielded men’s and women’s softball teams. I played for him from 1942 through 1947 and we won state titles in 1944 and 1945. He scouted for the All-American and recommended me for tryouts. Harold also managed the Daisies in 1949.”

“I went to spring training at Opa-Locka, Florida, in 1948 and was assigned to the Fort Wayne Daisies. As a pitcher, I was very erratic, but I could hit. It was tough being a hometown product, and in 1949 Harold traded me to Racine.”

June had a solid rookie season, playing in 20 games and hitting .264. She pitched 16 times, finishing with a 4-12 record and an ERA of 4.62. In 1949 she had mixed success, due partly to injuries. She batted .116 in 50 games (39 with Racine), but her pitching record improved to 3-4 with a 2.25 ERA.

”At Racine I got my control,” she recalled, “thanks to the teaching of manager Leo ‘Pop’ Murphy. I had a good bat, and also played first base. In ’48 I tore my right knee up. I had it repaired over the winter, and in ’49 I tore up my left knee, but I continued to play. I wait­ed until ‘5o to have it repaired.

“In 1949, after being traded, I learned how to slide, thanks to Sophie Kurys of the Belles. Also, I did double duty like many others. I pitched every fifth turn, and I played first base the rest of the time.”

Once she overcame knee injuries, June’s career blos­somed. She spent the rest of 1949 and all of 1950 with Racine. However, because of financial difficulties after the ’50 season, the Racine franchise was moved to Battle Creek, Michigan. 

In 1950, her only full season with the Belles, “Pep,” or “Lefty,” as she was also called, bounced back. She hit .268 with 11 doubles, five triples, four home runs, and a career-best 52 RBI. She also posted a 4-4 pitching mark with a 4.57 ERA. Her main problem continued to be control: she walked more hitters than she struck out. For example, in 1950 she passed 41 batters while fanning 21. In 1951 she walked 31 and struck out 20.

In mid-1951 June was traded to the Kalamazoo Lassies. During her three full seasons in Kalamazoo, the last two as an All-Star at first base, she continued to hit well. Her averages improved from .262 to .271 to .333. In 1954 the southpaw fashioned a 6-4 record, her only winning season as a hurler.

“I was fortunate in making the All-Star team in 1953 and 1954,” June observed. “I always said the only way I made it was when Rockford’s Dot Kamenshek retired [after the 1952 season].”

She added, modestly, “My team, the Kalamazoo Lassies, won the Shaughnessy Trophy in the last year of the league, 1954. I was lucky enough to be the win­ning pitcher in two ball games.”

Pretty, personable, and multi-talented, the 5′-5½” 145-pound brunette kept improving her game. She was a hit on and off the field. Recalled teammate Elaine Roth, “June had a good voice, played the piano, and when dressed up, she looked like a movie star.”

On the diamond in 1948, the AAGPBL peaked with ten teams and the league’s attendance reached an all­-time high of 910,000. The All-American returned to eight teams in 1949, 1950, and 1951, fell to six teams in 1952 and 1953, and ended with five clubs in 1954.

During the overhand years, the Rockford Peaches won the Shaughnessy Playoffs in 1948, 1949, and 1950. After Rockford’s run (the Peaches also won in 1945), the South Bend Blue Sox won back-to-back titles in 1951 and 1952. The Grand Rapids Chicks won league crowns in 1947 and 1953 (and the Milwaukee Chicks took the title in 1944). Finally, the Lassies won Kalamazoo’s only championship in 1954.

But attendance declined and team revenues fell. After the 1953 season, the league’s debt jumped to $80,000. While Peppas thinks the lack of good busi­ness management hurt several teams more than any­thing else, the impact of television hurt minor league baseball and doubtless affected the AAGPBL as well.

In any event, on the diamond in 1954, the girls played exciting ball. Hitting a regulation-sized base­ ball, “Jolting Jo” Weaver of Fort Wayne led the All­ American with a remarkable .429 average in 93 games. She also paced the league in home runs with a best-ever 29. Jean Geissinger of the Daisies hit .377 with 26 home runs and a league-high 91 RBI. Betty Foss, another Fort Wayne slugger, hit .352 with 14 homers and 54 RBI. And Betty Francis of South Bend averaged .350 with eight home runs and 58 RBI.

Nineteen players averaged at least .300. South Bend’s Wilma Briggs batted an even .300 while club­bing 25 homers and driving home 73 runs. Peppas averaged .333 with 16 homers and 49 RBI, making her one of the league’s best hitters.

In the first round of the Shaughnessy Playoffs, regu­lar-season champ Fort Wayne (54-40 record) won on a forfeit from third-place Grand Rapids (46-45). A dispute erupted when, due to an injury to Fort Wayne’s regular catcher, the league voted to allow the Daisies to add Rockford All-Star Ruth Richard to the roster.

Tempers flared. Grand Rapids, claiming that using a new player was unfair, played the first game under protest—and won, 8-7. Attempting to resolve the mat­ter the following night in Fort Wayne, Chick manager Woody English, a former major leaguer, and Daisy pilot Bill Allington ended up fighting at home plate. Later, the Chick players voted not to play, so the Daisies advanced to the championship round.

Meanwhile, fourth-place Kalamazoo (48-49) sur­prised second-place South Bend (48-44) in three games. Lassie Gloria Cordes hurled and lost the open­er, but pitchers Nancy Warren and Elaine Roth won games two and three, respectively.

On Wednesday, September 1, the best-of-five cham­pionship round opened at Kalamazoo’s Catholic Athletic Association Field.

Based on interviews, letters from players, and game stories that appeared in the local newspaper, Kalamazoo’s usual lineup (the stats are for 1954) fea­tured the following players:

• 2B—Nancy Mudge, an All-Star in 1954 who hit a career-best .232
• 1B/P—June Peppas (Jean Lovell often played first when June pitched)
• OF/C/RHP—Chris Ballingall, a “Home Run Twin” who slugged 17 dingers
• SS—Dot Schroeder, a slick fielder who was the league’s only 12-year player
• 3B—Fern Shollenberger, the four-time All-Star third sacker who hit .268
• OF/1B/C—Jean Lovell, a versatile player who hit .286 with 21 homers
• CF—Carol Habben, “Home Run Twin” who con­nected for 15 homers
• C/OF—Jenny “Rifle Arm” Romatowski, an All­ Star catcher who hit .258
• OF/1B—Mary Taylor, a second-year outfielder who averaged .251 lifetime
• RHP—Nancy Warren, with a lifetime mark of 114-93, was a key starter for Kazoo
• RHP—Elaine Roth, a spot starter and reliever, compiled a career 45-69 record
• RHP—Gloria Cordes, an All-Star in 1952 and 1954, was 12-7 with 2.92 ERA

Game One: Lassies 17, Daisies 9
Peppas 2-for-4

Kalamazoo hitters blasted the pitching of the league’s top winner, Maxine Kline. Although she had an 18-7 record with3.23 ERA during the season, Kline gave up 11 runs in six innings, and Kalamazoo scored six more in the eighth off Virginia Carver.

Performing before a crowd of 1,299 (a total of 8,230 paid to see the five games), Pep started for the Lassies, pitched seven solid innings, and rapped two hits-including a homer in the first inning. She tired in the eighth, yielding solo homers to Katie Horstman and Jo Weaver. Nancy Warren relieved, got Jean Geissinger to hit into a double play, and saved the victory.

Hitting dominated the loosely-fielded opener, as the two clubs combined for seven home runs and 11 errors (seven by the Daisies). Horstman connected for two four-baggers, while Weaver, Peppas, and three more Lassies—Carol Habben, Fern Shollenberger, and Chris Ballingall, who hit a grand slam—slugged one each.

Game Two: Daisies 11, Lassies 4
Peppas 1-for-3

In the second game, favored Fort Wayne bounced back at ”home run heaven,” as Kalamazoo’s bandbox CAA Field was dubbed, hitting five round-trippers to win, 11-4. Gloria Cordes started for the Lassies. Due to a mix-up over the game’s starting time, the umpires did not allow her to warm up. Starting cold, Cordes allowed five runs before getting a batter out. After a leadoff walk to Mary Weddle, Katie Horstman home­red for a 2-0 Daisy lead. Ruth Richard and Jo Weaver singled, and Betty Foss slugged a three-run homer for a 5-0 edge.

Right-hander Elaine Roth relieved Cordes and com­pleted the game. But Fort Wayne slammed three more homers. Kalamazoo countered with leadoff shots by Nancy Mudge in the third inning, Peppas (who played first base) in the seventh, and Dottie Schroeder in the ninth, but the game’s outcome was never in doubt.

Game Three: Daisies 8, Lassies 7
Peppas 1-for-4

After moving to Fort Wayne’s spacious Memorial Field for the rest of the series, the Daisies won a close one, 8-7, fueled by the heavy hitting of Jo Weaver. The AAGPBL’s best batter produced a double, a triple, and a three-run homer in five at-bats, driving in four runs. Still, Kalamazoo got off to a 3-0 lead in the fourth frame, thanks to a single and three Daisy errors. In the fifth, Nancy Mudge doubled and scored from second when Peppas lifted a long flyball to deep right field. Maxine Kline, doing double duty as an outfielder, caught the ball. But when she fell backward on the banked earth, the speedy Mudge raced home.

In the decisive seventh inning, Peppas added a base hit to spark a three-run Lassie rally, which was capped by Chris Ballingall’s two-run single. But the Daisies came back in the bottom of the inning, scoring twice off Nancy Warren for the final 8-7 margin.

Game Four: Lassies 6, Daisies 5
Peppas 2-for-4

Without the confusion preceding Game Two, Cordes, this time properly warmed up, pitched a complete game. Allowing five runs on nine hits, Gloria helped Kalamazoo tie the series. With Fort Wayne leading 5-2 in the eighth, Kalamazoo rallied for four runs by combining a walk, a sacrifice bunt, and five singles­ by Mudge, Ballingall, Fern Shollenberger, Jean Lovell, and Carol Habben, with Habben driving home the winning tally. Bill Allington summoned Phyllis Baker in relief of Kline, but it proved too late.

Ballingall led the visitors with three hits, including a double. Peppas contributed a single, a double, and one RBI; Dot Schroeder rapped a base hit and a solo home run; and Shollenberger added two singles—as the first seven batters in the lineup produced 13 hits.

Game Five: Lassies 8, Daisies 5
Peppas 3-for-5

Saving her best for last, June enjoyed a three-hit night and pitched a clutch game, yielding four singles and one double. She had plenty of hitting support from Mary Taylor, who had a perfect 5-for-5 game with two doubles, and Ballingall, who went 3-for-4.

Peppas made one big error. With her club ahead 5-1 going into the bottom of the fifth, she yielded two sin­gles and a walk to load the bases. With two outs, she dropped a pop fly, allowing two Daisies to score, but the left-hander got the third out with no further dam­age.

June gave up a run in the bottom of the eighth, but her teammates scored three in the last two frames. The game-winner came home in the top of the eighth on Schroeder’s big double. Also, a base hit plus RBI singles by Peppas and Ballingall added two markers in the ninth.

In the end, the inspired Lassies rose to the challenge and batted .337 as a team, while the usually heavy-hit­ting Daisies averaged .275.

The All-American League was unable to return in 1955 and soon faded from most memories. Finally, in 1980, Peppas launched the newsletter project to get in touch with friends, teammates, and opponents. “I missed an organizational meeting,” the former All­ Star recalled, “and was elected president, which I held for four years. We accomplished becoming a Players Association,  getting the permanent display on ‘Women in Baseball’ at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and the movie, A League of Their Own.

“We are quite proud of our accomplishments,” June Peppas reminisced, “and we hope the All-Americans will not be forgotten again. We were a proud lot.”

JIM SARGENT is a Professor of History and Dean of the Social Science Division at Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke. He has written many profile articles about former big leaguers and All-Americans.

When my father was born in 1897, northwest Florida was a vast forest of yellow pine. A person could not wrap his arms completely around the trunk of any of those great trees that had stood in place so long, there was no underbrush. The forest was as clean as a park and one could see for a quarter-mile. By the time my father was playing in the majors, that forest had been devastated: first, by turpentine workers who drained the gum by cutting deep, cup-like wells in the tree’s trunk; then by lumber mills that leveled the woodland. My father took the destruction of that for­est as a personal loss. For the rest of his life he had an abiding reverence for the pine tree and a crusading zeal for conservation and reforestation, an environ­mental consciousness that was years ahead of its time. The depth of his feeling impressed on me what an awesome place that old forest must have been.

The details of family history leading up to my father’s birth are pieced haphazardly in my mind, based on memories of tales I heard when growing up. Recently, a relative in Georgia informed me that research on the family had established the identity of its progenitor in America: one Claude Phillippe de Richebourg, the pastor of a Huguenot church who arrived in Virginia in 1690 and had migrated to Santee, South Carolina, by the time of his death in 1718. The Richbourgs’ connection to the Huguenots, a Protestant sect that was persecuted in 17th-century France, as well as their connection to South Carolina and cattle, had been a part of family lore for as long as I can remember. The economic function of Georgia and the Carolinas in the 18th century was to provide food for slave plantations on the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean, and South Carolina’s main product was beef.

By the late 19th century, a handful of South Carolina families had drifted down to northwest Florida, the Richbourgs among them. Those cattle clans managed their herds simply by turning them loose in the forest.

The cattle grazed in low places along the river branches and swamps, becoming nearly as wild as deer. Their range extended from Crestview, Florida, to the northwest shore of Choctawatchee Bay, an area about the size of Rhode Island. Every so often, a bunch of cows would be gathered up and herded to a railhead in Florala, Alabama, where they were sold off for a nickel a head. “But it was all profit,” my father would hasten to add.

Those periodic round-ups were called “cow hunts.” They were carried out by men and boys mounted on skinny horses riding in U.S. Army cavalry saddles, the most minimal and cheapest of gear, and using dogs with powerful jaws that would clamp down on a cow’s muzzle and hold it in place. There were celebrated dogs and horses whose names are lost in the fog of time, but one I do remember was Dillard, a horse renowned for his quickness and skill as a cow pony, as well as his longevity—some 18 years in service. For weeks at a time, the cow hunters lived in the forest in pursuit of cattle. To me, as a boy hearing those tales, it all sounded like a huge, glorious camping trip, compounded by the romance and excitement of careering through the wild on horseback. But my Uncle Clint, who had been born into the final days of cow-hunt life, used to shake his head and mutter about the absurdity of riding a horse for fun.

Once my father took sick while out on a hunt. For a couple of days, he could barely sit on his horse. When my grandfather finally noticed his boy’s indisposition, all he said was, “Son, you don’t look so good. You’d better go home.” Going home meant a 20-hour ride through the forest—alone. When my father finally reached his destination, he spent the next two months in bed with some unnamed fever. No one knew what it was, though he nearly died of it. I thought to ask him how old he was at the time: “Twelve,” he replied.

My father told of riding through the forest from cow-hunt encampments to play in ball games. When he was about 16, he went to boarding school in Defuniak Springs, Florida, and played baseball there. He spoke of a teacher, a woman who was in charge of the school’s athletics, who told him he had the ability to play baseball for a living. Volume II of SABR’s Minor League Baseball Stars lists Lance Richbourg as having played in the Dixie League with Dothan, Alabama, as early as 1916. He is listed as having played 48 games for Newport News of the Virginia League in 1918, which must have occurred while he was in the Navy because I have discharge papers dated December 7 of that year. After his discharge, my father enrolled at the University of Florida. A story he liked to tell was of standing on the porch and watching the festivities of his fraternity’s dance through a window because all he had to wear was his navy issue.

In the spring of 1919, my father lettered in baseball and was discovered and signed by the New York Giants. It came about like this: The Giants were working their way north after spring training, playing exhibition games along the way. One was in Gainesville against the University of Florida team, and beforehand the college president addressed the team. “Who knows but someday one of you might wear the colors of the New York Giants,” he said. One story has it that my father, playing third base, charged in on batter Heinie Zimmerman, expecting a bunt. Instead, Zimmerman lashed a line drive that my father miraculously gloved. As dramatic as that anecdote is, it seems he would have needed to perform deeds of more consequence—perhaps lining a couple of his signature triples—to catch the eye of John McGraw. Whatever my father did, the next day he was sitting in the bleachers watching the Giants work out when the legendary manager approached him and said, “Son, did you ever consider a career in professional baseball?” McGraw signed him then and there for $250 per month, which my father took to be all the money in the world.

That summer he went up to New York. The intra-team competition was so ferocious, he told me, that McGraw would have to clear the way so my father could get in a few swings during batting practice. ‘Those old veterans weren’t going to make some kid who might take their job feel welcome to it,’ my father said. He never did get into a game that season, and the next he tested McGraw’s patience by not reporting until his college term was done in May (he eventually earned a B.S. in agriculture in 1922). As a consequence, the Giants farmed him out to Grand Rapids, where he hit .415 in 87 games.

The next year, in 1921, McGraw sent him to the Philadelphia Phillies in a trade for Casey Stengel. Reporters considered it crazy to trade the “fleet-footed Richbourg” for the “clumsy Stengel,” but Casey went on to become a World Series hero for the Giants while my father played only ten games for the Phillies.

In 1923 my father, playing for the Nashville Vols, was enjoying a fantastic season. He and Kiki Cuyler composed two-thirds of what sportswriters were calling the best outfield ever in the Southern Association. It was broken up in midseason, however, when my father, batting .378 at the time, split the large bone in his lower left leg while sliding into third, beating out a triple. The Nashville Tennessean wrote, ‘If somebody had to break his leg, why couldn’t it be Warren G. Harding or the King of Spain?’ Just days earlier my father had been purchased by the Washington Senators, and the injury seriously interrupted the trajectory of his career. While Cuyler moved on to Pittsburgh in 1924, capitalizing on his prime to build a Hall of Fame career, my father reported to the Senators, not fully healed. Washington had Goose Goslin in left field and Sam Rice in center, but right field was up for grabs; nonetheless, my father was unable to beat out the likes of Nemo Leibold, George Fisher, and Carr Smith. The Senators ended up sending him to Milwaukee in a deal for Wid Matthews, and that third outfield slot eventually fell to Earl McNeely, whose famous “pebble hit” won the seventh game of the 1924 World Series.

In 1975, my father recollected his final at-bat with the Senators to Ed Barfield of the Pensacola News Journal: “We were playing Boston in Washington and were tied up 2-2 in the bottom of the ninth. Bucky Harris, our manager, had told us before the last inning that if our leadoff hitter, Muddy Ruel, got on base, then Fred Marberry, our pitcher, would have two swings to bunt him down. If he were to fail after two strikes, then I was to pinch-hit. Well, Ruel got on base, Marberry got two strikes on him trying to bunt, and I came in to pinch-hit. The count got to 3-2, and then I lined one over the third baseman’s head just fair for a triple. We won 3-2. As I was walking up the long ramp from the dugout, Harris came up, slapped me on the back, and said: “Way to hit the ball, kid. Pack your bags, you’re going to Milwaukee.”

That story serves well to invest the narrative of my father’s career with drama and bittersweet irony, but it never really occurred. The game that comes closest took place in Detroit on June 4, only a few days before his release when he pinch-hit and drove home the go-ahead run in the top of the eighth inning. The Tigers, however, scored in their half of the eighth and eventually won the game in extra innings. In the mind of my father—as scrupulous a person as anyone I’ve ever known—that story had become the truth. That he had come to believe it, in my opinion, shows the measure of his pain in failing to hang on with a team that became world champions.

My father had three solid seasons with Milwaukee. In 1926, he had a standout year, leading the American Association in runs, hits, triples, and stolen bases. From 1927 to 1931, he played right field for the Boston Braves, posting his best season in 1928 when he batted .337 and ranked fourth in the National League with 206 hits.

Because my father was a left-handed batter and fast, he often bunted for hits. He practiced throughout the season, spending mornings in Boston trying to place bunts into a cap that his partner, an old pitcher, would move around the infield. Once, playing in Cincinnati, opposed by Hall of Fame pitcher Eppa Rixey, my father laid down a bunt that rolled backward.

In the eighth inning and eventually won the game in extra innings. In the mind of my father—as scrupulous a person as anyone I’ve ever known—that story had become the truth. That he had come to believe it, in my opinion, shows the measure of his pain in failing to hang on with a team that became world champions.

Catcher Bubbles Hargrave charged blindly over the ball. When my father got to first base, he looked back and saw the ball sitting in the center of home plate—reportedly the shortest base hit in the history of baseball. On May 14, 1927, Lance Richbourg made it into baseball’s official record book—as well as Ripley’s Believe It or Not—by playing right field throughout 18 innings of a doubleheader without a single fielding chance, thereby setting the standard for a single day’s idleness. On July 31, 1929, my father entered the record book again when he hit three triples in one game, tying the major league mark. 

I have a newspaper clipping in which Paul Shannon of the Boston Post describes my father snagging a scorching line drive in his bare hand. “By way of a desperate spring, he managed to intercept the sphere though he took it over his head,” Shannon wrote. “The ball landed squarely on the tips of the fingers of his “Meat Hand.”‘ The article goes on to describe my father finishing that game and playing through the second game of the doubleheader, though he was seen to shake his hand after swinging and many of the spectators figured he must have been hit by a foul tip. X-rays after the game showed that his finger had been broken at the top joint. I remember that there was not a single straight finger on either of my father’s hands; apparently, they all had been broken at one time. Another Shannon clipping describes Richbourg as a “brittle type of athlete.” When I asked my father about that remark, he said, “I just took chances those other guys wouldn’t take.” One of those chances came in 1931 when my father ran into the outfield wall while chasing a fly ball. The resulting injuries limited him to 97 games that season, and his .287 batting average was his lowest with the Braves. That December he was traded to the Chicago Cubs. 

One time in Chicago, my father and some teammates were taken to a restaurant, something of a private club from his description. Upon seeing a couple of dark, dapper gents across the room, their host quickly made his way over to their table and introduced them to his ballplayer guests. One of those gentlemen was “Legs” Capone, Al’s brother. “I had to let them know who you were,” their host explained, “otherwise they might bomb my store or something.” After 44 games with the Cubs, my father was sent down to the International League, where he batted .371 in 75 games. “There is no greater gulf than the gulf between the major and the minor leagues,” my father used to say. He was called back to Chicago in September, but not in time to be eligible for the 1932 World Series, when Babe Ruth supposedly made his famous “called shot.”

After the Series, Cincinnati acquired my father, who refused to report when the Reds tried to send him back to the International League with Rochester. Henceforth he was sold to his old team from bittersweet 1923, the Nashville Vols, and in midseason 1935, he was named player-manager. “Richbourg is too much a gentleman to be a successful manager,” wrote one reporter when he was fired at season’s end, but he was soon rehired and continued as player-manager in Nashville through the 1937 season.

In 1938, he received a similar appointment in Richmond, Virginia, where I was born at the end of the season. My birth marked the end of my father’s playing career in organized baseball. After managing one more season in Richmond, he bought a ranch near Ft. Pierce, Florida, merging it with a much larger ranch owned by Alto Adams, a boyhood friend and successful lawyer who was soon appointed to the Florida Supreme Court and later ran unsuccessfully for governor. For a few years, my father managed the 20,000-acre ranch, also managing the Ft. Pierce baseball team in his spare time.

By the mid-1940s, my father was in charge of the Farm Security Program at Escambia Farms, Florida. That program helped returning World War II veterans acquire small farms, with a new house, barn, and mule composing the package to get them going raising cotton, corn, or peanuts. Perched on a little rise behind the Escambia Farms General Store, my father’s office was a small prefab house identical to those on the veterans’ farms, and that place, as well as the drives out dusty farm roads to visit FSP farmers, form some of my earliest memories involve the knowledge my father had gained from his lifelong experience working with cattle, a valuable resource in a community without a large animal veterinarian. Once, a full-grown stallion was brought to our house for my father to castrate, and when my mother asked, “Can you castrate a horse?” he confidently replied, “I can castrate anything.”

In 1948, my father was elected County Superintendent of Education in a landslide victory of 5,281 to 1,226, reflecting both his popularity and, possibly, dissatisfaction with the incumbent. When he took office, the school system faced financial challenges, and my father’s frugality brought it back to financial health within two and a half years. During his 16-year tenure, 17 new schools were constructed, and the operating budget grew from $900,000 to $7,428,000. Upon my father’s retirement in 1964, U.S. Representative Bob Sikes telegrammed, “I can think of no finer tribute to a man in Public Life than to say he gave every fiber of his being to the job.”

My father turned his full attention to the Crestview ranch, which had been homesteaded by his family generations before. I worked with him during the last years of his life, finding the ranch as a break-even proposition but rewarding if raising cattle was one’s passion, as it was for my father. He had a keen knowledge of each of the 200 cows in the herd. When the calves came, for instance, he always knew which calf belonged to which cow, though it took me several weeks. to learn, and even then, I could never match them all. We worked many long hard days together. His stamina and energy seemed youthful, which might have been an effect of his lifelong discipline to hard work. My father claimed to take a teaspoon of turpentine every day in winter to ward off colds, and he never had any serious illness.

When I left the ranch in 1975 to take a teaching job in Vermont, my father decided to cut back the herd. Early in the morning of September 10, he loaded a truck with cattle to send to market. After he got them all aboard, he sat down next to the cattle chute and died. He was 77 years old.

Shortly thereafter, Red Barber, the famous radio voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, remembered my father in his column in the Tallahassee newspaper:

“I only saw him once and at a distance. It was at a ball game in a small town and in a very small ballpark. It was just an exhibition game in the spring of 1927. The Boston Braves were playing the then-minor league Milwaukee Brewers in Sanford, Florida. This man I saw that one afternoon took my eye every time a fly ball was hit to his area. He was slender, and he moved with a fluid, certain grace. It was a joy to watch him judge where a ball would come down, glide to the spot and with a soft yet sure hand catch the ball. …

“Years later Branch Rickey explained what I had seen and would see many, many times in the big cities of the land—in his phrase, ‘the pleasing skills of the professional.’ And it came back to me in a flash when and where I first became in any way aware of it: 1927, Sanford, watching Lance Richbourg play the outfield.”

Dubbed by one critic as “America’s foremost baseball artist,” LANCE RICHBOURG JR. is an art professor at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, and a member of the Gardner­-Waterman Chapter of SABR. His work is represented by O.K. Harris gallery in New York City. The author wishes to thank Tom Simon and Elaine Segal for their editorial assistance.