World War II had ended with the surrender of Japan on September 2, but few of the ballplayers in the service had yet been demobilized. There was a high caliber of players participating, and the games included Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Billy Herman, Bob Lemon, Johnny Pesky, and Bob Kennedy. The Honolulu Advertiser’s Gayle Hayes wrote that the Navy series would “present more individual stars than even the world series on the mainland… a titanic battle between some of the best known players in baseball” [September 23, 1945]. Herman, Musial, and Dick Wakefield had all been selected for the 1943 All-Star Game.

A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Although this quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, at least one Twain researcher claims a different source.1 Beyond the content of the quote, its disputed deriva­tion highlights the need to resist the urge to assume something to be true just because it is repeated often enough or is viewed as “common knowledge.”

So it is with Roberto Clemente’s sole season in the minor leagues, with the Montreal Royals of the International League in 1954. This saga provides a striking example of a story retold so many times that it takes on a life of its own, eventually becoming so accepted as factual that even a careful researcher may fall into the trap of assuming the claims to be true and not feeling the need to verify them.

Although Clemente spent his entire major league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was originally part of the Brooklyn Dodgers organization. He signed with the Dodgers in February 1954 for a re2ported salary of $5,000 as well as a bonus of $10,000. Rules of the time required a team signing a player for a bonus, including salary, of more than $4,000 to keep him on the major league roster for two years or risk losing him in an off-season draft. Thus, the Dodgers’ choice to have Clemente spend 1954 in the minors meant that they might lose him to another team at the end of the season.3

What has been written about Clemente in Montreal contains a n assertion that th e Dodgers and Royals tried to hide him-that is, play him very little so that other teams wouldn’t notice him. The claim was expressed by Clemente at least as early as 1962 in an article by Howard Cohn in Sport magazine. “Clemente, on the other hand, felt-and still does­ that the Royals kept him out of the regular lineup so big-league teams would think him a weak prospect and ignore him in the post-season draft for which he’d be available as a bonus player if he4 weren’t elevated to the Brooklyn roster,” wrote Cohn.

Since then, this claim has been trumpeted in much that has been written about Clemente’s entry into organized baseball, including several biogra­phies; one of them, by Arnold Hano, was written during Clemente’s career, in 1968, and revised fol­ lowing Clemente’s death in 1972; two biographies, by Kal Wagenheim and Phil Musick, were writ­ ten shortly after Clemente’s death while another, by Bruce Markusen, came out a quarter century later. In early 2006, noted biographer David Maraniss, whose works include Vince Lombardi and Bill Clinton, had a biography of Clemente published.5

The biographers and others who maintain that Clemente was hidden — and beyond that, that the organization may have tried to frustrate Clemente to the point that he would jump the team, making him ineligible to be drafted by another team6 — offer numerous supporting examples. The examples, with few exceptions, turn out to be false.

Decision on Clemente’s Destination

The first question, however, concerns not what hap­pened in Montreal but why the Dodgers did not keep Clemente in Brooklyn in 1954. Many bonus players of this period were kept at the major league level, even though it meant pining on the bench for two years rather than developing in the minors.

As vice president of the Dodgers, Emil “Buzzie” Bavasi had the power to determine Clemente’s fate. In 1955, Bavasi told Pittsburgh writer Les Biederman that the team’s only purpose in signing Clemente had been to keep him away from the New York Giants, even though they knew they would eventually lose him to another team.7

Other explanations offered center around an often cited but never documented informal quota system said to be in effect in the years following the break­ing of the color barrier in organized baseball.8 The Dodgers already had five blacks who would play at least semi-regularly on their parent roster in 1954, presumably leaving no room for another player of color. (The claim of an informal quota is another possible myth that has become widely accepted over time. A check of a specific claim made in Wagenheim’s biography — that the Dodgers would never start all five blacks at the same time — is false, and there are other reasons to question the general claim of a quota system, but it is beyond the realm of this article to fully explore the issue.)9

Although Bavasi had claimed at the time that they signed Clemente only to keep him from the Giants, in 2005 he offered a different reason. “I know your sources are not idiots;’ he wrote in e-mail correspondence with the author, “but not one of those things you mentioned are [sic] accurate. Let’s start from the beginning.” Bavasi then wrote that while there was not a quota in effect, race was the factor in their deci­sion to have Clemente play in Montreal rather than Brooklyn:

“[Dodgers owner] Walter O’ Malley had two partners who were concerned about the number of minorities we would be bringing to the Dodgers. … The concern had nothing to do with quotas, but the thought was too many minorities might be a prob­lem with the white players. Not so, I said. Winning was the important thing. I agreed with the board that we should get a player’s opinion and I would be guided by the player’s opinion. The board called in Jackie Robinson. Hell, now I felt great. Jackie was told the problem, and, after thinking about it awhile, he asked me who would be sent out if Clemente took one of the spots. I said George Shuba. Jackie agreed that Shuba would be the one to go. Then he said Shuba was not among the best players on the club, but he was the most popular. With that he shocked me by saying, and I quote: “If I were the GM [general manager], I would not bring Clemente to the club and send Shuba or any other white player down. If I did this, I would be setting our program back five years.”10

Clemente in Montreal

So Clemente was headed for Montreal to play for manager Max Macon. According to statements attributed to Clemente in a 1966 Sports Illustrated article by Myron Cope, and later picked up by the biographers, the treatment he faced went beyond an attempt to hide him: “The idea was to make me look bad. If I struck out, I stayed in there; if I played well, I was benched.”11

Musick, in Who Was Roberto?, added, “A free swinger, Clemente suffered through stretches when he was not making contact with the ball. Fighting those slumps, he was showcased to disadvantage and stayed in the lineup days at a time.”12

However, box scores from The Sporting News reveal that Macon started Clemente in five straight games early in the season, a strange strategy if a team was trying to hide a player. Clemente had one hit in the first of those games, started again, had three hits, and started the next three games, coming out of the starting lineup only after going hitless in those final three games. This would seem to belie the claims that the organization was trying to make him look bad by rewarding a good performance with a benching and vice versa.

After those five starts Clemente played sparing­ ly over the next few months. Clemente may have, in part, been a victim of a crowded outfield situa­tion in Montreal, which included Jack Cassini, Dick Whitman, and Don Thompson as well as Sandy Amoros, who was sent down from Brooklyn in mid­ May and recalled by the Dodgers in mid-July, and Gino Cimoli, who was transferred to Montreal from the Dodgers’ other Triple-A farm team, the St. Paul Saints, in early May. (Clemente’s opportunities to play may not have been any greater had he been assigned to St. Paul rather than Montreal. With Bud Hutson, John Golich, Bert Hamric, Ed Moore, and Walt Moryn, the Saints, like the Royals, were also heavy on outfielders.)

When Clemente did play, he struggled with his hitting. In early July, his batting average was barely above .200. Part of that may be attributed to his infrequent playing time; it’s hard for a batter to get in a groove and hit well when he doesn’t play regularly. On the other hand, it’s hard for a player to get regular playing time if he’s not hitting well.

Macon said the reason he didn’t use him much at that time was that he “swung wildly,” especially at pitches that were outside of the strike zone. “If you had been in Montreal that year, you wouldn’t have believed how ridiculous some pitchers made him look,” Macon said of Clemente.13

Macon was known around the league for platoon­ing his hitters,14 and that is what happened with Clemente over the latter part of the season. In the first game of a doubleheader against Havana on July 25, Clemente entered the game in the ninth inning, came to the plate in the bottom of the 10th, and hit a game-ending home run.

He started the second game of the doubleheader, against lefthander Clarence “Hooks” Iotts; for the rest of the regular season and through the playoffs, the right-handed-hitting Clemente started every game in which the opposing starter was left-handed and did not start any games against right-handed starters. After July 25, Clemente’s usage was determined by the status of the opposing starting pitcher.

Other claims made to support the notion of Clemente being hidden:

• Clemente hit a long home run in the first week of the season and was benched in the next game.15 (Clemente did not homer until July 25, and he started the next game. His only other home run came on September 5, and, like his earlier homer, was a game-ending shot. Clemente did not start the next game as a right hander, Bob Trice, was the starting pitcher for Ottawa.)
• Clemente was benched after a game in which he had three triples.16 (Clemente did not have three triples in any game in 1954.)
• Clemente was often used only in the second game of a doubleheader, after the scouts had left. 17 (No such pattern of usage is indicated.)

The errors noted above were made by Wagenheim, Musick, and Markusen in their biographies. Maraniss, who went through Montreal newspapers for the 1954 season, avoided many of the inaccurate supporting examples made by the others. However, Maraniss par­roted the claim that Clemente was being set up to fail, writing, “It seemed that whenever he got a chance to play and played well, Macon benched him.”18 Maraniss also wrote, ”After the first four games, Clemente was leading the team in batting, going four for eight. Then he disappeared again.”19 However, Clemente’s disap­pearance after getting three hits in the team’s fifth (not fourth) game was not that abrupt; he started and went hitless in the next three games before going back to the bench.

Overall, Maraniss stuck to the standard story of Clemente being hidden and did not perform any real analysis of the claim. He also did not pick up on the pattern of usage that eventually developed, in which Clemente started regularly against left-handed pitch­ing. As a result, Maraniss cites instances of Clemente not playing over the final seven weeks as evidence of attempts to hide him, rather than the fact that a right­-handed pitcher was starting for the opposing team.

One claim made by biographers that is true regards Clemente being pulled for a pinch-hitter in the top of the first inning of a game. It occurred June 7 at Havana. The Royals had two runs in and the bases loaded with two out when Havana changed pitchers­ right-hander Raul Sanchez coming in for left-hander Hooks Iotts. Left-handed Dick Whitman then hit for Clemente. Although the story is presented as more evidence of how poorly Clemente was treated by Max Macon, it appears clear from the circumstances that it had more to do with Macon’s affinity for platooning and a desire to try and break the game open.

An essentially opposite situation occurred two months later as Toronto manager Luke Sewell, trying to counteract Macon’s platooning, employed a decoy starter. In the first game of an August 3 doublehead­er, Sewell started right hander Arnie Landeck against the Royals and then relieved him with left hander Vic Lombardi in the second inning. As a result, Dick Whitman started for Montreal and was pinch-hit for by Clemente before Whitman could bat even once. Conveniently, this counterpoint to the June 7 story is never mentioned.

Also, the details of Clemente getting pulled in the first inning get botched by the biographers. Markusen says the incident happened against Richmond in the second week of the season.21 Musick also says it occurred in a game against Richmond. However, a few pages later, Musick contradicts himself and says the game was in Rochester (wrong in both cases), that it was the last game of the season (not true), and it was against Rochester’s Jackie Collum (strike three).23

The name of Jackie Collum comes up again in an unrelated story by Wagenheim, who wrote that Clemente had two doubles and a triple off Collum and then was pulled for a pinch-hitter his next time up.24 Nothing like this happened — regardless of the pitcher.

And one has to wonder about references to Collum by two different biographers. Collum did not even pitch for Rochester, or in the International League at all in 1954.

SABR member and Montreal Royals historian Neil Raymond cross-checked the summary compiled by the author from The Sporting News box scores with game accounts and box scores from Montreal news­ papers. (See Clemente’s game-by-game compilation at the end of the article.) “What becomes apparent going through the Montreal papers daily (La Presse, The Gazette, The Star) is that this team was not per­ceived as a player-development exercise;’ maintained Raymond. “They were expected to win. Translation: Sandy Amoros’s at-bats were deemed a lot more valu­able than learning what Clemente could do, building his confidence, or training him by exposing him to opportunities to fail by being overmatched.

“I feel safe in saying that Clemente made very little impression on those who wrote about him during the 1954 campaign. These were iconoclastic writers. Their copy was eagerly sought-after breakfast or dinner fodder. If Clemente was being ‘hidden’ to the detriment of the team’s ability to perform, they would have peeped up. Not once in my newspaper research is there an allusion to this possibility, or a subtle wink at the canniness of the ‘brain trust.’ As difficult as it may be to accept to those who, like me, marveled at Clemente’s multifarious skills and dyna­mism throughout the 1960s (the bad-ball hitting, the cannon-like arm, the heady base running, etc.), it’s abundantly clear that he was almost an invisible man in Montreal in 1954.”25

A More Plausible Argument?

It’s possible that the strongest argument for a theory of hiding could revolve around the timing of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ discovery of Clemente and when Clemente began starting regularly against left­ handed pitching.

The accounts surrounding the discovery are con­sistent in some ways, albeit consistently inaccurate on some details: Clyde Sukeforth, then a Pirates coach, was dispatched on a scouting mission by Branch Rickey, then the Pirates executive vice president­ general manager, to check out Montreal pitcher Joe Black. All accounts say this occurred during a Royals series against Richmond in July. Almost every story says this series was in Richmond, with some of the accounts specifically mentioning Richmond’s Parker Field, although the only series between the two teams that month was in Montreal.

Sukeforth said Black did not pitch that series (not true, he did) and that Clemente’s only appearance was as a pinch-hitter (also not true; his only appearance in the series was as a pinch-runner). Even though Clemente barely appeared in the series, Sukeforth said he noticed, and was impressed by, Clemente while watching him bat and throw in pregame prac­tice. On the basis of Sukeforth’s report, Rickey sent scout Howie Haak for a follow-up visit.

The accounts vary to a much greater degree as to when the Pirates informed the Dodgers and/or Royals that they had discovered Clemente and planned on drafting him. Some reports contend that Sukeforth immediately told Macon of the Pirates’ interest in Clemente.26

The key is when the Dodgers organization found out that the Pirates were planning to draft Clemente. If Clemente was first discovered in the Richmond series in July (meaning that the essence of the story of Sukeforth’s scouting trip is correct even if the spe­cific details are not), and if Sukeforth immediately informed Macon, it raises an interesting possibility. The Richmond series was immediately before the Havana series in which Clemente began starting reg­ularly against left-handers.

If the Royals began playing Clemente more after being informed of the Pirates’ interest, then perhaps it could be argued that the Royals had been hiding Clemente up to that point; however, informed that their gambit had failed, they then decided to play Clemente more.

Even if all these ifs line up, the argument is still a stretch and nothing more than conjecture; however, it is still the most plausible one.

Interestingly, however, this is not the argument advanced by the biographers or anyone else claim­ ing that Clemente was being hidden. In fact, most go in the other direction, saying that the Royals used Clemente even less after being informed of Pittsburgh’s interest. Wagenheim and Markusen even make the outrageous and totally incorrect claim that Clemente did not play in any of the Royals’ final 25 games.27 Although Musick does not make the claim of Clemente not playing in the last 25 games, he writes that Macon restricted Clemente’s playing time even more after Sukeforth’s scouting trip and alleged revelation to Macon.28

Treatment of Max Macon

Maruksen at least provided some balance with quotes from Macon in which the manager denied being under orders to hide Clemente.29 Musick also provided some of Macon’s denials as well as Macon’s contention that pitchers were making Clemente look ridiculous. However, Musick offered these explana­tions on Macon’s part in a patronizing manner as he wrote, “Macon pleads innocence for his former employer twenty years after the fact, but his pleas bring bemused grins to the faces of his contemporaries. And he is part of a baseball establishment that is superprotective of its leaders. There are no skeletons in baseball’s closet: They are quickly ground to dust and scattered to the four winds, lest men of stature be embarrassed.” Musick also refers to Macon’s “southern drawl” becoming “increasingly less reassuring to the player’s Puerto Rican ears.”30

Drafted by Pittsburgh

By the end of the 1954 season, it had become clear to Bavasi and the rest of the Brooklyn brass that other teams were interested in Clemente. However, Bavasi said he still wasn’t ready to give up. The Pirates, by having the worst record in the majors in 1954, had the first pick in the November draft.

If Bavasi could get the Pirates to draft a different player off the Montreal Royals roster, Clemente would remain with the Dodgers organization. (Each team could lose only one player, so if a different Montreal player was taken, then no other team could draft Clemente or any other Royals player.)

Bavasi said he went to Branch Rickey, who had run the Brooklyn Dodgers before going to Pittsburgh. Bavasi had declined Rickey’s offer at that time to follow him to the Pirates, but, according to Bavasi, Rickey then told him, “Should I [Bavasi] need help at anytime, all I had to do was pick up the phone.”

Bavasi said he used this offer of help in 1954 to get Rickey to agree to draft a different player, pitch­er John Rutherford, off the Royals roster. However, Bavasi was dismayed to learn two days later that the deal was off and that the Pirates were going to draft Clemente. “It seemed that Walter O’Malley and Mr. Rickey got in another argument, and it seems Walter called Mr. Rickey every name in the book,” Bavasi explained. “Thus, we lost Roberto.”31

Summary

Some stories and claims may be difficult to fully verify or refute, and it’s possible that the contention that Clemente was being hidden and/or mistreated in Montreal is one of them. While this analysis may not provide a definitive answer one way or another, it is telling that the examples used to support the hiding claim are so consistently incorrect.

In a rather supercilious manner, Phil Musick wrote, “Whether or not the Dodgers consciously tried to hide Clemente from the prying eyes of scouts from other major league clubs is questionable-barely. The evidence insists that the Dodgers ordered him into virtual seclusion in Montreal; Macon insists other­ wise. The evidence does not support his claim.”32

In reality, the claims not supported by the evidence are those made by Musick and the other biographers.

A SABR member since 1979, STEW THORNLEY received the SABR-Macmillan Baseball Research Award in 1988 and the USA Today Baseball Weekly Award for the best research presentation at the 1998 SABR convention in San Mateo, California.

Notes

1. Barbara Schmidt’s web site on Mark Twain (www.twainquotes.com/ Lies.html) says this quote has never been verified as originating with Twain and that a related quote may have originated with British preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who attributed it to a proverb that he once used in a sermon.

2. The Sporting News, March 3, 1954, 26.

3. The bonus rule in effect at that time is chronicled in Baseball’s Biggest Blunder: The Bonus Rule of 1953-1957 by Brent Kelley, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. The rule is also discussed in a Baseball America article (“Despite Baseball’s Best Efforts, Bonuses Just Keep Growing” by Allan Simpson, June 20-July 3, 2005, 10-12). This article says, “Players with less than 90 days of pro experience were designated as bonus players if they signed multi-year contracts or were promised more than $4,000 from a major league team. Bonus players kept their tag for two years. They had to be placed on major league rosters imme­diately and could not be optioned to the minors unless they cleared waivers.”

4. “Roberto Clemente’s Problem” by Howard Cohn, Sport, May 1962, 56.

5. Roberto Clemente: Batting King by Arnold Hano, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973 (update of 1968 edition); Clemente! by Kal Wagenheim, New York: Praeger, 1973; Who Was Roberto? A Biography of Roberto Clemente by Phil Musick, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974; Roberto Clemente: The Great One by Bruce Markusen, Champaign, IL: Sports Publishing, 1998; Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero by David Maraniss, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

6. Musick, 80, 87; Markusen, 26.

7. “Dodgers Signed Clemente Just to Balk Giants” by Les Biederman, The Sporting News, May 25, 1955, 11.

8. Wagenheim, p. 35; Markusen, 33-34.

9. The claim that the Dodgers would not start five blacks in the same game was made by Wagenheim on page 35 of Clemente! Box scores of Brooklyn Dodgers games in 1954 from The Sporting News indicate four instances in which Jim Gilliam, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Sandy Amoros, and Roy Campanella were all in the starting lineup: July 17, August 24, September 6 (second game), and September 15. (The Dodgers had one other black player, pitcher Joe Black, briefly on their roster in 1954, but Black did not start any of the five games in which he pitched.)

10. E-mail correspondence with Buzzie Bavasi, June 3, 2005.

11. A quote from Clemente that contains these claims is in ”Aches and Pains and Three Batting Titles” by Myron Cope, Sports Illustrated, March 7, 1966, 34. One or both of the sentences in the Clemente quote listed in this article are from Wagenheim, 40; Musick, 81; and Markusen, 26.

12. Musick, 81.

13. Musick, 89.

14. The Sporting News, August 18, 1954, 34.

15. Musick, 80-81; Markusen, 18-19.

16. This claim is made in the quote attributed to Clemente in Cope’s 1966 Sports Illustrated article and also picked up by Hano, 27; Wagenheim, 40; Musick, 81; Markusen, 19.

17. Markusen, 27.

18. Maraniss, 46.

19. Maraniss, 43.

20. On page 51, Maraniss tells of a visit by Dodgers front-office personnel but that “it was back to the bench” upon their departure. He also does the same thing on pages 51-53 with stories of the trips by Pittsburgh Pirates scouts to see Clemente, claiming that Macon refused to play Clemente when scout Howie Haak visited. In reality, from the time that Clemente began platooning regularly, there were never more than two consecutive games in which he did not play, and, of course, these were games in which the opposing starting pitcher was right-handed.

21. Markusen, 19.

22. Musick, 81.

23. Musick, 87.

24. Wagenheim, 42.

25. E-mail correspondence with Neil Raymond, July 2005.

26. The discovery of Clemente is described in Cope’s 1966 Sports Illustrated article, 34; also by Hano, 29-30; Wagenheim, 41-42; Musick, 84- 87; and Markusen, 22-24; Maraniss, 51-53, and it is also covered in Branch Rickey in Pittsburgh: Baseball’s Trailblazing General Manager for the Pirates,1950-1955 by Andrew O’Toole, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000, 140-143.

27. Wagenheim, 42; Markusen, 26-27.

28. Musick, 84, 86.

29. Markusen, 26-27.

30. Musick, 86, 88-89.

31. E-mail correspondence with Buzzie Bavasi, June 3, 2005.

32. Musick, 80.

APPENDIX: Statistical Summary of Roberto Clemente’s 1954 Season with the Montreal Royals

(Click images to enlarge)

The uproar surrounding Levan’s banishment in 1959 revealed evidence linking other players to wide­ spread gambling in Southern ballparks. The Southern Association scandal was either, as The Sporting News dismissed it, “relatively insignificant;’1 or a potentially lethal danger that was deftly covered up by baseball authorities.

The story has a whistle-blower, but it has no reso­lution. That’s because the story has no Judge Landis. No Bart Giamatti. No John Dowd. Nobody who followed the evidence wherever it led. The baseball authorities were eager to let the story die.

The whistle-blower was Sammy Meeks, veteran infielder and first-base coach for the Mobile Bears. Meeks told baseball investigators that Levan had approached him in a Mobile hotel before a series between the two teams and introduced him to a gambler. Meeks was offered an unspecified amount of money to participate in a scheme that amounted to sign-giving rather than sign-stealing: from the coach’s box, he was to watch the Lookouts’ shortstop, Waldo Gonzalez. If Gonzalez stood erect, it signaled a fastball; if he crouched, it meant a curve.

Meeks said he declined to take money, but agreed to relay the signs to Mobile batters because he thought it would give his team an edge.

While Meeks, Levan, and the gambler were talk­ ing in the hotel bar, another Mobile player, shortstop Andy Frazier, joined the conversation. Frazier agreed to take the signs from Meeks.2

In the first game of a June 6 doubleheader, Frazier said, Meeks tipped him on two pitches-and both tip-offs were wrong. Mobile won the game, 7-3, when first baseman Gordy Coleman hit a grand-slam home run off Chattanooga’s Jim Kaat, but there was no evi­dence that Coleman knew what was coming.3

The 35-year-old Meeks was released by Mobile June 18 and joined Chattanooga two days later. Shifting his loyalty to his new club, he told Lookouts’ catcher Ray Holton about the incident. Holton alert­ed manager Red Marion and Marion reported it to the team’s president, Joe Engel. The information was relayed to George Trautman, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the gov­erning body of the minors.

Trautman sent his assistant, Phil Piton, to meet Engel, Southern Association President Charlie Hurth, and the Lookouts in Nashville on July 3.4

The executives questioned all Chattanooga players under oath, with a stenographer recording the inter­rogations, in a five-hour session at Nashville’s Andrew Jackson Hotel5 and uncovered more evidence against Jess Levan.

Jim Heise, a 26-year-old right-handed pitcher, revealed that Levan had approached him twice asking whether he wanted “to make a little money” by serving up fat pitches. Heise said he declined.6

Another pitcher, 22-year-old left hander Tom McAvoy, testified that Levan had approached him in Mobile and asked “whether he would like to throw a game.” McAvoy said he thought Levan was joking.7

Jess Levan was a first baseman — like fixers Chick Gandil and Babe Borton 40 years earlier — who had failed to stick in three brief big league trials. The six­-foot left-handed slugger from Reading, Pennsylvania, signed his first professional contract in 1944, but lost the next two years to military service.8 The Phillies gave him nine at-bats as a 20-year-old in 1947, and then he disappeared into the minors except for a 1950 spring training tryout with the Browns.9 He was a career .316 hitter in the minors.10 A . 412 average in 29 games with Charlotte brought him to the parent Washington club’s attention in 1954. Charlotte’s man­ager, the cracker-barrel wit Ellis Clary, said, “I wrote to Calvin Griffith that Levan could do him some good if hitting was still going to be a part of baseball.”

The next spring, Washington owner Clark Griffith likened him to Hall of Farner Goose Goslin, the best hitter in the franchise’s history, saying, “His kind don’t come along very often.” Manager Chuck Dressen and Washington Post writer Shirley Povich touted him as the Nats’ answer to World Series pinch-hitting hero Dusty Rhodes. Povich said Levan was “not much out­ fielder and not much first baseman.” Dressen quipped that his best position was “at bat.”11

With President Eisenhower in the stands on open­ing day in 1955, Levan lined a game-tying pinch single.12 But he delivered only two hits in 15 at-bats over the next month,13 and went from Dusty Rhodes to “hit the road:’ He returned to the minors. At 28, his days as a prospect were over.

In July 1959, shortly before his 32nd birthday, Levan was in his fourth season with AA Chattanooga and was the club’s all-time home run leader with 83.14 He was batting .337.15

Questioned by Hurth, Engel, and Piton, he first denied Sammy Meeks’ accusations, but acknowl­edged that he had introduced Chattanooga players to “an individual unknown to him, but obviously a gam­bler . . . Levan was to receive an unstated amount of money for his services:’ He insisted he never received any money and “he knew nothing of any program to throw games by the deliberate tipping of signs.”

As to Heise’s testimony, “Levan admitted the con­tacts, but continued to insist that he did not know the real purpose of them.” He denied McAvoy’s accusa­ ion altogether.

Levan’s questioners then asked, in effect, “C’mon, you must have known that this gambler wanted to fix games.” Levan replied, “Yes, sir, I’ll agree.”

With that, Levan ended his baseball career.

When confronted by Sammy Meeks, he confessed to a scheme involving signs tipped by Gonzalez, the 25-year-old Cuban shortstop. Gonzalez, called into the room, reluctantly admitted that Levan had dis­cussed the idea with him, but denied taking part.16

When the interrogation was finished, Southern Association President Hurth announced that Levan and Gonzalez were suspended indefinitely for “failure to report a bribery attempt by a gambler.” But he said there was no evidence that either man took any money. The case was forwarded to the National Association for a final ruling.17

The suspensions spurred several sportswriters to ask questions about gambling, a subject that was obviously familiar to them.

On July 28, Bob Christian of the Atlanta Journal reported that the suspensions “could be just one scratch on the surface of gambling activities involv­ing Southern Association players.” Christian’s story was not about game fixing; he focused on gamblers in the stands who bet on foul balls. Relying on a source “masked in deepest secrecy,” he charged that players on “several if not all teams” in the league cooperated with gamblers by deliberately fouling off pitches.

“Betting on foul balls has become increasingly popular in the league’s parks, replacing much of the ‘action’ that formerly was placed on ‘fly balls,”‘ he wrote. He quoted odds set by bookies on whether a player would hit a foul, such as “three-to-one on [one of] the next three pitches” or “three-to-two on any pitch.”

Christian continued, “Betting on Southern Association baseball, once big business, has declined steadily this year.” He quoted an unnamed gambler in one league city: “I used to handle $60,000, maybe $70,000, on a good weekend. But this year I don’t think that I handled that much for the whole season [through July].”18 The league’s shrinking attendance is the likely explanation; the 1959 attendance of just over 600,000 for eight teams was the lowest since the war-shortened 1918 season.19 By September both the Atlanta and Chattanooga franchises were threatening to fold.20

The next day Bud Shrake of the Dallas Times­ Herald chimed in, quoting a former Southern Association player as saying that Chattanooga’s Engel Stadium was “nothing but a gambling casino.”21 The anonymous player added that deliberate fouling of pitches “has been done by some players in the league for years.”22

Shrake said one player, later identified as shortstop Jack Caro, then with Dallas (Texas League), reported “a stranger” had offered him $700 in 1953 to hit three straight fouls, but he refused, partly because he didn’t think he could do it.23

Chattanooga Times sports editor Wirt Gammon, sticking up for his hometown, tried to play down the allegations. He said his contacts in the gambling community reported that betting on foul balls was just “dollar-exchanging”; the bets seldom amounted to more than $20.24

The allegations against Jess Levan were not about foul balls. On July 30, National Association President Trautman handed down his ruling: “For admittedly acting as liaison for a gambler in a program designed to throw Chattanooga games, Jesse Levan is hereby placed on the permanently ineligible list.”25

Trautman said Levan was the first man to be banned for life since a player in the Carolina League in 1948. He declined to identify that player on the grounds that he had become “a respectable citizen:’ (The player was pitcher-manager Barney DeForge of the Reidsville club.)26

Waldo Gonzalez, who did or did not relay his catch­er’s signs, was suspended for one year.27 Trautman justified the lenient sentence because both Levan and Gonzalez testified that Gonzalez refused to pass the signs.28

No other player was disciplined, either because they did not go along with the attempted fix or because they thought it a joke or, in the case of Andy Frazier, who received misleading signals, because he “told the truth.”29

Trautman’s public statement is long and detailed, but it conceals more than it reveals. The state­ ment records nothing beyond what the players said. Levan’s contention that he did not know the gambler in Mobile is not challenged. There is no indication in the public record that Levan or anyone else was asked to name the gambler.There is no indication that he was questioned about how he hooked up with this mystery man or about the identity of those who put him up to his earlier approaches to pitcher Jim Heise. Trautman’s statement does not reveal any effort to examine Levan’s bank records to confirm his claim that he took no money.

The Chattanooga Times’ Gammon reported, “Testimony brought out, but did not reveal for pub­lication, [the gambler’s] first name, his type of build, and what European stock he comes from. Will they catch him?”30 No.

In fact, Trautman’s ruling was written to reassure the public that Levan was merely a lone rogue, if a stupid one. In his first finding, Trautman asserts that after “intensive” questioning, all other Chattanooga players were found innocent.

He mentions no interrogation of other Mobile players besides Frazier and Meeks.

In the next paragraph, he declares, “No proof was obtained at this hearing, or elsewhere as the inves­tigation progressed, that a game or games had actu­ally been ‘thrown.’ “31 If the investigation did progress “elsewhere;’ Trautman’s statement does not say where or how.

Levan denied the charges. “If Meeks was approached, he was approached by a gambler.I did not approach him;’ he said. “I have never been a contact man for any gambler who tried to throw Chattanooga games, as I understand I have been charged. . . This thing has been quite a shock. . . I never approached anybody with a proposition to throw a Chattanooga ball game.”32

“Levan plans to hock his car to hire a lawyer to appeal his life suspension,” The Chattanooga Times reported.33 An appeal was a vain hope; Commissioner Ford Frick had already commented, “It looks as if they had them dead to rights.”34

Trautman later disclosed that Levan had given fur­ther testimony in July, recounting that he and other players had been approached by gamblers in 1959 and asked to throw a doubleheader between Chattanooga and Mobile. He said the players refused. Again, no gamblers were named.35

The banishment of Levan had its “say it ain’t so” moment. That was the headline above a UPI story in the August 2 Atlanta Journal: “Say It Ain’t So, Jesse:’ It recounted how 10-year-old Lookouts bat-boy Bo Short, vacationing with his family in Daytona Beach, Florida, learned of his favorite player’s dis­grace.”It’s like a bad dream;’ he told UPI, “choking back tears:’ Bo had gone to spring training with his father, Chattanooga Times sportswriter George Short, and Levan had helped him with his homework: “He told me I had to study my lessons and do the right thing.”36

The scandal also produced the ritual hand-wring­ing. The Chattanooga Times reported, “The FBI is on this case.”37 The Chattanooga district attorney asked for a transcript of the ballplayers’ testimony.38 A Mobile newspaper called for a grand jury inves­tigation.39 Atlanta Journal reporter Bob Christian was invited to tell what he knew to a Georgia grand jury.40

No further reports on any of those investigations ever appeared.

But that was not the end of it. As a result of the news stories about betting on foul balls, Trautman’s assistant Phil Piton conducted another round of inter­views in August with former Southern Association players. Jack Caro of Dallas admitted that he was the player who turned down $700 to hit foul balls.Caro said he told about it after the Levan case was publi­cized, but at the time he thought it was a joke. Piton said Caro was the only player to admit knowledge of such activities. He was not disciplined.41

In November, Trautman decreed a second lifetime ban, this time for the only player who admitted taking money from gamblers. Former major league catcher Joe Tipton had confessed to the baseball investigators that he received payoffs for hitting foul balls while he was playing for Birmingham against Chattanooga in 1957. His take: $50 from Jess Levan, an additional $75 received in the mail. Tipton said Levan had put him up to it.

Tipton also revealed that he had been approached in Birmingham in 1958 by a gambler who said he was from Chattanooga, and who asked him to persuade other players to hit foul balls for money. Again, no gambler was named.

The 37-year-old Tipton was out of baseball by 1959. Trautman said he had come forward “because of his desire to clear his conscience.”42

Trautman also announced that Levan’s appeal had been denied.

And that was the end of it. Jess Levan was ban­ished, claiming all the while that he never received any money. Joe Tipton was banished for taking the piddling sum of $125.

Levan’s gambler contacts? No follow-up. Betting in other parks? No follow-up.The Chattanooga ball­park was “a gambling casino?” No follow-up. An examination of The Sporting News and several daily newspapers for a year after the scandal turned up no additional stories.

In its year-end roundup of baseball activities in 1959, The Sporting News dismissed the incident as “a blown-up gambling scandal in the minors that prom­ised to shake the foundations of the game yet proved relatively insignificant…. [T]he probe led to the uncovering of little gambling activity and that direct­ed to betting on foul balls.”43

Not that gambling and baseball were strangers, 40 years after the Black Sox and 30 years before Pete Rose. The Sporting News published the Las Vegas betting line on the 1960 major league pen­nant races: Yankees, 4-5; Braves 7-5.44 In July 1960, Chicago police arrested 20 bleacherites in a gambling raid at Wrigley Field. The “Baseball Bible” reported, “Hundreds of dollars were wagered, sometimes just on the umpire’s calls on balls and strikes.” Commissioner Frick had called the cops after finding that “gambling conditions at the Cubs’ park were among the worst in the majors.”45 There were many other published reports of police raids on gamblers in major and minor league parks in the 1940s and 1950s.46

The story of the Southern Association scandal went away, but the gamblers in the ballparks did not. Four years later, Ed Doherty, a veteran baseball executive who was general manager of the Nashville Vols (then in the Sally League after the Southern Association folded), pointed the team’s new play-by-play broad­caster toward a group of men sitting behind the third­ base dugout.”They’re gamblers,” Doherty warned. “I don’t want you to mention them on the air.”

The young announcer had heard of the Black Sox and naively believed that Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had driven the gamblers out of baseball. “What do they bet on?” he asked.

“They’ll bet on anything;’ Doherty replied. “Why, they’ll bet on a foul ball.”47

15 MEN OUT

Jess Levan and Joe Tipton were among 15 minor league players banned on gambling-related charges from 1920 to 1959. The others:

Merry Christmas, Babe

First baseman William Baker “Babe” Borton of the Pacific Coast League Vernon Tigers and Harl Maggert, William Rumler, and Gene Dale of Salt Lake City were kicked out in 1920 for allegedly fixing the 1919 PCL pennant race.

Opposing players testified that Borton had offered them bribes “to lay down in games against Vernon, so Vernon could win the pennant” — as it did.48

Borton confessed, but sloshed gasoline on the fire: He claimed his Vernon teammates had raised a pool to pay off their opponents. His teammates denied it. League president W. H. McCarthy believed Borton was covering for a gambling syndicate that had put up the money.

In December a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Borton, Maggert, Rumler, and Nate Raymond, an alleged gambler from Seattle, for crimi­nal conspiracy to fix games. The grand jury named two dozen people who allegedly put up a bribe pool of $3,995, including Roscoe Arbuckle (the real name of silent-film star Fatty Arbuckle, a part-owner of the Vernon club) and S. Goldwyn. (Samuel Goldwyn, the “G” in MGM, was a pioneer movie producer.)

On Christmas Eve a judge dismissed the charges because fixing games was not a crime under California law.49

Salt Lake City pitcher Gene Dale never spoke to the grand jury or to baseball investigators. Borton named him as one who had taken payoffs.50

Borton, 32, had played regularly for St. Louis of the Federal League in 1915 and had trials with three American League teams. Maggert, a 37-year-old outfielder, had played briefly in the majors as far back as 1907. Outfielder Rumler, 29, had played part-time in three seasons with the Browns. (He was later reinstated.)51 Dale, 31, had pitched in the majors with the Reds and Cardinals.52

A Gloomy Right-Hander

Pitcher Julio Bonetti of the PCL Los Angeles Angels was released in 1941 for associating with gamblers. A private detective hired by the team saw Bonetti take a handful of cash from an alleged gambler a few hours before he started, and lost, a game. Bonetti at first denied it, but eventually said he had placed a bet on a horse race for the gambler. He insisted he did not throw the game.

Sinker-balling right hander Bonetti, 28, had won 20 games for the Angels in 1939. He had a tryout with the Cubs the following spring, but was sold back to Los Angeles. A sportswriter said he had been “gloomy” because he didn’t think the Cubs had given him a fair chance. He won 14 games for the Angels in 1940 and seven in 1941 before he was released.53 The published record does not show that he was officially banned; he was in the Army the next year.54

“Fooling Around”

Outfielder Hooper Triplett of the Sally League Columbus (GA) Cardinals was banned in 1946 for betting $20 against his team. Triplett claimed he was only “fooling around.” His statements and those of others hinted he was drunk when he placed the bet.

Triplett was the 26-year-old brother of former big league outfielder Coaker Triplett. He returned to base­ ball that season after three years in the military.55

“A Combination Baseball Club and Bookie Hangout”

In the most celebrated gambling scandal since the Black Sox, five players in the Class D Evangeline League were banished after they were accused of throwing games in the 1946 post-season playoffs: manager-first baseman Paul Fugit, third baseman Alvin W. Kaiser, center fielder Leonard Pecou, and pitcher Bill Thomas of the Houma, Louisiana, Indians and catcher Don Vettorel of Abbeville, Louisiana.56

One sportswriter said the investigation painted the Houma team as “a combination baseball club and bookie hangout where the players did everything except stop in the middle of a double play to rush off and play the daily double. Bookies not only invaded club premises but wore Houma uniforms.”57

Although Houma won both playoff series, the players were accused of throwing one game against Abbeville in the finals and two others in the previous round against Alexandria, Louisiana.

National Association President W. G. Bramham said the players had been hanging out in gambling houses and betting heavily on horse races. Bramham found “circumstantial evidence ” of thrown games, but his official ruling banned them for associating with gamblers.Testimony indicated that some of the Houma players were employed by bookies.Fugit said some players came to Houma after a crackdown on gambling in New Orleans left them unemployed.

Bramham, who was retiring, said his successor, George Trautman, would continue the investigation. He added, “The situation in the Evangeline League is very, very bad.”58

A month later, Trautman declared the investi­gation closed and gave the league “a clean bill of health.”59 At the National Association’s fall meeting in Minneapolis, he lamented, “This evil [gambling], like the poor, is always with us.”60

All the players maintained their innocence. Pecou and Thomas were reinstated three years later.61 The Sporting News reported the bans were lifted due to “circumstances beyond (Trautman’s ) control.” The circumstances were not mentioned.62

Thomas won a minor league record 383 games without reaching the majors.In 1946, when he was 41 years old, he won 35 regular-season games for Houma and four more in the playoffs.After he returned from suspension, he won 23 in the Evangeline League in 1950 and pitched on for two more years.63

“They Don’t Care Anything About You”

Center fielder Al McElreath of Muskogee in the Class A Western Association was declared permanently ineligible for trying to persuade teammates to throw a 1947 game and committing intentional misplays in the game. McElreath said the charges were “a lie.”

A teammate said he refused to be part of the fix, and McElreath told him, “I don’t see why you won’t do it because they don’t care anything about you.”

National Association President Trautman heard testimony that the usually reliable outfielder stag­ gered under a fly ball and let it drop behind him. At bat he signaled for a hit-and-run but didn’t swing, and the runner was thrown out.

Marion Allen McElreath was 32 and had played in the minors since 1931, rising as high as AA, then the top level.64

“A Considerable Temptation”

In 1948 Barney DeForge, pitcher-manager of Reidsville, North Carolina, in the Class C Carolina League, and Emanuel Weingarten, owner of two teams in other Southern minor leagues, were banned after DeForge admitted fixing a game in return for the big payoff of $300.

DeForge put himself in as a relief pitcher when Reidsville was trailing Winston-Salem, 2-0, and quickly gave up four walks and a wild pitch.The final score, 5-0, beat the spread being offered by a gambler in the stands.(Betting on run spreads was unusual in baseball because the scores are usually so low.)

North Carolina was one of the few states where fixing games was a felony.A Forsyth County grand jury indicted the 31-year-old DeForge along with Weingarten, the alleged go-between, and the alleged gambler, a South Carolina used-car dealer named W.C.McWaters.Another South Carolina car dealer, Tommy Phillips, was later added as a defendant.65

At trial in Winston-Salem, DeForge testified as a prosecution witness, admitting guilt and implicating his co-defendants. He was convicted on the basis of his own testimony, but the jury acquitted McWaters and Phillips. The Sporting News account gives no explanation for that verdict. Weingarten had died, apparently of natural causes, before the trial.

DeForge appears to be the only player ever con­victed on a criminal charge of throwing a game.

The prosecutor and the Forsyth County sheriff, former big league pitcher Ernie Shore, urged leniency for DeForge because he “came clean.” He received a suspended sentence.66

Ed McAuley of the Cleveland News, commenting on the case, pointed to the pitifully small salaries in the low minors: “Three hundred dollars would rep­ resent a considerable temptation to a fellow in such circumstances.”67

McAuley and Robert L.Burnes, sports editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, saw a common thread in the betting scandals of 1946-1948: poor pay and the large number of veteran players who hung on in the expanding low minors after World War II.

”Are the players in the depths of the minor leagues, in the B, C and D classes, being paid a living wage?” Burnes asked. “The answer …is a definite no.” He said Class C players were averaging about $10 a game, those in Class D $5 to $10-good enough for a young man with high hopes, not so good for a veteran who had to be resigned to earning $150 or $200 a month for the rest of his career.68

With 58 minor leagues in operation in 1948,69 McAuley estimated 15,000 men were playing profes­sional baseball. Many lost the prime of their careers to the war. “There are scores of veterans who long ago abandoned hope of reaching the majors,” he said.70

Burnes’s and McAuley’s analysis is supported by later events. As the minors shrank dramatically in the 1950s, small-town independent leagues like the Evangeline disappeared. The surviving teams came under increasingly tight control by their big league parents. Shrunken farm systems had fewer slots for minor league lifers, while a growing American econ­omy offered more and better job opportunities for poorly educated men.

Except for the Southern Association scandal in 1959, no minor leaguer has since been banned for involvement in gambling or game-fixing.

Another common theme connects the minor league scandals, from Babe Borton in 1920 to Jess Levan 39 years later: the accusations against one player, or a handful, usually led to reports of much wider gambling problems. League presidents promised crackdowns on betting in the stands; they vowed to enforce rules against players on the field talking to fans. But none of the investigations of widespread gambling ever went anywhere.

WARREN CORBETT, a former batting champion of the Bearden, Tennessee, Little League, is the editor of a trade publication in Washington.

Notes

1. The Sporting News, December 30, 1959, 5.
2. Chattanooga Times, July 31, 1959, 31. The Times printed the Associated Press transcript of National Association President George Trautman’s July 30 ruling in the case, hereinafter cited as “Trautman ruling.”
3. Ibid. and Chattanooga Times, August 1, 1959, 12.
4. Trautman ruling.
5. Chattanooga Times, July 6, 1959, 11. The author queried the pres­ent-day governing body of the minors and the Baseball Hall of Fame library, but no trace of the stenographic record has been found.
6. Trautman ruling.
7. Ibid.
8. Documents in Levan’s file at the Hall of Fame library.
9. www.sportplanet.com.
10. SABR Minor League Stars, Vol. 3, 22.
11. Washington Post, March 30, 1955, 29.
12. The Sporting News, April 20, 1955, 22.
13. Retrosheet player page; Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, 8th ed.
14. Washington Post and Times Herald, July 5, 1959, C4.
15. SABR’s Minor League Stars Vol. III, 95.
16. Trautman ruling.
17. Chattanooga Times, July 4, 1959, p. 1.
18. Atlanta Journal, July 28, 1959, p. 10.
19. The Sporting News, September 16, 1959, 31.
20. Atlanta Journal, September 2, 1959, 40.
21. Quoted in an Associated Press story, Washington Post and Times­ Herald, August 19, 1959, C4.
22. Quoted in Atlanta Journal, November 14, 1959, 6. Bud Shrake, a famous Texas character, is the co-author of Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book. Austin Chronicle, November 2, 2001.
23. Associated Press story in Washington Post and Times Herald, August 19, 1959, C4.
24. Chattanooga Times, August 4, 1959, 11.
25. Trautman ruling.
26. UPI story in the New York Times, July 31, 1959, 15. DeForge: The Sporting News, July 9, 1948, 5.
27. Trautman ruling. Gonzalez sat out the 1960 season, then played briefly for two minor league teams in 1961. (Old-Time Data, Shawnee Mission, KS.)
28. The Sporting News, August 5, 1959, 23. The Associated Press text of Trautman’s ruling, published in the July 31 Chattanooga Times, reads, “…both Levan and Gonzalez testified that he actually did pass signs to certain Mobile batsmen:’ I accept The Sporting News version because it is consistent with the statements quoted in the rest of the ruling and because, if Gonzalez admitted “that he actually did pass signs;’ leni­ ency would not have been justified. In all other respects, the AP text conforms to excerpts quoted elsewhere.
29. Trautman ruling.
30. Chattanooga Times, August 2, 1959, D1.
31. Trautman ruling.
32. UPI story in New York Times, July 31, 1959, 15.
33. Chattanooga Times, August 1, 1959, p. 11.
34. Ibid., July 31, 1959, 31.
35. The Sporting News, November 25, 1959, 6.
36. Atlanta Journal, August 2, 1959, D1. Bo’s father probably wrote the story, since newspaper writers commonly picked up extra money by contributing to the wire services.
37. Chattanooga Times, July 7, 1959, 11.
38. The Sporting News, September 2, 1959, 22.
39. Associated Press story in Atlanta Journal, August 1, 1959, 11.
40. Associated Press story in Chattanooga Times, July 31, 1959, 31.
41. Associated Press story in Washington Post and Times Herald, August 19, 1959, C4.
42. The Sporting News, November 25, 1959, 6. Tipton was a backup catcher in the majors from 1948 through 1954. His only claim to fame is that he was traded from the White Sox to the Athletics for Nellie Fox. He died in 1994.
43. The Sporting News, December 30, 1959, 5.
44. Ibid., Nov. 17, 1959, 7.
45. Ibid., Aug.3, 1960, 28.
46. Curiously, stories on that topic vanished from TSN after 1960. Whether the paper decided to stop reporting them, or whether police decided they had better things to do, cannot be determined.
47. The author was the young broadcaster.
48. The Sporting News, August 19, 1920, 3.
49. Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1920, IIIl; December 11, 1920, Ill; December 25, 1920, 6.
50. Ibid., October 21, 1920, IIIL
51. Daniel Ginsburg, author of The Fix Is In (McFarland, 1995) in an e-mail exchange with the author, January 31, 2004.
52. Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia.
53. L.A. Times, July 3, 1941, 1.
54. Ibid., October 22, 1942, 19.
55. The Sporting News, August 21, 1946, 17 and September 4, 1946, 12.
56. Ibid., February 5, 1947, 1.
57. United Press story in the New York Times, January 30, 1947, 28.
58. The Sporting News., February 5, 1947, 1.
59. Ibid., March 12, 1947, 18.
60. Ibid., December 8, 1948.
61. George W. Hilton, “The Evangeline League Scandal of 1946,” SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, 1982, 102.
62. The Sporting News, September 14, 1949, 8.
63. SABR’s Minor League Stars, vol. I, rev. ed. 1984, 122.
64. The Sporting News, June 11, 1947, 11.
65. Ibid., July 9, 1948, 5.
66. Ibid., November 3, 1948, p.11; Weingarten’s death: Ibid., July 14, 1948, p. 42.
67. Ibid. June 16, 1948, p. 9.
68. Ibid., p. 10.
69. Total Baseball, 5th ed., 460. Fifty or more minor leagues started each season from 1947 to 1951, the highest number in history.
70. The Sporting News, June 16, 1948, 9.

For the residents of Macomb, Illinois, it was a scene straight out of the movie Field of Dreams. The infamous “Black Sox” had mysteriously showed up in their town, on their field, ready to play ball.

Only they did not emerge from a mystical cornfield on the horizon, but rather a friend’s automobile parked behind the grandstand. And “Shoeless” Joe Jackson wasn’t the only one who showed up wanting to play; he brought his teammates Eddie Cicotte and Charles “Swede” Risberg, as well.

Just five weeks removed from the “Trial of the Century” (before there was even such a designation), a trial in which they were acquitted by a cheering jury and then promptly banished from the game by baseball’s new commissioner, the three disgraced ballplayers were back in uniform together for the first* time.

The date was September 11, 1921.

* * *

Exactly one year earlier, Jackson, Cicotte and Risberg were at Comiskey Park in Chicago — as they had been for most of the previous decade — battling for the American League pennant late in the season.1 They did not realize that these were the final games of their professional careers.

On September 28, 1920, Cicotte walked into White Sox team counsel Alfred Austrian’s office and confessed that he had plotted to “throw” the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, an admission that sent shock waves around the country.2 Jackson followed Cicotte to testify to a grand jury convened in Chicago to investigate gambling in baseball. Under pressure from White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and his lawyer Austrian, both players admitted their involvement in the fix, implicating six other teammates: Risberg, Lefty Williams, Chick Gandil, Happy Felsch, Fred McMullin and Buck Weaver.3

In March 1921, indictments were handed down against the eight ballplayers and a handful of gamblers; a criminal conspiracy trial began in June.4 Under a national spotlight, it took just over five weeks before the jury declared them not guilty of conspiracy on August 2.5 But their fate was sealed that same night. As they toasted their freedom in a party with members of the jury at a local Italian restaurant6, newly appointed baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was busy preparing a statement:

“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no man who throws a game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”7

Suddenly, their careers were over. None of them would ever set foot in a major league park again.

Cicotte, the oldest of the eight players, was just 37 years old. His only livelihood had disappeared, as had that of his teammates. Lacking any outside work experience and without the benefit of much more than an elementary education — McMullin had gone to high school in Los Angeles, but Weaver had quit school in the eighth grade and the famously illiterate Jackson was working by the time he was 8 years old8 — their prospects for the future were not bright.

Eddie Cicotte

So the “Eight Men Out” did the only thing they knew how: they went looking for a game.

Over the next decade, they traveled throughout the country and even into Canada and Mexico just to play baseball for a living. Their road trips were not to Detroit, Boston and Washington anymore, but to dots on the map such as Douglas, Arizona; Bastrop, Louisiana; and Waycross, Georgia.9

They played together and apart, for one semipro game at a time and for whole seasons in outlaw leagues. They were celebrated and cheered by some fans, jeered and ridiculed by others. They stirred up controversy everywhere they played. It was a nomadic life that most of the players kept up for the rest of the 1920s and, for some, even into the mid-1930s. But barred from professional baseball — and taking grief from Commissioner Landis, who threatened to suspend anyone caught playing against the Black Sox — it was all they had left.10

This is how Jackson, Cicotte and Risberg found themselves suiting up for a game in a rural town in western Illinois less than five weeks after they stood on trial for conspiring to “fix” the World Series. The stakes here were much different, but they were just as meaningful to the towns involved — this was for the championship of McDonough County.

* * *

Since their inception in the early 19th century, the towns of Colchester and Macomb were engaged in a spirited battle on political, economic and cultural levels.11 The county seat (Macomb) and the mining town on the outskirts (Colchester), connected at the time by one paved road and separated by just seven miles12, were no different than thousands of other budding communities around the nation. And like thousands of other American small towns, nowhere was their rivalry more intense than on the baseball field.

Swede Risberg

By the end of World War I, both the Colchester and Macomb teams were very competitive around western Illinois, regularly beating the likes of surrounding communities such as Industry, Rushville and Bushnell, Negro traveling teams from Galesburg and Monmouth, and other barnstorming squads that passed through the area.13

On June 19, 1921 — eight days before the Black Sox trial began in Chicago — the McDonough County rivals met up at Colchester’s Red Men Park for an early-season grudge match. The field, on the northeast side of town, was maintained by the Colchester team’s sponsor, a fraternal group called the Improved Order of Red Men.14

It was a good day to root for the home team. Colchester’s 14-1 win caused Colchester Independent editor J.H. Bayless to write:

“Once upon a time, a bunch of nice young men in the city of Macomb had a dream. They dreamed that they were ball players and could beat most any team in these parts. … They undertook to use the Colchester Redmen [sic] as their first stepping stone to fame and fortune, but alas and alack, their plans miscarried and they were trampled on, figuratively speaking.”15

The over-the-top boasting surely did not sit well with Macomb’s proud civic leaders, adding an extra painful insult to the bruised egos they sustained in the loss. Macomb vowed that the two-game series on Independence Day weekend would not have the same result.16

Colchester Red Men baseball team, circa 1910s. Like thousands of other American small towns before World War II, Colchester’s civic leaders prided themselves on fielding a competitive baseball team. (Western Illinois University / John E. Hallwas)

Colchester predicted, as was the custom for many town teams in those days, that Macomb would find a way to improve its team for the next game — and they were right. Not a single one of the nine players who took the field for Macomb on July 3 had been with the team two weeks earlier.17

Macomb’s desire to win overstepped even racial boundaries. Their new shortstop and cleanup hitter was Adolph “Ziggy” Hamblin, a black player from Galesburg who was a three-sport star at nearby Knox College.18 Nearly a quarter-century before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, employing a talented black player for an important game was not an unprecedented step for some semipro teams.19 Macomb also added, among others, a hard-hitting third baseman, “Boots” Runkle, a second baseman from Knox College named Welch, and an outfielder from Monmouth College who used the alias “Johnson.”20

Macomb’s additions had the desired effect, as Colchester managed five hits in a 3-0 loss. The second game, on July 4, was just as well-played, but Colchester pulled this one out to win 4-2 in the 13th inning on a two-run home run by one of their own new players, a right fielder named Marks.21

Both teams showed up at Red Men Park the following Sunday for what was supposed to be the deciding third game (apparently the June 21 result was discounted because both lineups had turned over so much). Macomb brought in another minor leaguer named Switzer, who had reportedly played for the Rock Island club of the Three-Eye League. Colchester took advantage of Ziggy Hamblin’s absence — which was noted but not explained by the local newspapers — to win going away, 8-4.22

* * *

Ten days after that decisive third game in Colchester, the Macomb Journal published an Associated Press article about the Black Sox trial in Chicago, which garnered national headlines all summer long.23

As the trial dragged on throughout July 1921, Shoeless Joe Jackson bided his time with friends at his successful South Side poolroom and cigar store on 55th Street in Chicago, which he had owned and operated for about a year.24 Students from the nearby University of Chicago popularized the hangout, which also might have been frequented by Henry “Kelly” Wagle on his trips to the big city. Wagle was a 35-year-old Colchester supporter who placed more than a rooting interest in the team’s games against Macomb — usually a few dollars or more.25

Henry “Kelly” Wagle

In Colchester, Wagle cultivated his image as a philanthropic businessman, generous to one and all, raised by an upstanding family, respected around town — and he was all of those things — but everyone knew what he really was: a bootlegger.26 Prohibition had opened the doors to organized crime in America’s small towns, and Wagle was one of the most successful at his chosen profession this side of Al Capone. In fact, he soon became friends with the notorious mob boss27, and Wagle often drove one of his flashy automobiles — in 1921 alone, he owned a black Ford, a white Cadillac and a blue Marmon28 — across Illinois’ rural highways to meet Capone. In those years, Wagle acquired most of his alcohol from a supplier at 35th and Halsted streets in Chicago, about eight blocks from Comiskey Park, and near where many of the White Sox lived.29 The sociable Wagle no doubt struck up conversations with the players and likely even slipped them a quart of “booze” from time to time.30

It was an especially difficult summer for the ballplayers, because baseball had turned its back on the “Eight Men Out.” However, they still had plenty of opportunities to play for money — even in Chicago, where they passed the hat around the bleachers at White City Ball Park on Sunday afternoons before the trial began in July.31 Hundreds of fans showed up at the corner of 63rd Street and South Park Avenue each weekend to see Jackson, Cicotte, Risberg, Gandil and Williams, on a team promoted as the “South Side Stars,” play the likes of the local Elks’ Club, the “Nebraska Indians” and the “Woodlawns.”32

The Black Sox did not lack for offers to play in other cities, either. The Boston Globe reported that more than 50 towns had invited one or more of the players to a Sunday game, even as the trial was going on. The article stated that Jackson was “sought by half a dozen Wisconsin towns,” Williams was wanted by “several Iowa points” and Cicotte had turned down several requests “as to whether he could pitch tomorrow [July 25].”33

While some of the more lucrative — and nearby — offers were eagerly accepted, many were turned down for various reasons, not the least of which was that the possibility of jail time was still very real. So mostly they stayed at home in Chicago; Jackson managing his poolroom, Weaver tending his drugstore, Cicotte taking care of his family, all laying low on the south side.34

When Kelly Wagle made contact to ask for their assistance and athletic expertise in his hometown of Colchester, the request was likely met with indifference at first. But Wagle had a charming way of disarming even the most guarded of exiled ballplayers, and his advances did not go unnoticed.35 There would be money in it for the players, of course, and no hassles other than the customary catcalls from the bleacher bums when they showed up for the game — nothing they weren’t used to by now. All Wagle asked was that the players not tell anyone but him if they chose to accept.

In the meantime, Lefty Williams was receiving a similar offer from backers of the Macomb team.36 Wagle had known about this ahead of time, having made it his habit as a bettor to be prepared for situations before they occurred, but he figured that Williams would not want to leave his wife, Lyria, in Chicago and travel to Macomb (250 miles away) for a game so soon after the trial. Wagle’s assessment was accurate: the lefthander would not be pitching for Macomb or Colchester, not now, not ever.37

But Jackson seemed willing to listen to Wagle’s offer, as did Risberg and Gandil, the two purported ringleaders of the 1919 World Series fix. Cicotte was also interested; after declining most of his non-Chicago offers from various promoters during the summer, “Knuckles” said he wouldn’t mind suiting up, too.38

First, however, there was another game to play.

* * *

While Colchester was busy courting the Black Sox, Macomb was securing the services of a right-handed fireballer who called himself “Frank Smith.” Although his identity was never revealed, it was reported that Smith was a former hurler in the Three-Eye League and a St. Louis Browns farmhand.39 While his background and his pedigree remained a mystery, his talent was decidedly not. After joining Macomb in mid-July, Smith dominated in his first two starts over Bushnell and Industry, leading the Macomb Journal to boast that it was the clear — if unofficial — champion of McDonough County, which brought a quick rebuke from Bayless.40

A game was scheduled for August 21 at Red Men Park, and talk soon began to swirl that both teams were trying to recruit more “ringers” for the highly anticipated contest. On August 18, the Macomb By-Stander reported that “rumor had it” Colchester was on the verge of bringing in players from Chicago — which was only half right. Colchester showed up for the game with two players from the University of Chicago, catcher Clarence Vollmer and a top semipro pitcher called “Adams.”41

Macomb countered with another minor leaguer, Jimmie Connors of Rock Island’s Three-Eye League club, who played first base for Macomb. Now their roster was comprised of four collegiate players and three minor-leaguers, including the pitcher.42 It was an imposing lineup and also a successful one. Frank Smith was his usual impressive self against Colchester, “a complete master of the situation from beginning to end” in a 4-0 shutout.43

It was “the most sensational game played in the mining city in the last decade,” boasted the Macomb Journal — an exhibition worthy of an encore. A fifth and final game had already been scheduled, for September 11 at Macomb, before the 1,300 spectators had even cleared the grounds.44

The upcoming “championship” game was the talk of both towns immediately afterward, and it would continue to be so until September 11 — three weeks away. J.H. Bayless made a seemingly innocuous remark near the end of his game story in the Colchester Independent: “We believe that we can improve the team a little with some of our home boys.”45 Bayless wasn’t aware that the same idea had already passed through Kelly Wagle’s mind.

* * *

In the Macomb Journal, just below the box score signifying Macomb’s victory over Colchester was a small box, labeled, “This Time Last Year.” The final item mentioned that the Chicago White Sox were leading the American League standings one year ago — on August 22, 1920.46

But that didn’t matter to Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte and their six former White Sox teammates — their major-league careers were over for good. Commissioner Landis, a federal judge in Illinois since 1905, had laid down his own brand of the law when the law had failed to find the players guilty of any crime. His announcement that banned the players for life came just hours after the verdict was handed down in Chicago.47

Organized baseball quickly made it clear that the “Eight Men Out” would not be welcomed back. The National Association, the game’s ruling body, announced that it would not allow any of the Black Sox to play in the minor leagues, while many semipro leagues, such as the Lake Shore League in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, voted against the players’ participation, as well.48

The residents of McDonough County, however, had no such referendum on which to vote for or against the “baseball crooks.” Kelly Wagle was very good at keeping a secret — his darkest one would not be uncovered until a year after his death.

Wagle’s early efforts to secure the Black Sox had paid off. In addition to Jackson, Cicotte and Risberg, Chick Gandil had also agreed to play against Macomb for a reasonable fee — in advance, of course.49 They had learned from their bungled World Series fix, when only Cicotte had received, on demand, a payment before Game One. Gandil had spent the rest of the Series begging the gamblers for the money he had promised his teammates, with little success.50

The Black Sox did not always ask for their money up-front; they knew that usually they could rake in far more by passing the hat around the bleachers during the game.51 But because their participation was to be unveiled on the day of the game, there would not be enough time to promote their presence, which was sure to bring in a larger crowd. While no records exist showing how much Wagle offered to pay the players, they likely received about $250 apiece, give or take a bottle of whiskey. That was the equivalent of two weeks’ salary for a major-league player making $6,000 per year, and easily affordable for Wagle.52 He planned to make much more on the game itself.

Money — whether it was because they were paid poorly (editor’s note: they were not) or they simply were greedy — was a prime motivating factor for the Black Sox to consider fixing the World Series back in 1919. It was also the reason the players were willing to suit up for Colchester against Macomb. Because of their suspensions, they no longer were receiving paychecks from the White Sox.53 Jackson, Weaver, Risberg, and Felsch later sued the team for back pay owed to them, but these cases were not resolved until years later, when it was getting harder for them to make ends meet simply by playing semipro and outlaw games around the country.54 A hundred dollars or two for an afternoon’s work was easily worth the effort.

* * *

Meanwhile, baseball fever was rising throughout McDonough County as the calendar turned to September.

Macomb’s confidence was high in the days leading up to the “championship” game on September 11. The Journal wrote, “With a team not considered as fast as this, they defeated the Colchester importations before, and they believe they can do it again.”55

By all accounts, Colchester’s team had not changed. They still had “the three Chicago players engaged that they secured before, according to the dope from that city.”56 None of the three newspapers in McDonough County even hinted at the possibility that “the three Chicago players” were any different than Vollmer, Adams, and a semipro catcher by the name of “Kid” Standard, who was a distant relative of Dr. A.P. Standard, the newly elected president of the Macomb Fairgrounds Association.57 Kelly Wagle’s secret was secure.

On Saturday, September 10, Wagle was busy meeting four out-of-towners who had arrived on the 6:18 p.m. train from Kansas City.58 It was Jackson, Cicotte, Risberg and the catcher, Standard. Chick Gandil had also traveled with them from Oklahoma but missed the train in Kansas City after calling on some friends between connections. Before the ballplayers could be noticed by anyone in town, Wagle quickly whisked them up to Bushnell, a small community 15 miles northeast of Macomb, where they spent the night.59

Finally, after all the hype that had been building for four months, it was time for the big game between Colchester and Macomb — a game that would be talked about in McDonough County for years to come.

* * *

Sunday, September 11, 1921, arrived quietly but with great anticipation. Game time was set for 3 p.m. at the Macomb Fairgrounds, and a typically large crowd was expected there when the unofficial championship of McDonough County was to be decided.60

As the fans trickled in to the ballfield, where additional wooden bleachers had been set up down the foul lines to accommodate the throng that would reach 1,611, they noticed nothing out of the ordinary.61 Adams was warming up with Clarence Vollmer on one side of the diamond, while Frank Smith was on the other side loosening up his arm with his catcher, a minor-leaguer named Wilson. Members of the Macomb team joked with some Colchester players, asking them “if they wouldn’t strengthen up a little in order that the fans could be insured [sic] of a good game.” They didn’t know what they were in for.62

After a long pregame workout, and the crowd had gotten settled, three players in “rather seedy-looking uniforms” with World War I stars on their jerseys emerged from Kelly Wagle’s automobile behind the grandstand. They began to play catch amidst “a painful silence” as the spectators strained to recognize their vaguely familiar faces.63

Then, umpire Clifford McPherron — who Colchester tried to keep out of the game because he had once played for Macomb years before — stepped to home plate and announced the pitching matchups for both teams: “Battery for Colchester, Cicotte and Standard; Macomb, Smith and Wilson.”64

According to J.H. Bayless in the Independent, it was “the surprise of a lifetime, as no one could conceive of the bigness of the deal, not thinking Colchester was able to handle a deal of this magnitude.”65

After the initial shock set in, the Macomb fans jeered lustily and team promoter Art Thompson protested that the game should not be played with the “blackest of the Black Sox” present. Noting the red, white and blue rings on Cicotte’s stockings — similar to those worn by the White Sox during the 1917 World Series — one heckler shouted, “You’ve got a lot of guts to wear those colors.” When he came to bat, Jackson was “frequently reminded of his record of working in the ship yards instead of Uncle Sam’s army during the war.”66

Eddie Cicotte warms up before a game in the 1917 World Series at Comiskey Park in Chicago. For the Series,just months after America entered World War I, the White Sox wore patriotic uniforms with American flag patches on both sleeves and red, white, and blue stockings. (SDN-057908C, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum)

The Black Sox players, however, had heard it all before and were not fazed by the negative reaction they received from the Macomb side. The Macomb fans had reason to be distressed. As the game began, it was clear that Cicotte was as sharp as he had ever been in the American League. A roster of college boys and imported minor-leaguers, even though it had dominated the local competition all summer, was no match for the knuckleballer’s dazzling array of pitches — the emery ball, drop ball, and, of course, his famous “shine” ball — which had helped him win 208 games, including 35 shutouts, since 1908.67

Bayless explained: “Cicotte simply toyed with the batters, not passing a man and striking them out when necessary. (Connors) of Rock Island, the idol of Macomb fans, struck out every time he was at bat. … Not a member of the Macomb team saw second except [umpire] McPherron!”68

Cicotte allowed just four singles — all but one of those coming to the bottom half of the order — and struck out 10. He bared down especially hard on Wilson, per request of Kelly Wagle, who was said to have bet that the Macomb catcher would not record a hit.69 Wilson struck out all three times and did not so much as register a foul tip.

Jackson and Risberg were equally impressive in the field. On one base hit by Boots Runkle to left, Jackson “loafed” a little to bait Runkle into trying for second, which he did. But “old Joe tried out his good right arm and Risberg did the rest.” For his part, Risberg chased one high fly deep into the outfield and made a running catch over his shoulder that brought many cheers from the Colchester side.70

The presence of the Black Sox even seemed to elevate the play of their teammates, as Clarence Vollmer and Kid Standard each recorded two hits and the third baseman, Boyle, had a double and two singles. Cicotte gave his club the lead in the second inning, as Hamblin muffed his hard grounder to short, letting Standard score with the first run. Risberg also drove in the former Chicago ace with a run in the fourth. Jackson (who had an off-day, going 1-for-5 with a strikeout), Adams, and Vollmer all scored, while every starter but John Kipling recorded a hit.71

Colchester’s 5-0 victory was a decisive one, and the debate over its legitimacy had already begun long before the game was over.

Both Macomb newspapers were heavy-handed in their criticism of Colchester, noting, “They allowed a desire to win a game to override their better judgment on sportsmanship in general. … It is certain that the local team will not again play against those players whom Judge Landis has barred from professional baseball because of their alleged crookedness.”72

The By-Stander added: “Colchester won a ballgame yesterday and Macomb lost one — but both teams lost something that means a lot more than winning or losing. … It is not ‘sport’ to engage or play these men who have sold out their clubs and their friends. If the ‘Black Sox’ are ‘out in the sticks to get the money,’ as one player put it, the By-Stander won’t give any of its space to help them do it.”73

Colchester fans — and in particular, the unabashed Independent editor, J.H. Bayless — were nothing short of ecstatic after “pulling over a fast one” on the county seat.74 He wrote: “A mighty cheer went up from those from Colchester, Industry, Rushville, Bushnell and nearly every place except Macomb. … Even when Cicotte, Risberg and Jackson — men of worldwide reputation, perhaps the best there is — were making apparently impossible plays, the Macomb fans refused to be moved to cheers. We don’t wonder, for they are a hard bunch of losers.

“The Colchester Redman Base Ball team are champions of McDonough County.”75

* * *

Following the game, an anonymous poem (perhaps written by Bayless) was published in the Colchester Independent on September 15. The headline read “Championship Baseball Game”:

Old Cicotte played ball the other day,
Old Cicotte taught the boys how to play
The rooters and the fans, of course, had a lot of fun,
And it didn’t take old Cy long to show them how it was done.

They wouldn’t allow us to have an ump, but of course they didn’t care,
For when old Cy pitched the ball, their bat it wasn’t there.
And we beat them on the square.
Some felt a little sorry for the team of the County Seat —
But of course they had a reason, for they bet on the mining town’s defeat.

They say they played Chicago, well what if they did?
We had to play Galesburg, Monmouth, Rock Island and St. Louis and still we didn’t kid.
Hamblin and Howell, the County Seat stars,
Were shown up right by this little team of ours.

When Cy threw the ball, Old Doc he couldn’t see,
But maybe this was due to the lack of a patch upon his knee.
Well, the little old mining town isn’t afraid to spend the ‘mon’
And when old Cy didn’t let them have a run,
We rode right home with the bacon and the beans
And now we are Champions of McDonough County teams.

And the little old By-Stander, the Democratic press,
We see they have their stinger out but one thing they don’t confess,
They tried to hire “Lefty” Williams, the ‘Black Sox’ indeed.
See, the color didn’t matter, they wanted the man who had the speed.

But being unsuccessful this Black Sox to obtain,
They have started in to ragging, they have an awful pain.
You can’t hurt old Cicotte with your foul mouth and pen,
For the courts have proved him innocent of the lying tongues of men.

Now if you cannot take your medicine, and smile upon the flowers,
We’ll send you back the beans, but the bacon sure is ours!76

* * *

Speeding out of the Macomb Fairgrounds after the game, with the Black Sox and Kid Standard in tow, Kelly Wagle could not have been more satisfied with his celebrated accomplishment.

But his story — and the players’ — was one of dark secrets and tragic endings.

The skeleton in the players’ closet was, of course, well known. They would pay for their sins every time they stopped on a ramshackle field in some rural town, knowing that their skills were more suited for a well-manicured diamond in a major-league city.

Shoeless Joe Jackson, by far the most famous of the banished eight, went back to his dry-cleaning business in Savannah, Georgia, and was largely forgiven by the Southern people he so dearly loved. They still considered Jackson one of their own, and his smashing line drives and circus catches earned him great acclaim when he led his Americus, Georgia, team in the independent South Georgia League to the “Little World Series” championship in 1923. He was “the biggest attraction the league ever had.”77

Later, he moved back home to Greenville, South Carolina, and opened a successful liquor store on the west end of town. He finally stopped playing baseball in the mid-1930s, around the age of 45, but continued teaching youngsters the game and stayed involved in the game. A few years later, he was invited to serve as chairman of the protest board for the Western Carolina Semi-Pro League and he held the post for the rest of his life.78

Jackson continued to deny his involvement in the Black Sox Scandal, and said, “I know in my heart that I played to the best of my abilities.”79 He died of a heart attack on December 5, 1951, just days before he was to appear on a television special to publicize his case for reinstatement.80

Eddie Cicotte stayed around Chicago for another year and played ball with Risberg (and sometimes with and against Felsch, Weaver, or Williams) on a barnstorming team called the Ex-Major League Stars in 1922. But he and Risberg had a falling-out that summer after Cicotte demanded his money up-front and the shortstop responded by punching him in the mouth, knocking out two of his teeth!81

After 14 years in the big leagues and another two years playing exhibition games in Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin, Cicotte had grown tired of being away from his family all the time, so he moved back home to his farm outside Detroit. He continued playing ball on infrequent occasions, but made his living working in the Ford Motor Company service department in Highland Park, Michigan, and spent his final years raising strawberries.82

He disappeared from the public eye until 1963, when Eliot Asinof’s authoritative work on the 1919 World Series scandal, Eight Men Out, was published. He gave several interviews thereafter and expressed regret for his role in the scandal. Cicotte died quietly at age 84, on May 5, 1969, in Farmington, Michigan.83

Swede Risberg moved to Rochester, Minnesota, and bought a farm there in the early 1920s. But he spent the rest of the decade touring the northern part of the country and Canada — often playing with or against Happy Felsch — during the summer.84

Like many barnstorming stars, Risberg found that more money could be made as a pitcher and, while he had only pitched professionally in the low minor leagues as a teenager, he spent most of his post-major-league career on the mound. His travels took him to Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota (1922-24), Scobey, Montana (1925), Watertown and Lignite, South Dakota (1926-27), Manitoba and Saskatchewan (1927-29), Jamestown, North Dakota (1929-30), Sioux Falls, South Dakota (1931-32), and Klamath Falls, Oregon (1934-35) before he finally hung up his spikes for good.85

In 1927, he and Chick Gandil became “the center of baseball controversy” after claiming that the entire White Sox team had paid members of the Detroit Tigers to intentionally lose games to them ten years earlier. Judge Landis called for an investigation and they went to Chicago, along with dozens of other major league stars — including their ex-Black Sox teammate, Buck Weaver — to testify in the matter. But Weaver failed to corroborate their story, instead making a dramatic plea for his own reinstatement, and Landis dismissed the charges. Quietly, Risberg returned home to Minnesota.86

The Great Depression hit Swede and his family hard, as it did millions of other Americans, and they lost their home, a car agency, a hotel and their farm.87 Risberg worked many odd jobs for the next two decades — including shoveling corn for a dollar a day in Sioux Falls, South Dakota — before opening a successful nightclub called “Risberg’s” on the California-Oregon border.88 He was interviewed for a regular column in the Red Bluff Daily News during the 1970 World Series, providing analysis on Brooks Robinson, Pete Rose, Jim Palmer and Johnny Bench, et al, (although he erred on his prediction of Cincinnati to win).89

Risberg remained in good health over the years, despite walking with a decided limp for most of his life. An old spike wound that had never healed forced him to get surgery — still a risky procedure before World War II — which gradually deteriorated the circulation below his knee. Later in life, after moving in with his son Robert’s family in Red Bluff, Risberg’s leg was amputated and he spent his final years in a wheelchair at a convalescent home. He died of cancer on his 81st birthday, October 13, 1975, the last surviving member of the Black Sox. Unlike most of his banished teammates, he rarely claimed innocence or applied for reinstatement from baseball.90

Kelly Wagle, the mastermind of Colchester’s most memorable victory, continued circumventing the law throughout the Roaring Twenties, doing his best to avoid persecution by the various civic leaders brought in to “clean up” McDonough County.

He was arrested for the first and only time in 1927, when he spent six months in jail for illegally possessing and transporting liquor.91 But soon he was back to bootlegging, expanding his operation all the way to Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri with the help of several partners.92 But with greater success also came threats to that success, and Wagle had a history of using the same violent methods favored by his friend Al Capone to dispel those threats.93

Back in 1919, Wagle had quietly followed his wife Beulah to Omaha, Nebraska, after she had sold $1,400 worth of his alcohol to a bootlegger from Galesburg and left town with her lover. On November 20, a woman’s body was found with a bullet wound in her head, lying face-down at the bottom of an embankment near a little-used country road outside of Omaha.94 The Omaha Bee published a gruesome photograph of the corpse asking for help in identifying her, but no one was able to. The crime remained unsolved … for 11 years. In 1930, two enterprising reporters for the Omaha World-Herald, with the help of a Chicago Tribune staffer, located Beulah’s father in nearby Carthage, Illinois, and finally confirmed (through dental records) the identity of the “Omaha Mystery Girl”: Beulah Wagle.95

By then, however, Kelly Wagle was dead — murdered in a drive-by shooting on the streets of Colchester on April 8, 1929.96 His death was never officially solved, but as his widow, Blanche, told a local newspaper later, “Everybody knows who did it.” Wagle’s gangland-style death — orchestrated by his former partner-turned-chief rival, Jay Moon, who was engaged to Kelly’s sister97 — was reminiscent of something put on by Al Capone, such as the infamous “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” that occurred in Chicago earlier that year.98

It also signaled the end of an era for Colchester.

The death of the most notorious man in McDonough County brought about a revitalized effort to enforce Prohibition and bring a stop to the violence and lawlessness of the bootlegging days. After the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, Colchester voted not to allow alcohol sales four years later — and the town has been dry ever since.99

Macomb discontinued its Independence Day fair in 1928 and the Fairgrounds was sold to the city’s Board of Education two years later. All the buildings were removed, except for an old horse barn in the southwest corner of the grounds. The baseball field where the Black Sox had once played became the high school’s athletic facility for the next decade, but it fell into disrepair and was abandoned by World War II, then deeded to the state for an armory site.100

But the extraordinary events that took place on September 11, 1921, were never forgotten. For one day, at least, Macomb was a major-league city with major-league baseball. And for that one day, because of the slick ingenuity of Henry “Kelly” Wagle, the Colchester Red Men team was the champion of McDonough County.

Photo Credits

BlackBetsy.com, Chicago History Museum, Western Illinois University / John E. Hallwas, Macomb Journal, Colchester Independent, Chicago Tribune.

Notes

Born in New York City on February 26, 1920, Gardella worked in shipyards and played in Bronx sandlot leagues. In the minor leagues Gardella made a name for himself as a strong hitter and risky fielder for the Jersey City Giants. On May 13, 1944, he hom­ered for Jersey City and was called up to the New York Giants the next day. He played his first games in a doubleheader in Pittsburgh and three days later hit two singles and a triple against the Cubs. In June he hit a dramatic homer to defeat the Cubs, putting Hall of Famer Joe Medwick on the Giants bench. In his first two seasons Gardella batted .250 and .272 with 18 home runs in 1945. His older brother Al joined him for 16 games with the Giants.

As the 1946 season approached, the major leagues looked forward to the first season after World War II, with many stars returning from military service. Owners presumed that the players would qui­etly accept salaries dictated to them. Baseball’s reserve clause bound a player to his team, and unless released, a player was forbidden to negotiate with any other team. The player either accepted what was offered or sat out the season in hopes that the owner would meet his demands. Under a 1922 United States Supreme Court ruling, major league baseball enjoyed immunity from anti-trust laws.

In 1946 things changed. Major league baseball faced its first serious challenge since the collapse of the Federal League decades earlier. Jorge Pasquel, the oldest of five brothers and three sisters, and President of the Mexican baseball league, decided to compete for the services of major league players. With a family for­tune estimated at $60 million dollars, the Pasquels had the means to challenge the majors. Starting as cigar manufacturers, they now owned banking, ranching, and exporting businesses. Jorge Pasquel was so con­fident that he offered to bet skeptics two million dol­lars that his league would finish the season. Pasquel envisioned teams in Mexico City, Monterrey, San Luis Potosi, Toreon, Tampico, Veracruz, and Puebla stocked with American players. His brother Bernardo served as vice president.

When the New York Giants assembled for spring training in Miami, Danny Gardella stunned the base­ball world. His contract of $4,500 had expired and the Giants offered $5,000 for the new season, assum­ing that the reserve clause would give him no choice but to accept it. But the 25-year-old Gardella had other plans. On February 18 he signed a five-year deal to play in Mexico, along with teammates Nap Reyes, Adrian Zabala, and Luis Olmo of the Dodgers. He defiantly told reporters, “You may say for me that I do not intend to let the Giants enrich themselves at my expense, by selling me to a minor league club after the shabby treatment they have accorded me. So I have now decided to take my gifted talents to Mexico:’

On February 22 he became the first American player to arrive in Mexico. He told Mexican fans “I’m mighty glad I’m no longer connected with the New York Giants. They are paying me more so why shouldn’t I play in Mexico?”

Major league baseball responded quickly. On March 10 Commissioner Happy Chandler warned players that they faced a five-year suspension if they played in Mexico. The Mexican season opened on March 23, and Gardella hit a two-run homer as his Veracruz Blues defeated the Mexico City Reds before 33,000 spectators. Mexico’s president Manuel Avila Camacho threw out the first ball. Eight days later, second baseman George Hausmann and pitcher Sal Maglie announced that they would be leaving the Giants for Mexico. Dodger catcher Mickey Owen was next to sign with Pasquel, for a $12,500 bonus. Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who later moved the Giants from New York to San Francisco, denounced the play­ers’ disloyalty, saying, “So long as they wanted to go to Mexico, the quicker they went, the better. We no longer have any use for them.”

Gardella was undaunted by his former owner’s comments. On April 21 he hit two home runs against Monterrey. Pasquel kept up his raids on major league talent. April 26 saw him sign two more Giants, pitch­ers Harry Feldman and Ace Adams. By now eight Giants had “jumped” to Mexico. Mexican baseball achieved another milestone on May 16, when Babe Ruth attended a game and praised Pasquel for bring­ing top baseball to Mexico. At the July 9 all-star game Gardella hit two home runs and Admiral William F. Halsey tossed out the first ball. The all-star game rep­resented the high-water mark of Pasquel’s Mexican league. Tensions soon rose between the highly paid imported major leaguers and the Mexican and Cuban players who had dominated Mexican baseball. In one game a fight erupted over a hard tag at the plate by catcher Mickey Owen on left fielder Claro Duany. Gardella and Ramon Heredia joined in. It was soon apparent that Mexico’s small stadiums made main­taining the salaries of the Americans a challenge.

As the season wore down, Pasquel promised no further forays into the major leagues and by the next season his other American stars, Max Lanier, Ace Adams, Harry Feldman, George Hausmann, and Roy Zimmerman were gone. The Mexican league enacted limited payrolls and a mandatory number of Mexican citizens per team. Commissioner Chandler was unmoved. His ban still stood. Former Mexican League players, desperate to return to the majors, were reduced to barnstorming or playing abroad. Gardella played in Drummondville, Quebec, and worked as a hospital orderly in Mount Vernon, New York, earning 36 dollars per week. As the 1947 season passed with the ban on jumpers reaffirmed, Gardella was determined to rejoin the majors.

Gardella filed a federal suit against major league baseball seeking $300,000 in damages. His attor­ney, Frederic A. Johnson, accused the major leagues of violating the Clayton and Sherman anti-trust laws through its reserve clause, which permanently bound a player to his employer. An experienced constitu­tional lawyer, Johnson once served as law secretary for Judge Joseph Crater, the vanishing judge. Crater’s last courthouse statement was “Don’t forget to turn the lights out, Johnson,” before leaving to dine out and take his fateful taxi cab ride. A law school class­mate of Commissioner Chandler, Johnson was eager to challenge the reserve clause. Major league baseball used the same defense that had proven successful at the United States Supreme Court in 1922. Claiming that organized baseball was not interstate commerce but merely an amusement, it moved to dismiss the case. On July 14, 1948, U.S. District Judge Henry Goddard agreed.

Baseball rejoiced in the dismissal, but Gardella and Johnson weren’t finished. They appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and drew a panel of appellate judges that included two of the most respected judges of the era, Learned Hand and Jerome Frank. Appointed by President William Howard Taft as a trial judge in 1909, Hand was named as an appellate judge by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Jerome Frank was appointed chair­man of the Securities and Exchange Commission by President Roosevelt in 1939 and nominated by Roosevelt as a federal appeals judge in 1941. Both judges were frequently mentioned as potential Supreme Court justices.

In a two to one decision, the Second Circuit reversed the dismissal on February 9, 1949, and ordered Gardella’s case to trial. Hand and Frank voted with Gardella while Judge Harrie B. Chase sided with baseball management. Owners and gener­ al managers feared the end of the reserve clause and predicted the demise of professional baseball. Giants’ attorney Edgar Feeley said the farm system would be destroyed and only a handful of top-salaried players would benefit. Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager who signed Jackie Robinson, was not gener­ous toward Gardella. Rickey warned that the reserve clause was opposed by players of communist tenden­cies. Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck was more circumspect, saying only, “I don’t have the legal back­ground necessary to say anything:’

Gardella drew scant support from his fellow play­ers. Fellow Mexican Leaguer Mickey Owen stated, “Danny is enjoying the notoriety of his damage suit. I hope he loses it.” Stan Musial said, “I don’t know much about the case but I think baseball has done all right for over a hundred years the way it is:’ Pitcher Bob Lemon added, “I can’t see where it will do ball­ players any good:’

Gardella and Johnson looked forward to the next round in court. Johnson promised to go right to trial. Gardella refuted the charges that he was damaging the national pastime. “They say I am undermining the structure of the baseball contract,” he said “Let’s say I’m helping to end a baseball evil. That’s what it amounts to as far as I am concerned.” Gardella received an unexpected boost when the United States Justice Department announced that it would begin an investigation of major league baseball and the antitrust laws.

Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned for life from the majors, remained neutral. “I’m sixty-one years old,” he said “and it would not mean anything to me one way or the other.”

Jumpers Max Lanier, Fred Martin, and Sal Maglie filed their own suits to gain reinstatement, but their cases were not as strong as Gardella’s, who was not under any contract with major league baseball. Despite Gardella’s win in the appeals court, he was still banned. United States District Court Judge Edward Conger refused to issue an injunction impos­ ing reinstatement, and on June 3, 1949, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Gardella must wait for his trial before it would intervene. Faced with the prospect of lengthy litigation and the end of the reserve clause, major league baseball decided to end the suspensions if players terminated their litigation. On June 5, 1949, Chandler allowed the jumpers to return, and on August 27 Lanier and Martin dropped their suits. Gardella refused to withdraw his.

With a November trial looming, attorney Johnson announced that under no circumstances would Gardella apply for reinstatement. Johnson deposed Commissioner Chandler, and both sides prepared for the trial. On October 7 at World Series headquarters in Brooklyn‘s St. George Hotel, Gardella surprised everyone by announcing that he was withdrawing the lawsuit and joining the St. Louis Cardinals for the 1950 season. Cards president Fred M. Saigh denied that Gardella received any cash for ending his case.

Gardella’s stay with the Cardinals was short and unhappy. He played only one game for the Cards, going hitless in one at-bat. On April 25 the Cards sold him to Houston, a minor league team in the Texas League. On June 15 he returned to the Bronx, his baseball career over. Asked if he had received money to give up his claim, he said only, “You may say that Gardella was paid something to drop his suit. That is all:’ The Cardinals denied any blacklisting of Gardella, claiming that all major league teams had passed on his services.

Gardella was publicly silent until 1961, when he revealed that he received a $60,000 settlement from baseball to withdraw his lawsuit. “I felt like I was get­ting paid off, but being a poor man I felt more or less justified. It wasn’t like I had a lot of money and was being paid off,” he explained. Legal fees ate up about half of his award.

Following his baseball career Gardella worked in various jobs, including factory work, movers, truck driving, and sweeping. He died in Yonkers, New York, on March 6, 2005, at age 85, leaving 10 children and 27 grandchildren.

Gardella’s attorney Frederic A. Johnson died at age 90 in 1985. After the Gardella case he continued practicing law for many years and served as an editor for the New York Law Journal. An ardent baseball fan throughout his life, he attended many games, and in 1982 he told reporters at Shea Stadium that he had seen about 1,000 games.

Jorge Pasquel died in a private plane crash on March 7, 1955. His Mexican league dissolved in 1953 and its remnants merged into organized baseball.

Baseball owners ousted Commissioner Chandler in 1951. Chandler returned to Kentucky politics and was elected governor again. In 1982 he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He died on June 15, 1991. Chandler is remembered as the commissioner who oversaw the introduction of pensions and mini­mum salaries for players and the end of segregation in the majors. In comparison to his predecessor, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, he was seen as a players’ commissioner.

Judge Learned Hand took senior status as a judge on June 1, 1951, and died on August 18, 1961. Judge Jerome Frank died on January 13, 1957, still an active judge at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Despite the respect they earned as appellate judges, neither was ever nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gardella’s efforts to free baseball players of the reserve clause are barely recognized, perhaps because his lawsuit was settled and the issue was left for another day. Would he have been successful before the United States Supreme Court? No one will ever know, but owners were not taking any chances. Although he was termed a jumper, Gardella had not broken his contract. That placed him in a much stronger posi­tion than the other players who went to Mexico. In contrast to players who lost challenges, Gardella may have had the support of the United States government. Its announcement of an investigation of major league baseball surely spurred the resolution of his claim. Major league baseball would have been asking the Supreme Court to overrule two of the most esteemed judges in the lower courts, Hand and Frank. It is no surprise that major league baseball did not want the Gardella case before the Supreme Court.

In this era of free agency it would be unthinkable for any professional sport to bind a player to one team for his entire career. That this is so is due largely to the efforts of an unheralded outfielder from the Bronx.

DAVID MANDELL practices law in New London County, Connecticut, and is a lifelong Giants fan.

On December 18, 1907, owner John I. Taylor decided that his 1908 team would wear red stockings and be known as the “Red Sox,” as they have been since that time on.

A handful of readers have approached me, pointing out newspaper stories in the intervening years (between 1903 and 1908) where the team was indeed called the Pilgrims. Tom Spaulding was the first, and then Charlie Bevis, Glenn Currie, and Ed Coen all directed me to items they had located. Using SABR’s access to ProQuest, I undertook a fresh look.

The first references to the Pilgrims, and the most frequent, turn up in the Washington Post. The moniker seems to have been one that writers for the Post enjoyed more than those in other cities, and around June 1906 there appear occasional usages. The first time I could find the Boston Globe use the term in a baseball story was an April 26, 1907, sports page cartoon declaring “There is no joy in Pilgrimville” following a particular defeat administered the Boston ball club by the Athletics. The Globe’s game account on May 15 used the nickname in both the fourth and fifth paragraph.

There is another mention of “Pilgrims” in the July 12, 1907, story and about another 10 uses before the year was out, more or less a baker’s dozen of mentions in the one year-many fewer than in the Washington Post. The first use in the Chicago Tribune was found in the June 21, 1907, edition. The Times used the word “Pilgrims” an indicated 182 times during the 1907 base­ ball season, but never once in connection with baseball.

The 1907 Boston Journal interchangeably referred to the team as the Americans or Pilgrims throughout 1907, though more often as the Americans. The Boston Herald used the Pilgrims fairly frequently as well, probably a little more than half the time.

My conclusion? Sometime in 1906, perhaps influenced by the name of a touring soccer team, the Washington Post began to apply the nickname “Pilgrims” to Boston’s American League baseball team, and during 1907 it caught on sufficiently in some Boston newspapers to be a short-lived nick­name for the team. Had your time machine landed in 1903, and you were to ask, “Hey, how ‘ bout them Pilgrims?”, Boston’s baseball fanatics might not have understood the allusion. If you stuck around to catch a few more seasons, in 1907 they likely would have-though the 1906 team (49-105) is not one that any fan found engaging. And after the spring training suicide of skipper Chick Stahl, the 1907 team suffered through four managers while winning only 59 games. Taylor was no doubt right in thinking it was time to refashion the team, even as to its name.

So, the Boston Pilgrims actually did exist, at least in the minds of some writers for a while in 1907. By no means is there any indication that the nick­name was commonly used, though it appears it might have been sufficiently familiar to have been understood at the time. It remains a wonderful name, but its appeal seems to have grown dramatically as the decades have passed. For clarity, Boston Americans remains unchallenged as the choice until 1908 and the Red Sox.

The reporter’s job was to produce a detailed account of the game’s proceedings. He had virtually unlimited space to create a complete description of the game. If a team was to score 25 runs, the reader would get a description of how each one crossed the plate. The story would be written in his personal style, but it is still a narrative of all the significant plays and events to give the reader the entire story.

The cartoonist, on the other hand, had a lim­ited space in which to create his work, so he had to make a condensed version of the story. Because the scenes depicted were entirely of his choosing, he cre­ated an interpretation of the game that resulted in a summary more like that of a fan than reporter. The artist also had the power to satirize, and it was a duty which he seemed to relish. For example, an umpire will be drawn with daggers coming out of his eyes as he’s arguing with a player. On a play in which a fielder hopelessly misplays a batted ball, he will be shown in a confrontation with a baseball that has come to life saying, “You can’t catch me.”

Wallace Goldsmith produced cartoons for the Boston Globe from 1909 to 1919, and his creations were primarily of sporting topics. The subjects he covered were numerous, with the competition levels ranging from the local schoolboy to the professional ranks. Aside from his work of sporting subjects, he created editorial cartoons of Boston city politics as well as national issues such as the women’s suffrage movement or President Wilson’s foreign policies. He also made cartoons of local interest such as scenes from around the city on a record hot day or the win­ning species from the Boston poultry and dog shows. His work in this genre would compare favorably to any artist who specialized in political cartoons and would do so today if created using current topics.

He was the creator of a comic strip whose main character, Mr. Asa Spades, is a bumbling black man who gets caught up in adventures that revolved around the events of the day. This is an item that cer­tainly wouldn’t be published today, but in an adver­tisement from 1910 it was hailed as a cartoon that “should be read by every man, woman and child in New England.”

The main focus of Mr. Goldsmith’s work was the coverage of the Red Sox and Braves. He traveled with the Red Sox to the spring training destinations of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Redondo Beach, California, to provide daily reports of the workouts. During the baseball season his cartoons were reviews of the pre­vious day’s game for whichever team was playing at home in Boston. His cartoons usually consist of a large sketch that serves as a highlight of a thrilling play or sequence of plays which should allow the viewer to make an instant judgment of the game’s outcome. This large sketch is surrounded by three to six smaller sketches depicting some great plays and not so great plays, along with such incidental moments as a bois­terous spectator in the stands or a park employee reclaiming a foul ball from a fan.

He was always among the corps of writers pro­viding coverage of the World Series games. In an advertisement introducing the staff of reporters and experts covering the 1914 fall classic, here is the brief summary that accompanied his picture.

Everybody knows Goldsmith’s baseball cartoons and his cleverness in picturing happenings on the baseball field, and during the World Series no bit of humor will escape his eye.

When he draws a likeness of a ball player you know who it is, and his sketches of the champions will be characteristic attitudes truer to life than would be possible in any photograph. Goldsmith will see the crucial plays in every game and will picture them in his graphic and funny way.

As an indication that Mr. Goldsmith was considered an important member of the Boston Globe staff, I make reference to an ad for a contest open to local children to acquire new subscribers. The Globe pub­lished a list of different features as selling points for them to recommend to potential customers while canvassing their neighborhood. Among the various suggested columns and editorials were features that would be of interest to baseball fans, “the funny and graphic cartoons” of Wallace Goldsmith.

In an example of how writer Timothy Murnane and Wallace Goldsmith interpreted the same event, I refer to an incident reported on May 27, 1914, in a game between the Red Sox and Cleveland. There was a play at second base in which the Red Sox Del Gainor was tagged out by Napoleon Lajoie, a product of the hidden-ball trick. Umpires Jack Sheridan and Oliver Chill each made call reversals on the play and caused protests from both teams. Here is how Murnane reported the incident:

There was quite a mixup at the base, and when Umpire Jack Sheridan looked, he saw Lajoie hold­ing the Boston runner off the base and declared him out. This caused a sharp cry of protest from the Boston players, who argued that Lajoie pushed Gainor off the base, and as Sheridan had been caught looking anywhere but where the ball was he turned to the umpire at the plate for advice.

Umpire Chill waved his hand, as much as to say that the man was safe. Then Sheridan turned around and waved Gainor safe. At this stage nearly the whole Cleveland outfit, headed by the irate Frenchman from Woonsocket headed for the umpire at the plate.

Chill evidently saw them coming, for he imme­diately changed his mind and commenced to wave the player out. Umpire Sheridan then made his third decision, and this time was in full accord with the umpire in charge of the game, the pair of them having made five decisions on one play and pulling a juicy bone about the size of Bunker Hill Monument.

The cartoon Goldsmith produced was titled ONE WAY TO UMPIRE: IF YOU DON’T SEE IT, GUESS IT. In it Lajoie is shown tagging a prostrate Gainor with base umpire Sheridan having his back to the play while he is dreaming of lying on the beach. Plate umpire Chill is looking away from the play, dreaming of women and saying, “How lovely the ladies look in their summer garb.”

I believe that Mr. Goldsmith created his best work in 1914, 1915, and 1916, so I have included exam­ples from those years that will showcase his talent.

(Click image to enlarge)

The cartoon from May 23, 1916, is what I consider a typical example of a game recap. This was a close game which was decided in the ninth inning when Tilly Walker scored on Harold Janvin’s single to left to give the Red Sox a 2-1 win over the Detroit Tigers. You will always notice certain distinguishing features utilizing a bit of artistic license. Smoke rings coming off a bat indicates a mighty blast or a puff of smoke off a glove means the fielding of a hot liner. Dotted lines track the flight of the ball; in this case you can see two examples of the ball leaving the bat and the return throw from a fielder. The players are constant­ly making some kind of statement, such as Janvin’s excitement over his hit or Gardner’s disappointment about his groundout. The fans have something to say also, the gent shouting, “It’s the dinner bell blow” cer­tainly lets us know that the hit has ended the game.

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The main element of a Goldsmith cartoon is his use of humor and sarcasm, especially when used to show the ineptitude of the opposing team. The car­toon from April 28, 1916, reviews a game in which the Braves defeated the Giants 3-2. The incident to poke fun at occurred in the fifth inning when umpire Bill Klem was so annoyed by the chatter coming from the New York bench that he banished all players to the dressing room. Only manager John McGraw and the batboy were allowed to remain in the dugout as shown in the small sketch. The scene of the players filing out across the field is portrayed as a parade with McGraw riding atop an elephant and the whole group being trailed by a circus wagon. In the sixth inning, John McGraw was ejected for using offensive lan­guage, apparently taken from the book he is holding, titled “McGraw’s Vocabulary.”

(Click image to enlarge)

While the battles of World War I were being fought in Europe, Mr. Goldsmith often integrated a war theme into his work. The cartoon from September 3, 1914, illustrates when the Miracle Braves took the lead in the pennant race. A Brave is overhead snatch­ing the flag from the New York Giants in an airship named “The Stallings Zeppelin” in reference to the Boston manager George Stallings. He is dropping two bombs, one labeled first game and the other labeled second game, which represents the Braves winning both ends of a doubleheader from the Phillies. In the background is a Brooklyn player setting off a mine, signifying their win over the Giants, all events which combined to cause the change in the standings.

In the cartoon that appeared on May 16, 1915, an Indian is shown getting blasted out of his canoe by a torpedo launched from a submarine piloted by a Pirate. You will notice that the canoe is named “9th” and the torpedo is labeled “6 hits in a row.” In this game the Braves were leading Pittsburgh by a score of 6 to 4 when, in the ninth inning, the Pirates had a string of six consecutive hits and scored six runs to eventually win the game 10-6.

Equipment was often fashioned as weaponry, as in a cartoon from April 18, 1916, which shows Walter Johnson getting shot to pieces by a Gatling gun with barrels made of baseball bats. In that game the Red Sox batters tagged Johnson for 11 hits in his six innings of work, and Boston won by a score of 5-1.

One feature of the cartoons that really made an impression that this was a different era is the com­plete lack of political correctness and portrayals of seemingly acceptable stereotypes. There are many humiliating representations of Native Americans. When the Boston Braves won, they were shown as Indians on the warpath, shooting arrows at a foe or wielding knives and tomahawks. When they lost, they were the poor souls who have been relocated to a reservation, bent over a campfire with an empty pot hanging over it.

During the war years players of German descent were sometimes pictured with spiked helmets like the ones worn by the German soldiers in the trenches of France. In the cartoon from May 26, 1915, Cincinnati’s players Buck Herzog, Fritz Von Kolnitz, and Fritz Mollwitz are shown in this capacity and acting quite militaristic in the sketch where they are ordering the ball to roll foul.

I believe that you really must admire Wallace Goldsmith’s portfolio of work at the Boston Globe. His cartoons reviewing the Red Sox and Braves games are impressive because he produced these pieces on a daily basis with each one being a unique and clever essay of the game. He was truly an imaginative and talented man.

ED BRACKETT is a Cad Designer for Atrium Medical Corp. in Hudson, New Hampshire. He is a member of the Massachusetts Baseball Umpire Association and can be seen calling games in the Merrimac Valley. This is his first article published by SABR.

The Hall of Famers

In 1919, George Halas, a former football star at the University of Illinois, played five games in right field for the New York Yankees. The following year, Babe Ruth would occupy that slot and Halas would be among the original contingent to form the American Professional Football Association, which in 1922 would be renamed the National Football League. By ’22, Halas had assumed ownership of the Decatur Staleys, moved them to Chicago, and changed their moniker to the Bears. He would play for, manage, and administer the team until his death in 1983, the only man associated with the NFL throughout its first 50 years.

Halas is one of eight NFL Hall of Famers tied to major league baseball. The others include Red Badgro, Paddy Driscoll, Cal Hubbard, Greasy Neale, Ernie Nevers, Ace Parker, and Jim Thorpe. Badgro sandwiched a NFL  career  around two seasons as a part-time outfielder for the St. Louis Browns in 1929-30. Driscoll’s 13 games with the Chicago Cubs in 1917 ended his amateur career as a star halfback and kicker at Northwestern University. Three years later, Driscoll became a charter member of the NFL as quarterback and halfback for the Staleys and Chicago Cardinals.

Cal Hubbard was a star end, tackle, and lineback­er for Centenary College in Louisiana and Geneva College in Pennsylvania, earning All-American rec­ognition in 1926. The following year he turned pro, signed with the New York Giants, and helped them win the NFL championship. Halas, for one, claimed that Hubbard was the best lineman he ever saw, cer­tainly the most feared of his era.

During the off-season, Hubbard began umpiring in the minors and was promoted to the American League in 1936. While hunting birds after the 1951 baseball season, Hubbard was struck in the eye with a shotgun pellet. The injury forced his retirement; though, he stayed as a supervisor until 1970. Hubbard is the only man concurrently enshrined in the Baseball, College Football, and Pro Football Halls of Fame.

Greasy Neale starred in baseball, football, and bas­ketball at West Virginia’s Wesleyan College. He joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1916 and later starred in the infamous 1919 World Series, hitting .357. Football was his calling, though. While still playing baseball, Neale played football professionally and coached at Washington and Jefferson, a small Pennsylvania college that attained substantial national recognition and a Rose Bowl berth under Neale’s guidance. The longtime college coach joined the NFL with the Eagles in 1941 and won the NFL championship in 1948 and ’49.

Ernie Nevers’ first major league hit came off fire­baller Walter Johnson; however, he is best known in baseball for giving up two home runs to Babe Ruth during the famed 1927 season. A 6-12 record and 4.64 ERA did not distinguish Nevers on the ball field. The gridiron was another matter. He was recognized by Pop Warner as the finest football player he ever coached, much to the dismay of Jim Thorpe fans.

Nevers’ reputation was made in a hard-fought contest against Knute Rockne’s Four Horseman of Notre Dame in the 1925 Rose Bowl, though his Stanford team lost 27-10. Missing most of the season with two broken ankles, Nevers taped up to compete in all 60 minutes of the game.

After turning pro, Nevers became a storied full­ back with the Duluth Eskimos and Chicago Cardinals in the NFL during 1926-31. On Thanksgiving Day 1929 Nevers executed perhaps the finest individual performance in NFL history. He scored all the points for the Cardinals in a 40-6 rout over the Chicago Bears. Nevers rushed for six touchdowns and kicked four extra points. To date, no one has surpassed his point total; it is the NFL’s oldest surviving significant record.

Ace Parker hit a pinch home run in his first at­ bat in the bigs for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1937. Playing baseball and football full-time, the infielder decided to concentrate on football in ’39, though he did sneak away during the spring and summer to swing a bat in the minors through 1952.

Jim Thorpe is generally regarded as the finest male athlete of the 20th century. He initially gained fame as a two-time All-American halfback at the Carlisle Indian School. At the. 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, he won the pentathlon and decathlon, a feat no other iron man has duplicated. Unfortunately, the Amateur Athletic Union stripped his medals and amateur status in early 1913 after it was discovered that Thorpe had played Class-D baseball in 1909-10.

John McGraw stepped in and signed the Olympian to a three-year contract with the New York Giants in February 1913. Retiring with a career .252 batting average over six seasons, Thorpe’s baseball highlight may have come with the winning hit against Hippo Vaughn in the 10th inning of the famous double no­ hit game on May 2, 1917.

Thorpe helped reorganize the Canton Bulldogs in 1915, beginning his professional football career. In the years prior to the development of the NFL, Thorpe enjoyed his most productive seasons on the gridiron. He could do everything well: run, pass, kick, catch, and tackle. Thorpe is credited by many with reviving the pro game and almost single-handedly improving its financial future.

Thorpe later served as figurehead president of the American Professional Football Association. The fledgling league used his popularity to gain credibil­ity. During the 1920s Thorpe wore the uniform of eight different teams.

NFL Players and Officials

In all, 68 men have donned the uniforms of MLB and the NFL, plus one that played strictly in the AFL. Of those, Brian Jordan has played significantly more baseball games than the rest and, conversely, Deion Sanders has done the same between the goal posts. Vic Janowicz became the first Heisman Trophy winner to play in the majors in 1953, after signing a bonus contract with the Pittsburgh. After 83 games and a .214 batting average, Janowicz left the Pirates in ’54 to join the Washington Redskins. His football career was over two years later after a near-fatal auto accident during training camp.

Hugo Bezdek is the only man to manage in MLB and coach in the NFL. Bezdek, who never played base­ ball but did work as a scout on the West Coast and as Pittsburgh’s business manager, was hired by Barney Dreyfuss to manage the Pirates during 1917-19. Tom Brown, who appeared with the 1963 Senators, was the first major leaguer to play in the Super Bowl. The defensive back helped the Packers take the first two. Across the line that first championship game was run­ning back Mike Garrett with Kansas City. Garrett, the 1965 Heisman Trophy winner, became a huge feather in the American Football League’s cap when he signed with the Chiefs for five years and $450,000. When his contract expired, Garrett left football to join the Pittsburgh Pirates organization but quit after being traded to the Padres, never reaching the bigs.

Charlie Dressen, Bo Jackson, and Deion Sanders are among the bigger names to play in both pro leagues. Manager Dressen won 1,008 games in 16 sea­sons with five different major league clubs, including two pennants with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952-53. He also played quarterback for two NFL teams in 1920-23.

Bo Jackson was one of the premier athletes of the 20th century. In 1985 he won the Heisman Trophy as a running back for Auburn University, rushing for 1,786 yards and 17 touchdowns. He was named MVP in both the 1983 Sugar Bowl and 1984 Liberty Bowl. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers made him the #1 pick in the NFL draft in 1986, but Jackson opted to sign a $7 million deal with the Kansas City Royals instead. Then Bo announced his intention to play football as well and signed with the Los Angeles Raiders.

As a testament to his skills, Jackson was the first man to play in both the All-Star and Pro Bowl Games. On a routine tackle during a 1991 playoff game, Jackson suffered a career-ending injury that required hip-replacement surgery. He was able to return to baseball in 1993, becoming the first professional ath­lete to compete with an artificial hip.

Sanders was drafted by the Kansas City Royals out of high school but chose Florida State University instead. There he starred in baseball, football, and track and field, qualifying for the 1988 Olympic trials as a sprinter. As one of the top defensive backs in the country, Sanders was named All-American twice.

In 1988 Sanders was selected by the Yankees in the amateur draft. The NFL Atlanta Falcons drafted him the following year. He played both sports for eight years, then retired from baseball. In September 1989 Sanders became the first athlete to hit a home run and score a touchdown for major league teams in the same week. Sanders earned two Super Bowl rings in the 1990s, becoming the first man to play in both the Super Bowl and the World Series. Sanders is recog­nized as one of the all-time great cornerbacks.

Others of note include Carroll Hardy, the only man to pinch-hit for Ted Williams. It happened in 1960 after Williams fouled a ball off his foot. Hinkey Haines played 28 games in the outfield for the Yankees’ first world championship team in 1923 and two games in the World Series. A running back out of Penn State, Haines led the league in touchdowns for the champion New York Giants in 1927.

Minor league legend Ox Eckhardt played fullback  for  the   Giants   during the 1928 season. He  left the  gridiron  for the promise  of a  baseball  career. Though he had only two brief stays in the majors, Eckhardt  batted  .367 in 14  seasons  in  the minors. From 1925 to 1940, he collected nearly 2,800 hits and five batting titles.

Reserve catcher Charlie Berry played 11 sea­sons in the American League  from 1925 to 1938. He also played in the NFL for two seasons with the Pottsville Maroons in 1925-26. Berry later umpired in the American League for 21 years and refereed in the NFL for 24 seasons. He was the head lines­man during the famous 1958 championship game. Syracuse University fullback Ron Luciano made the Detroit Lions roster in 1959-60, but never made it off the injured reserve list.

Dusty Boggess umpired in the National League from 1944 to 1962. He also refereed over 500 games in the NFL and scouted for the Steelers. Fellow umpire Frank Umont was a tackle for the New York Giants in 1943-45. Longtime umpire, farm director, and general manager Billy Evans joined the Cleveland Rams as general manager in 1941. Umpire Jim McKean played at quarterback and kicker in the Canadian Football League.

Catcher Mike Wilson appeared in five games for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1921. He also donned foot­ ball gear professionally prior to the existence of the NFL. Later, Wilson became an assistant to NFL Commissioner Bert Bell and supervisor of officials. Red Kellett played nine games in the infield for the Red Sox in 1934. In 1953 he was hired as general manager by the Baltimore Colts. From there until his retirement in late 1966, Kellett build one of the powerhouses of the NFL.

Negro Leagues

Jackie Robinson’s UCLA teammate Kenny Washington and Woody Strode beat Robinson to the bigs when they joined the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. The NFL had not fielded an African American player since 1933. Three Negro Leaguers, Bobby Marshall, Sol Butler, and Joe Lillard, played during the early years of the NFL.

Bobby Marshall played first base and managed in the Negro Leagues in 1909-11. At 40 years old in 1920 the former University of Minnesota star joined Rhode Island in the NFL. Playing end, he reappeared in the league for three games with Duluth in 1925.

Pitcher Sol Butler appeared in a few games for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1925, posting a 1-0 record. The back out of Dubuque played 23 games in the NFL during 1923-26, rushing for a pair of touchdowns.

Pitcher-outfielder Joe Lillard toiled on the dia­mond from 1932 to 1937 with the Chicago American Giants, among others. During the off-season in 1932 and ‘33, Lillard played for the Chicago Cardinals as a halfback, punt returner, and kicker. As roster sizes shrank during the Depression, Lillard and Pittsburgh Pirates tackle Ray Kemp would be the last African Americans in the NFL until after World War II.

Jackie Robinson played professional football in the Pacific Coast Football League in 1941 and ’44 with the Los Angeles Bulldogs. The PCFL was a place African Americans found work waiting for the NFL to inte­grate. Robinson’s teammate with the Bulldogs, Ziggy Marcell, also played in the Negro Leagues.

Early Professional Football

Professional football initially developed from a rivalry among Pittsburgh area clubs in the 1890s. However, the first major hotbed was in Ohio at the end of the decade. The four-way antagonism between Latrobe, Canton, Massillon, and Greensburg later spurred the development of the modern game.

Ed Abbaticchio played fullback for Latrobe in 1895-1900. He is reputed to be the first to boot a spiral punt. Since baseball bred a much more hospi­table lifestyle, Abby played 28 games at third base for the Phillies in 1897-98 and was later picked up by the Boston Braves in 1903. Ballplayer and future presi­dent of the Players’ Fraternity, Dave Fultz, also played pro football in Pittsburgh at the tum of the century.

Dave Berry, one of football’s foremost coaches and promoters, formed the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, team in 1895. Suffering financial hardship, Berry encour­aged Phillies owner John Rogers to form a football team in 1902 to create a rivalry. This was during the NL’s war against the upstart AL, a battle which was especially acrimonious in Philadelphia due to the loss of Napoleon Lajoie, Bill Bernard, Chick Fraser, and Elmer Flick to the crosstown Athletics.

A’s owner, Ben Shibe, wasn’t about to be outdone. He recruited his manager, Connie Mack, and famed University of Pennsylvania tackle Blondy Wallace to build a better team. A couple more clubs signed up and the first professional football league was established, called the National Football League. The league folded after only one season when the Athletics pulled out after losing $4,000. However, it did make an impact. During the season the aptly named Philadelphia Athletics won the first professional football night game, under a crude lighting system aligned along the sidelines. Christy Mathewson, a former halfback at Bucknell, played punter for the Pittsburgh All-Stars, and it is unclear whether guard Rube Waddell saw action, though he did suit up for the A’s. Fred Crolius, on loan from the Pirates, was a teammate of Mathewson.

Pennsylvania clubs may have established the first professional football league in 1902, but the true development of the pro game grew out of an Ohio rivalry between Massillon and Canton which began in earnest the following year. Charlie Moran, for­mally a college standout, took over the reins of the Massillon Tigers as player-coach in 1905. In 1927 he also led the Frankford Yellow Jackets in the NFL. Moran umpired in the National League for 23 years between 1918 and 1939 after brief stints as both ends of the battery for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1903 and ’08. Fellow umpire Cy Riger lined up at right tackle for the pioneering Tigers in 1903.

Charlie Follis, a catcher for three seasons with the  Cuban Giants, joined the Shelby football club of the Ohio League, where he played beside and later against Branch Rickey. On September 15, 1904, with Shelby the halfback became the first African American to officially sign a professional football contract.

Here, an interesting chain developed which linked integration in both professional football and base­ball. Follis, the first African American professional football player, was a teammate of Rickey, who hired the first acknowledged African American profession­al baseball player in organized baseball in the 20th century, Jackie Robinson. Robinson, in turn, was a UCLA teammate of Kenny Washington, who, along with Woody Strode, reintegrated the NFL in 1946.

American Football League, 1926

In 1925 George Halas signed running back Red Grange to a Bears contract and began barnstorming. Their trip throughout the country helped popularize the sport. Grange’s agent, C.C. Pyle, saw an opportu­nity to showcase his star and formed the short-lived American Football League. Major leaguers Garland Buckeye, Johnny Mohardt, and Al Pierotti played in the AFL.

All-American Football Conference, 1946-1949

The administration of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the AAFC was run, at various times, by baseball men William Cox, former Phillies owner; Branch Rickey; and Freddie Fitzsimmons. Rickey added Pepper Martin to the roster after seeing him fooling around kicking a foot­ball. The 44-year-old Martin was suc­cessful during the preseason but devel­oped an injury and never played during the season despite the team’s hopes.

Hall of Farner Ace Parker played in the AAFC, as did Pete Layden and fullback Jim Castiglia. In 1948-49 tailback Herman Wedemeyer played for the Los Angeles Dons and Baltimore Colts. He then played baseball for the PCL San Francisco Seals’ farm club in Salt Lake City in 1950. Wedemeyer went on to serve in the Hawaiian state con­gress and found a recurring role on the tele­vision show Hawaii Five-O.

American Football League, 1960-69

Tom Yewcic played quarterback, halfback, and punter for the Boston Patriots during 1961-66. Prior to that, he played a game at catcher for the Detroit Tigers in June 1957. AFL founder Lamar Hunt was a backer of Bill Shea’s aborted Continental League.

The Minor Leagues

Yankees power-hitting prospect Ken Strong suffered a career-ending wrist injury in 1931. He originally broke the bone against the center-field fence making a catch, but it was misdiagnosed as a sprain. After the season, a doctor performed surgery on his right wrist but removed the wrong bone. Strong had lost the flex­ibility needed to play baseball. On 1930 he went deep four times on June 8 in an Eastern League game and set the season mark with 41 round trips while also batting .373 and knocking in 130 runners.

The 200-pounder had starred at New York University during their successful 1926-28 cam­paigns. Strong returned to football and became a Hall of Fame halfback and kicker for the Staten Island Stapletons and New York Giants.

Other NFL Hall of Famers to play in the minor leagues are Sammy Baugh, John Elway, Joe Guyon, Don Hutson, Bobby Layne, Art Rooney and Charlie Trippi. Canadian Football League Hall of Farner Lionel Conacher also played in the minors.

Among the recent NFL men to have played in the minors you’ll recognize Cedric Benson, Bubby Brister, Isaac Byrd, Quincy Carter, Elway, Kay-Jay Harris, Doug Johnson, John Lynch, Mewelde Moore, Vernand Morency, Jay Schroeder, Akili Smith, Chris Weinke, and Ricky Williams.

Baseball and football share a common link at the executive level as well. Joe Carr, Bob Howsam, and Edward Bennett Williams are among the many that have helped shape both industries. Future profes­sional athletes tend to excel at many sports before they focus on their career path. Many baseball men shined on the gridiron in college and found a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame or local galler­ies, such as Charlie Caldwell, Chuck Essegian, Bob Harvey, Jackie Jensen, Dutch Meyer, Homer Norton, and Jack Thornton, to name a few. For these reasons the two sports will always share a bond. There are sure to be many more in the future, some learning their trade as you read.

BRIAN McKENNA grew up and lives in Baltimore. A lifelong baseball fan, his first book Early Exits: The Premature Ending of Baseball Careers, will soon be released from Scarecrow Press.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Mark Ford of the Professional Football Researchers Association for finding many of my errors and sparking the thought process.

Sources

Barber, Phil and John Fawaz. NFL’s Greatest: Pro Football’s Best Players, Teams and Games. New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2000.

Carroll, Bob, Michael Gershman, David Neft, and John Thorn. Total Football II: The Official Encyclopedia ofthe National Football League. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Daly, Dan and Bob O’Donnell. The Pro Football Chronicle. New York: Collier, 1990.

Grosshandler, Stanley. The Grosshandler Lists from The Coffin Corner Newsletter. North Huntingdon, PA: Professional Football Researchers Association, Vol. 27, No. 5, 2005.

James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Johnson, Lloyd. The Minor League Register. Durham, NC: Baseball America, 1994.

Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff. The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, 2nd ed. Durham, NC: Baseball America, 1997.

Kriegel, Mark. Namath: A Biography. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. MacCambridge, Michael. America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. New York: Random House, 2004.

Maher, Tod and Bob Gill. The Pro Football Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan, 1997.

National Football League. NFL 2005 Record and Fact Book. New York: Time Inc. Home Entertainment, 2005.

Peterson, Robert W. Pigskin: The Early Years ofPro Football. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Pietrusza, David, Matthew Silverman, and Michael Gershman. Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. New York: Total Sports, 2000.

Porter, David L. Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Football. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Shatzkin, Mike and Jim Charlton. The Ballplayers: Baseball’s Ultimate Biographical Reference. New York: Arbor House, 1990.

Thorn, John, Phil Birnbaum, Bill Deane, Rob Neyer, Alan Schwarz, Donald Dewey, Nicholas Acocella and Peter Wayner. Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia, 8th ed. Wilmington, DE: Sport Classic, 2004.

Whittingham, Richard. What a Game They Played: An Inside Look at the Golden Era of Pro Football. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

profootballreference.com

thebaseballcube.com

That’s an outlandish statement to make about a team that won just 40 of 160 games.

But even among baseball historians, few realize that nearly a quarter of those precious few victories came during a two-week burst in May in which the Mets won nine of 12.

Subtracting that run, they were actually 31-117.

Even the human symbol of the ’62 Mets’ futil­ity, Marv Throneberry, has had his very rough edges dulled by time and nostalgia. Many have heard of the day Throneberry was called out for not having touched first on a triple, and of how a coach’s pro­test was muted when the umpire mumbled, “He also missed second.” But the anecdote has blunted the true terror of Throneberry’s performance in that game, the first of a doubleheader against the.Cubs at the Polo Grounds on June 17.

Throneberry drove in two runs with his first-inning should-have-been-a-triple, but conceivably cost the Mets another, since Charlie Neal followed his not­ so-fancy footwork with a solo home run. But in the top of the inning, during a rundown play, he had also committed that most rare and foolish of errors, field­er’s obstruction-when the player without the ball in a rundown play just stands there in the base path and lets the runner slam into him. That Throneberry gaffe led directly to four unearned Chicago runs.

Just to top it off, in a game that theoretically could have been 8-4 Mets, New York rallied to score two runs in the bottom of the ninth to trail 8-7. They got the tying run to first with two men out before their last batter struck out — Throneberry, of course.

If the agonies he caused were not enough, there was pitcher Craig Anderson. The “3” in his 3-17 won­ lost record seems to preserve for him a shred of digni­ty. It doesn’t. Anderson was not only 0-11 as a starter, but his last two relief victories came in one double­header — on May 12.

At that point Anderson’s record stood at 3-1.

For the next four and a half months Anderson and the blighted Bob Miller would combine to go 0-28 — until Miller won his only game of the year, on the sea­son’s penultimate day, September 29.

The next day, of course, saw the ignominious fare­ well of Mets catcher Joe Pignatano. In what would be his last major league at-bat, Pignatano lined into a triple play. Less well remembered is that both the base runners in the play, Richie Ashburn and Sammy Drake, were also in their final big league games. Hall of Farner Ashburn’s career, in fact, ended at that moment — Drake would replace him in the field for the bottom of the eighth inning.

So the Mets were bad. However bad you think they were, they were worse.

But why?

The clue may have been contained in that career­ evaporating triple play into which Pignatano hit. He, Ashburn, and Drake were hardly the only men to sing their finales with the ’62 Mets. Of the 45 players who stumbled through all or parts of the season, 19 of them would never play another season in,the majors — and 10 of those guys were under the age of” 30.

The players were bad.

The men who chose the players were worse.

Though there was little criticism of it at the time, Met management’s obsession with bringing in former Dodgers and Yankees as gate attractions has forever after been blamed. The Houston  Colt .45s, born in the same expansion draft, went for more of a mixture of middle-level veterans and prospects, and won 24 more games than did the Mets, to finish a fairly respectable eighth.

The Mets, under the control of future Hall of Famers George Weiss and Casey Stengel, seemed instead to go for players they had heard of during their much more successful tenure across the Harlem River with the Yankees. Their Opening Day line­up featured no fewer than four former Brooklyn Dodgers (Roger Craig, Gil Hodges, Charlie Neal, and Don Zimmer). Clem Labine was in the bullpen, and Pignatano would be added before season’s end — as would ex-Yankees Throneberry and Gene Woodling. The original Met plan for ’62 had called for two more familiar faces, the ex-Dodger pitcher Billy Loes, and the former Giant ace Johnny Antonelli. The latter even rode on the Mets float in the 1961 Thanksgiving Day parade. Antonelli had the presence of mind to retire before spring training began, and Loes was so ineffective in early practices that he was returned to San Francisco, and then released.

But surely even a Rotisserie-like fascination with guys Weiss and Stengel might have “remem­bered from a couple of years ago” can’t explain the continuing death march of the ’62 Mets. The worst teams always get slightly better as veterans fade and get moved out, and Weiss certainly wasn’t loath to unload some of the disasters: Zimmer, Labine, Gus Bell, Jim Marshall, Hobie Landrith, Joe Ginsberg, Bobby Gene Smith, and Herb Moford were all gone before summer.

It may have been the transactions the Mets didn’t make that doomed them to the modern record for futility.

This is dangerous territory for the researcher. Just because Team A obtains Player X doesn’t mean that Team B should, or could have, nor that Player X would have produced as well as he did with Team A. But the pattern of the roster moves the Mets made concurrently with those by other major league teams in 1962 suggests that, at best, Weiss and Stengel were asleep at the switch.

A column in the April 27, 1962, edition of the New York Times quotes an unnamed Mets spokesman about the decision not to bid for a player just released by a local rival. “If he couldn’t help the Yankees,” the spokesman asked rhetorically, “how could he have been any help to us?”

“He” was Robin Roberts, cut loose in the Bronx after having not even pitched in the first two weeks of the Yankees season. To be fair, Roberts had seemingly bottomed out the year before in Philadelphia, when he struggled with a knee injury to a 1-10 record.

Ignored by the Mets — not deemed worthy of more than an anonymous quote — Roberts instead went to Baltimore, where he managed to win 37 games over the next three seasons, and would continue to pitch solidly if not spectacularly in the majors until 1966. As the Times noted, on the same day they passed on Roberts, the Mets picked up pitcher Dave Hillman from Cincinnati. Hillman managed to produce a 6.32 ERA in 13 appearances in New York, the last of his major league career.

Having eschewed one National League ace of the ’50s, the Mets promptly went out and traded for another one: Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell. The cost wasn’t great-they got him even-up for third-string first baseman Jim Marshall. But while the Mets were making that move on May 6, the Colts were preparing to obtain reliever Don McMahon from Milwaukee in a straight cash deal (it was consummated the same day the Mets traded for Throneberry). Weiss and Stengel should have remembered McMahon-he pitched against them six times in the World Series of ’57 and ’58.

Mizell was a robust 0-2 with a 7.34 ERA in New York, dropped into long relief after just two calami­tous starts. These were his last games in the majors. By contrast, McMahon pitched until 1974.

At about the same time, the Reds were giving up on a left hander who had bounced back and forth between Cincinnati and Triple-A. His name was Mike Cuellar, and he had 185 wins ahead of him with four pennant winners, but the Mets couldn’ t be bothered with his sudden free agent status — they were too busy coaxing the Indians into trading them catcher Harry Chiti for a player to be named later (who, as most everyone knows, would prove to be himself).

The then traditional May 15 cut-down date could  have been a shopping day for the talent-starved Mets. But, of course, they’d just traded for Throneberry and had no roster room to sign, say, the pitcher released outright by the L.A. Angels — Joe Nuxhall. Nuxhall  had also been released six weeks earlier by Baltimore (while the Mets were trying to decide whether or not to hang on to Butterball Botz, Aubrey Gatewood, or Howie Nunn). The Mets passed again; Nuxhall instead went back to Cincinnati, where, after a brief rehab stint in the minors, he managed a 20-8 record over the next season and a half, and a 46-28 mark over the last five years of his career. 

Stengel and Weiss did, however, give a long look to another pitcher released by the A’s — ex-Yankee Art Ditmar. Ultimately, they didn’t sign him, either. 

Soon after, the Mets got rid of the rapidly aging 33-year-old outfielder Gus Bell. But on June 15, they replaced him with 39-year old outfielder Gene Woodling, a Stengel favorite from a decade before.

The missed bargain-basement opportunities continued at a rate of about once a month. The Mets bought Pignatano — their seventh catcher of the season — from the Giants on July 13. A few days later, the Phillies released veteran pitcher Frank Sullivan. The Mets passed. Sullivan finished the year 4-1 with a 3.24 ERA for Minnesota. Pignatano finished the season (and his career) by hitting into a triple play in his last major league at-bat.

In August, Cincinnati gave up on former Cubs starter Moe Drabowsky, and waived him out of the National League — the Mets again passing — to Kansas City. Drabowsky was no superstar, but he did pitch until 1972, going 54-50 with 51 saves over the rest of his career. Instead, the Mets managed to buy minor league pitcher Larry Foss from the Pirates. He’d make five September appearances with New York (0-1, 4.63) and vanish from the majors.

Hindsight is a wonderful and unfair tool with which to criticize the always dicey business of trying to improve a moribund ball club. But we’re not blaming Weiss and Stengel for failing to swap for the serviceable veterans who were traded that season, like Bob Buhl, Charlie Maxwell, Pedro Ramos, or Bobby Shantz, or even prospects like Don Lock and Steve Hamilton. We’re not even questioning how their expansion cousins signed amateurs in that pre-draft summer like Joe Morgan, Rusty Staub, Jerry Grote, and Jim Wynn, while their own scouts came up with Ray Apple, Paul Deem, and Ed Kranepool. We’re not even noting that Grote, Staub, and Wynn had already made it to Houston’s 1963 spring camp, while Weiss and Stengel auditioned instead the likes of more ’50s Yankee flash-in-the-pans like Bob Cerv and Johnny Kucks.

We’re talking about buying Dave Hillman instead of signing Robin Roberts.

KEITH OLBERMANN joined SABR in 1984. He hosts MSNBC’s primetime newscast Countdown and co-hosts an hour of the Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio. His latest book, The Worst Persons in the World, is published by John Wiley & Sons.

Diz dominated National League batters from the early to mid-’30s, setting countless records while, through his zany antics, further etching himself into American folklore as a truly original character. His meteoric rise finally stalled, however, when the old soupbone he’d ridden to greatness failed him in 1937. On track for another 25-win season, Dean started the ’37 All-Star game only to suffer a broken toe when he was struck by an Earl Averill line drive. He rushed himself back into the Cards’ rotation before he was fully healed, and subsequently altered his pitching motion to favor his injured foot. The results were devastating as the change in his delivery caused him to develop bursitis in his throwing shoulder, a condition that would plague him for the few short years he continued to pitch.

By the spring of 1941, Ol’ Diz wasn’t doing so much bragging anymore, mainly because he could no longer back it up. Nine months after his All-Star mishap of 1937, Dean was dealt to the Cubs, where he struggled to a 16-8 record in 42 games from 1938-40. Following a tough 1941 spring training and a poor showing in his only start of the season on April 25, the Cubs had seen enough. When May 14 arrived, or ”Axe Day” as some called it because it was the day for roster cut-downs, Dean was given his outright release. Diz’s subsequent statement that he “was through” insofar as the Big Show was concerned stamped a sad finality on the playing days of the 31-year-old from Lucas, Arkansas — or so everybody thought.

On September 28, 1947, over six years since he’d thrown his last professional pitch, Dizzy Dean took the mound as the starting pitcher for the St. Louis Browns in their last game of the campaign, a season-closing Sunday afternoon contest against the Chicago White Sox at Sportsman’s Park. The events that led Diz to don the brown and orange of St. Louis’ other big league team, and the events of the game itself, just served to enhance the already colorful legacy he’d crafted for himself.

Following his release from the Cubs back in 1941, Dean flirted with the idea of embarking on a new career as a pitching coach, but that plan was quickly abandoned when Diz was approached about a different opportunity, something that would turn out to be his second true calling — broadcasting. Dean joined KMOX radio, where he worked with partner Johnny O’Hara broadcasting both Cardinals and Browns home games from 1941 to 1946. He was an immediate success, connecting with listeners through his exuberant personality and purely original homespun sense of humor. Fans loved Ol’ Diz’s incorrect use of the English language. A melee was a “melly:’ A conflict became a “confliction:’ A base runner didn’t slide into third, he “slud.”

KMOX listeners also found Dean’s original creations for typical baseball situations amusing. When players and umpires argued, they were “disputers:’ If Diz strongly agreed with something said by his on-air partner, he’d exclaim, “You ain’t just a-woofin; brother!” He coined the phrase “a sluggers’ fest” to describe a game with unusually prolific offensive output. And, to Dean, a bases-loaded, two-out, bottom-of-the-ninth situation meant “there’s a lotta nerve-wrackin’ goin’ on out there.” Diz occasionally stirred things up with his sometimes candid observations, but his down-home demeanor usually allowed the incident to be quickly diffused. One anecdote has it that Dean once observed a young couple “neckin”‘ in the bleachers, to which Diz, while on the air, is reported to have said, “That young feller is kissin’ her on the strikes and she’s kissin’ him on the balls.”

On January 11, 1947, Cardinals owner Sam Breadon announced that he had created a new six-station radio network to broadcast all Cardinals games, home and away. Despite being named by The Sporting News as the best baseball announcer of 1946, Breadon also announced that Dean was out, replaced by Harry Caray and Gabby Street as the Cards looked to create a more “conventional” and “dignified” broadcast.

“They can’t do that to me;’ said an outraged Dean. But as he came to the realization that they could and, in fact, did, he accepted his new exclusive position with the Brownies and said, “Well, now I’m a fella with two home teams. I can root for them Cards and support the good ol’ Brownies, too. And that’s what I’m gonna do. You know, these Browns have a great organization and it’ll be fun doin’ their games again.” Dizzy quickly learned that watching the Browns lose game after game was a little more difficult than he had imagined. “Boy, you earn your dough watchin’ these fellas,” he once said.

The Cardinals, a perennial pennant contender, had previously acted as a buffer for Dean, but without their games to counter the losing of the Brownies, Dean eventually grew weary. He became increasingly more critical of the Browns as the summer of ’47 wore on. Dizzy, referring to Al Zarilla (.224) and Les Moss (.157), posed the on-air question, “What’re they doin’ up in the big leagues if they can’t swing a bat no better than that?”

Brownie pitchers weren’t exempt from Ol’ Diz’s scrutiny, either. He wondered on-air how Jack Kramer (11-16), Sam Zoldak (9-10), Bob Muncrief (8-14), and Ellis Kinder (8-15) — guys with losing records — had the gall to ask for their paychecks.

By September, with just a few weeks left in the campaign and the Browns looking at a possible 100-loss season, Dean began intensifying his criticism. “Gosh, folks,” he told his listeners, “I haven’t pitched since 1941, but I feel sure I could go out there today and do better than a lot of these throwers who are drawin’ big salaries as major league pitchers.” Diz repeated his theory on a number of occasions over the course of the next week, then took the whole subject to a new level when he volunteered to pitch “for nothin”‘ in the last week of the season to convince the public that he was serious. The idea quickly caught fire with fans, who besieged Browns management with requests to “let Diz make good on his boast.”

This was still the pre-Veeck era of the Browns, so the full-out circus atmosphere had yet to evolve, but even Bill De Witt, the Browns general manager at that time, knew a good attendance-drawing gimmick when he saw one. When the Browns returned from their last road trip of the season on Monday, September 22, DeWitt signed Dean to a 1947 contract for a salary of $1, the minimum salary required to make the document binding. They then agreed to pencil Dizzy in as the starter in the season finale, to be played six days later.

The buzz created by the news of Dean’s upcoming appearance generated speculation of a big turnout at Sportsman’s Park for the game. Rumors were swirling that the $1 contract was a mere formality and that Dean was actually paid $1,000 for his impending one-game gig. He played it close to the vest, however, refusing to divulge any details and saying, “This is the first baseball contract I signed without first turnin’ it back for more money. Everybody was satisfied with the contract the Browns offered me.”

There’s no question that the Browns brass were hoping that Dizzy would provide their lowly franchise with one last chance to make the turnstiles click in 1947. The Browns’ futility on the field up to that point in the season had a devastating effect on their attendance, and with only four games left on the schedule they had yet to draw 300,000 — less than half of what they drew in 1946. Then things got worse. Only an embarrassing 315 paid to see the Browns lose a 9-1 contest to the Indians on September 24, a league low for 1947. That dubious achievement only served to increase the hopes that Diz would be the Browns’ temporary deliverance from their attendance woes.

At the age of 37 in 1947, Ol’ Diz wasn’t exactly the picture of physical fitness. A skinny 6-foot 2-inches back in his glory days with the Cardinals, Dean now had the “gait and gut of somebody 10 years older,” — that according to Robert Gregory’s 1992 book, Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression, which was very helpful in the writing of this article.

That wasn’t about to discourage Dean, though. Even in his prime, Dean wasn’t known for his conditioning. He had always relied on his God-given ability, and on was quite often reported to have let fly with a hard one without sufficiently warming up his famous right arm. So, in keeping with that tradition, Diz’s preparation for his return to the mound was minimal — he threw a round of batting practice to the Brownies and then declared, “I’m ready!”

On September 28, 1947, 15,916 — many of them holdovers from the Gas House Gang days of the mid-1930s — paid to see if Diz was, in fact, ready. When asked before the game how he would manage to juggle his broadcasting and pitching duties, Dean casually replied, “Well, I sorta figure my partner Johnny could handle the first three innings while I’m
doin’ the pitchin’. If I ain’t doin’ so well after that, I’ll come up and broadcast the rest of it.” Dizzy then followed with a statement of amazing foresightedness considering the popularity of today’s reality television. “But I’ll stay in as long as I can,” he said, “and if Johnny wants me to spell him a while I guess I could put a walkie-talkie on my back and do my broadcastin’ between pitches.” Needless to say, if that had happened the audio would have been priceless.

Dizzy had hinted that he would most likely only pitch three innings, but Browns manager Muddy Ruel made it clear that while he didn’t approve of the whole Dean stunt, Diz would be allowed to go as long as he wanted to. After the top of the first inning was completed, Diz looked good enough to make some folks wonder whether he could go a full nine, and at the end of his work that day he even made a believer of Ruel. White Sox leadoff man Don Kolloway opened the game with a ground ball behind second base that Browns second baseman Johnny Berardino stopped, but not in time to make a throw to first. The threat was quickly snuffed, however, when Dizzy got Sox right fielder Bob Kennedy to hit into a 6-4-3 double- play — Vern Stephens to Berardino to Walt Judnich. Chicago left fielder Dave Philley then rolled out to Berardino to end the inning.

Dizzy’s broadcast booth complaints about the Browns’ inability to hit came back to roost as St. Louis failed to score in the home half of the first against White Sox starter Eddie Lopat, but he seemed unfazed as he strolled back out to the mound for his second inning of work. Sox first baseman Rudy York, a dangerous hitter with 21 home runs, opened the second with a flyout to Browns center fielder Paul Lehner. Ol’ Diz appeared to be in some trouble when he allowed a single to Chicago center fielder Thurman Tucker, followed by a base on balls to shortstop Jack Wallaesa, but he again got out of the jam courtesy of another double-play ball when he induced Sox third baseman Cass Michaels to hit into another 6-4-3 job. 

Dean’s new teammates again failed to score any runs in the bottom of the second, but not to worry — Diz appeared to be getting stronger in the top of the third. He set down the Pale Hose in order as catcher Mike Tresh flied to Browns right fielder Rny Coleman, followed by center field flyouts off the bats of Lopat and Kolloway. Seemingly determined to validate Dean’s statements about their anemic offense, the Browns did not score in their half of the third inning.

Dizzy’s pitching performance alone through three innings would have been enough to send the Browns’ third-largest crowd of the season home happy, but leave it to Ol’ Diz to give them something extra. As he walked to the plate to open the bottom of the third for his lone at-bat of the game, here’s how The Sporting News described the scene:

Always one to give the customers some kind of show while doing his pitching chores, Dean didn’t miss this opportunity to get a laugh out of his public. When he went to bat, he carried a black-striped bludgeon to the plate, only to have it ruled out as “illegal” by Umpire Cal Hubbard. Diz walked back to the rack, pulled out a gaudier red- colored stick and took his place at the plate. The bludgeon had been sent to Dean by the Southwest MFG. Co., makers of bats, as a gag. He swung at the first pitch and singled. Later, trying to reach second on a teammate’s infield grounder, Diz was forced, but slid into the bag as in days of old, and came off the diamond limping.

Despite a pulled leg muscle, Dean hobbled to the mound for the top of the fourth for what would prove to be the last time in his storied career. If Dean’s wife, Pat, had got her way, however, Ol’ Diz may never have gone back out to the hill. While her husband was still limping off the field following his slide into second, Pat leaned over the dugout rail and hollered to Ruel, “He’s proved his point — now get him out of there before he kills himself!”

Kennedy opened the frame with a single to left, but was stranded as the “Great One” got Philley and York on long flies to center. Diz then closed the inning by retiring Tucker on a drive to Brownie left fielder Jeff Heath. As Dean limped off the mound, he must have known that he was through. He flashed a warm smile and good-naturedly waved his cap as he made his way to the dugout, obviously happy with the fact that he had, as Pat had said, proved his point. The fans at the park knew they were witnessing something special, and they bade farewell to the old Cardinal great with resounding cheers. His Brownie teammates greeted him in the dugout with smiles and congratulations, to which Dean grinned and said, “I’m goin’ back to my retirement!” He then called on trainer Doc Bauman for one final rubdown.

Dean’s work on the hill that day was impressive. He wasn’t as fast as he’d been back in the days when he was “foggin’ ’em through” for the Cardinals, but he kept the White Sox off balance with near-perfect control. In four complete innings, Dizzy threw but 39 pitches, facing just 14 batters and allowing no runs. Les Moss, Dean’s catcher that day, said that Diz simply set the Sox hitters down with his “good control and that big ol’ flat curve:’ The rest of the game was played out of mere formality — the crowd had already seen what they’d come to see. For the record, though, Glen Moulder relieved Dizzy and went the rest of the way. He pitched well for four frames, but Chicago roughed him up for five runs in the ninth inning, sending the Browns to defeat, 5-2-their 95th loss of the season and good enough for another last-place finish.

Dizzy left immediately after the game for his home in Texas, but not before reporters got one last statement from him. “I still believe I can pitch good enough to win games today;’ Diz said, full of his old swagger, “but I don’t intend to try it,” he added hastily. “I have a contract as a radio announcer and I’m gonna stick to that job:’ Before Dean could resume his broadcasting career, however, there were some loose ends that needed to be tied. In an article entitled DIZZY GOES  BACK TO MINORS—TO GET FREE AGENCY, this is how The Sporting News explained the details involved in closing out Dean’s career:

Dizzy Dean, who swore he never would become a minor leaguer after his major league career was over, unwittingly found himself one for a few days, during the time it took to unwind some baseball red tape. Under the rules, Jerome Herman, who signed a $1-a-year contract and pitched four scoreless innings for the Browns against the White Sox the last day of the season, could not be given his unconditional release, since there is a lid on waivers for that purpose after September 25, three days before Dizzy went to the pitchers’ mound. It was necessary for the Browns to release him outright to their Toledo American Association farm after getting waivers. The Mud Hens, in turn, obtained the necessary Association waivers to make him a free agent.

The iconic status Dean had achieved during his heyday with the Cardinals still had a hold on baseball fans across America, so there was always a great deal of interest in anything relating to him. As the newspapers and radio spread word around the country of Dean’s success on the mound for the Brownies, fans were amazed. As for the $1-a-year contract — people weren’t buying it. They knew that Ol’ Diz was just too smart to let management make off with all the dough.

Dizzy stuck by the story that he did it “for nothin’,” but statements from players left people wondering. Vern Stephens, for one, was sure that Dean had cleaned up from his performance with the Brownies, and upon his return home to Long Beach, California, he told Long Beach Press-Telegram reporter Frank Blair that Dizzy “undoubtedly received a percentage of the gate for his part in luring fans through the turnstiles.”

When the 1948 season began, Diz was back in his familiar seat in front of the KMOX microphone broadcasting Browns games. He remained there through 1949, but in 1950 he joined the New York Yankees television broadcast team of Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy because he was fed up with the “humpty-dumpty” Browns. Television was the future, and Dizzy knew it. “Well, folks,” Dean said, bidding farewell to his radio public, “I’m through talkin’ about things you ain’t seein’.” And with that, the old country boy left for the bright lights of New York City.

Dean remained in broadcasting through the mid-1960s, a run which included a particularly successful ll-year stint as the star of the Game of the Week telecast. St. Louis baseball fans were ecstatic when Dizzy was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953, but the happy group wasn’t limited to Cardinals fans. Because Dizzy once bragged — and then backed it up — while wearing brown and orange flannels, Ol’ Diz was already a Hall of Famer in the hearts of Brownie fans.

RONNIE JOYNER is a graphic artist living in Charlotte Hall, Maryland. Joyner’s baseball illustrations can be seen regularly in Sports Collector’s Digest, as well as in publications of the Philadelphia Athletics, St. Louis Browns (where a version of this article first appeared), and Washington Senators historical societies. He has co-authored recent autobiographies by Don Gutteridge, Virgil Trucks, and original Met Frank Thomas.