The deal that brought Feller to Cleveland was one of the most lopsided interstate transfers in baseball, if not economic, history. Ohio got a future Hall of Farner, Iowa got one dollar and an autographed Cleveland Indians team baseball, Feller’s signing bonus. Feller would go on to become the best pitcher of his generation and one of the greatest of all time. After a career spanning eighteen seasons, interrupted for nearly four years for military service, he retired in 1956 with 266 wins, 2,581 strikeouts, 3 no-hitters, 12 one-hitters, and the single-season strikeout record. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 1962 and in 1969 was voted the greatest living right-handed pitcher.

In his prime, Feller was regarded as one of the best pitchers in the game, and he was compensated as such. From 1946 to 1948, three of the most dominant seasons of his career, Feller reigned as the highest-paid player in the game. When he earned $82,500 in 1948, he became the highest-paid player in the history of baseball. His earnings eclipsed Babe Ruth’s record $80,000 salary for 1931. Feller quickly relinquished the salary crown the following year, 1949, when Joe DiMaggio became the first $100,000 man in MLB history (figure 1).

Even during his best years, Bob Feller never drew the highest base salary in the league (figure 2). Yet, a shrewd negotiator, he parlayed his success and drawing power into some of the most lucrative contracts in baseball history at the time. He used the knowledge that he was a crowd favorite to negotiate a series of bonus clauses that would pay him more than $160,000 over his career, amounting to 25 percent of his total earnings from the Indians. Except for his first bonus clause, they were exclusively based on attendance.

Feller’s third season in the majors, 1938, was the first for which he negotiated a bonus clause in his contract. He was coming off two seasons that, while producing only a 14-10 record, did see him average more than a strikeout an inning and post ERAs more than a full run below the league average each year. It had not taken long for Feller to establish himself as a crowd favorite and a menace to opposing hitters. That year he had a performance clause in his contract that would have paid him $1,000 for each win over 20 and $2,500 each for reaching 15 and 20 wins. However, he had attendance clauses that same year, and the performance clause kicked in only if an attendance clause did not, so he did not earn anything extra for winning 17 games. He did, however, pocket $5,000 for the attendance clauses, which paid him $2,500 each for attendance of 500,000 and 550,000.

Beginning in 1938, his attendance clauses were regular, appearing each full season he played through 1949. The last three years, the attendance clause specified adult paid admissions instead of total admission (tables 1 and 2). Without access to the actual financial records of the team, it is impossible to determine the composition of the attendance, only the total. In 1947 the Indians drew 1,521,978 fans. Feller received bonuses of $7,500 for each 100,000 adult admissions from 750,000 through 1,050,000 and $5,000 for each of the next 100,000 up to 1,250,000. In order for him to earn the full complement of bonus money, 82 percent of the attendance would have to be made up of adult admissions. Similar figures for 1948 and 1949 would be 76 percent and 89 percent, respectively. Without more detailed information, we can only speculate as to whether he earned his bonuses in each of these years. The figures in table 3 assume that he did.

In addition to his shrewd bargaining for bonus clauses, he earned income off the field as well, endorsing popsicles, Wheaties, and sporting goods; authoring his autobiography at the ripe old age of twenty-eight; licensing his name and likeness for comic books and baseball-bat pens; and collecting appearance fees. He participated in offseason barnstorming tours beginning in 1936 and organized his own in 1946, 1947, and 1949. The 1946 tour was a huge financial success, netting him a reported $80,000, which more than made up for the money he lost on each of his next two barnstorming tours. In some years he earned nearly as much through these ancillary earnings as he did from the Cleveland Indians.

Feller revealed his negotiating strategy in a Sport magazine interview in 1947. He credited his success to careful research, claiming that he kept close track of the club’s finances and then estimated his contribution to team revenues, using that as a base for his contract negotiations. He did not reveal how he kept track of club finances, but the results can hardly be disputed.

His financial acumen was often a source of interest to the media. In several interviews over the course of his career, his salary, bonus clauses, negotiating skills, and offseason financial dealings were mentioned. The press dutifully reported salary and bonus-clause figures fed to them by Feller and Indians ownership, especially Bill Veeck, but seldom had accurate information. In most cases the figures they reported were inflated values of what Feller was actually paid (in base salary), actually earned, or could potentially earn through his bonus clauses. It is no surprise that Veeck would seek to generate publicity from the news that Feller was set to become the first $100,000-a-year ballplayer or that his 1947 salary would catapult him ahead of Babe Ruth for the all-time highest salary in MLB history. Neither claim turned out to be true. In his best year, Feller was paid $82,500 by the Indians, and he did not surpass Ruth until 1948, and then it was on the basis of bonus clauses, not base salary.       

The only year that Rapid Robert was unable to turn over a bonus clause was 1939, the tail end of the Great Depression. His salary declined from $22,500 in 1938 to $20,000 in 1939 because attendance dropped from 652,006 to 563,926, and his attendance clause did not kick in until 600,000. In 1938 he had padded his salary by $5,000 with attendance bonuses and had a chance to earn as much in bonuses in 1939 if the team drew more than 700,000. The failure of the Indians to draw well was certainly not Feller’s fault. He won 24 games, the first of five consecutive (full) seasons he would win 20 or more (leading the league in wins each of those years). His 24 victories accounted for 28 percent of Cleveland’s total of 87. The problem was the lackluster performance of the Tribe on days when Feller was not pitching. Their 87 wins got them no closer than third place, a distant 20. games behind the pennant-winning Yankees. The 13 percent decrease in Cleveland attendance was far greater than the 0.3 percent league average decrease, further evidence that it was not a nationwide lack of interest in baseball that choked off the crowds in Cleveland.

From 1938 through 1949, Feller cashed in on more than two dozen separate attendance bonus clauses in his contracts. During his peak earning years, 1946-49, Feller earned more in bonus incentives alone than the average Hall of Farner earned from salary and bonuses combined.

Feller did not have an immediate impact on Cleveland’s annual attendance. For the first three years of his career, it rose slightly, almost exactly in line with the American League average. It spiked in 1940 before falling back to the American League average through both the slump brought about by the Second World War and then the gradual rise through 1946. At this point, while Feller entered the best years of his career and Cleveland’s fortunes rose with him, the Indians’ attendance grew rapidly, outstripping the American League average, increasing by nearly half a million fans from 1946 to 1947 and rising by another million the next year, during a lull in the growth of the average attendance of the other American League teams. Even as Cleveland’s attendance began a decline from 1949 through 1953, it remained above the league average. After a brief uptick in 1954 it continued its decline, until it fell below the league average in 1956 to a level nearly one-third its 1948 peak (figure 4). Feller’s salary was tied to attendance only through the 1949 season. It is not likely that Feller foresaw a decline in attendance and opted out of bonus clauses in anticipation of such, because he actually took a base-salary cut from $40,000 to $37,500 in 1950.

Coming off a 15-win season in 1949, his lowest full season total since 1937, he took a salary cut of nearly 50 percent. In 1950 his base salary was reduced by only $2,500, but his long series of attendance bonuses ended, costing him thousands more. Had his 1950 contract had the same bonus clauses as his 1949 contract, he would have earned an additional $20,000. The reality was that the team believed his best days were behind him at age thirty-one. After the 1949 season, his salary glided downward with the fortunes of the team for the rest of his career, with one slight jump in 1952, the result of an outstanding 1951 season that saw him lead the American League in wins, with 22, and reach the 20-win plateau for the sixth, and final, time in his career. That proved to be the last great year of his career, and his sinking salary reflected his decreasing value to the team. Even the team’s record-setting 111-win season (up to then, 111 was the most wins by an American League club, and the winning percentage, .721, remains an American League record) in 1954, aided by a solid season from Feller, did not break his salary slide. Cleveland rewarded his 13-3 record and 3.09 ERA (more than half a run below the league average) with another salary cut, the third of four consecutive salary decreases.

As lucrative as the bonus clauses proved to be to Feller, it still remains to be seen whether his negotiating strategy was sound. While he repeatedly earned his attendance bonuses, would he have done better to forgo the bonuses and take a straight salary? In economics parlance, this is known as an opportunity cost. What could Feller have been expected to earn in base salary if he had not instead negotiated bonus clauses? It is not possible to know exactly what salary he could have earned, but we can estimate it by comparing his career salary progression to that of his Hall of Fame peers. Feller negotiated two parts to his salary each year from 1938 through 1949 (except for 1942-45, when he was serving in the navy instead of serving up fastballs). The first part was a base salary; the second was a series of bonus clauses based on attendance. In order to estimate his earnings had he bargained for a straight salary instead of a wage plus bonus, I assumed that his wage would have risen by the average of other Hall of Fame pitchers in his cohort instead of at the rate it actually did.

It turns out that Feller made the right decision. Depending on which assumption we make as to his salary growth, he earned between $70,000 and $140,000 more in his career as a result of choosing bonus clauses over guaranteed salary amounts. His actual career earnings were $657,675, so he likely earned between 12 percent and 27 percent more over his career as a result of his bonus clauses. While he fell a bit short in 1938 and 1939, he more than made up for it with the rest of his bonus clauses. In his peak bonus earning years he made nearly twice what he would likely have earned on a straight salary contract.

I estimated salaries for Bob Feller by looking at the average growth rates of the salaries of Hall of Fame players by years of experience. In order to do this, I gathered the available salary data for every Hall of Farner whose career overlapped Bob Feller’s by at least five years. The resulting pool included fifty-nine players whose careers spanned the years 1918 to 1977. In order to avoid inflation issues, I omitted from that sample all players whose career started before 1934 or ended after 1963. I then divided this group into pitchers and hitters, giving me three different sets of players (pitchers, hitters, and both combined) whose salary progress I could use to estimate Feller’s salary. I looked at all three samples and chose to focus on only the one that would have resulted in the highest opportunity cost for Feller. That group was made up of the pitchers whose careers most closely lined up with Feller. Even when biasing the results upward in this way, it still turns out that Feller made the right decision. The group of pitchers included Hal Newhouser (1939-55), Early Wynn (1939-63), Bob Lemon (1941-58), and Warren Spahn (1942-65).

I looked at each of these pitchers’ salaries by years of experience and calculated the average rate of growth of salary for each year of experience. I then took those growth rates and estimated Bob Feller’s salary for each of those years that he had a bonus clause and estimated what his salary would have been had it grown at the same rate as the average Hall of Fame pitcher during those years. This is the line labeled “estimated” in figure 3.

In his critical third though tenth years of experience, Feller’s salary had a lower growth rate than average in five of the eight years. In those years when his growth rate was higher, it was barely so (18.2 to 14.4, 37.5 to 31.0 and O to -9.2) but it was far below the average every other year, falling between one-quarter and one-tenth the average growth rate. The estimated salary assumes that Feller would have seen his base salary grow at the rate the average pitcher saw his salary grow each year. Had he done this, he would have been worse off than having negotiated the lower base growth and the bonus clause. I consider the estimated growth only during the bonus clause years, sticking with the actual growth during the years without bonus clauses. When calculated this way, Feller outearned the estimated salary by more than $70,000 over the eight-year period, or nearly $10,000 per year more from bonus clauses than he might reasonably have been expected to earn in straight salary.

One of the frequent laments of older players is that they never had the opportunity to earn the outrageous salaries that players earn today. Free agency and billion-dollar television packages have certainly changed the salary landscape. If Bob Feller were active today, what kind of salary could he have earned? Using the Bill James similarity index, the most similar active player to Bob Feller is Randy Johnson, who has a career similar in length to Feller. If Feller earned salaries on a par with Johnson (not including bonus earnings) he would have earned approximately $165 million over a hypothetical twenty-year career today. If we eliminate seasons 7-10, the equivalent seasons that Feller missed for military service, Johnson earned $145 million. Even after Feller’s salary is adjusted for inflation, his earnings totaled a relatively modest $6.4 million and change.

Table 4 carries the Johnson-Feller comparison one step farther by looking at how they were compensated for their performance. The table adjusts all salaries for inflation and then calculates how much each pitcher was paid per inning pitched, wins, and strikeouts. It is no surprise, but certainly illuminating, to see how much better compensated was the Big Unit than Rapid Robert. In their second seasons, Feller was paid more per win (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than Randy Johnson, but that quickly changed. Feller’s highest salary per win was a bit more than $39,000, a figure that Johnson has exceeded in eighteen of the twenty years of his career, peaking at a salary of $2.7 million per win in 2003. Comparisons of price per inning pitched and per strikeout yield similar results.

Bob Feller was a strikeout artist, a hero of World War II, and a master negotiator. He may have come cheap to the Indians in the beginning, but he clearly extracted his pound of flesh as his career wore on. The available evidence suggests that he earned just about as much as he possibly could have during his career. But what about that autographed baseball? Today, on the open market, it might fetch about $100. It still turns out to be a pretty good deal for the Indians, and for Bob Feller as well.

SOURCES

Laird, A. W. Ranking Baseball’s Elite. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990.

Mansch, Larry. “Hitting Bob Feller,” The National Pastime 17 (1997): 125-27.

Marshall, William. Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945-1951. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

McCaffrey, Eugene V., and Roger A. McCaffrey. Players’ Choice. New York: Facts on File, 1987.

Sickels, John. Bob Feller: Ace of the Greatest Generation. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2004.

Three players have hit .400 or better three times.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb—owner of the highest lifetime batting average (.366) and most batting titles (twelve in a thirteen-year span)—hit .420, .409, and .401 in 1911, 1912, and 1922, respectively.

Second to Ty Cobb in career average, at .358, is Rogers Hornsby, whose .400 years were 1922, 1924, and 1925. His .424 mark in 1924 surpasses all twentieth century batting averages by a player over a full season.

Add “Big Ed” Delahanty’ s name to the list. A Cleveland native and outfielder for the Phillies, he hit over .400 in 1894, 1895, and 1899.

Several other players came close to hitting .400 three times, and their names are not Napoleon LaJoie, Willie Keeler, Hugh Duffy, or Joe Jackson. Actually, only three members of the prestigious .400 club have batted .400 exactly twice: Sam Thompson, George Sisler, and Jesse Burkett, left fielder for the Cleveland Spiders in the 1890s.

Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on December 4, 1868, to Granville and Eleanor Burkett, Jesse Burkett lived near the Ohio River in a neighborhood called Wheeling Island. A son of the laboring class (his father worked for the Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company and later for the Wheeling Traction Company), Burkett played baseball until dark and often was late for supper. He also loved to swim in the Ohio River. His swimming prowess was to be tested profoundly at age twelve when a little girl fell out of a skiff into the muddy river. While several adults stood by and did nothing, young Burkett plunged into the water, crawled about the river bottom, found and brought the girl to the surface, and dragged her to the shore. Her heart was still beating, but attempts at artificial respiration failed, and she died right there. At eighty-three, Burkett’ s eyes would well with tears when he told this story to a reporter. The event haunted Jesse Burkett his entire life.

Wheeling’s competitive amateur and semipro leagues, which produced a number of major leaguers during this period, provided an opportunity for Jesse to prove his athletic talents as a hard-throwing pitcher and part-time outfielder. He showed enough promise at age eighteen to sign his first professional baseball contract as a pitcher for the Scranton team in the Central League in 1888. The Wheeling Daily Register on March 30 of that year wrote optimistically about the scrappy five-foot-eight-inch, 155-pounder: “Jesse Burkett leaves for Scranton with which club he has signed as a pitcher for the season. Jesse has several good curves and is an all-around good ball player. He will no doubt make a success on the diamond.” In his rookie season at Scranton, he won 14 games.2

The following year, Burkett advanced to Worcester of the Atlantic Association and enjoyed a spectacular season on and off the field. His 30-6 record (he hit .267) helped his team win the Atlantic Association Championship.3 Off the field, Burkett fell in love with and married a local girl, Ellen G. McGrath. Worcester would be his home for the rest of his life.

Jack Glasscock, a native of Wheeling and captain of the New York Giants, persuaded the National League team to purchase Burkett’ s contract in 1890. Surprisingly, Burkett showed them more promise as a hitter than as a pitcher. He hit .309 and knocked in 60 runs, but as a pitcher he posted a dismal 3-10 record and a 5.57 ERA. Overlooked by the Giants (who sold his contract to Cleveland after the season) was Burkett’s .461 slugging average. There Burkett ranked fifth in the league.

As a member of the Lincoln (Nebraska) team of the Western Association in 1891, Burkett was converted into an outfielder and now concentrated on hitting. This is when he “began to make my reputation,” he would tell an interviewer years later. Burkett’s .316 batting average (fourth best in the league), line-drive hitting to all fields, superb bunting, and aggressive baserunning impressed the Cleveland club, which added him (on August 15) to the late-season roster. For the next fourteen years Burkett would shine as one of baseball’s premier hitters.

Burkett arrived in Cleveland late in 1891 just as the Spiders had moved from their home at old National League Park (at East 39th Street and Payne Avenue) to new League Park (at East 66th and Lexington Avenue). Professional baseball’s most modern edifice (it was rebuilt for the 1910 season), it would showcase the sublime talents of the game’s immortals over the next fifty years. But during the 1890s the atmosphere at League Park, both on the field and in the stands, suggested the Roman Coliseum (or a British soccer stadium) more than a pastoral setting appropriate to the national pastime. “The tactics of the ’80s were aggressive,” as Bill James observed in his Historical Baseball Abstract; “the tactics of the ’90s were violent. The game of the ’80s was crude; the game of the ’90s was criminal. The baseball of the ’80s had ugly elements; the game of the ’90s was just ugly. ” The young left fielder’s natural combativeness fit perfectly, as the Spiders and their fans were notoriously rowdy.

Fighting and cursing were part of the game. Spiking other players, tripping baserunners or grabbing their belts or blocking their way as they rounded the bases, and shoving and spitting on umpires were also common. Unruly fans often bombarded umpires and opposing players with beer bottles, vegetables, eggs, and rocks. Jesse Burkett once refused to leave the field after being ejected from a game for cursing an umpire. Two policemen eventually escorted him from the grounds. On another occasion, Burkett and several other Spiders spent a night in jail. Their animated protests of an umpire’s decision to call a game due to darkness had incited the Louisville fans to riot and the Louisville police court to fine each player $200. Another time, the bellicose Burkett, after exchanging epithets with the manager of the Washington team, punched the skipper in the nose, drawing a $50 fine.

Noted for his surly disposition and caustic tongue, “the Crab,” as he was nicknamed, believed that it was the fight in him that made him a great player, recalling for a local paper in 1953 that “you got to be a battler. If you don’t, they’ll walk all over you. After you lick three or four of them, they don’t show up any more looking fora fight.” To succeed against brawnier athletes, the diminutive West Virginian was forced to be a scrapper.

Many students of baseball hold that the modern form of the game began in 1893, when the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate was increased from 50 feet to 60 feet, 6 inches. In the course of two years, from 1892 to 1894, league batting averages rose from about .250 to over .300, and runs per game increased from 5 to 7. Another important rule change (adopted in 1894) prevented expert bunters such as Burkett and Willie Keeler from deliberately bunting pitches foul until they got one they liked. Bunting foul with two strikes now became an out. The Crab is considered by many to be the best bunter in history. He once bragged that he could hit .300 if he bunted every time up. At age seventy, after watching Red Sox players struggle to lay down bunts properly during a morning practice in Fenway Park, Burkett stepped into the batting cage. He ordered the pitcher to throw as hard as he could and proceeded to bunt the first pitch down the third-base line, to bunt the second pitch down the first base line, and to smash the third pitch over second base. Jesse Burkett’s amazing eyesight certainly contributed to his extraordinary skills at the plate. Even at eighty-four he could read without glasses. The only specs he ever wore were sunglasses on the field.

From the late summer of 1891 until traded to the Cardinals in 1899, Jesse Burkett was Cleveland’s best hitter. With his smoldering spirit, daring baserunning, slashing hitting style, bunting mastery, speed, and intelligence, he dominated the National League. The Crab owns too many individual team records to list, so behold these league-leading numbers. In 1895 Burkett batted .409 with 225 hits; in 1896, he hit .410 with 240 hits, 160 runs, and 317 total bases. In 1898 Burkett’s 213 hits ranked second in the league, close behind Willie Keeler’s 216. (A hitting machine, Burkett would accumulate more than 200 hits in six out of seven consecutive seasons, 1895-1901. He came up two hits short in 1897.)

The Cleveland Spiders boasted a formidable roster throughout Burkett’s time with them in the 1890s. Only the Boston Beaneaters and Baltimore Orioles won more games than the Spiders, but no team boasted more stars. Listen to this lineup: Cy Young, 511 career wins, Hall of Farner; Chief Zimmer, the finest defensive catcher in the game; second baseman Cupid Childs, a lifetime .306 hitter; Ed McKean, a slugging shortstop with better career statistics than Lou Boudreau; Patsy Tebeau, a notable player-manager; and, of course, Jesse Cail Burkett, another Cooperstown resident. In 1895, this formidable squad handed Cleveland the honor of a Temple Cup championship (in the equivalent of the World Series for a period in the 1890s) when it defeated the hated Orioles in the best-of-seven contest, four games to one. (The Crab performed brilliantly, igniting a first-game win with a clutch ninth-inning double and batting .450 for the series.) From 1892 to 1896, the Burkett-aided Spiders would participate in three world championship series. Through the end of the twentieth century, only two other major-league teams in Cleveland would capture the world championship, the Indians of 1920 and 1948.

Let me venture a quick word on the infamous 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who won 20 and lost 134, making it the worst team in baseball history. This club, dubbed “the Misfits” by the press, was an aberration. The owner, Frank DeHaas Robison, shipped all of his star players (including Burkett) to the St. Louis Browns (also of the National League), a rival team he now also owned, having bought them in 1899 after National League officials prevented his plan to sell the Spiders, whose home attendance Robison found too low. Burkett remained an excellent hitter in St. Louis, finishing that year at .396, a frustrating second to Delahanty’s .410 (and leaving him agonizingly close to joining Cobb, Hornsby, and Delahanty in the club of players who have hit .400 three times). The Crab did win his third batting championship, however, in 1901, when he hit for a .376 average. That summer he also led the league in hits—it was the seventh time he collected more than 200—as well as runs and total bases.

Burkett would play in St. Louis for the next three years, 1902 through 1904, but not for the same team. He signed on with the new American League team, also named the Browns (to invoke memories of the great St. Louis teams of the 1880s—by now the National League team, the former Browns, had changed their name to the Cardinals). Burkett spent 1905, his last season in the majors, close to his adopted home, Worcester, with Boston’s American League team, the future Red Sox. He was thirty-six and batting only .257 when Boston released him, ending his sixteen-year major-league career at a point when his lifetime batting average was .338, a remarkable figure that stands as a permanent testimony to his achievement.

Jesse Burkett couldn’t leave the game. He bought the Worcester club of the New England League and as player-manager led his team to four consecutive pennants, topping the league in hitting in 1906 with a .344 average. Burkett ran the team until 1915, when he managed in the Eastern League. He went on to coach at Holy Cross (1917-20) and to scout for John McGraw, the legendary manager of the New York Giants and a former rival. He returned to the big-league diamond in 1921 as a coach for McGraw. Still salty as ever, Burkett was not popular with his players. They refused to vote him a share of the World Series bonus when they won the championship.4 Burkett was back in Worcester in 1923 and would coach various teams, including Assumption College, until 1933, when he turned sixty-five.

On the field Burkett could be abrasive and short tempered, but from all accounts his disposition away from the ballyard was friendly. He was always generous when describing the talents of other ballplayers. “There were better players than me,” he acknowledged. One in particular commanded Burkett’s utmost respect: “Cobb could do anything around the plate—hit, bunt, drag the ball. He could field and throw.” On Honus Wagner: “He was quite a ballplayer, that boy. He had a good pair of hands on him.”5 Burkett made many more friends than enemies during his lifetime and counted the gentlemanly Connie Mack as his closest baseball colleague.

Burkett, who played baseball during its most roughhouse era, neither smoked nor chewed tobacco, as did so many of his contemporaries. (Heavy drinking was also widespread. Two of the most notorious drinkers of 1890s baseball—Patsy Tebeau and Lou Sockalexis—were teammates.) Drinking an occasional beer, eating vanilla ice cream, and consuming ten teaspoonfuls of sugar a day were his only vices. The Crab and the Georgia Peach displayed the same “will to win at all costs” on the field, but Burkett behaved with equanimity off the field. Unlike Cobb, he was a devoted husband and father. One of the country’s finest Little League organizations is named in his honor, befitting his reputation for kindness toward children.

During his playing days, the player who has become Cleveland’s forgotten legend enjoyed the respect and admiration of baseball fans everywhere. Jesse Burkett’s performance and personality made him impossible to ignore. Although through the Old-Timers Committee he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946, today only serious fans remember his name, let alone his accomplishments. As Jesse Burkett never forgot the young girl he attempted to rescue from the murky Ohio River during his childhood, let us not disregard his brilliant contribution to Cleveland’s baseball history.

SOURCES

Baseball-almanac.com.

Baseball-reference.com.

James, Bill. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. New York: Villard, 1988.

“Jesse Burkett.” In Baseball’s First Stars, ed. Frederick Ivor-Campbell. Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1996.

Okrent, Daniel, and Harris Lewine, eds. The Ultimate Baseball Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

NOTES

1. The number of batting titles won by Cobb is disputable, as, according to Total Baseball and The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, the highest American League batting average in 1910 belongs to Nap Lajoie (at .384, with Cobb at .383), although both sources accede to MLB’s official recognition of Cobb as the batting champion that year.

2. The Historical Register, compiled by SABR members, 4th ed. (San Diego: Baseball Press Books, 1998). Some sources credit Burkett with as many as 27 wins in 1888.

3. The Historical Register. Some sources credit Burkett with as many as 39 wins in 1889.

4. He is said to have been voted out of his share again in 1922, when the Giants repeated. See Deadball Era Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research, Deadball Stars of the American League, ed. David Jones (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006), 767.

5. Worcester Sunday Telegram, January 11, 1953.

One of the founding members of the American Association, the Toledo Mud Hens, had a mixed record of success over the first decade of the league’s history. High points came in 1907, 1910, and 1912 with strong second-place finishes—in 1907, missing the bunting barely, by a couple of games. Despite these modest successes, the team finished in the second division most years, including three tail-ending performances (1902-4) in the first three years of the league. Later, a generous friend, coal millionaire Charles Somers, who also owned the American League’s Cleveland Naps, acquired the Mud Hens. It was this dual ownership that paved the way for the Association’s first location shift—a move designed to thwart a potential problem, the upstart Federal League.

In 1913, a new minor-league circuit began operation. Consisting of six clubs, most in the Midwest, the Federal League was an independent circuit, operating outside the aegis of Organized Baseball. As the summer progressed, the six-team league survived more or less intact (the only franchise move being from Covington to Kansas City on June 26). The potential fan base was large, as the loop included several major-league cities, Cleveland among them. In the inaugural season, Cleveland’s Green Sox finished second, playing in Luna Park, a small local diamond. Though the facilities were modest, the manager was none other than pitching legend Cy Young, one of the city’s most cherished baseball heroes.

Buoyed by their success, the Federals decided to upgrade in 1914. No longer content with minor-league status, the Feds declared themselves a major league before the season. Expanding to an eight-team circuit, the Feds also kept certain franchises in place, allowing direct competition with major-league teams in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, all carryover locales from the 1913 campaign. This tum of events startled baseball’s cozy world, prompting direct intervention by the owner of the Mud Hens.

Before the 1914 season, the American Association, though facing direct Federal competition in Indianapolis and Kansas City, decided to remain firm—ready to go head-to-head with the upstarts. However, in March, the Feds announced that their eighth franchise, originally slated to operate in Toronto, was transferring to Brooklyn, butting heads with the Robins of the National League. Alarmed, and not wanting a sudden shift to his turf, Somers took direct action. Knowing full well there was only one suitable site for big-league baseball in Cleveland, League Park, he decided to make it impossible for the Feds to claim any playing dates there. Later that month, Somers announced that he would be transferring his Toledo club to Cleveland, where they would play in League Park when his American League club was on the road.

Logistically, the transfer was easily accomplished, as Cleveland geographically fit into the existing league structure very nicely. However, there were a couple of problems. First, the Association schedule had already been drawn up, so on paper the Toledo games were simply transferred to Cleveland. Of course, this did not dovetail nicely with the existing schedule. As a result, many of the home games of Cleveland’s American Association club were transferred to their opponents’ parks. In addition, the American League, wary of the Association’s encroachment, stipulated that the minor league could not play any home games until the Naps had finished their first lengthy homestand, even though the American League team was slated to start the season on the road.

The American Association’s Cleveland club opened the 1914 season at Indianapolis, dropping a 4-0 decision to the Indians on April 14. Called a variety of nicknames, including Scouts, Warriors, and Sheeks (after manager James Sheckard), the team eventually came to be known as the Bearcats. After facing all seven Association rivals on the road, the Bearcats (7-17) finally opened the season at home on May 14, besting Minneapolis 6-4. Over the next month, Cleveland won more than it lost and clambered back into the race. By early June, the team had clawed its way into second, only a game behind Milwaukee. Despite losing star outfielder Dave Hillyard to a broken leg, the Bearcats continued to perform well, finally grasping first place (50-42) by a few percentage points on July 19.

Then, the season began to unravel. Over the course of another monthlong road trip, the Bearcats went 12-18, dropping out of contention. When they finally returned home on August 19, the club was in fifth place, barely over .500. During the final month they treaded water, finishing fifth with a record of 82-81, 14 1/2 games out of first. Their star performer was Jay Kirke (.349), who spent half the season with the Bearcats and the other half with Cleveland’s other team, the Naps.

Overall, the season was considered a modest success. The team drew almost 100,000 fans—not too bad when considering that the Bearcats lost at least sixteen home dates because of scheduling conflicts. Though they were outdrawn by the American League’s cellar dwelling Indians, the Association club certainly had its own fan base, as reported in the pages of The Sporting News: “The idea that a minor league will not draw in a town used to big league ball is receiving a rather rude jolt in Cleveland. The Naps, cellar occupants of the American League, are getting hardly any crowds, while the American Association club, managed by Sheckard, is getting most of the support.”

Toledo fielded a team in the Southern Michigan Association in 1914. The city certainly missed having a high-class Association club, but it was not weepy-eyed about having Somers out of town. Over the course of his ownership, Somers took full advantage of Toledo’s proximity to Cleveland, regularly shuttling players from one club to the other-naturally favoring the American League Naps. With the two clubs now sharing the same facility, League Park, in 1914, the movement of players increased dramatically. For instance, in addition to Kirke, the Bearcats lost the services of starting first baseman Jack Lelivelt (.295), who was promoted to the American League after 92 games, and starting pitcher Lefty James (9-6), who was also called up.

After the 1914 season, the Feds switched another team to a major-league locale, transferring the pennant winning Indianapolis club to Newark, New Jersey, thereby giving the New York City area another big league club. For the rebel league, Cleveland was still not an option, since Somers made plans to keep his American Association club in League Park for the upcoming season.

With a full off-season to put a workable schedule in place, it must have come as a disappointment to Cleveland’s Association club to see virtually the same problems unfurled at its feet in 1915. The team was scheduled to lose sixteen home dates, as it had the year before. In 1914, the Bearcats were able to overcome this obstacle, posting a reasonably decent season. In 1915, a different story would unfold, primarily the result of instability at the top.

The combination of owning a losing American League club and then incurring the expenses entailed in keeping his star players out of Federal League clutches had stretched Somers financially thin. He hastily fired his underperforming manager, Joe Birmingham, who sued in response. In short, Somers was looking for a way out, even if it meant unloading his Association club.

Aswirl in turmoil, Cleveland’s American Association season opened at home in April 1915 with a 10-1 trimming courtesy of Indianapolis. After a brief homestand, the team took to the road for a monthlong trip, visiting every league opponent on the way. During this marathon, scribes began to call the team the Spiders—doubt referring to Cleveland’s National League team of 1900, which spent much of the season on the road. (One Sporting News wag even substituted the name Spiders for Cleveland in the April 25 box score.) Still, the team was playing decently enough, finally arriving home in late May with a record of 14-17.

During the next homestand, which stretched into mid-June, Somers reduced ticket prices to encourage better turnout. At the same time, he announced he was seeking a buyer for the club who would move it, with luck, back to Toledo, which was without a pro club of any kind in 1915. Shortly thereafter, the Association gave its blessing for such a transfer; however, no takers emerged.

On the field, the team continued to hover around the .500 mark, reaching the breakeven point on July 4 thanks to a 10-5 road trip. (Two of the five losses were no-hitters.) After another good week, the Spiders (38-36) rose to third. Alas, for them it would be a downhill slide the rest of the way.

With the transfer back to Toledo still on hold, the team drifted through July and August, dropping to seventh in the standings. In late August, two weeks into another long swing through Association cities, the announcement was made that the team would play the rest of its games on the road, completing its makeover as the Spiders. Even so, the final weeks of the Spiders’ season would include a few home games after all. In mid-September, they played four times—two games against St. Paul and two against Kansas City, both teams being already on the road nearby. The home season ended with a whimper. The Blues failed to show on September 16, giving Cleveland a 9-0 forfeit win in its last home game.

Overall, the Cleveland Spiders (67-82) in 1915 finished seventh, a lengthy 22 1/2 games from the top. Once again, their best player—this time Denney Wilie (.311)—was snatched away by Cleveland’s American League team before the hundred-game mark. Luckily for them, the Spiders kept the services of Lefty James (19-13) for the whole season-probably keeping them out of the cellar. The announced attendance was 86,000—a drop from the previous campaign, but still better than what several other Association clubs drew.

Following the 1915 season, the Federal League fragmented, with several Fed owners latching on to American League and National League clubs. With the threat gone, Cleveland’s Association team quietly moved back to Toledo for the 1916 season.

Somers did accomplish his goal in keeping the Feds at bay. Although scheduling conflicts prevented League Park from being used every day during the 1914 and 1915 seasons, the handful of open dates were not enough to entice a Federal League jump. It would prove to be his only victory in the world of baseball during the Federal League war. To keep creditors at bay, he sold off his best stars on the American League club, including Nap Lajoie and Joe Jackson. In the end, it was not enough, and the bankers took virtually all of Somers’s baseball empire, including both his Cleveland clubs.

Although this kind of preemptive strike has not been repeated in the world of minor-league baseball, it was used at a higher level many years later. In the early 1960s, with the possibility looming large that a rival league, the Continental League, would soon be established, Houston was granted a National League franchise-a move to prevent the perceived usurpers from gaining a toehold there.

The example of minor leagues and major leagues sharing the same locale has been repeated many times, right up to the present. Several minor-league clubs, both affiliated and independent, are currently in orbit around Chicago. In New York, also represented by an American League and a National League franchise, two minor league teams, the Brooklyn Cyclones (Class A, Mets) and the Staten Island Yankees (Class A), currently operate within the city limits, tapping into the same market as do their parent, major-league clubs. They illustrate the trend in Organized Baseball in recent years for the major league club to maintain one or more of its minor-league affiliates geographically close to the city that the big-league team plays in. The Akron Aeros (Class AA) and Lake County Captains (Class A), farm teams in the Indians organization, play in state-of-the-art ballparks less an hour’s drive south and east, respectively, from Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland, multiplying the opportunities that baseball fans in the Western Reserve have for enjoying the game in person all summer long.

Yet, in a modest way, The Kid from Cleveland is a noteworthy film. It is so for its on-location filming throughout the city, allowing contemporary viewers a Polaroid portrait of Cleveland as it looked sixty years ago. But what really makes the film special is the number of real-life Cleveland Indians in its cast. Their appearances not only lend the film authenticity but also make for a valuable visual and historical record of a place and time in baseball history.

Bona fide major-leaguers may be seen in feature films from Right Off the Bat in 1915 and Somewhere in Georgia in 1916 to Analyze That (2002), Anger Management (2003), and Fever Pitch (2005). None of these films—including the Major League movies, which remain the best-known films that spotlight the Tribe—feature entire big-league ball clubs. The Kid from Cleveland does. Practically the whole Cleveland organization appears in the film: players from Gene Bearden and Ray Boone to Bob Kennedy and Ken Keltner, Early Wynn and Sam Zoldak; team owner Bill Veeck and player-manager Lou Boudreau; coaches Tris Speaker and Bill McKechnie; pitching coach Mel Harder; trainer “Lefty” Weisman; and the recently retired Hank Greenberg, then working in the Indians front office. A celebrated ex-Indian, Lew Fonseca, is credited as the film’s “Baseball Supervisor.”

Also cast in The Kid from Cleveland, whose working titles were Pride of the Indians and The Cleveland Story, are real-life sportswriters (local scribes Gordon Cobbledick, Franklin Lewis, Ed McAuley) and umpires (American League arbiters Bill Summers, Bill Grieve). They and the “Members of the Cleveland Indians Baseball Club,” are thanked at the film’s finale. Movie-star-handsome player-turned-actor John Berardino, who later played Dr. Steve Hardy on the TV soap General Hospital—and who, as Johnny Berardino, graced the rosters of the Browns, Indians, and Pirates between 1939 and 1952—is the one baseball personality who does not play himself. He is cast as Mac, a shady character who fences stolen goods. (As a publicity stunt, Veeck insured Berardino’s mug for $1 million during his tenure in Cleveland.) The film’s associate producer was a local celebrity: K. Elmo Lowe, a fixture at the Cleveland Play House for almost a half-century as actor, director, and artistic director. Lowe appears onscreen as well, playing an undercover cop.

The title character in The Kid from Cleveland is neither a fireballing “Nuke” LaLoosh-like rookie nor a composed Henry Wiggen-like veteran. He is Johnny Barrows (Russ Tamblyn, when he still was billed as “Rusty”), a troubled youth. Johnny’s alienation stems from his lack of rapport with his stepfather. But he loves baseball, and in particular the Cleveland Indians. During the course of the story, Johnny finds a mentor in Mike Jackson (George Brent), the team’s kindhearted radio broadcaster.

It is the presence of the Indians, however, that makes the film essential viewing for the baseball historian or buff—and, more pointedly, the Cleveland sports aficionado. When The Kid from Cleveland was released, the Indians were the reigning World Series champs. They play the role of the “godfathers” recruited by Jackson to help Johnny. Furthermore, interspersed throughout the film are shots culled from the team’s official 1948 World Series promotional film, and footage from a postseries victory parade and regular-season games at Municipal Stadium.

Most of The Kid from Cleveland was filmed on a twenty-two-day production schedule in May and June of 1949, with many of its exteriors shot on location on the city’s streets, bridges, and playgrounds. For example, sequences featuring the ballplayers in spring training were filmed not in the hot desert sun of Tucson, Arizona, but in Cleveland’s League Park, the team’s home field (and known as Dunn Field from 1916 through 1927) from 1910 to 1932 and 1934 to 1946. A scene set outside Tucson, on a ranch where the ballplayers consume a barbecue supper was shot on East 87th Street, north of Euclid Avenue.

In a 2005 post on the film’s Internet Movie Database “user comments” page, an anonymous Clevelander recalled:

I was an “extra” in the movie, which was filmed at the end of [the] street where I lived, near Hough Ave. It was very near League Park, at [the] other end of my street! Some of the kids in [the] neighborhood were also in the movie, of course we were all not paid but did have a lot of fun with the “stars” and were treated to a ballgame, taken by bus [to Municipal Stadium], where we ran around under the bleachers.

Upon seeing the film on television several years ago, the writer observed that it was “a bit of a ‘tearjerker’ as [it] brought back many memories of the days after WWII and the pride we in Cleveland had, and I still have, for our Indians.”

It is wholly appropriate, then, that The Kid from Cleveland opens with the following written prologue: “This is the story of a city, a kid and a baseball team.” (This line was slightly altered for the marketing campaign. The film was publicized as “the story of a kid… a city … and 30 Godfathers!,” with headshots of twenty Indians lining the top of its advertising poster.) It also was appropriate for the Indians organization to be involved with a film about a troubled teen. At the time, Veeck and his ballplayers were supporting efforts to fight juvenile delinquency in Cleveland.

Combating underage misbehavior is not the only critical issue explored in the film. Two years before The Kid from Cleveland went into production, Larry Doby became the first African American to play in the American League. This landmark event is paid homage onscreen. Near the finale, Bill Veeck offers a well-intentioned (but entirely fictitious) anecdote in which he describes Doby’s first major league at-bat:

When Larry first joined the club, he was kind of in a spot, something like Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers …. His first time up, he was nervous. Very nervous. Much more nervous than the average rookie. Because, you see, he had the additional load of some 15 million people riding on his back. And that’s quite a load. Larry wasn’t just batting for himself. He was batting for some 15 million people—15 million people who really believed in him.

And so when he struck out, he felt he let all those people down …. And after Larry struck out, he made that long trip to the dugout, and he went down the dugout steps and walked the entire length and sat down at the extreme corner. He was the picture of absolute dejection. And the next hitter was Joe Gordon, one of baseball’s really great hitters. [Gordon is shown on screen taking two strikes.] Joe took a terrific cut at the ball. He missed it by at least six inches more than Larry had. I don’t say that he did it intentionally. But I know he’s never missed a pitch by that much before. Joe too made that long trip back to the dugout. He didn’t stop, but walked the entire length to sit next to [Doby]. He too sat in exactly the same position, to prove to this boy that, here at least, he was just another ballplayer.

The critic for Variety, the show-business trade publication, described this sequence as “heart-warming,” adding that it “should enhance [Doby’s and Gordon’s] popularity.” Even though its content is fabricated, what really matters is the essence, rather than the specifics, of the anecdote and what it reveals about Larry Doby’s plight, Joe Gordon’s character, and Bill Veeck’s commitment to integrating major league baseball. Moreover, other sequences in which Doby and Satchel Paige casually mix with their fellow Indians are extraordinary for the late 1940s, a time when the civil-rights movement was in its infancy and Hollywood movies of recent vintage mostly depicted black characters as comical caricatures: maids and mammies, janitors and train porters who fecklessly wrecked the English language.

Perhaps it was the social-issue aspect of the film that drew its director, Herbert Kline, and screenwriter, John Bright, to the project. Kline was most acclaimed as a maker of humanist, anti-Fascist documentaries, while Bright was a co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild. By the early 1950s, in the wake of the House UnAmerican Activities hearings in Washington and the dawn of McCarthyism, both were blacklisted from Hollywood.

During the shoot, fiction and reality clashed in other ways. Just as the film was released, Leonard Lyons, the syndicated Broadway columnist, reported:

Republic Pictures hired Bill Summers to umpire a ballgame in The Kid from Cleveland, in which Lou Boudreau is called upon to hit a home run. The script provided that the first pitch to Boudreau was to be a strike, the second a ball—and the Boudreau homer …. Summers called the first one a strike, and then called the second one “strike two” … The director, Herbert Kline, corrected the umpire. “That’s a ball. Look at your script” … ‘I’m looking at the plate,” Umpire Summers replied. “Tell your pitcher to look at the script.”

The Kid from Cleveland had its world premiere at the Stillman Theater in the city on September 2, 1949, several days before going into national release. The Sporting News reported that “the premiere … was staged in Cleveland with all the fanfare of a Hollywood opening,” with many of the stars, professional actor and ballplayer alike, on hand to scribble autographs and wave to onlookers.

The film earned mixed notices, with the negative far outweighing the positive. A representative review was penned by Howard Barnes, writing in the New York Herald Tribune. Barnes described the film as

a quasi-documentary which is a silly patchwork of clips, amateur acting and a case history. Ball fans will find interest in authentic shots of the 1948 World Series …. Film fanciers will discover an extraordinarily inept production.

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther dubbed The Kid from Cleveland “a labored tale” and “generally routine.” His piece ran on September 5, and he noted, “In fact, Mr. Veeck and the Indians pay so much attention to [helping Johnny] that one perceives (since the time is the present) why maybe the Indians are in third place.” (Bob Dolgan, writing in the Plain Dealer in 2001, observed that the “distraction” of filming The Kid from Cleveland during the baseball season “is blamed for [the] Indians’ fall to third place” in the 1949 campaign.)

One of the few who liked The Kid from Cleveland was the Variety reviewer. After labeling the film “a sermon on juvenile delinquency,” the scribe admitted that its story was “nicely developed,” noting that it was “best when it focuses on the diamond triumphs and defeats of the 1948 World Champions.” The critic also observed that the film “incorporates the intense baseball enthusiasm in Cleveland.”

Ed McAuley, writing in The Sporting News, gushed over The Kid from Cleveland-perhaps because he appeared in the film. Among his observations: “The players prove surprisingly adept at switching to the world of make-believe” and “the baseball sequences are excellent.” At least he admitted, “This writer, being no movie connoisseur, can only say he got a big kick out of seeing a bunch of guys he knows so well act themselves.”

McAuley offered various witticisms, culled from his baseball knowledge and insider status as a sportswriter. He noted that Gene Bearden “talks much more than he did in The Stratton Story [another 1949 release, in which he played himself], when his contribution to the culture of his times consisted of the muttered word: ‘Okay.'” He observed that Ken Keltner “says more words in the picture than I’ve heard him speak in 13 years, but maybe that’s only because he doesn’t like to talk to sports writers.” McAuley added:

The script writer pulled an amazing boner when he ended the 1948 World Series with Dale Mitchell making the last putout. Lou Boudreau will wonder why he took the trouble to put Bob Kennedy in left field to bolster the defense in the final innings.

McAuley may have been the only “nonactor” participant who did not toss beanballs at the film. In Everything Baseball, James Mote quoted Lou Boudreau on The Kid from Cleveland: “I would like to buy every print of the film and burn it. Boy, that picture was a dog.” Added Veeck, “I have one unwritten law at home that I adhere to: I never allow my kids to mention or see that abortion.” On another occasion, the owner commented on the ballplayer performances by observing, “We failed at playing ourselves.” While interviewing Bob Feller in Cooperstown several years ago, I asked him if he had any memories of making The Kid from Cleveland. He had nothing whatsoever to say about the experience. In his book, Now Pitching, Bob Feller: A Baseball Memoir, he described it as “an entirely forgettable movie” and quipped, “Those ’30 godfathers’ must have been the only people who ever saw it. At least that’s what we hope.”

Despite this negativity, some contemporary Tribe fans and movie aficionados treasure The Kid from Cleveland. In 2006, Plain Dealer film critic Clint O’Connor published a piece on the all-time best baseball movies. The Kid from Cleveland was not one of them. He later reported that he received “about 50 e-mails and phone calls” from readers who suggested films they felt had been “tragically omitted.” Near the top of the list was The Kid from Cleveland. “Some callers suggested I was out of my mind for not including this one,” O’Connor reported, “and that it not only was a great baseball movie, but a great movie, period.”

Whatever one’s opinion of the film’s artistic merits, it is undeniably fun to watch The Kid from Cleveland and savor the presences of its long-ago ballplayer-heroes. One scene in the film features Johnny Barrows on a ballfield during spring training. Johnny has been warming up, and he asks Satchel Paige, “Is this the right windup for your hesitation pitch?” Paige advises him to “watch old Satch” as he shows him the correct way to throw. The youngster tries, but fails miserably. “Don’t worry about that, Johnny,” a supportive Paige declares. “It took me twenty years to get that pitch.” Bob Feller, who has been observing the scene, promptly quips, “Satch, some folks say it took you thirty years.” A second voice chimes in that it might have been forty.

In The Kid from Cleveland, ballplayers comment on their real-life opponents. At one point, Lou Boudreau pronounces, “I wish all my problems were that easy,” in response to a plot development, “Like getting rid of Ted Williams without the Boston Red Sox putting me in jail for it.” In another scene, Boudreau asks Hank Greenberg if he ever batted against a ghost. “I sure did,” Greenberg observes. “His name was Dizzy Dean. I never even saw the ball.”

Much of the dialogue might have been penned by a team publicist rather than a Hollywood screenwriter. After Greenberg’s remark about Dean, Johnny exclaims, “Bet he couldn’t pitch faster than Feller, or Lemon, or Bearden.” Predictably, the youngster wants to grow up to be “a ballplayer on the Indians, a shortstop like Lou Boudreau.” This is not surprising, as Mike Jackson volunteers that Boudreau is “one of the greatest clutch hitters in the game.” Of Tris Speaker, the broadcaster declares, “Mr. Speaker is as well-known in baseball as Shakespeare was a playwright.” In a glaring comment that mirrors life in America during the postwar years, Jackson observes, before Game 5 of the 1948 World Series, “It was a wonderful day for the game. Even the ladies turned out in large numbers, grateful for the nursery that Bill Veeck had introduced to play host to the next generation of Indians fans.” During this game, Veeck notes that over 86,000 spectators have packed into Municipal Stadium. Jackson tells his radio listeners, “Today’s gate raises the Indians total to almost three million people this season. No other team, not even the Yankees in their heyday with Babe Ruth, ever drew that many.”

Of all the nonprofessionals, Boudreau and Veeck have the biggest parts. Given his legendary flair for theatrics, it is no surprise that Variety reported that Veeck “shapes up surprisingly well as a thespian.” One would have to agree with Ed McAuley’s assessment of Veeck’s performance, with the sportswriter describing the owner as “the best of the amateurs.” McAuley might have been thinking of Veeck’ s Doby-Gordon “anecdote” when he observed that Veeck “is so natural that I half expected him to wink and say, ‘Stick around. When this is over, we’ll get together and tell a few lies.'”

The Indians organization received no compensation for participating in the film. The ballplayers also were not paid, but were promised a percentage of the profits. Only trouble is, there were none. The Kid from Cleveland cannot be found on the Variety list of top ninety-two moneymaking films released in 1949. Other baseball movies made the cut: Take Me Out to the Ball Game earned $3,350,000, for thirteenth place; It Happens Every Spring grossed $1,850,000, for fifty-eighth place.

In June 1952, The Sporting News noted:

Hal Lebovitz of the Cleveland News reports that the producers of the movie The Kid from Cleveland sent Lou Boudreau a financial report which showed the film … to be in the red by approximately $150,000 …. The producers added the note, “We hope the Indians win the pennant so we can reissue the film and wipe out the deficit. … Causing Lebovitz to observe, “They obviously forgot that Boudreau is now manager of the rival Boston Red Sox.”

FILM CREDITS

The Kid from Cleveland. Released by Republic Pictures. PRODUCER: Walter Calmes. DIRECTOR: Herbert Kline. SCREENPLAY: John Bright, from a story by Kline and Bright. CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jack Marta. EDITOR: Jason H. Bernie. MUSIC: Nathan Scott. ASSOCIATE PRODUCER: K. Elmo Lowe. BASEBALL SUPERVISOR: Lew Fonseca. RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes. CAST: George Brent (Mike Jackson); Lynn Bari (Katherine Jackson); Rusty (Russ) Tamblyn Johnny Barrows); Tommy Cook (Dan Hudson); Ann Doran (Emily Novak); Louis Jean Heydt (Carl Novak); K. Elmo Lowe (Dave Joyce); Johnny Berardino (Mac); The Cleveland Indians Baseball Team with Bill Veeck; Lou Boudreau; Tris Speaker; Hank Greenberg; Bob Feller; Gene Bearden; Satchell (Satchel) Paige; Bob Lemon; Steve Gromek; Joe Gordon; Mickey Vernon; Ken Keltner; Ray Boone; Dale Mitchell; Larry Doby; Bob Kennedy; Jim Hegan. Appearing uncredited: Bobby Avila; Al Benton; Allie Clark; Gordon Cobbledick; Mike Garcia; Bill Grieve; Mel Harder; Franklin Lewis; Ed MacAuley; Bill McKechnie; Frank Papish; Hal Peck; Bill Summers; Mike Tresh; Thurman Tucker; “Lefty” Weisman; Early Wynn; Sam Zoldak. Appearing in archival footage: Alvin Dark; Bob Elliott; Tommy Holmes; Phil Masi; Nelson Potter; Al Rosen; Sibby Sisti; Warren Spahn; Eddie Stanky; Earl Torgeson.

SOURCES

Barnes, Howard, “On the Screen.” New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1949.

Crowther, Bosley. “The Kid from Cleveland.” New York Times, September 5, 1949.

Dolgan, Bob. “Lou Boudreau Highlights.” Plain Dealer, August 12, 2001.

Edelman, Rob. Great Baseball Films. New York: Citadel Press, 1994.

Feller, Bob, with Bill Gilbert. Now Pitching, Bob Feller: A Baseball Memoir. New York: Carol, 1990.

Gee, Michael. “Take me out to the movies.” Boston Herald, May 14, 2004.

Hanson, Patricia King, ed. American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1941-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

“Kid From Cleveland.” Variety, September 7, 1949.

Lyons, Leonard. “The Lyons Den.” Washington Post, September 3, 1949.

McAuley, Ed. “Indians’ Reel Roles Marked by Realism.” The Sporting News, September 14, 1949.

Mote, James. Everything Baseball. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1989.

Motion Picture Production Encyclopedia, 1950 Edition. Hollywood: Hollywood Reporter Press, 1950.

O’Connor, Clint. “Baseball-flick fans tweak the lineup: Readers choose their favorite of critic’s picks, send in their own choices.” Plain Dealer, May 7, 2006.

Ruhl, Oscar. “From the Ruhl Book.” The Sporting News, June 11, 1952.

The performance that day by the object of the newspaper’s affection overshadowed a great pitching performance by Stanley Coveleski. The Tribe’s pitching ace went the distance, giving up just two hits in the last six innings. Still, it was the twenty-eight-year-old left fielder, all five feet eleven inches and 180 pounds of him, who supplied the real fireworks. His home run into the left-field bleachers in the seventh inning increased the visitors’ lead to 2-0. His towering drive over the fence in the top of the nineteenth broke a 2-2 tie. But even that was not the whole story. In the bottom of the ninth, this same fellow climbed the left field fence to rob Yankee Elmer Miller of an extra-base hit and help preserve the tie. Then, in the twelfth inning, he brought Miller up short once again, throwing the Yanks’ center fielder out at second as he tried to stretch a single.

Certainly a casual fan need not look far to identify the Cleveland outfielder who carried the day: Tris Speaker. No one in the game roamed the outfield like the “Grey Eagle.” The fleet outfielder was better known for stroking doubles and triples, but he was no stranger to the home run. If it wasn’t Spoke, then most certainly it had to have been Robert Braggo Roth. In 1915 he led the American League with seven home runs. But alas, it was neither. The hero that late May day was Joe Wood, better known as Smoky Joe, a title earned in Boston, not Cleveland, achieved by staring down batters, not pitchers. All that changed, however, in that wonderful nineteenth inning on a day he later termed “one of the biggest days of my life,” a day when Joe could finally look back and say the haze had lifted and “the worst was finally over.”2

As this last poignant statement reflects, Smoky Joe Wood’s journey to the Cleveland outfield in 1918 was an arduous one. The future baseballer was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 25, 1889, eventually landing in Ness City, Kansas, where he began seriously playing town baseball in 1906. In the early days he played the infield and pitched. The next two years found him playing professional ball in the minors for Hutchinson of the Western Association and Kansas City of the high-end American Association. By then it was clear that he would make his real mark as a pitcher. By the end of the 1908 season he was pitching for the Boston Red Sox. His seven-plus seasons in Boston were nothing short of sensational, particularly 1912, when he finished with a 34-5 record that included a 16-game winning streak, which tied an American League record. Walter Johnson set the record earlier that same season. Wood’s victory over Johnson, at a time when the Washington pitching star was in the midst of a winning streak of his own, preserved Wood’s own streak and became a baseball classic. Wood’s mound heroics continued into the 1912 World Series with the Giants. Here he was the pitcher of record in four games, the winning moundsman in three, two at the Polo Grounds and then the deciding victory in Boston in Game 8, as his Red Sox captured the crown.

In 1913, the Smoky Joe “Express” rounded a bend and almost derailed. In a 1963 interview with baseball historian Larry Ritter, Wood told of an injury to the thumb of his pitching hand that occurred in early 1913, when his feet slipped as he came off the mound to field a ball. In 1917, writing for Baseball Magazine, he gave a slightly different version. “I broke my [right] thumb in sliding to base and started to pitch before the thumb had fully regained its strength.”3 Be that as it may, since he was not fully healed he threw awkwardly, incurring a sore right pitching arm as a result. Then in 1915, after below-par years in both 1913 and 1914, he again strained the arm. By now the pain was severe, sending him to doctors who diagnosed neuritis. Following the 1915 season, he sought chiropractic treatment, at the time thought unconventional and frowned upon. Joe offered differing versions of the effectiveness of that treatment, but he felt ready to return to pitch for the Red Sox during the summer of 1916. It was at this point that he and Sox owner Joe Lannin bumped heads on the terms of a contract. As a result, Wood sat out the entire 1916 baseball season.

In early 1917 Wood saw yet another physician who x-rayed him and determined that at some point the pitcher “had torn the lining of the bone” in his shoulder. The tear was healed, perhaps aided by his forced layoff. By that time theatrical producer Harry Frazee was the new owner of the Red Sox. On Joe’s word that he was recovered, Frazee offered a new contract at a substantially reduced figure from the previous one. Joe refused it but received assurances that he could try to negotiate a deal with other clubs. “He [Frazee] offered to let me make all the negotiation and promised if the sale could be effected to his satisfaction as well as mine, to go through with his part of the deal,” Wood recalled. “I had been Speaker’s room-mate for a very long time and wished to join him at Cleveland. So I immediately got in touch with the Cleveland club, and as they seemed to want me the sale was speedily arranged.”4

Actually, the negotiations were not that simple. At first the Red Sox demanded Cleveland catcher Steve O’Neill. Eventually they sought a straight cash payment of $25,000, finally settling for $15,000. When the deal was completed on February 24, 1917, Cleveland owner Jim Dunn and manager Lee Fohl thought they were getting a pitcher. As Fohl noted at the time, “If it were otherwise, I know Spoke would not have advised us so strongly to land him.”5

Despite management’s optimism, not everyone was convinced that Wood was the Smoky Joe of old. Cleveland sportswriter Henry P. Edwards made sure he advised readers that “Wood also is something of a batter, having hit .250 or better in five of his campaigns with Boston. During seven seasons as a member of the Red Sox he has made 121 hits, including twenty-six doubles, six triples and four [actually five] home runs. In home runs he excelled the total output [three] of the Cleveland hurlers for the last ten years.”6

Wood’s pitching comeback was short-lived. He pitched in only five games in 1917, covering just over fifteen innings. He started one game against the Yankees at Cleveland’s Dunn Field (League Park) on May 26, a 4-3 loss in which he gave up all four runs, allowed eleven hits, and struck out one. By mid-June, local newspapers were calling the pitching effort against the Yanks a “comeback stunt.” According to Robert Drury, a medical doctor who treated Joe that year, the hurler should have limited his action to an inning or two.  In fact, he held the New Yorkers scoreless through four and pitched eight. Drury recounted that Wood had “strained his arm badly and probably permanently as the result of trying to earn his salary too early in the season.”7

That was essentially it for Joe Wood’s major-league pitching career. Not much was heard from his bat that season, either. In six at-bats, he did not fashion a hit. When he announced that he would not accept another dime from the Indians until he was pitching, again it seemed certain his short but illustrious career was finished. But those who thought Wood had tossed in the towel had never taken true measure of the man. In order to stay in baseball, he would “have carried the water bucket if they had water boys.”8

In order to strengthen his arm, Wood followed Drury’s advice, performing hard labor outside in the cold during the offseason. In the spring of 1918 he reported to camp, thinking he could make his way back to the mound. It did not pan out, but in Joe’s case a world’s misfortune opened another avenue, and he turned it into a five-year career as a Tribe outfielder.

As the 1918 season opened, the Indians, like many other teams, experienced a shortage of players because of World War I. In Cleveland’s case the situation was exacerbated by illness and injury to several players, including outfielder Jack Graney. Buoyed by a spring of hard work in the batting cage, Wood regained his ability to hit, underscored in dramatic fashion in the Polo Grounds on May 24, which led to his appearance in 119 of the 127 games his team played that war-shortened season. In the field he played nineteen games at second base, four at first, and the remainder in the outfield. Despite a right wing too sore to pitch, he demonstrated an adequate throwing arm and average range. He was, it turned out, a natural fly chaser who could hit. He finished this-in many ways his rookie season with a healthy batting average of .296, 5 home runs, and 66 RBIs. Among players with at least 400 plate appearances, he ranked seventh in the league in batting average. He ranked fifth in home runs, and he tied a young pitcher named Babe Ruth for third in RBIs, two ahead of a fellow named Ty Cobb. He had accomplished the task through hours of hard work, shagging fly balls, taking infield practice, and choking up on his bat. His efforts once again earned him a big-league paycheck. In June he signed a new contract.

Heading into the 1919 season, Joe Wood was a solid member of the Indians’ outfield corps. When he arrived for spring training, he welcomed a new manager. Tris Speaker had replaced Lee Fohl. Although he was obviously happy for his friend, the change did not bode particularly well for Joe. Spoke was an early proponent of the platoon system. In 1919, Cleveland had a number of capable outfielders. In addition to Speaker, definitely not a candidate for the platoon, there were lefties Elmer Smith and Jack Graney and the right-handed Wood. As the season wore on and Joe saw mostly left-handed pitching, his games played (72), as well as his average (.255), home runs (0), and RBIs (27) dropped accordingly. Apparently the platoon system worked, however, as the team improved its record and finished in second place for the second consecutive year.

In 1920, the Indians took direct aim at the American League pennant and went it one better, topping the Brooklyn Dodgers by winning five of seven games to capture the franchise’s first World Series. Wood played his part, again serving on the platoon detail. In this first year of “lively” ball, he played sixty-one times, batted .270, slugged a home run, and drove in thirty mates. He even followed up on a brief 1919 relief appearance with two innings of relief, which included the last of 989 career strikeouts. The 1920 pitching performance was to be his last.

In the 1920 World Series the platoon system permitted Joe to appear in four games. In so doing, he joined Babe Ruth as players with the rare distinction of both pitching their teams to victory and later playing the outfield in World Series play. His two hits in ten official trips included a double. He scored two runs, both in Game 1, a 3-1 Cleveland win. He also walked once.

In 1921, Wood hit his batting stride, although by now the addition of Charlie Jamieson had pretty much rendered him a part-timer. He ended the season with a .366 average as he hit four home runs and doubled his RBIs to 60. Given that it was an era of inflated averages (the league hit .292), one still wonders why Joe appeared in only 66 games. After all, he outhit all Tribe outfielders, even Speaker at .362, as the Indians finished as bridesmaid to the pennant-winning Yanks. Had Joe batted enough to qualify for the title, his average would have placed fifth, just five points shy of George Sisler of the Browns.

Whatever the reason for his limited play in 1921, it was remedied in 1922 when Elmer Smith was sold to the Red Sox and Wood appeared in 142 games against both right-and left-handed pitchers for the fourth-place Indians. In 505 at-bats (583 plate appearances) he hit a very respectable .297. Moreover, his eight home runs and team-leading 92 RBIs were both career highs. It was therefore a surprise when Joe announced that fall that he was leaving baseball to coach the varsity pitchers and take charge of the freshman squad at Yale. Later he took over the varsity and was a fixture at the school until 1942.

Why did Smoky Joe Wood, age thirty-two and in his prime, follow his best year as a position player by announcing his retirement? He always offered that he came to realize that the rigors of professional baseball were keeping him from quality time with his growing family. Then there were the rumblings of the Cleveland fans. They once adored him but now voiced their displeasure, particularly in early 1922, when he showed a propensity for taking a called third strike.9 Or just maybe Joe Wood had come to Cleveland to lift the “smoky” haze that hung over him. Although not exactly according to plan, he had eventually proven to everyone, including himself, that he was much more than a great pitcher; he was a mighty fine everyday player too. Maybe now, his place in baseball history secure, it was the perfect time to lay down bat and glove and move along. 

NOTES

1. New York Times, May 25, 1918. 

2. Joe Wood, quoted in The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence A. Ritter (New York: Morrow, 1985), 169. 

3. Joe Wood, “Doing the Come Back Stunt,” Baseball Magazine, August 1917, 425-26. 

4. Wood, “Doing the Come Back Stunt,” 426.

5. Lee Fohl, quoted in Plain Dealer, February 25, 1917.

6. Lee Fohl, quoted in Plain Dealer, February 25, 1917.                                                                                                                                                                                 

7. Dr. Robert Drury, quoted in news article, source unknown, June 13, 1917, Joe Wood’s clippings file, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, New York. 

8. Joe Wood quoted in The Glory of Their Times, 169. 

9. The Sporting News, November 16, 1922.

Branded with the “can’t miss” tag, Maris didn’t disappoint the Cleveland brass during his rapid four-year ascent through the Indian farm system, leading Keokuk and Reading to the playoffs and Fargo-Moorhead and Indianapolis all the way to a league championship. “In the minor leagues with Cleveland, they always stressed fundamentals. They always looked for those ballplayers that could do everything, and Roger was that kind of ballplayer,” Jim “Mudcat” Grant, a teammate of Maris with the Indians in 1958, said. “Everybody in the organization knew that out of the three or four hundred ballplayers in the system, Roger was in the top five.”

Herb Score, the one-time Indians pitching great and longtime broadcaster for the club, said in a 1996 interview: “I saw Roger when he first signed, at spring training and through the minor leagues. Roger was just one of those fellows that you … knew was going to be a big leaguer.” Kerby Farrell, who replaced Al Lopez at the Indians’ helm following the 1956 season, told the Associated Press in March 1957 that Maris would “get a long look” at spring training in Tucson, Arizona, adding, “Maris has a chance to be a great ballplayer.

“I’d like to give Maris a good shot in left field,” Farrell, Maris’s Triple-A manager at Indianapolis, continued. “The kid’s going to be great someday. Wait until you see him. He can run, he’s got a fine arm and he came along great last year after a slow start. If determination and desire count, he’ll be somewhere with us.”

And in a feature in The Sporting News (March 1, 1957), Cleveland correspondent Hal Lebovitz wrote that “Maris has the tools to become another Mantle, lacking only the powerful arm Mickey owns. The job in left field is his to win.”

The hype surrounding Maris didn’t stop there. The April 1957 issue of Sport carried a feature on rookies with a chance to reach the majors, with Maris listed as the Tribe’s number-one outfield hopeful. In his preview of major league rookies for Look, New York sportswriter Tom Meany tabbed Maris as one of the top four outfield prospects. Sports Illustrated ran a story (March 25, 1957), citing Maris as one of its top ten rookie selections. Of Maris, SI stated, “Here is the youth who could add needed speed to a lead-footed Cleveland offense. Extremely fast, he can bunt-or pull the long ball to right.”

To hear reporters of the day tell it, the only thing that could keep Maris from starting the season with Cleveland was himself. Those stories of a brooding, moody Roger Maris didn’t start in New York. Lebovitz observed in The Sporting News that “Maris is a brooder who might be upset with a slow start, which seems to have plagued him in his four years of professional baseball, all on pennant winners.” (Tulsa, where Maris began the 1955 season, did not win the pennant in the Texas League that year, although Lebovitz’ s characterization of the teams Maris had played for up to then is largely accurate.)

In his column in the Fargo Forum, Maris’ s hometown daily newspaper in North Dakota, published the week of April 3, 1957, Eugene Fitzgerald concurred:

Maris is a brooder, and once in a batting slump he has a tough time shaking it. … A typical Maris brooding period right now could be costly to the  chances of the Fargoan making the majors as a    regular …. Regardless of what anyone wishes to  read into opinions expressed here, no one would  be happier than I would be if Maris went all the way …. But I don’t like the reports I hear about his temperament. I hope they’re untrue.

Such fears proved unfounded, inasmuch as Maris not only made the jump to the majors but also laid claim to the vacancy in left field. A notorious slow starter throughout his minor-league days, Maris broke in with a bang when the Indians hosted the Chicago White Sox on Opening Day, April 16, 1957. Maris clubbed three singles in five at-bats off White Sox ace Billy Pierce and scored a run in the fourth inning of a game won in eleven innings by Chicago, 3-2.

Two days later, Maris hit the first of his 275 career home runs, a grand slam in the top of the eleventh inning off Tigers reliever Jack Crimian that gave the Tribe an 8-3 victory in Detroit.

Maris opened his rookie campaign with a nine-game hitting streak. All was going well for the young outfielder until he suffered two broken ribs while trying to break up a double play against the Kansas City Athletics on May 10. Maris was hitting .315 at the time. By June 1, his average had slipped to .258.

A month after he returned to the lineup, Maris took two foul tips off his right instep and spent nearly another two weeks, June 29 through July 10, on the shelf. The ninth inning of back-to-back games against Boston in mid-June illustrated the ups and downs Maris was experiencing. On June 18, Maris’ s home run keyed a 7-6 win over the Red Sox, while a 3-for-5 performance hiked his average to .270. Twenty-four hours later, Maris was accidentally struck on the left temple when Red Sox catcher Sammy White was returning the ball to pitcher Frank Sullivan. Maris dropped to the ground but was able to walk off the field. X-rays showed no fractures, and Maris returned to the lineup the next day.

“Roger was a very good teammate,” according to Herb Score,

and a very intense ballplayer; he played hard. I would consider him a hard-nosed ballplayer. People tend to focus on the home runs, but he was an outstanding outfielder, and in his younger days, he could run very well.

For the remainder of his rookie year, what was essentially a two-month slump took Maris’s average from .271 on July 17 to .235 at season’s end. He contributed 14 home runs, 51 RBIs, and eight stolen bases to the Indians offense despite missing 37 games due to injuries.

The upheaval that took place within the Cleveland organization during the 1957-58 offseason didn’t bode well for Maris. After the Indians finished sixth with a 76-77 season, 21. games behind the pennant-winning New York Yankees, Farrell was fired and replaced by Bobby Bragan. Later, in a move that would have long-range repercussions on the franchise, General Manager Hank Greenberg was sacked and replaced by “Trader” Frank Lane on November 12, 1957. With Lane in charge, no player in the organization was safe. Roger Maris would learn soon enough the difference between playing for a manager who believed in his abilities (Farrell) and one who was indifferent (Bragan).

Maris began 1958 as the Indians’ right fielder. As in 1957, he started off well. He was hitting .280 with three home runs and six runs batted in when he pulled a lower back muscle during a pregame workout in early May. Bragan constructed Maris’s hesitation to play with the injury as an attempt to malinger, thus earning the second-year outfielder a permanent residence in Bragan’ s doghouse.

For the remainder of his stay in Cleveland, Maris’ s playing time was sporadic. When he hit a pair of two home runs in a game at Detroit on May 14, Maris was batting .275, a figure that dropped to .225 with nine home runs and 27 RBIs as the June 15 trading deadline approached.

Considering the combination of Lane’s itchy trigger finger and Bragan’ s disposition, it was only a matter of time before Maris would find himself wearing a new uniform. In an attempt to showcase Maris for a possible trade, he was returned to the Cleveland lineup as a leadoff hitter.

After a proposed deal with the Yankees fell through as the trading deadline approached, Lane dialed up Kansas City and unloaded Maris, infielder Preston Ward, and pitcher Dick Tomanek to the Athletics for infielder Vic Power and utility man Woodie Held.

“No matter what they got, if you traded Roger Maris you had to get had, because Roger was a complete ballplayer,” Mudcat Grant said.

We had an idiot for a general manager in Frank Lane that could not see the talent, but always criticized Roger for his attitude. With a ballplayer like that who could really play and was sitting on the bench, I would’ve had an attitude also. Lane didn’t see the attitude as something positive, so he traded Roger and that was a big mistake.

In his June 18, 1958, column in the Fargo Forum, Eugene Fitzgerald wrote:

It was somewhat surprising that Maris was dealt to Kansas City. It was generally believed the Shanley High product … would wind up with the New York Yankees. There is no secret that Maris hasn’t been happy at Cleveland, not an uncommon situation with the Indians. There is no secret that the Yankees would like to have Maris. His transfer to Kansas City may delay his arrival at Yankee Stadium. Whether the charges are true or not that Kansas City is a [major-league] farm club for the Yankees, it must be recognized that Maris has a better chance now to join the Yankees than he had while in the employ of the Cleveland club.

It took a year and a half, but Fitzgerald’s prognostications eventually came to pass—on all counts.

The Cleveland Tate Stars began playing baseball in the city in 1918 and joined the NNL in 1921. After the Stars left the league in 1923, the Cleveland Browns took their place and finished last. The Elites, the Hornets, and the Tigers all followed and did not fare much better. In the 1930s, the Stars, the Cubs, and the Giants represented Cleveland in rival Negro leagues, and the Red Sox gave it a try in the NNL, but none could seem to break the cycle of losing teams. The Cleveland Bears entered the Negro American League (NAL) in 1939 and enjoyed brief success-they finished first (22-4) in 1939 but the next year fell to 6-16 and then moved to Jacksonville, Florida, in 1941-paving the way for Ernest Wright and the Buckeyes, who made two trips to the World Series before moving to Louisville in 1949 and finally folding at the end of the season.

The Cleveland Tate Stars set the pattern for the mediocrity that would charaterize Cleveland’s Negro League teams until the 1940s. The team began its existence as a local squad, and a few box scores have been found that reveal a bit about it. A 1919 account in the Chicago Defender talks about the Stars’ first practice under manager Bill Irvin at Woodland Hills Park. Most of the players who showed up to try out were either rookies or veterans from other teams in the area. They were trying to get ready for their first game on April 13 against the National Cafes. They went on to win their first regular game of the new season, against the Johnny Otts, 3-2. A large crowd came out to see the Stars play and was treated to a game filled with speed and enthusiasm.1 The papers reported a five-game winning streak for the Stars in early June, and a nailbiter in July against the Tellings Nine. George Branham came away with the victory by allowing only five hits through eight innings and getting some fine fielding from one Rev Cannaday.2

A short series of games was played in 1920 against a team from Oberlin to try to name the best team in Ohio. Three games were played, with the Tate Stars winning two. Following a 3-1 victory, the local paper referred to the Tate Stars as Cleveland’s “crack colored team.” Winning pitcher Lefty Brady struck out fourteen batters to secure the win.3 The series also included a dance in Rowland Hall on the Oberlin campus.

Before the start of the 1921 season, Jim Taylor left Indianapolis to manage the Stars. He immediately set out to sign some new players for his squad, beginning with Ralph (Roy) Moore, first baseman and pitcher. While Taylor worked on the roster, owner George Tate and his business manager Devoe worked on a deal to use one of the Akron parks for practice while their own field was under construction. Tate Field became their new home, and by June they were enjoying their home-field advantage as they took two games from the Pittsburgh Keystones, 8-7 and 8-3. Branham came away with the victory in both contests. Outfielder Willie Miles and second baseman Claude Johnson led the offensive charge in both games. Errors hurt the Stars in the first contest, but they only committed one in the second.4

The Stars played through some hot streaks in the summer, winning eight out of nine games in late June. They finished the streak with a come-from-behind win against the Columbus Buckeyes, 10-9. A six-run rally brought them back from defeat, with Rev Cannaday providing solid hitting. In mid-July they pulled off a sweep with a doubleheader victory over the Bacharach Giants, 3-1 and 6-5. In the first contest the Stars beat Cannonball Dick Redding behind the four-hit pitching of Johnson.5

In a battle of wills, the Tate Stars beat Suds Sutherland (a former Detroit Tiger) and his Cowpers teammates 7-6 in sixteen innings. The Stars got twenty-one hits off the former major league pitcher but gave up sixteen of their own. The Stars pulled off a nice doubleheader victory against the Kansas City Monarchs near the end of the season, winning 8-6 and 6-4. Johnson hit a home run in the second game to support the six-hit pitching of Hamilton. In late 1921 the Stars played the Indianapolis ABCs and came out on the losing end of a 6-1 score before a hometown crowd. The Stars hit into four double plays and could not stop the hard hitting of Ben Taylor, who went 3 for 3 and a walk to lead the ABCs.6

The Stars lost again to the ABCs near the start of the 1922 season, with a 4-0 shutout going to Taylor’s crew. They lost another doubleheader to the ABCs in June when they were outhit 30-24. Indianapolis clouted nine extra base hits, including three homers, compared to the Stars’ three for extra bases. Indianapolis continued to give the Tates trouble with three out of four victories in September.7 While they did not enjoy much success in the NNL in 1922, the Tate Stars did establish a strong record in Ohio with their independent play against teams such as the Great Americans of Mansfield. In October they were tied for the lead in the Cleveland City Series after beating the Tellings 16-0. They relied on the strong pitching of Branham and Bob McClure, and solid hitting and fielding from Johnson, Cannaday, Taylor, and Fred Boyd. For example, they won two straight from the Tellings in April, with Branham getting the victory in the second game, 6-4. Cannaday led the attack with two hits and two runs scored. Branham later beat the Detroit Stars 5-1, with the only hit being a home run by Bruce Petway. They beat the Kansas City Monarchs in late July, with Johnson helping the hitting attack and McClure beating “Bullet Joe” Rogan 6-5. The Monarchs came back in the nightcap to triumph 9-3, with Drake besting Branham.8

In 1923, the Tate Stars appeared to have an uncertain future. Rube Foster paid a visit to the city in February in an effort to encourage more support for the team and to try to fix “the tangled up affairs” of the ballclub.9 Reports indicated that the owners found themselves in court over unpaid debts. George Tate struggled to make ends meet and finally had to sell the Tate ballpark to businessman George R. Hooper in early July to save the team. These early difficulties may have been the harbinger of things to come for future Cleveland entries in the NNL. In fact, the Stars played many of their home games in Toledo at Washington Park. They lost a doubleheader to the ABCs there in August when they could not turn their hits into runs. In the first game the Stars had eleven hits but scored only twice, and in the nightcap they had eight hits and still only scored two runs to lose 3-2. Bob McCall came out the loser in the first game, while Branham lost the second.10

The Stars did manage to play their early games at home, even with the future of the park and the team in jeopardy. They split an early series with the Homestead Grays, losing the first game 3-1 but pounding the ball in the second to triumph 14-5. Johnson had three extra base hits in the second, including two home runs.11 In a non-league series with the Ambridge Eagles of Ambridge, Pennsylvania, the Stars continued their heavy hitting with a 27-hit barrage to win 14-1 and 8-2. George (Rube) Henderson hit the only home run in the second game for the Tates. A series of August games in Memphis did not go as well; the Tates lost to the Red Sox 5-1 and 8-1.12

Compiling the roster for the Tate Stars reveals few names that many would recognize, and it appears that many of the players were local stars who never played outside the Cleveland area. An important exception to that pattern was the inclusion of Candy Jim Taylor, who was with the Stars in 1921 and 1922 as player-manager. A few other names that are more recognizable are Vic Harris, Cannaday, Boots McClain, Buck Ewing, Hooks Johnson, and Bob McCall. Vic Harris is best known for the many years he spent with the Homestead Grays beginning in 1925, but he got his start with the Tate Stars in 1923 before going on to have a successful baseball career spanning twenty-eight years. Jim Taylor came in with a strong reputation as a player and a well-known name as one, with Ben and C. I., of the Taylor brothers.

When the Tate Stars folded and did not return in 1924 a new Cleveland entry, the Browns, joined the

NNL and continued to use Hooper Park for their home games. As the Stars had struggled financially so too did the entries that succeeded them in the Negro Leagues. In mid-1924 a reporter explained that the Browns could not win despite “apparent strength both on the offense and defense.” 13 Without a winning record, fans would not come out in large enough numbers to support the teams. The Tate Stars started out with a great deal of excitement and promise but were unable to translate that into winning records, and ultimately they had to leave the NNL.

NOTES

1. “Tate Stars Start Training,” Chicago Defender, April 12, 1919; “Tates Win First Game of Season,” Chicago Defender, May 17, 1919.

2. “Two-run Rally in Ninth Wins for Tate Stars,” Chicago Defender, July 2, 1921.

3. “Oberlin Club Lost Game to Clevelanders,” Chronicle Telegram, September 10, 1920.

4. “Tate Stars to build New Park in Cleveland,” Chicago Defender, March 19, 1921; “Tate Stars Take Two from Pittsburgh Keystones,” Chicago Defender, June 11, 1921.

5. “Tate Stars Nose Out Columbus Buckeyes,” Chicago Defender, June 25, 1921; “Tate’s Stars Win Two Games from Connors,” Chicago Defender, July 15, 1922.

6. “Tate Stars Win 16-Inning Game Off Sutherland,” Chicago Defender, August 13, 1921; “Tate Stars Surprise Fans; Win 2 from Kansas City,” Chicago Defender, August 27, 1921; “ABCs Win 6 to l,” Indianapolis Star, September 27, 1921.

7. “ABCs Trounce Tate Stars 4-0,” Savannah Tribune, May 4, 1922; “Charleston Gets 2 Homers; A.B.C’s Down Tates Twice,” Chicago Defender, June 12, 1922; “Indianapolis Takes Three Out of Four from Tates,” Chicago Defender, September 2, 1922.

8. “Cleveland Akron Stars Will Oppose Great Americans This Week,” Mansfield News, July 19, 1922; “Tate Stars 6; Tellings 4,” Chicago Defender, April 29, 1922; “Detroit Stars Stop Tates, Pennant Aspirations, 8-2,” Chicago Defender, May 27, 1922; “Tate’s Defeat Rogan in Last Half of Ninth, “Chicago Defender, July 22, 1922; “Tate Stars Tie Up the Cleveland City Series,” Chicago Defender, October 17, 1922.

9. “Rube Foster Banqueted by Cleveland Business Men,” Chicago Defender, February 17, 1923.

10. “Cleveland Business Man Buys Tate’s Baseball Park,” Chicago Defender, July 14, 1923; “ABCs Grab Double Bill from Cleveland,” The Indianapolis Star, August 17, 1923.

11. “Tate Stars Split Even with Homestead Grays, “Chicago Defender, May 19, 1923.

12. “Tate Stars Win Two,” Chicago Defender, July 28, 1923; “Memphis Beats Tate Stars,” Chicago Defender, August 11, 1923.

13. “St. Louis Takes 2 from Cleveland,” Chicago Defender, July 5, 1924.

Indians team owner Alva Bradley had hired “Ol’ Oss” Vitt before the 1938 season, following Vitt’s phenomenal run as skipper of the minor-league Newark Bears. Vitt replaced Steve O’Neill, who was popular with the players, gregarious, self-confident, and straightforward. Vitt was none of these things. Upon assuming the Cleveland helm, he’d gone to the press with the pronouncement that, after having had a look at the team, he had “only two major leaguers, Feller and [Mel] Harder.”

Vitt was tough, but the 1940 preseason gave no indication of the drama that was to play out in Cleveland. That isn’t to say that all was perfect. Veteran pitcher Johnny Allen and catcher Frankie Pytlak were contractual holdouts, young star Lou Boudreau tore cartilage in his ankle during an intrasquad game, and promising rookie Paul O’Dea was struck in the eye by a batting practice foul ball and never played again. Despite that adversity, Vitt was buoyant. Even when confronted with stories such as the one about Jeff Heath and another player staging a fight in the hope that Vitt would try to break it up so that Heath could “accidentally” take a swing at the manager, “Ol’ Os” remained calm.

“I guess it can’t be helped,” Vitt responded to reporters. “I’ll just go along doing the best I can and the boys will have to like it.” Those words are consistent with the notion that Vitt was a Dr. Jekyll to reporters but a Mr. Hyde to his players. The players thought the manager antagonistic and spiteful, while the press portrayed him as suffering and misunderstood.

Vitt had his work cut out for him on the field. Oddsmakers were so confident that the Yankees would win their fifth consecutive pennant that the odds on New York were set at 7-20, and the scarce few who disagreed almost unanimously believed that Boston would win the American League. Vitt, though, remained a study in confidence, telling reporters that Cleveland just might unseat the Yankees.

The season began with Feller’s opening-day no-hit classic against the White Sox, and by April 27 the team was in first place with a record of 6-2. Joe DiMaggio had suffered a sore heel earlier in the season, raising doubts about his health. If fate was not smiling on Cleveland baseball, at least it did not seem to be smirking, either. But fate has, on occasion, displayed a sense of humor.

On the following day, the real fireworks began. On a sunny afternoon against Schoolboy Rowe, and in front of a crowd of more than 30,000 in Detroit, the Tribe entered the ninth inning with a 9-3 lead. Cleveland pitcher Al Milnar, along with the bullpen, gave up six runs, allowing the score to tie at 9-9. At that point, Vitt theatrically “mugged” on the bench, criticizing everyone in earshot for the team’s play. Hal Trosky homered with two out in the tenth inning to win the game, but Vitt had dipped his toes in the river of discontent.

The next day Feller was a bit off, and Cleveland lost to Detroit 4-3. Vitt snapped at his star to the press, and the team edged toward meltdown. As captain, Trosky was toeing a thin line between the professional pride of his teammates and the responsibility afforded by his title. Managing egos became as much a daily ritual as managing to hit American League pitching.

On May 1, crisis found Trosky’ s family. His fourteen-month-old son James inhaled a piece of bacon at breakfast, and Hal’s wife Lorraine rushed the boy to the hospital. As soon as word reached the team, Trosky dropped everything and took a cab to the airport to get back to Cleveland.

Jim Trosky’s condition improved. After a few days, when doctors were confident that pneumonia would not set in, Hal made plans to rejoin the team in Washington for a series with the Senators. Frighteningly, the boy took an abrupt turn for the worse, and Hal cabled Vitt that he’d be staying home until the boy got better. While the delay was brief, Vitt wasn’t pleased. The slugger’s eventual return, though, boosted the team to a two-game-series sweep of the Yankees and imbued the clubhouse with renewed optimism. By Memorial Day, Trosky had eleven homers and the team was in second place with a record of 23-13. The first week in June, however, marked the beginning of the end.

After the Tribe split a doubleheader with the Senators, narrowly avoiding losses in both ends with a late run in the nightcap, Vitt conveyed his anger with Al Smith, despite the win, and said as much to the press. A couple of players later claimed to have overheard Vitt yearning for his Newark Bears squad, a thinly veiled assertion that the minor-league team would have performed as well or better. Opinion did not change at all when, three days later, despite Trosky’ s fourteenth home run, Cleveland lost to the Yankees when George Selkirk stole home off Feller.

On June 10, the Indians were rained out in Boston, and the players spent the day in the hotel lobby dissecting their misfortune. The blame, naturally, fell on Vitt. Some players advanced the idea of mutiny, of trying to have the manger fired, but again Trosky counseled patience. The slugger was a proud man, and he wanted no part of public finger pointing, even though he had been a repeated victim of Vitt’s acid tongue.

The next day, the Red Sox blew out the Indians. Vitt was in rare form during the game, again screaming about his star, “Look at him! He’s supposed to be my ace. I’m supposed to win a pennant with that kind of pitching?”

That evening, Trosky spoke with Frank Gibbons of the Cleveland Press. He told the reporter that the Indians could win the pennant with their current players but had no chance as long as Vitt was the manager. Gibbons cautioned Trosky to wait and see how things turned out before doing anything rash, the same advice Trosky had given his teammates.

In the hotel lobby the next morning, the players checked out early. At breakfast they began surreptitiously plotting about how to solve the “Vitt problem.” During the game that afternoon, which the Indians lost, Vitt snidely chastised Mel Harder. “It’s about time you won one, the money you’re getting.” To the other players, this was rock bottom. Mel Harder was in his thirteenth year with the team, was one of its touchstones in what was shaping up to be a memorable pennant race, and was unquestionably respected by everyone in the organization-everyone except one.

Harder could only respond, “I gave you the best I had.” On the train ride from Boston to Cleveland, no one bothered to break out the cards. Ben Chapman and Rollie Hemsley reportedly called Lou Boudreau and Ray Mack into their berth and told the young infielders that some of the players were circulating a petition calling for Vitt’s ouster. Boudreau and Mack, along with Al Smith, Beau Bell, Mike Naymick, and Soup Campbell, were excused from participating because the veterans did not want to penalize the younger players by potentially ruining their careers.

It was a gesture that demonstrated the sobriety and seriousness of the mutineers. Mel Harder and Johnny Allen, in a meeting with the rest of the players, told the team that they would go to owner Alva Bradley alone. The players disagreed, but they did anoint Harder as their spokesman. (See Fred Schuld’s article on page 46.)

On June 13, actual tragedy struck Trosky. As the train pulled into the Cleveland station, Hal received word that his mother had passed away unexpectedly in Iowa. Trosky went directly from the train station to the airport, while Harder called Bradley’s office seeking an appointment with the owner. Instead of sending Harder alone, though, ten of the dissidents went to Bradley’s office en masse to demonstrate the depth of their resolve. It was an act unprecedented in baseball history.

The players were all seasoned veterans who knew how baseball was played, both as a game and as a business. They were men who played before the era of spoiled superstars, men who worked in the offseason not of choice but necessity, and they were men who understood the consequences of their actions. Clearly, this was no idle grumbling about a stern taskmaster. Vitt had wounded each deeply enough to provoke them to take this extraordinary measure.

The players told Bradley that Vitt had to go if the team was to compete successfully. They outlined four specific grievances, each of which Bradley later confirmed, and they demanded that the owner take action. Trosky even telephoned Bradley from the airport to ensure that his absence would not be misconstrued as disagreement. Despite his personal misgivings about the action, as captain he could not stand by while his teammates pressed the issue.

Bradley told the players that he would look into the matter and warned them that if word of this got out, the players would be ridiculed forever. Naturally, the story was leaked to reporter Gordon Cobbledick almost immediately. The team won that afternoon, but it was the insurrection that was front-page news the following morning. The headline for the story was physically larger on the printed page than was the news of Hitler’s invasion of Paris. Even Trosky’ s hometown paper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, jumped on the bandwagon and bashed the “Crybaby Indians.”

In the following days, reporters attempted to dissect the events leading up to the insurrection. Most concluded that although Vitt was a good baseball strategist, he had completely lost the respect of the players by making them lose face among the other American League teams. One Iowa writer contacted Trosky at home, where he was still grieving for his mother, and asked the player about the team.

“Those writers,” Trosky reportedly answered,

“know the situation so well that I couldn’t add anything to what they have already stated. The boys are sincere in their complaints. Take Bob Feller, for example. Bob is the kind who never did anybody any harm. But he was among the leaders of the movement. He must feel justified. It’s the same with the rest.”

He continued:

There’s a lot of defense offered for Vitt, namely, that he must have a lot of ability because he is keeping his team near the top of the league. But that is mis-leading. We are up there because the Yankees have not yet come into their own. But we’re only playing .575 ball. That isn’t championship stuff. Our showing is due mainly to the failure of some other teams.

Owner Alva Bradley took no action. In 1951, the Cleveland News discovered and published a memo from Alva Bradley written a decade earlier:

We should have won the pennant. … Our real trouble started when a group of 10 players came to my office and made four distinct charges against (Vitt) and asked for his dismissal. The four charges made against Vitt, on investigations I have made, were 100% correct.

Bradley later offered the managerial job to coach Luke Sewell, who declined. “Oscar was a fine fellow, but he talked too much,” Sewell recalled.

He would say these things, promise things, which he forgot he ever said or promised. Players resented this because they thought he did it on purpose. But he didn’t. … [The rebellion] was not all Oscar’s fault. The players were to blame, too. They picked on one another, blamed each other when things went wrong, and blew a pennant they should have won.

Despite the players’ subsequent public retraction of their charges (Roy Weatherly refused to sign), after a half-season of humiliation at every park the team visited, and following a dramatic loss to Detroit and Floyd Giebell on the last weekend in September, Bradley fired Vitt after a directors’ meeting on October 28 and replaced him with Roger Peckinpaugh. The season had ended, but the event colored the careers and reputations of almost all those involved.

In a sad postscript, the Plain Dealer ran the following a year later, on September 28, 1941:

Oscar Vitt disclosed today he had resigned as manager of the Portland baseball club which finished last in the Coast League this season. The former Cleveland Indians manager submitted his resignation at the close of the season …. Vitt expressed belief that if the Portland club had had a few more replacements it probably could have finished well up in the first division.

SOURCES

Books
Schneider, Russell. The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia. New York: Sports Publishing, 2001.

Thorn, John, et al. Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball. New York: Warner Books, 2001.

Newspapers
Cleveland News

Cleveland Press

Des Moines Register

New York Daily News

New York Times Plain Dealer

The Sporting News

Interviews

Rick Ferrell

Denny Galehouse

Mel Harder

Willis Hudlin

Lorraine Trosky

Sunny Jim, as he was nicknamed by friends, was born in St. Anthony, Iowa, on September 11, 1866. He left school at age fourteen to serve as a messenger boy for the First National Bank in nearby Marshalltown. He apparently paid close attention to the banking and finance business, later accepting a position as bookkeeper for the Hawkeye Linseed Oil Company. Dunn spent five years there, sharpening his skills on the bottom line. He eventually left Hawkeye for a similar opportunity with the A. E. Shorthill Company, where a chance meeting brought him close to his future occupation in baseball. Dunn and his coworker Henry Anson, whose son Adrian was making a splash in professional baseball, became close friends. Undoubtedly what Dunn heard about the exploits of his friend’s son helped pique his interest in the game.

Soon Sunny Jim decided he was ready to leave A. E. Shorthill and venture out on his own. His finances were not enough to bankroll a new enterprise, but Henry Anson had a lot of confidence in his younger friend, enough to lend him the cash needed to start Dunn’s contracting business. Flush with the necessary operating money, Dunn tried entering the coal business but found it not to his liking. He switched his focus to railroad contracting, which became his vocation for many years in Chicago until his entrance into major-league baseball. He never forgot the kindness of Henry Anson, and he did what he could to return it.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Dunn bid successfully for the rights to construct the Cleveland Belt Line Railroad, the brainchild of entrepreneur Ben Hopkins. It was planned to circumnavigate the city limits, allowing freight carriers to deliver steel and ore in a more efficient manner directly to the mills. Once again baseball intersected with the railroad contractor, as Ben Hopkins had many friends on the Cleveland Naps and was a regular visitor to League Park. Dunn later remarked that, during his stay in Cleveland, he witnessed Addie Joss’s perfect game in 1908 and found a distinct fascination with the crowd and its excitement. He took notice of the 10,000 spectators and the revenue dollars going to owners Charles Somers and J. F. Kilfoyl. Seven years later the opportunity of a lifetime came along, and Sunny Jim was too clever a businessman to let it pass him by.

How Dunn acquired the Cleveland Indians in the winter of 1916 is a story that has several different twists and turns. One of the popular versions lies in Franklin “Whitey” Lewis’s 1949 team history, The Cleveland Indians. Lewis had been sports editor of the Cleveland Press for ten years and had access to veteran sportswriters including Henry P. Edwards and Ed Bang. Lewis also had at his disposal an extensive archive of clippings and articles. His version of the transaction whereby Dunn acquired the team is colorful, complete with direct quotes from the principals.

Lewis takes the reader to a popular saloon in Chicago, where Ban Johnson and a group of businessmen are idly chatting about Charlie Somers’s financial predicament. Cleveland’s owner since the team’s inception in 1901, Somers had gone broke from poor attendance and bad real-estate investments. Suddenly Johnson turns to one of the men and declares him to be the new owner of the Indians. Dunn, purportedly that man, gulps audibly and stammers that he has $15,000 available. Others, including the bartender, chime in with various amounts, and the plan is hatched. Dunn, excited about the scheme, remarks that he knows nothing about the business of baseball, but he is assured by the iron-willed Johnson that he will get him the right men to run the ballclub.

This amusing story notwithstanding, it is unlikely that Jim Dunn, a shrewd businessman, would be rushed into such a deal. Dunn had amassed more than a million dollars in his contracting business. Whether or not he understood the business of baseball, he had the acumen to determine if a potential venture had the necessary upside for him to take a flyer on it. Whenever Dunn and Johnson actually met to discuss buying the Indians, surely Dunn had done his homework. The purchase price was in the neighborhood of $500,000. It is unlikely that Dunn agreed to buy the club and then ran about Chicago drumming up investors. If anything, Sunny Jim had analyzed the situation closely.                                           

Dunn moved quickly to strengthen his ballclub. Before February was out, he added infielder Ivan Howard and catcher Tom Daly, and he paid $5,000 for Washington first baseman Chick Gandil.1 The last purchase looked good on paper. He brought excellent fielding skills and power to the lineup. Character issues surrounding Gandil would come forward several years later and do tremendous harm to the integrity of the game; luckily for Dunn, Gandil was gone and playing in Chicago before he became embroiled in public scandal, the scheme to throw the 1919 World Series.

Indians players were quite excited about the moves made by their new owner. “Why Washington ever let Chick Gandil go,” Ray Chapman remarked to the Plain Dealer, “is more than I can see, for I think he is the best first baseman” in the American League. Later that spring, Cleveland manager Lee Fohl echoed the sentiment: “It is a surprise what the addition of just one man will make to a ballclub but there is no denying the fact that the addition of Chick Gandil has made our team look much different than it did a year ago.” In just a short time, Fohl would be stunned by the addition of another player with a few more skills than Gandil ever had.

With the players on hand, Dunn busied himself for the start of the regular season. He had the team stock incorporated in Columbus, Ohio, changing the name of his enterprise to the Cleveland Baseball Company. New uniforms were designed, with the home whites to be fashioned with navy-blue stripes along with blue caps. Away uniforms would be gray with black caps.

In late February, the 1916 Indians assembled in New Orleans for spring training. In a bit of wonderful irony, the minor-league New Orleans Pelicans were owned by none other than Charles Somers. While cold-blooded bankers were selling off his holdings, Somers negotiated to retain his ownership in the Southern League club. The bankers’ committee caved in and allowed Somers the favor. Not only could Somers remain in baseball, but his Pelicans were also affiliated with Cleveland, leaving him a small connection to the franchise.

While fans speculated about the Indians’ chances in the upcoming season, Jim Dunn kept working to improve the ballclub. Through various sources Dunn discovered that the best center fielder in baseball might be available for the right price. In April, Dunn turned the baseball world upside down by shelling out the improbable sum of $55,000, among other considerations, to bring the great Tris Speaker to Cleveland. In one quick stroke, Sunny Jim had breathed new life into Cleveland’s baseball hopes. He restored the city’s confidence in the ownership and put a competitive team on the field.

An excited Dunn told Cleveland baseball fans: “I will not stand for a tailender. If I thought the Cleveland club was destined to remain a second-division team I would not buy it. Cleveland is a corking good town and I think it will do a comeback in baseball.” The addition of Speaker dramatically improved the ballclub and opened a pipeline to Boston, which eventually led to the acquisitions of Joe Wood and Larry Gardner. Both would prove to be valuable contributors in elevating the Indians to pennant-contender status.

In 1919 a frustrated Jim Dunn accepted the resignation of manager Lee Fohl after a dramatic grand slam by Babe Ruth on June 18 cost the Indians a game at League Park, a fateful episode in Indians history. The Indians were leading 7-4 in the top of the ninth. With two out and the bases loaded, Speaker, according to some accounts, signaled for the left-handed reliever Fritz Coumbe to pitch to Ruth. According to other accounts, Fohl, having stepped out of the dugout to get the signal for which of three relievers-two righties and one lefty-was ready, misunderstood and brought in Coumbe, who hadn’t sufficiently warmed up.

Dunn promoted Tris Speaker to the position of player-manager, a move the Cleveland faithful happily approved. Speaker proved to be an able manager, implementing a platoon system with his outfielders and handling the pitching staff, including Ray Caldwell, who had a serious drinking problem.

The 1920 season was the culmination of Jim Dunn’s hard work over five years, during which he had overseen several key additions to the Indians roster. He managed to acquire, after Speaker, Wood, and Gardner, first baseman “Doc” Johnston, outfielder Charlie Jamieson, and pitchers Ray Caldwell and Walter Mails. Elmer Smith was dealt to Washington in 1916 but brought back the following year. Despite the horrific death of Ray Chapman in August, the Indians were able to steady themselves and bring the pennant to Cleveland. The addition of shortstop Joe Sewell from the New Orleans Pelicans helped rally the club. A jubilant Jim Dunn sat in the owner’s box and happily watched his team win the World Series. In his contract for the next season, each player received a bonus, and, in tum, Sunny Jim received from his players the gift of a pair of diamond cufflinks.

The Jim Dunn era came to a sudden halt in June 1922. Dunn died of a recurring heart ailment at the young age of fifty-six. He left his stock in the Indians to his wife, who did not have the desire to operate a major-league franchise. Ernest S. Barnard effectively ran the club for the next five years, until Mrs. Dunn put it up for sale in 1927. All the momentum built by the late Mr. Dunn evaporated, and the Indians would not claim another pennant until 1948.

In his six years of ownership, Jim Dunn rescued a down-and-out franchise and turned it into one of the elite ballclubs of the American League. His legacy was that of promises delivered. He vowed to bring a championship to a city that had seen only a near miss or two since 1901. He won over the skeptics and actually brought Cleveland to the pinnacle of the baseball world.

Sources

Lewis, Franklin A. The Cleveland Indians. New York: Putnam, 1949.

Cleveland Leader, January 1916-June 1922.

Cleveland News, January 1916-June 1922.

Plain Dealer, January 1916-June 1922.

Notes

1 Sources differ as to the amount. The figure of $5,000 is attested by Deadball Era Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research, Deadball Stars of the American League, ed. David Jones (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006). It is $7,500 according to Retrosheet.org and BaseballReference.com.

The field was his love, and when the folks in Chardon named it after him, he considered it the honor of his life.

The longtime Indians pitcher and coach died Sunday morning peacefully after many months of fighting off illnesses, mainly difficulty with breathing and eating.

Through all his suffering, mention a baseball incident or ask a question about the game and his eyes would brighten and he would dip into that fine memory of his and offer pearls no other person had. He would say, for example, that Lou Gehrig was tougher to pitch against than Babe Ruth.

Harder’ s birthday was last Tuesday.

He turned 93. Russell Schneider, once my peer at The Plain Dealer and now a columnist for Sun newspapers, thoughtfully mentioned fans might want to send Mel a birthday card. He was inundated with them, and many carried warm personal messages of their recollections about this outstanding pitcher and special man.

Fortunately, he was able to have them read to him during the final few days of his life and to know how much we admired and cared about this exceptional pitcher and gentleman.

He was one of the greatest pitchers ever to put on an Indians uniform.

He came to the Indians at age 18 in 1928, pitched through 1947, and won 223 games.

Then he became the team’s pitching coach.

Bob Lemon is in the Hall of Fame.

He always said Harder made him.  

Early Wynn is in the Hall of Fame. He always said Harder put him there.

Bob Feller is in the Hall of Fame. He and Harder were teammates. During which time Harder often counseled the young pitcher at Feller’s request, and later Harder coached him. Ask Feller about Harder, and he’ll speak only in superlatives.

The fourth man of that Big Four staff-often called the greatest of all time-was Mike Garcia. Garcia, until the day he died, would tell me how much of his success he owed to Harder. And if Garcia had pitched long enough, he probably would be in the Hall of Fame today, too.  

Al Lopez was the manager under whom Harder coached. Together, they led the Indians through several outstanding seasons, the climax of which was a record 111 victories and the American League pennant in 1954. Lopez often told me of Harder’ s brilliance as a teacher.

“He never pushed his ideas on the guys,” said Lopez. “He would wait until they seemed eager for help and advice.”

Lopez is in the Hall of Fame.  

Harder should be, too.  

One of the disappointments in his life was that he had yet to be elected.

There is no pitcher more deserving.  

Joe DiMaggio told me more than once that Harder was the toughest pitcher he ever faced. I heard this from so many old-timers.

Ted Williams always found Harder a problem, and he campaigned hard, along with Feller and many of his fans here, for Harder to be elected.

It was not to be because the Veterans Committee was rife with politics and this year it was changed for that very reason, influenced in part by the fact that it was so unfair to Harder.

We thought we had enough votes for him in 2000. The group pushing his election talked with every member of the Veterans Committee and we were promised the votes to get him in. But we were double-crossed by those who had friends they secretly favored and thus were lying to us.

Harder, of course, had pitched long before many of those on the Veterans Committee became seriously involved with the game. They really didn’t know him and Harder was the quiet type who never made headlines with quotes or pushed himself. You’d never hear him toot his own horn.

So the man richly deserving of the honor lost out. It’s the Hall of Fame’s loss. The new selection process, of which I am now a part, makes it almost impossible for any old-timer to receive sufficient votes. I just voted for him—No. 1 on my list—and I’ll keep pushing because to be in Harder’s corner is a labor of love, although now a seemingly hopeless one.

But he did have that Mel Harder Field and the Wahoo Club every year gives out its Distinguished Service Award in Mel’s name. And he is in the Greater Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame, the Ohio Baseball Hall of Fame and many others.

There are a few of us around who saw him pitch. He pitched the historic opener at Cleveland Stadium. If memory serves, the date was July 31, 1932. It was Wes Ferrell’s turn to pitch, but on game day he begged off for some mysterious reason. Roger Peckinpaugh, the manager, asked Harder, pitching out of turn, to take the ball.

Harder never would say no. Before 80,000 fans, he and Lefty Grove of the Philadelphia Athletics engaged in a brilliant pitching battle, Grove finally winning, 1-0. (Incidentally, Grove is in the Hall of Fame.) Harder pitched mostly for poor Cleveland teams, yet managed to have two seasons of 20 or more victories, and to accumulate 223 victories with little hitting behind him reveals how great a pitcher he was. His exceptional curveball buckled the knees of the best hitters.

In 1940, the Indians had one of their better teams and rebelled against Manager Oscar Vitt, firmly believing his thoughtless, outspoken criticism of some players—one being Feller—was costing them the pennant.

Hal Trosky, the first baseman, was to be the team’s spokesman when the players presented their complaints to owner Alva Bradley and to request the removal of Vitt.

On the day of the meeting, Trosky had to leave the team for Iowa because of an illness in his family. Harder was asked to be the spokesman. Although this was not his nature, again he didn’t say no because it hurt him deeply to hear the manner in which Vitt, in front of everybody on the bench, cut up those on the field when a misplay occurred.

The “revolution” resulted in the team being called the Cleveland Cry Babies, and in a sense, Harder was left holding the bag, but he never regretted standing up for his teammates.

He always was a standup guy and ever the gentleman. Even against Vitt, he never was vitriolic or swore. I never have heard anyone, not even Vitt, say an unkind word against Harder. He lived and died without an enemy.

He was a super husband to his wife Sandy, who died many years ago, and a father of two daughters who idolized him.

And anyone who became acquainted with him became a permanent Harder fan and friend.

The Burr Funeral Home in Chardon is certain to be crowded Thursday from 1 to 4 and 6 to 9 P.M. for our last goodbyes.

If there is a Hall of Fame in heaven for the good and special people, Harder will be in it today.

Lord knows he belongs.

Author’s note

This article is excerpted from The Best of Hal Lebovitz: Great Sportswriting from Six Decades in Cleveland (softcover / $14.95 / 352 pages), 2006 by Hal Lebovitz. The book is available online from Amazon.com.