Ruth was already a superstar before he arrived in New York, and the most famous baseball transaction in the history of the sport only enhanced that image. But it was his arrival in New York that launched him beyond mere baseball fame to the icon he became. No stage other than New York could properly display the magnificence that was Babe Ruth.

His on field exploits are well known, and are not the focus of this study. Rather, I focus on the financial side of the Babe Ruth phenomenon. Using recently discovered documents made available through the generosity of author Jane Leavy, I construct a financial picture of Ruth that goes beyond his baseball career. With the aid of Walsh, Ruth leveraged his prodigious baseball talents into an impressive financial machine that allowed him to live large while he played, and survive comfortably when his career came to a sad and much more sudden end than he preferred. Despite his battles with Walsh, in fact because of Walsh’s dogged determination, Ruth lived quite comfortably after retirement. While he never faded from the public eye, after retiring from baseball his income earning opportunities slowed. He was removed from the source of his greatest accomplishments, no longer enjoyed the shrewd guidance of baseball’s first real agent, and suffered deteriorating health, all of which combined to reduce his income. But an income reduced from the lofty heights that Ruth enjoyed as a player still left him quite comfortable in his waning years, and allowed him to leave a substantial trust fund to his wife Claire after his death.

“I WANT TO REPRESENT YOU”

The story of how Walsh met Ruth is not well known, primarily because its main protagonist, Walsh himself, rarely repeated the same tale twice. The most entertaining (and least likely) version has Walsh climbing the fire escape outside Ruth’s hotel, climbing in through the open window to his room, and disrupting Ruth, who at the time was “entertaining” a female associate. Walsh, in his telling, slapped Ruth’s bare derriere and loudly proclaimed “Babe, I want to represent you!” The rest, as Walsh would say, was history.1

A more likely, though also never verified, tale of the joining of this pair was also told by Walsh. In this version, he discovered Ruth’s favorite source of beer, a deli near his apartment. Walsh staked out the location, and opportunistically filled in for a missing delivery boy (or bribed said delivery boy, the version depending on the time, audience, and perhaps quantity of alcohol present at the time of its telling) when Ruth called in for a delivery. Gaining access to Ruth’s apartment via a barrel of beer, Walsh then impressed upon him the riches he could deliver to Ruth as his representative (the word “agent” not yet being common).

Regardless of exactly how or when Ruth and Walsh first met, the results were stunning for both. Walsh guided Ruth to wealth and financial security, which allowed him to feed his outsized appetite for life. More importantly, Walsh was able to prepare Ruth for a very comfortable, if professionally unsatisfying, future. Ruth’s talent on the field, his magnetic personality off it, and Walsh’s persistence and shrewd planning benefitted both men for years to come.

Walsh’s association with Ruth began with a simple one-year agreement to syndicate ghostwritten stories for the Babe, making a bit of easy money for the two of them. It grew into a life- and lifestyle-changing relationship that propelled Ruth off the field as much as Ruth propelled the game on the field.

Walsh was not the first person to represent Ruth in some way, but he consolidated all the job descriptions of the various predecessors into one, and then exceeded all of their accomplishments and expectations. Prior to Walsh, Ruth had variously employed a press agent, business manager, multiple barnstorming tour organizers, and a theatrical agent, with varying degrees of financial success.

Ultimately, Walsh formed two companies. The first, which existed before he landed Ruth, was the Christy Walsh Syndicate, which specialized in syndicating ghostwritten articles for celebrity athletes.2 The second, Christy Walsh Management, was initially responsible for marketing and managing Ruth in all endeavors beyond the ghostwritten word. Both enterprises were buoyed primarily by Ruth, but did represent other high profile clients, including Lou Gehrig, Knute Rockne, Glenn “Pop” Warner, Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Rogers Hornsby, and Walter Johnson, to name a few.3

BASEBALL’S BEST PLAYER…AND PAID LIKE IT!

Ruth was already a household name, a prodigious talent, and a well-paid player before he arrived in New York. On December 26, 1919, baseball’s most famous sale was consummated between Harry Frazee, owner of the Red Sox, and Jacob Ruppert, co-owner (with Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston) of the Yankees, which sent Ruth to New York in return for $100,000 plus a loan in the amount of $300,000.4 The sale was announced to the public on January 5, 1920, by which time Ruth had already informed the Yankees that he wanted a cut of the sale price and a new contract to replace the three-year $10,000 per season pact he had signed with Boston prior to the 1919 season.

Ruth had been publicly angling for a substantial salary increase for months before the sale was announced. In November, Ruth had threatened, “I deserve more money and I will not play unless I get it.”5 He repeated his demands a month later, saying, “If Frazee wants to give me $20,000 I’ll play. But if the Red Sox don’t want to pay that much…I won’t play…Mrs. Ruth and myself won’t have to worry over financial troubles for a few years and that’s why we can be independent.”6

He was well aware of his rising fame and box-office potential, even before Walsh’s arrival. There were reports that Ruth had signed a film deal for $10,000, and the first cut was already finished. The script allegedly provided a small part for his wife, Helen. “Ruth says he will stay in the movies indefinitely and play ball between times until Frazee comes through,”7 reported one small-town newspaper. Ruth’s cryptic comment about not needing baseball, and the fact that he was actually in Los Angeles at the time of the sale, helped lend credence to the rumors about his budding movie career.

For his part, Ruth had already sworn off the motion-picture business, claiming to have rejected Hollywood’s siren song. “I told ’em what I wanted and they couldn’t see the proposition that way, so it’s all off as far as I am concerned…I have signed no contracts and I doubt if I will. I don’t like the grease paint part anyway.”8 Ruth’s resistance would not last. His first starring role was filmed the following summer, though in Haverstraw, New York, not Hollywood. Headin’ Home was released in September 1920. It was his first, though certainly not last, credited acting role.9 Ruth was promised $50,000, but only received $15,000 for his celluloid debut, the producers of the film having gone bankrupt.10

The Yankees dispatched Miller Huggins to California to reel in the Babe. While he did not get a cut of the sale price, the Yankees did agree to Ruth’s demands for a new contract. The new deal doubled his pay for the two remaining years on the contract. While they did not raise his base salary, they did give him a $10,000 “signing bonus” for each of the two years left on the original three-year deal.11 The renegotiated contract tied Ruth with Cobb and Tris Speaker as the highest-paid players in the game in 1920. The following year Cobb would pass Ruth for the top earner crown when the Tigers gave him a $25,000 contract. However, Ruth obliterated that record salary in 1922 when he signed a $52,000 deal. For the rest of his career, Ruth would stand alone as the highest paid player in baseball. (Table 1) Ruth’s 14 years atop the salary mountain, and 13 consecutive years as the highest paid player in the game, have never been topped.12

The Yankees were aware of Ruth’s reputation for being somewhat cantankerous and demanding when it came to matters fiscal. In fact, this was reported to be one of the reasons that Frazee was willing to part with one of baseball’s rising stars.13 But the Yankees were prepared. As part of the negotiation process, the Yankees secured a promise from the Red Sox that if Ruth held out for a salary increase, the Red Sox would pay 50% of any increase, up to $5000. So in the end, Ruth got $20,000 per year in 1920 and 1921, but it only cost the Yankees $15,000 each year. After a successful debut season in New York (he led the league in runs, RBIs, walks, OBP, slugging, OPS, and home runs— smashing a heretofore unheard-of 54—while batting .376), Ruth again won a contract concession from the Yankees. This time, he got them to include a bonus clause that promised to pay him $50 per home run. Ruth did not disappoint, breaking the home-run record again, this time pounding 59, and adding $2950 to his Yankee paycheck in the process. This 29.5% addition to his base pay represented the last time the Yankees ever added a performance bonus to Ruth’s contract.14

Table 1. Highest Paid MLB Players 1920–34

(Click image to enlarge)

JUST HOW MUCH MONEY IS THAT ANYWAY

Table 2 indicates how rapidly Ruth’s income increased from the Yankees, World Series shares, and, as will be discussed in more detail, from endorsement and investment earnings, almost all of which were due to Walsh. The significance of those dollar amounts is not easy to appreciate. After all, today we are bombarded with gaudy financial details of player salaries. And the average American household takes in more money today than most of Ruth’s outsized paychecks of yesteryear. Inflation and a changing baseball labor market have made direct salary comparisons meaningless. In order to truly appreciate Ruth’s earnings accomplishments, a bit of context is necessary.

Table 2. Babe Ruth Career Earnings

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The most obvious way to put Ruth’s salary in context is to simply adjust it for inflation. When we do this by using the standard CPI deflator, his peak salary of $80,000 in 1930 and 1931 translates into a rather pedestrian (by MLB standards) $1,220,000 in 2019 dollars. This is only 27% of the average MLB salary, and $20,000 more than what the Padres paid Aaron Loup that year. Loup appeared in four games for San Diego, pitching a total of three innings and generating a WAR of 0.2. Ruth certainly did not have his best year in 1930, but he did bat .359 and led the league with 49 home runs, a .493 OBA, .732 SLG, 1.225 OPS, and 136 walks. He also drove in 153 runs, and just for good measure, picked up a complete game victory in his first mound appearance in nine years. His season was good for 10.5 WAR, 53 times higher than Loup.15

Another way to appreciate the spending power of Ruth’s income is to compare it to the average American income instead of simply adjusting for inflation. What would Ruth earn today if his salary was the same multiple of the average American income as it was during his Yankee career? Figure 1 exhibits this relationship, comparing Ruth’s career earnings to the 15 most recent years of currently available US household income data. For example, in 1920 Ruth earned 13.5 times what the average American earned. If he earned that much in 2004, he would have earned $777,379. His salary using this comparison peaks at $5.7 million in 2018, far better than the simple inflation adjusted value of $1.2 million, but still not particularly impressive. For example, it would have made him only the 16th highest paid player on the 2019 Yankees.

For another perspective, Figure 2 compares Ruth’s adjusted salary, using the same method of multiple of average income, to the actual earnings of Barry Bonds during his career. As we can see, each year Bonds earned between two and six times Ruth’s calculated modern day salary. In fact, Ruth’s calculated modern day salary more closely resembles the career salary path of Billy Hamilton than it does Bonds. So the obvious question is why does Ruth look like Hamilton? Surely that cannot be the modern day equivalent of Babe Ruth’s earning power.

The answer to this lies not in the relative abilities of players today versus yesteryear, nor in simple multiples of older salaries to account for inflation or average incomes. Rather, it is a function of how the business of baseball has changed. In Ruth’s day, there was one primary source of income for a team: ticket sales. During Ruth’s career, the Yankees regularly earned 50-60% of their total income from the sale of tickets each year. Compare that to today, where the average team gets only a third of its earnings from gate revenue. Television is the major source of income for MLB, though it does vary considerably across teams. Concession revenues are much higher, and advertising has become much more sophisticated and pays more than it ever did. In 1930, no MLB team earned stadium naming rights. Today almost every team does. Luxury boxes and parking are other significant revenue sources that did not exist in Ruth’s day.

Players today earn much more than they did in Ruth’s day however, mostly because of free agency. Ruth had two options: play for the Yankees, or find a different line of work. The ability of a player to sell his services to the highest bidder, and the far greater amount of revenue those bidders now generate, explains why Hamilton earns more than Ruth’s projected modern income.

To get a true sense of how audacious Ruth’s salaries were in modern terms, we need to think of his salary in a different way. During his tenure with the Yankees (1920-34), the team signed 238 different players to contracts. At no time was anyone affiliated with the Yankees paid more than Ruth.16 These contracts called for a total salary of $3,529,159, of which $867,275 was paid to Ruth. In other words, over the course of his career Ruth took home 24.6% of the total payroll doled out by the Yankees, while the other 237 players split the remaining 75.4%. Ruth’s annual take of the Yankee player payroll ranged between a low of 14.5% in 1920 to a high of 27.8% in 1931 (Figure 3).

In five different seasons Ruth alone was paid more than a quarter of the team’s total payroll. That kind of share of team payroll is more common today in the free agent era. For example, in 2019 Zack Greinke, who was paid $34.5 million, accounted for 30.2% of the Diamondbacks payroll, and the average team allocated 18.8% of its player payroll to its highest paid player. Viewing this from the other direction, if Ruth were paid 24.6% of the 2019 Yankee payroll, he would earn $58.5 million, which would make him the highest paid player in the history of the game.

Ruth’s pay relative to the average American household and the average MLB player was also quite impressive (Figure 4). He often earned ten times the average player, peaking at 11.2 times the average MLB salary in 1930. Putting a modern spin on that, if Stephen Strasburg, the highest paid player in 2019 at $38.3 million, had earned 11.2 times as much as the average major leaguer, he would have taken home a tidy $49.8 million. Ruth also dwarfed his fellow Americans in the income category, taking home 83 times as much as the average American household in 1932. That kind of ratio relative to average Americans is commonplace today. The average MLB player earns 70 times what the average American household took home in 2019. Steven Strasburg earned more than six hundred times the average American household income. And note here the difference between household and individual. In 2018 the average American earned slightly more than $43,000, but the average American household, which oftentimes features two full time income earners, brought in $63,179.17

THERE IS ONLY ONE BABE RUTH!

But Ruth earned far more than just his contracted salary (Table 2). In addition to the aforementioned bonuses, he earned player shares of the World Series receipts in most every season.18 Toward the end of his career he was also paid a percentage of the gate for exhibition games in which he participated. But most significantly, there was the endorsement income (Table 3), most of which was thanks to Walsh. The Yankees paid Ruth a total of $867,275 during his career, and during that same time he earned an additional $469,432 in endorsement and investment (annuity and trust fund) income. Actually, he earned more, as the only endorsement income records we have are from Walsh’s records, and he did not begin to represent Ruth until 1921. In addition, even when represented by Walsh, Ruth occasionally negotiated some deals on his own, and he had preexisting contracts for vaudeville appearances and barnstorming tours that ran as late as 1923.

Table 3. Source of Babe Ruth’s Endorsement Income

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Walsh used the Rod Tidwell rule for choosing endorsement opportunities for Ruth: “Show me the money.”19 Babe hawked everything from underwear to annuities, and put the earning power of his baseball peers to shame while doing it. He earned $3000 for a print ad for Whizit coveralls. This was what the average major leaguer earned in an entire year in 1920, and was 30% of his base salary that year. He got $1302 for a similar type ad for Benrus watches. That is how much the average American earned in 1921.

His most lucrative deal was a three-year contract Walsh negotiated with Quaker Oats that netted Ruth $62,788, not to mention all the Puffed Wheat and oatmeal he cared to eat. That amount was about what the entire Yankees pitching staff took home in 1921.

Babe also sold underwear, earning $13,433 for lending his name to Babe Ruth’s All America Athletic Underwear line. It was his longest lasting commercial relationship, covering 13 years, one year longer than the deal he had with Spalding Brothers. “There is Only One Babe Ruth,” crowed the tag line in one of his underwear ads. And apparently that was worth a lot to both Ruth and the proprietor of said undergarments. Ruth once negotiated a $1000 appearance fee for spending an hour with a pile of underwear in one of Chicago’s leading department stores.20

Ruth was also a popular addition to vaudeville programs, earning $19,890 for his brief appearances telling corny jokes and performing kitschy songs. It took the average major leaguer more than three years to take home the amount that Ruth got for a few weeks of appearances.

His biggest paychecks were cashed selling himself: $157,030 earned from his ghostwritten syndications and another $94,027 from barnstorming tours, the most famous of which was the 1927 tour he and Lou Gehrig took across America. During Ruth’s career, the Yankees signed 238 total players to big-league contracts, one of whom was Ruth. Only nine of them earned as much over their entire careers as Ruth did barnstorming.

Ruth earned $6,835 shilling his Ruth’s Home Run candy bars for a nickel apiece, but not a cent from the sale of the Baby Ruth bar. You can still get a Baby Ruth (which was not named after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter), but good luck finding a Ruth’s Home Run bar. Curtiss Candy, shamelessly capitalizing on the popularity of Ruth, was selling one billion bars each year by 1925 when Ruth and Walsh began a fruitless six-year court battle to gain a bite of the sweet proceeds.21

Walsh ended his relationship with Ruth in 1935. The confluence of Ruth’s retirement and the dissolution of Walsh’s marriage led to his severing ties with both the Babe and the Christy Walsh Syndicate. The final contract he negotiated for Ruth expired on May 1, 1938, thus ending their financial relationship. He sent Ruth an itemized accounting of their financial relationship over “17 years of congenial and mutually profitable relations.”22 Walsh did make one brief, final appearance on behalf of Ruth when he negotiated his coaching contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers three years later.

PRIVATE CITIZEN RUTH

Ruth’s career came to an inglorious end, back in Boston where it had begun. He was unceremoniously released by the Yankees on February 26, 1935, and signed that same day by the Braves. He did enjoy one last hurrah, banging out the final three home runs of his career in a game at Forbes Field on May 25. But the sizzle was gone, and when Ruth realized he had been misled, and the Braves really did not have any plans to make him a manager or front-office executive, he retired shortly thereafter. He did appear in uniform again, signing a one-year deal for $15,000 to coach first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He had been talked into this position under the pretense of being given a shot at managing. The offer was not serious, and once again, when Ruth realized he was merely a sideshow, he walked away, this time for good.

It didn’t really get much better for Ruth. He did negotiate numerous appearances, both grand (visiting children in the hospital) and garish (dressing in costume for a country club softball game). While his post-career life did not live up to his career accomplishments, he did not suffer financially, thanks to the perseverance and shrewd investments made by Walsh.

When Walsh was squirreling money away for the Babe during his fattest career earning years, Ruth protested, preferring the instant gratification that came from faster cars, more booze, and more women to share it with. But ultimately, Walsh prevailed. This allowed Ruth to live a very comfortable, if not lavish, lifestyle during his retirement (Table 4).

Table 4. Babe Ruth’s Post-Career Earnings

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Though Ruth’s annual earnings decreased during his retirement as a result of diminishing endorsement income, it still afforded him a very comfortable standard of living relative to the average American (Figure 5). Ruth’s deteriorating health slowed down his activities and his spending, so the fact that he was earning only 6% of his peak career earnings by the end still left him far from destitute. In fact, since his first full season in 1915, he never earned less than two and a half times more than the average American for the rest of his life. Not bad for a kid who grew up in a boys’ home.

Walsh worked wonders for the Babe, and he didn’t do so badly for himself either, taking a cool 25% of Ruth’s endorsement earnings as his commission. In case you are wondering, that is about five times what the modern sports agent earns—though as previously indicated, on a much higher base. Walsh’s annual earnings from Ruth alone were five to ten times the average American paycheck of the day, and Ruth was not his only source of income, though he was his most lucrative.

And the Yankees did all right as well. Figure 6 shows their earnings due solely to Ruth and compares them to alternate investments that they could have made with the $100,000 they paid for Ruth.23 Of course, as recent research has shown,24 the Yankees actually paid far less than that for Ruth, which makes the deal even sweeter … if you’re a Yankees fan.

MICHAEL HAUPERT is Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He is co-chair of the SABR Business of Baseball Committee, editor of the newsletter “Outside the Lines,” and a 2020 recipient of the Henry Chadwick Award.

Sources

Ahrens, Mark, “Christy Walsh, Baseball’s First Agent,” August 4, 2010, https://www.booksonbaseball.com/2010/08/christy-walsh-baseballs-first-agent.

American League Base Ball Club of New York Records 1913-1950, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY.

Audited Financial Reports of the Office of the Commissioner, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY.

Baseball-Reference.com.

Boston Globe, various issues.

Christy Walsh Records, private collection.

The Daily Times (Davenport), various issues.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org.

Haupert Baseball Salary Database, private collection, 2020.

Haupert, Michael, “The Sultan of Swag: Babe Ruth as a Financial Investment,” The Baseball Research Journal 44 no. 2, (Fall 2015), pp 100-07.

Haupert, Michael, “Sale of the Century: The Yankees Bought Babe Ruth for Nothing,” in Bill Nowlin, ed., The Babe, Phoenix: SABR, 2019, pp 79-82.

Internet Movie Data Base, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0751899/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.

Leavy, Jane, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, New York: Doubleday and Co., 2018.

Los Angeles Times, various issues.

Lynch Jr., Michael T., Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the FeudThat Nearly Destroyed the American League, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008.

The New York Times, various issues.

Stout, Glenn, The Selling of the Babe, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016.

Voigt, David Quentin, American Baseball: From the Commissioners to Continental Expansion, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Notes

1. For more detail on the alleged stories of the meeting between Ruth and Walsh, see Leavy.

2. At its peak, Walsh employed 34 writers, including Ford Frick and Damon Runyon. See Voigt.

3. Ahrens; See Leavy for a more detailed discussion of Walsh’s business affairs.

4. Haupert, “Sale of the Century.”

5. “Ruth Sends Back Contract to Frazee,” Boston Globe, November 4, 1919.

6. “Renounces Films and May Give Up Baseball,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1919.

7. “Babe Ruth Moves to Film Headquarters,” The Daily Times (Davenport, IA), November 4, 1919.

8. “Renounces Films and May Give Up Baseball,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1919.

9. Ruth appeared in nine more films between 1927 and 1932, and appeared as himself in an additional 20 films, shorts, and documentaries. He is also credited with three soundtrack appearances (though two came after his death), and as a writer for The Babe Ruth Story. See imdb.com for complete details.

10. Leavy, 228.

11. Giving a player a raise by adding a signing bonus to his contract was a common tool used by owners to mollify players who demanded a raise (and were talented enough to have some bargaining leverage). This gave the player the money they desired, but preserved a lower base salary for future bargaining purposes. If the team and player negotiated a percentage raise in the future, it was based on the salary, not the total pay in the contract.

12. The closest challengers have been Alex Rodriguez (12-time salary leader, six consecutive years) and Willie Mays (11-time salary leader, seven consecutive years), see Haupert Baseball Salary Database.

13. “Red Sox Sell Ruth for $100,000 Cash,” Boston Globe, January 6, 1920, 1,5.

14. Later in his career, the Yankees added an exhibition-game clause to Ruth’s contract, giving him a percentage of the gate for exhibition games in which he played for the Yankees.

15. Performance data measures from Baseball-Reference.com.

16. This includes all employees, even owners Ruppert and Huston, who did not take salaries from the team. Note that taking a salary and collecting team profits are different. AL Base Ball Club of New York Records.

17. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

18. Participants in the World Series earned substantial shares of the receipts, while teams finishing in second through fourth in each league earned progressively smaller shares. Audited Financial Reports of the Office of the Commissioner.

19. Cuba Gooding, Jr., playing the character Rod Tidwell, uses this line in a conversation with his agent, in Jerry Maguire, Tri Star Pictures, 1996.

20. Leavy, 223

21. See Leavy, p. 223-36 for a thorough account of the legal battle between Ruth and Curtiss Candy Co.

22. Leavy, 419.

23. Haupert, “The Sultan of Swag.”

24. Haupert, “Sale of the Century.”

Though war clouds were gathering, it dropped peacefully out of the sky of Japan, seven years before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and eleven years before atomic blasts destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It landed softly on the other side of the fence in right center field at a ballpark in Sendai, a city on the northeast coast of Japan, 187 miles from Tokyo. It was November 9, 1934, and Babe Ruth had just connected for the first of his 13 home runs during an eighteen-game, 12-city goodwill tour of Japan.1

The team of all-stars came by ship, the Empress of Japan, that departed Vancouver, British Columbia, on October 20 and arrived in Yokohama 10 days later.2 The All-Americans represented the best of the best. Managed by the legendary Connie Mack, the team included future Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, Lefty Gomez, and Earl Averill. Also on the tour was Moe Berg, a mediocre journeyman catcher who secretly filmed Tokyo Bay. According to some accounts, Jimmy Doolittle later used Berg’s film, among others, to plan his famous attack on Tokyo in 1942.3

After receiving a warm welcome in Yokohama, the team journeyed by train to Tokyo where hundreds of thousands lined the streets to greet the All-Americans as they rode in a caravan of open-air cars. Babe Ruth was in the lead car, perched atop the back seat and smiling broadly while he waved an American flag in one hand and a Japanese flag in the other. Parades and banquets would follow in other cities, including Osaka, Nagoya, Kokura, Kyoto, Omiya, Sendai, and Yokohama.4

For Ruth, it was the beginning of the end. Mere weeks before he and his teammates departed for Japan, he had played his final game for his beloved New York Yankees. Rotund at age 39 and uncertain about his future, he would retire from baseball as a Boston Brave only two months into the 1935 season. But in Japan he had one grand hurrah. Adored by millions of Japanese, he often posed for photos with dignitaries, ordinary citizens, and children. He wore a kimono while posing with schoolgirls and he borrowed a fan’s umbrella while playing the outfield during a downpour.5 He was truly loved by the Japanese.

During the tour in which the team went 18-0 against Japanese All-Stars, Ambassador Joseph Grew proudly stated that “Babe Ruth is a more effective Ambassador than I could ever be.”6 After returning to the United States and during a celebratory banquet, manager Connie Mack concluded that the tour was one of the greatest peace measures in the history of nations and “there will be no war between the United States and Japan.”7 Simultaneously, The New York Times reported that “The Babe’s big bulk blotted out such unimportant things as international squabbles over oil and navies.”8

The now famous tour also benefitted the Japanese. Wealthy newspaper owner Matsutaro Shoriki, who sponsored the tour and was greatly disappointed in his team’s performance, elected to keep his squad together and create Japan’s first professional baseball team, the Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club, in December 1934. It was the beginning of professional baseball in Japan. A year later Shoriki’s club completed its own goodwill tour in the US, playing 90 games, mostly against minor league, college, and amateur teams. That team consisted of 11 future Japanese Hall of Famers and would later become the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, as the team is known today.9

The outline of the ballpark as it existed in 1934, shown overlaid on a photo of the zoo. The small circle is where Babe Ruth’s first home run in Japan landed and where his statue stands today. (COURTESY OF YOICHI NAGATA AND TOKYO SABR)

But the goodwill tours of 1934 and 1935 could not stave off war. Learning that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, Ruth reportedly tossed many of his Japanese gifts out the window of his New York City apartment.10 Japanese soldiers would shout “Go to hell Babe Ruth” while engaged in battle with Americans.11 The war was particularly devastating for professional baseball in Japan. They lost 69 Japanese Baseball League players in combat, five of whom had competed against Ruth and his teammates during the 1934 tour. The US, on the other hand, lost two former major league players in combat and another to illness during the war.12

Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought an end to the war, the healing process began. Lefty O’Doul and his San Francisco Seals arrived in Japan in 1949 for a national tour, the first in 15 years. Other tours would follow and so would the exchange of players between nations. By 2020, more than 600 Americans had gone to Japan to play professionally. Fifty-eight Japanese players have been on the rosters of MLB teams. And, not to be overlooked, eight Americans have managed Japanese teams, most notably Don Blasingame, Bobby Valentine, Trey Hillman, Marty Brown, and Terry Collins.13

Although the old ballpark in Sendai where Ruth hit his first home run of the 1934 tour was dismantled and replaced with the city’s first zoo, the very spot where Ruth’s home run ball landed was permanently marked and recognized as sacred ground. In 2002, a statue of Babe Ruth was erected on the very spot in Yagiyama Zoological Park in Sendai City, formerly the Miyagi Prefecture Yagiyama Baseball Stadium. The statue was funded by donations from local citizens who had formed the “Let’s Build a Babe Ruth Statue in Former Yagiyama Field” committee.14

In the Summer of 2006, and on the eve of the first World Baseball Classic, Japanese Ambassador to the US, Ryozo Kato, spoke about the Babe’s continued popularity in Japan today: “Concerning the sport of baseball, most knowledgeable Japanese fans are familiar with Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays among others. Many of the current MLB stars are also popular in Japan. In other sports, some boxing champions are popular along with golfers such as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Tiger Woods, and sumo wrestlers, Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki (all of Hawaiian descent) can be mentioned. However, over the last century, baseball remains the most popular game in Japan and Babe Ruth is still considered the ‘King.’ That fact alone is an amazing feat.”15 (Kato later became the Commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball, serving from 2008 to 2013. However, he resigned after it was disclosed that the baseballs were secretly juiced during the 2013 season, although Kato claimed he had no knowledge of it.16)

But finding the Babe’s statue is not easy. In the summer of 2017, as I was completing a Fulbright Fellowship in Japan where I taught a course titled “Baseball Diplomacy in Japan-US Relations” at two universities, I began my quest to visit each of Nippon Professional Baseball’s stadiums. Riding the shinkansen (bullet trains) from north to south, east to west, I not only took in lots of ballgames and absorbed and observed Japanese culture in its various regional forms, I often imagined myself as a member of that 1934 tour. I deliberately stayed in several hotels where the ’34 team stayed, including the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. I walked the streets of Ginza, the shopping district of Tokyo where the caravan of the American All-Stars maneuvered its way through thousands of adoring fans, and I visited Hibiya Park where the team was formally welcomed by Japanese officials. And I also sat in two stadiums where the Babe played in 1934: Hanshin Koshein Stadium (built in 1924) and home to the Hanshin Tigers, and Meiji Jingu Stadium (built in 1926), home of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.

The trip from Tokyo to Sendai to the north can be completed in less than two hours by bullet train. My room at the Mitsui Garden Hotel was a welcome refuge from a hot and humid August night. The next morning I arose early and took a 25-minute subway ride from my hotel to the Yagiyama Zoological Park. According to its website, the zoo opened in 1965 and 144 different species of animals are housed there, including monkeys, elephants, penguins, and tigers.17 After paying a small admission fee, I entered the zoo and immediately got lost somewhere between the monkey and penguin exhibits. Backtracking to the entrance as best I could, I found a very kind guide who assisted me with my quest to find Babe Ruth’s statue. Confronted with a language barrier, I imitated a batter’s swing. The guide smiled and then laughed as she motioned for me to follow her. We moved through a winding maze of animal exhibits and finally, as we emerged from a blind curve, there was the Babe, completing his powerful swing that produced his first home run in Japan. No more than twenty feet away was his roommate, a powerful rhinoceros. How appropriate!

I handed the guide my iPhone and politely motioned for her to take my photo as I climbed up to assume a position next to the Babe. Wrapping my arm around his broad back, I thanked him for his contribution to baseball and I thanked Japan for acknowledging the important role he has played in cultivating wholesome Japanese-American relations.

That evening I saw the Tohoku Rakuten Eagles win a home game at Rakuten Seimei Park Miyagi. Two days later and further north I saw Shohei Ohtani and his Nippon Ham Fighters win in Sapporo, and two days after that I was in Osaka for the opening ceremonies of the famous Koshien high school baseball tournament.18 My journey through Japanese baseball was complete. I circled the bases with the Babe by my side.

A few months after my return to the United States I found time to reflect on my many wonderful experiences in Japan, not the least of which was my special side trip to visit Babe Ruth’s statue in Sendai’s Yagiyama Zoo. I compared my journey to Japan to the journey of the 1934 All-Stars. They came by ship; I came by plane. They came during peacetime and so had I. They came to teach and learn as baseball players, and I came to teach and learn as a Fulbright Scholar. They were Americans who played baseball in Japan; I was an American who taught a course about baseball in Japan. They traveled to 12 cities to play baseball; I traveled to 12 cities to see baseball. And they practiced the art of soft power diplomacy and so did I. We played the same game on the same field 83 years apart. We were all teammates acting as goodwill ambassadors doing our best to make the world a better place. The Babe was our captain.

STEVEN K. WISENSALE, PhD, is a long-time SABR member and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut where he taught a course, “Baseball and Society: Politics, Economics, Race and Gender.” He went to Japan as a Fulbright Scholar in 2017 where he taught a course, “Baseball Diplomacy in Japan-US Relations,” at two universities. During his stay he also made a presentation on his research at a meeting of the Tokyo SABR chapter. He can be reached via e-mail at steven.wisensale@uconn.edu.

Babe Ruth’s statue, with the author. (COURTESY OF STEVEN WISENSALE)

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Yoichi Nagata, Satomi Mitani, and the members of Tokyo SABR for their assistance in conducting his research.

Notes

1. Robert Fitts, Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage & Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 130. Also refer to the game’s line score on page 277. Ruth hit two home runs that day.

2. From 1930 to 1939 the Empress of Japan served as the luxurious flagship of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. Capable of accommodating 1,260 passengers, it made the roundtrip journey between Vancouver and Yokohama 58 times in nine years before being converted to a troop transport ship at the beginning of World War II. More information about the Empress of Japan, including photos, can be accessed at the CruiseLine-History.com site: https://www.cruiselinehistory.com/cruise-line-history-the-empress-of-japan-10-days-from-Vancouver-to-japan.

3. Fitts, 254. If Doolittle used Berg’s 22-second film at all, its overall contribution to planning the raid was probably very minor. Doolittle relied heavily on Captain Steve Jurika who lived in Tokyo between 1939 and 1941 where he identified and mapped potential bombing targets for future raids if there was a war. According to Amazon.com, there have been sixteen books written about Berg’s espionage exploits and two films have been produced: The Hollywood version, The Catcher Was a Spy, starring Paul Rudd, was released in 2018. Aviva Kempner’s documentary, The Spy Behind Home Plate, was released in 2019. (Kempner also did a documentary on Hank Greenberg.)

4. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, along with its library, offers many resources for researchers interested in studying the 1934 tour in more detail. The six-minute video, “The 1934 Japan Tour Footage” (filmed by Jimmie Foxx) and the accompanying article, provide an excellent summary of the tour. (See https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/baseball-history/1934-japan-tour-footage-uncovered) Still photos from the tour, including one of Ruth waving an American flag in one hand and a Japanese flag in the other during the welcoming parade in Tokyo, along with another picture of him using an umbrella while playing the outfield during a game in rainy Kokura in late November, can be found in Fitts’ Banzai Babe Ruth photo gallery between pages 146 and 147.

5. Many images of Ruth in Japan, including one of him wearing a kimono, can be accessed via online image search. See https://www.bing.com/im-ages/search?q=Images+of+Babe+Ruth+in+Japan&qs=n&form=QBIDMH&sp=-1&pq=images+of+babe+ruth+in+japan&c=0-28&cvid=F8169EE6DC68468CB3AB3862F7BBF328&first-&scenario=ImageBasicHover&cw=1349&ch=751.

6. Fitts, 83.

7. Fitts, 193.

8. The New York Times, November 3, 1934.

9. Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Refer to chapter 5 for more details about the 1935 goodwill tour in the United States.

10. Patrick Parr, “The Sultan of Swat Babe Ruth Visits Japan.” Japan Today, November 8, 2018, https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/babe-ruth-the-sultan-of-swat-visits-japan. The incident of Ruth destroying his Japanese gifts after hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor has been confirmed in several interviews with his daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, who witnessed the event. See Banzai Babe Ruth, page 255, where Fitts references his interview with Stevens on November 7, 2007. She died at age 102 in March 2019.

11. Jeremiah A. O’Leary, “To Hell with Babe Ruth, Yell Charging Japanese.” The New York Times, March 3, 1944. Staff Sergeant O’Leary, a Marine Corps combat correspondent filed his story from Cape Gloucester in New Guinea in March 1944. However, in May 2011, Bonnie Taylor Blake, a freelance writer and blogger challenged this story and other similar war stories. See her blog entry “To Hell with Babe Ruth,” at https://btaylorblake.com/2011/05/29/to-hell-with-babe-ruth.

12. Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice: World War II Deaths is part of Gary Bedingfield’s “Baseball in Wartime” network. https://www.baseballsgreatestsacrifice.com/world_war_ii.html; See also Robert Weintrob, “Two Who Did Not Return,” The New York Times, May 25, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/sports/baseball/remembering-the-major-leaguers-who-died-in-world-war-ii.html?.

13. Brad Lefton, “Japan Shifting Views on Managers,” The New York Times, August 24, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/sports/baseball/25managers.html.

14. Babe Ruth Central, “Babe’s 1934 Barnstorming Trip to Japan.” This site is devoted to cultivating and preserving the legacy of Babe Ruth. This story can be accessed at http://www.baberuthcentral.com/babesimpact/babe-ruths-legacy/babes-1934-barnstorming-trip-to-japan.

15. Babe Ruth Central, 2.

16. ESPN.com News Services, “Ryozo Kato Resigns as Commish.” September 19, 2013. Kato resigned just days after former major leaguer Wladimir Balentien, a gaikokujin (foreigner), hit home runs 56 and 57, breaking the Japanese season record held by legendary slugger Sadaharu Oh for 49 years. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story_/id/9692461/japanese-commissioner-ryozo-kato-resigns-juiced-ball.

17. Interested readers can visit the Zoo’s website at http://www.city.sendai.jp/zoo/index.html where a translator option will provide the information in English. Babe Ruth’s next-door neighbor is a very large rhinoceros.

18. The Koshien high school tournament is 100 years old. Each year 49 teams from 47 prefectures compete over a two-week period in August in legendary Koshien Stadium, home of the Hanshin Tigers. Each day 50,000 fans pack the stadium to watch teams compete in the single elimination tournament. A major TV network provides national coverage for those who cannot get tickets to the games. More information about a recent documentary on Koshien can be accessed at https://www.mlb.com/news/japan-s-koshien-tournament-featured-in-documentary.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” — The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)1

By long-standing consensus, a 21-year-old show girl named Violet Popovich “opened the door for [Mark] Koenig to become a Cub and baseball legend” when she shot Bill Jurges of the Chicago Cubs in July 1932. Three decades later, Bill Veeck Jr., whose father ran the Cubs franchise in that era, vividly remembered the sensational impact of Popovich’s deed: “Turmoil! Sirens! Police! Doctors! Newspapermen! Scandal!”2 One effect of Popovich’s resulting notoriety has been to furnish innumerable baseball writers with an all-but-irresistible opening act for the saga that culminated in Ruth’s called shot.

In more nuts-and-bolts fashion, the shooting invariably serves to explain Mark Koenig’s arrival in Chicago—namely, that the Cubs had to rush out and replace the wounded Jurges with another shortstop, a former Yankee whose mistreatment by the Cubs would later rouse Ruth’s (probably feigned) ire. This conventional wisdom regarding Koenig’s path to Chicago began taking shape as early as September 1932, when Murray Tynan of the New York Herald-Tribune noted that the Cubs had bought Koenig “to take care of the emergency that existed when Jurges was shot and wounded” (emphasis added).3 Since then, a legion of baseball voices, whether or not privy to Tynan’s pioneering effort, has reached near unanimity on this point (Table 1).

Table 1. “Koenig Replaced Jurges After He Was Shot”

(Click image to enlarge)

Contrary to the hypothesis of Tynan et al., however, Koenig absolutely, positively did not fill in for or replace Jurges while he recovered from his gunshot wounds. Two points bear emphasis: 1) for the entire span of Jurges’s absence in July, Koenig was gainfully employed as a shortstop in the Pacific Coast League, and 2) he did not make a start for the Cubs until six weeks after the shooting. Every inning Jurges missed while recuperating was covered by the Cubs’ incumbent starting third baseman, Woody English. You can look it up. Nonetheless, casual as well as more-attentive students of the called shot can be forgiven for believing that Koenig (who did take Jurges’s place by the second half of August) all but stepped over Jurges’s prostrate form to take up his new position at shortstop. Popovich may go unnamed, but one way or another her bullets invariably seem to be the catalyst for the called shot.

The Internet era seems to have provided renewed opportunities for mischief-making about Jurges’s and Koenig’s status at various points in summer 1932. A biography commissioned by the Society for American Baseball Research asserts that Koenig was already starting for the Cubs at “the end of July”—while the National Baseball Hall of Fame website places Koenig’s arrival in “late August.”17 Koenig’s purchase date of August 5 and arrival on August 11 render both statements inaccurate. As for Jurges, an item at Baseball-Reference.com ignores the site’s sizable databases in order to claim that the wounded Cubs shortstop missed “three weeks,” nearly a week longer than the actual 15 days.18 That’s a rounding error compared to the calculations of another site, which extends Jurges’s absence through “the end of the season”—a fivefold increase in the period involved.19

One result of the Internet era’s free-form approach to the story is to obscure the exact nature of Koenig’s acquisition—not only when but, more important, why this essential figure in the chain of events actually became a Cub. One means of investigating the problem begins with a seemingly innocuous question: If the Cubs needed Koenig urgently after Popovich shot Jurges, why did they take another month—until August 5—to acquire him?

The inclination to ignore Jurges’s and Koenig’s whereabouts during the missing month probably has more than one point of origin. Confirmation bias provides one plausible source: after all, Koenig took over after the Cubs’ original shortstop was almost killed, didn’t he? Then too, tracking the Cubs’ personnel maneuvers in July and August 1932 can prove daunting without a scorecard—and there’s the ever-present lure of adding a dash of sex and violence to one of the most memorable baseball stories ever told.

Table 2: Basic Jurges—Koenig Timeline, 1932

• July 6: Jurges shot
• July 6-23: English takes over as Cubs’ shortstop
• July 24: Jurges reinstated as starting shortstop
• August 5: Koenig acquired (Jurges continues starting)
• August 11: Koenig joins ballclub (Jurges continues starting)
• August 14-18: Koenig makes three late-inning appearances as pinch-hitter or defensive replacement (Jurges continues starting)
• August 19: Jurges sits down Koenig begins 22 consecutive starts at shortstop

Besides the date of Jurges’s shooting, few accounts of Mark Koenig’s arrival in Chicago include the dates or events listed above. (Courtesy Baseball-Reference.com)

In recent years, several efforts have substantiated the Jurges-Koenig timeline in more accurate detail. In 2013, this writer’s Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club traced the dates of Koenig’s acquisition and his progress into the Cubs’ lineup; since then, Babe Ruth’s Called Shot: The Myth and Mystery of Baseball’s Greatest Home Run (2014); “The Show Girl and the Shortstop” (Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2016); and The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Season of 1932 (2020) have likewise mapped the same basic timeline.20 These efforts concur that Koenig did not appear on the field for the Cubs until mid-August 1932—a common framework that, at a minimum, rules out the long-held consensus that Koenig arrived under emergency circumstances.

That’s progress, yet both Ruth’s Called Shot and “Show Girl” afford Popovich at least some role, however tenuous, in facilitating Koenig’s arrival in Chicago. “Show Girl” in particular stresses the far-reaching, historic importance of being Violet Popovich, a woman who left no domino standing:

When Violet [Popovich] recklessly pulled the trigger in the Hotel Carlos, her bullets not only struck Jurges but had a domino effect on the Cubs, Mark Koenig, the 1932 pennant race, the division of the World Series money, and Babe Ruth’s arguable “called shot.” (“The Show Girl and the Shortstop,” page 74; emphasis added.)21

Popovich did it with her .22 on the fifth floor of the Carlos, and from there the entire strand fell cleanly to the legendary finale starring Babe Ruth, not a miss or even a wobble on the way. As in the oft-told stories of decades past, Popovich bears ultimate responsibility for the drama that continues to fire the imagination of baseball fans everywhere. Search engine optimization, Google Books, and the ubiquitous Wikipedia should ensure a long life for this version of Popovich’s impact on baseball history.22

MAKING A DIFFERENT CASE

Or maybe not. The narrative of Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club plainly tied Koenig’s purchase on August 5 to Rogers Hornsby’s removal from the roster on August 3, and in 2020, The Called Shot confirmed that Koenig was indeed Hornsby’s direct replacement. In between those two efforts, “Show Girl” also lowered its pro-Popovich stance momentarily to concede offhandedly that there just might be something to the Hornsby-replacement case:

One could make a case that the Cubs hired Koenig to replace Rogers Hornsby…[b]ut sports-writers observed that [William] Veeck had been concerned about Jurges’s recovery. (“The Show Girl and the Shortstop,” page 71; emphasis added.)

However, no investigation ensued concerning the possibility that the Cubs “hired Koenig to replace Rogers Hornsby.” Nonetheless, if there’s any credible case that Koenig was acquired to replace Hornsby, an associated inference arises: Perhaps Popovich toppled nothing but the Jurges domino and missed the rest of the line completely. Hornsby’s woes would replace Jurges’s as the Cubs’ main incentive for obtaining Koenig.

With the disposition of so many dominoes at stake in some of baseball history’s best-known outlets, it seems only sporting to look at both cases (including variant versions) in greater depth. There’s really no lack of raw material to sift through: to begin with, Bill Veeck Sr. and more than a few sportswriters (more precisely, baseball writers, a distinction that makes a difference) addressed the point repeatedly in August 1932. Such standard research tools as statistics, box scores, and specific recorded events are also readily available. (See Table 3.)

Table 3. Mark Koenig’s Projected Role with the Cubs: Press Comments Appearing in August–September 1932

(Click image to enlarge)

The idea that Koenig stepped into Rogers Hornsby’s shoes rather than Bill Jurges’s may strike many students of the game, schooled to accept Jurges as the weak link and Koenig as the solution, as downright outlandish: “Koenig replaced Jurges, didn’t he?” Well, yes and no; in a way; something like that. Perhaps a more systematic airing of the Hornsby-replaceme case and other forgotten voices from the past c begin to peel away decades of misunderstandings a establish a better platform for future discussions.

1. The Roster Opening. The process begins by revisiting the unremarkable but necessary underpinning of the Koenig transaction: that is, on August 3 the Chicago Cubs officially released a reserve infielder named Hornsby and, two business days later, purchased a Pacific Coast League infielder named Koenig. In the narrowest, most elementary sense, then, the ball club certainly did “[hire] Koenig to replace Hornsby.”

2. Hornsby: A Two-for-One Package. Merely reciting the bare bones of the roster transaction, though, does not explore additional factors that might have led to the release of this particular reserve infielder. Bad bat? Bad glove? Bad influence in the clubhouse? All of the above, yes—but more important, the evening before releasing reserve infielder Hornsby, Bill Veeck Sr. convened a press conference at Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Hotel to announce a non-roster transaction: he had just fired infielder Hornsby’s inseparable twin, manager Rogers Hornsby.23 The managerial firing left infielder Hornsby technically still a Cub until the league offices opened the next morning, Tuesday, August 3, the official date on which infielder Hornsby is recorded as following manager Hornsby out the door. Hornsby’s vacated roster spot lay open until Thursday, August 5, when the Cubs acquired a replacement infielder, Koenig (although he did not join the club in person until the next week).

Veeck had fired an executive for cause: that was the main thing, on its face nothing to do with Jurges’s performance or anything Popovich had done, and that action also automatically involved cutting a reserve infielder. (Admittedly, the opportunity to upgrade the infield in the bargain must have been the cherry atop Veeck’s sundae.) Whether or not Veeck was simultaneously concerned about Jurges’s continued viability as a starter, the firing of Hornsby was what set things off—pushed over the next domino, if you will. The demonstrable elements of the firing and its context merit a thorough, good-faith evaluation before plunging into more-nebulous considerations. In short, it is no stretch to suggest that Veeck’s overriding concern in early August was ridding the club of manager Hornsby and that Koenig’s acquisition was simply a byproduct of the firing. If that case can be assembled coherently, the consequences of Hornsby’s behavior, not Violet Popovich’s, could be considered the driver of events toward the called shot.

3. Filling Hornsby’s Cleats. Reviewing the construction of the Cubs roster at the time of the firing provides one means of evaluating what Veeck’s plans for Koenig might have been. Koenig, at least technically, simply filled the void that had been created by terminating the player portion of a player-manager arrangement: so far, so good, but did the Cubs president have any expanded role in mind for the new man beyond merely inheriting Hornsby’s limited playing duties—such as, say, taking over shortstopping duties for a recently injured player?

A fair question—but at the time, Veeck explained that Koenig had been acquired for “utility purposes” and as a “utility infielder,” both terms closely matching the common understanding of Hornsby’s previous role on the squad.24 In the following weeks, describing Koenig’s role in Veeck’s terms (not to mention a dearth of references to any faltering or inadequacy on Jurges’s part) was echoed in a score of comments from more than a dozen contemporary writers, several of them assigned to cover the Cubs daily. (It was also noted that Koenig received Hornsby’s old jersey number.) Intimations that the former Yankee might have been brought in with another role in mind began to appear only weeks later, after Koenig had established himself as the new star of the Cubs’ pennant drive.

4. The Shortage of Shortstops. Why did Veeck settle on shortstop Koenig in particular? No doubt, Koenig’s remarkable comeback in the Pacific Coast League had caught his eye, and it’s been suggested that Jurges’s health was still in question. But were there any demonstrable reasons beyond concern about Jurges to focus on acquiring another shortstop? Examining the available records can shed additional light here as well.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Woody English had manned shortstop for more than two weeks with no realistic backup should he sprain a finger. It was by no means the first time in 1932 that the Cubs found themselves in such a predicament: both Jurges and English had already spent extended stretches of the season soloing at short without a net when one or the other was injured. Aggravating the situation, English was the team’s regular starting third baseman: each time he had to slide over to short, the Cubs were forced to call upon a couple of less than satisfactory reserves (one named Hornsby) at third. In sum, most fantasy-baseball managers would appraise the left side of the 1932 Cubs infield as in urgent need of an upgrade. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that this long-festering problem was Veeck’s primary concern as he mulled over a potential replacement for infielder Hornsby, all the more so if evidence of Jurges’s unsatisfactory performance should prove less than convincing.

5. Jurges’s Condition. Was Jurges’s performance during his comeback unsatisfactory? The same record book that establishes the precise dates of his absence also demonstrates that in the month after Jurges returned to action July 22, he outwardly displayed the stamina of a healthy, fully recovered ballplayer: starting 26 consecutive games, departing only occasionally for late-inning pinch hitters, and playing anywhere between 14 and 19 innings on eight different days (six double headers plus two extra-inning games). None of that seems to raise the kind of red flags that ordinarily trigger a search for a healthier replacement. Nor does scrutinizing such benchmarks as batting average and various fielding metrics reveal measurable declines in Jurges’s performance during his comeback. Jurges maintained his starting role without a pause through a historic, wrenching change of managers, soon followed by the acquisition and arrival of the better-known and much more experienced Koenig.

6. The unexplored country. The Cubs’ pace in acquiring and using Koenig is another factor in evaluating the narrative that Jurges’s incapacity or diminished performance provoked Koenig’s acquisition. The weeks that elapsed between the shooting and Koenig’s purchase were followed by a further two unhurried weeks of arrival and deployment. Upon joining the Cubs on August 11, Koenig was immediately consigned to the bench; not until August 19—six weeks after the shooting, nearly a month after Jurges returned to the lineup, and more than a week after Koenig’s arrival—did the signal suddenly switch to “go” for the ex-Yankee. In an abrupt reversal that began on that date, the Cubs quickly made Koenig their exclusive starting shortstop and just as swiftly demoted Jurges to the role of reserve infielder previously occupied by Hornsby and Koenig himself.

The reasons the Cubs chose one particular day in mid-August for their about-face regarding Koenig are among the most intriguing and problematic factors in the Hornsby-replacement case, yet that day has been decidedly underreported in nearly all quarters, even though you can look that up, too. To believe the reports of the Chicago dailies—two of them appearing the next morning—Koenig’s first start on August 19 amounted to an unanticipated happenstance, not the fulfillment of a front-office plan.25

The idea that Mark Koenig owed his opportunity to Violet Popovich began to gain traction in the press only after Koenig had established himself as the Cubs’ regular shortstop. The sources for such reassessments, however, tend to be unclear, and details that can be confirmed are scarce or fuzzy—even down to what the exact problem with Jurges or shortstop was supposed to have been. Beginning with that shaky foundation, the accounts often contradicted one another, forgot to remember what their own papers had reported about the Koenig transaction, and avoided addressing the 14-day gap between Koenig’s purchase and his first start.

Those are sizable, though not insurmountable, hurdles in the way of the idea that the Cubs needed Koenig because Violet Popovich hurt Bill Jurges. To be sure, the ex post facto accounts, if shy on verifiable details, originated with veteran, well-situated writers: the two most congruent versions evidently originated with the sports desk of none other than the Chicago Tribune.26 That itself is a clue worthy of its own full airing as the main portal to link Violet Popovich and Mark Koenig.

DOES IT MATTER?

For reasons large and small, scrutinizing Popovich’s relevance to the called shot impacts more than quibbles and gotchas over fine points of particular comments, or guesswork about the Cubs’ personnel decisions.

The Credibly Shrinking Violet. To begin with, if credible evidence lessening or removing Popovich’s effect on the Koenig domino gains a foothold in the literature, her role in the big story of 1932 shrinks to that of a mere bystander whose misadventures affected the field of play only briefly; she becomes a meddlesome if dangerous hanger-on whose legacy ultimately differs little from that of another well-known gun-toting Chicago woman, Ruth Ann Steinhagen.27

Who Pushed Over the First Domino, and When? Subtracting Popovich from the equation would also shorten the line of dominoes, which would not begin toppling toward the called shot until a different and later point. A brand-new, unwitting author of the Cubs’ eventual debacle would take Popovich’s place at the head of the downsized line: Rogers Hornsby, the man who provoked Bill Veeck into taking drastic action.

What Was the Plan? Mischaracterizing or exaggerating Popovich’s continued responsibility for Jurges’s condition also tends to equate Koenig’s acquisition with the modern era’s late-summer roster moves designed to put contenders over the top. But if all the 1932 Cubs originally intended was to shore up their bench— and as suggested earlier, credible evidence exists to support that case—Koenig’s acquisition originally amounted to no more than adding a journeyman.

Whether or not the eventual World Series controversy had anything to do with Popovich, it’s still undeniably true that Koenig starred at shortstop, the Cubs halved his Series share, the feud commenced, and Ruth eventually turned Wrigley Field into his personal playground. Students of the called shot remain hopelessly divided on the question of Ruth’s gesture to center field on October 1, yet on either side of the great divide it remains a truism that the show opened on July 6, with Popovich setting the cascade of dominoes on its way. Generations of insistent repetition in that regard have grafted the show girl’s sad tale into the permanent narrative.

Should it develop that there’s no Popovich to kick around anymore, the lodestar that the young woman “opened the door for Koenig to become a Cub and baseball legend” will no longer provide a convenient, safe shortcut through the dog days of the 1932 pennant race and the fabled postseason that followed. Before diving deeper into a swirl of contrarian evidence, counterevidence, and rebuttals, a couple of preliminary spoilers may be in order: Mark Koenig’s famous starring role in the pennant race did not unfold in the manner repeated by generations of writers and fans, and as a result, the importance of being Violet Popovich just may have been oversold.

ROBERTS EHRGOTT is the author of Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs during the Jazz Age (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). The Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency served as the representative for the book, which placed as first runner-up in voting for the 2014 Casey Award in baseball literature. Ehrgott’s career in baseball history began in the 1980s, when he reintroduced Indianapolis residents to a virtually forgotten native son, Hall of Famer Chuck Klein; as a result, the city dedicated a municipal sports complex in Klein’s name. Away from squinting at microfilm and online baseball archives, Ehrgott has edited publications as diverse as The Saturday Evening Post and the academic journal Educational Horizons, founded in 1910 to serve women in education.

Notes

1. Second epigraph (“When the legend becomes fact…”): Carleton Young, playing a newspaper editor in the motion picture The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), uttered these words near the end of the film. Director: John Ford. Screenplay: James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck.

2. Bill Veeck, Jr., with Ed Linn, The Hustler’s Handbook (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 164.

3. Murray Tynan, “Koenig Comes Back to Dazzle Those Who Counted Him Done,” New York Herald-Tribune, September 4, 1932.

4. Bert Randolph Sugar, Baseball’s 50 Greatest Games (New York: Exeter Books, 1986), 70.

5. Mike Shatzkin, The Ballplayers: Baseball’s Ultimate Biographical Reference (New York: Arbor House Publishing, 1990), 581.

6. Tom Seaver and Martin Appel, Great Moments in Baseball (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), 102.

7. Peter Golenbock, Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 232.

8. Lloyd Johnson and Brenda Ward, Who’s Who in Baseball History (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1994), 226.

9. Leo Trachtenberg, The Wonder Team: The True Story of the Incomparable 1927New York Yankees (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), 17.

10. David S. Neft and Richard M. Cohen, The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball, 16th edition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 172. This wording from the long-running annual series can be found on Google Books; it also appears in this writer’s well-thumbed hard-copy version of the 16th edition (1996). However, the 1981 edition, also present on Google Books as of February 23, 2021, says only: “A sore spot was eased late in the year when ex-Yankee Mark Koenig was brought [sic] to play shortstop,” without the additional “after Billy Jurges had been shot . . .” phrasing. Word searches in the 1981 edition for “Jurges” produced only a table with his batting statistics. Evidently, sometime between 1981 and 1996, one of the authors (Neft died in 1991) must have come across some plausible secondary information and added it to the annual’s ongoing 1932 season recap.

11. Frank Crosetti, quoted in Richard Lally, Bombers: An Oral History of the New York Yankees (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 4. Crosetti’s statement is interesting on several accounts. Although Crosetti was a starter for the 1932 Yankees throughout the season and the World Series, what did he know, and when did he know it? A couple of assumptions: a) everyone in professional baseball had heard about Jurges’s shooting on July 6, but b) Koenig’s acquisition on August 5 necessarily received much less attention. However, c) surely someone on the Yankees had been following their former teammate’s remarkable comeback in the PC.L. and his re-entry into the major leagues. The Yankees, then, d) must have known at the start of the Series that the Cubs had not picked up Koenig to replace the injured Jurges. Perhaps the overwhelming nature of the developing Cubs-Yankees feud and its famous consequences more or less blurred this less-critical distinction from their consciousness. Alternatively, the Yankees possessed closely guarded inside information about the Koenig transaction—or more likely, with the passage of decades and the inexorable pull of “Koenig at shortstop, replacing the injured Jurges” (perhaps aided by some less-than-thorough baseball history methodology in the pre-Seymour era), Crosetti came to believe a point that might have struck him as absurd in August 1932.

12. Ron Santo and Phil Pepe, Few and Chosen: Defining Cubs Greatness Across the Eras (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2005), 46.

13. Leigh Montville, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 309.

14. Harvey Frommer, Five O’Clock Lightning: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and the Greatest Baseball Team in History, the 1927 New York Yankees (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 227.

15. George F. Will, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (New York: Crown Archetype, 2014), 57.

16. Edmund F. Wehrle, Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball’s Campaign Against Its Biggest Star (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018), 199.

17. “End of July”: Paul Geisler Jr., “Billy Jurges,” accessed February 23, 2021, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/aada6293. “Late August”: Scott Pitoniak, “He Called It,” accessed February 23, 2021, https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/baseball-history/ruth-called-it.

18. Anonymous, “Billy Jurges,” accessed February 23, 2021, https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Billy_Jurges.

19. Anonymous, “1932: The So-Called Shot,” accessed February 23, 2021, http://www.thisgreatgame.com/1932-baseball-history.html.

20. Roberts Ehrgott, Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs during the Jazz Age (University of Nebraska Press, 2013); Ed Sherman, Babe Ruth’s Called Shot: The Myth and Mystery of Baseball’s Greatest Home Run (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014); Jack Bales, “The Show Girl and the Shortstop” (Baseball Research Journal 45, no. 2, Winter 2016); Thomas Wolf, The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Season of 1932 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

21. Although the author’s name appears on page 74 as providing assistance with the article, the quoted passages from pages 71 and 74 of “Show Girl” do not represent any input he provided in the course of several prepublication email exchanges.

22. On January 30, 2019, such conclusions dominated the first pages of Google, DuckDuckGo, and StartPage after the phrase “Jurges Popovich” was entered into each search engine.

23. See Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club, 303-304. According to various newspaper accounts of the time, Hornsby had two contracts with the Cubs—one as a manager and one as a player.

24. “Utility purposes”: Associated Press report in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 1932. “Utility infielder”: Veeck as quoted by Dan Daniel in “Dan’s Series Dope,” New York World-Telegram, September 24, 1932.

25. For instance, an unsigned item in the August 20 Chicago Tribune reported that Jurges had taken the bench due to “a misery in his stomach [emphasis added], but there have been complications involving his batting average.” Hence, the city’s major daily reported that Jurges was out sick, but the back half of the item also illustrates the problems involved in evaluating other possibilities involving Jurges’s benching: his batting average had actually risen a tick since he was shot six weeks earlier, and he was also, for him, on something of a batting tear—7 hits in his last 21 plate appearances, a walk-off RBI single a few days earlier, and the next day, a 19-inning, 2-for-7 stint along with one of the Cubs’ three RBI. The author hopes to publish a longer monograph that attempts to demonstrate just how elusive and murky the Popovich-Jurges-Koenig scenario continues to be, even after removing the most-glaring misconceptions—an area that, barring the discovery of some rock-solid primary source, is probably no more likely to reach final resolution than the called shot itself.

26. Arch Ward, “Talking It Over,” Chicago Tribune, August 31, 1932, 17; “Series May Cast Old Pals in Role of Foes” (no byline), The Sporting News, September 15, 1932, 3. The author’s understanding is that Tribune reporters contributed the Cubs (and White Sox) reports in The Sporting News. Because Edward Burns covered the Cubs for the Tribune during the second half of the 1932 season, he would thus be the presumed writer of “Series May Cast Old Pals.” As stressed in the current article, there is substantial reason to question whether either the Tribune or The Sporting News piece can be regarded as definitive or—particularly in Ward’s case—accurate.

27. In June 1949, Steinhagen, like the Popovich of 1932 a young, single Chicagoan, shot Eddie Waitkus of the Philadelphia Phillies in a Chicago hotel room. Steinhagen had become infatuated with her future victim during his previous tour of duty with the Cubs. Waitkus’s injuries caused him to miss the last 3 1/2 months of the season. (One measure of the relative notoriety of these would-be femmes fatale: an Internet search for “Violet Popovich” on February 12, 2019, resulted in 271,000 Google hits, compared to 65,000 for “Ruth Ann Steinhagen.” Evidently, the grip of the Bambino, his called shot, and possible related events has maintained a greater hold on the public imagination than a well-regarded novel that was adapted as a successful and memorable movie.)

Nolan Ryan celebrates his 7th no-hitter on May 1, 1991. (MLB.COM)

A pitcher usually needs good command and quality stuff to toss a no-hitter.1 Stellar fielding and a dollop of good luck doesn’t hurt, either. A bad-hop single or a flare off the end of the bat that falls for a hit is all it takes to break one up. Between 1901 and 2020, a no-hitter was thrown in the American, National, or Federal League 263 times.2 It has been done just once in every 769 regular-season games.3

Although joining this exclusive club is a significant accomplishment, some no-hitters are more impressive than others. The two no-hitters thrown under postseason pressure, Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and Roy Halladay’s no-no in the 2010 NLDS, are truly remarkable. At the other end of the scale are the no-hitters thrown in the dying days of the season against a weak-hitting, second-division club. In extreme cases, a pitcher may have the dubious honor of tossing a no-hitter in a losing cause, which is exactly what happened to Baltimore’s Steve Barber when he walked 10 batters in his combined no-hitter with Stu Miller in 1967.

Setting aside the two postseason no-hitters, an interesting question comes to mind: Who threw the greatest regular-season no-hitter since 1901?4 Some might suggest Max Scherzer’s 17-strikeout, zero-walk performance against the New York Mets on October 3, 2015, was the best of them all. I’d argue it may be the most dominant no-hitter of all time, but it’s not the greatest. It’s probably not even the most commendable no-hitter that Scherzer threw in 2015. Less than four months before his no-no at Citi Field, he no-hit a much stronger Pittsburgh lineup, striking out 10 without walking a single batter.

Rather than focusing on who threw the most dominant no-hitter, this paper will identify a short list of the greatest no-hitters thrown since 1901 based on their difficulty. An objective, quantitative method will be used. The results are not intended to be a definitive list, because different methodologies may lead to different results.

This article will also highlight the particularly noteworthy no-hitters identified and list some of the more interesting bits of trivia uncovered during the data analysis.

METHODOLOGY

The key factor when assessing the difficulty of each no-hitter is the batting average of the hitters in the opposing lineup. Statistics that measure speed, on-base ability, and power are important in generating runs, yet they are less relevant when it comes to breaking up a no-hitter.

The end-of-season batting average will be used for each player instead of the batting average at the time of the no-hitter. This will provide a better measurement of a hitter’s ability, since batting averages in early-season no-hitters can be misleading. For example, all Chicago White Sox batters had a .000 batting average immediately after Bob Feller’s Opening Day gem in 1940.

Neutralized batting averages (BAn) will be used instead of regular batting averages to eliminate the impact of a player’s home ballpark. This will allow, for instance, the batting averages of the 1996 Colorado Rockies to be compared fairly to those of the 1905 Chicago White Sox.5

A weighted neutralized batting average (BAwn) will be calculated for each no-hit lineup. This figure will be weighted based on the number of official at-bats in the game by each batter. For example, the BAn of a pinch-hitter who had one at-bat in the game will have one-third of the impact on BAwn as the BAn of a player who had three at-bats. One of the benefits of weighting by at-bats instead of plate appearances is that a pitcher will not get credit for walking a dangerous hitter, which may be done to help preserve the no-hitter.

A composite batting average (BAc) of the no-hit lineup will be calculated by adjusting the weighted neutralized batting average by the one-year park factor for hits (divided by 100) of the ballpark in which the no-hitter occurred. This composite batting average will approximate the combined season batting average of the opposing lineup had they played all their regular-season games in that ballpark, with each player having the same proportion of at-bats during the season as in the no-hitter.

The park factor for hits is not to be confused with the much more common park factor for runs, which is less relevant to no-hitters. The one-year park factor is used instead of the three-year version, since many ballparks, such as Braves Field in Boston, have undergone frequent modifications.6

DATA

A list of no-hitters was downloaded from Retrosheet. All 263 no-hitters thrown between 1901 and 2020 in the National, American, and Federal Leagues were included in the analysis.

Batting data for each of the 263 no-hitters were downloaded from the Regular Season Box Score Event Files, Regular Season Event Files, and Post-Season Event Files on the Retrosheet web site. The neutralized season batting averages for the players in the no-hit lineups were obtained from the Baseball-Reference.com web site, as were the yearly league-wide batting averages. The one-year park factors for hits were gleaned from the Ballparks Database on the Seamheads.com web site.7 The Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference.com player and team identifiers were cross-referenced using the Teams and People tables in the Lahman Baseball Database, which is available at SeanLahman.com.

No-hitters thrown in the Negro Leagues and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League were not included because the required (structured) data are not currently available.

All data were loaded into an Oracle 18c database. SQL queries were used to generate the results.

DISCUSSION

Historical Trends

As the chart in Figure 1 shows, there is a strong negative correlation between the major-league batting average and the frequency of no-hitters in a decade.8 It’s no surprise the 2010s saw the highest frequency of no-hitters since the 1960s given that the batting average in the big leagues plummeted from .269 in 2006 to just .252 in 2019. If batting averages continue to decline, no-hitters may soon be as frequent as they were in the Deadball Era and the 1960s.

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Summary Data by No-Hitter Type

Of the 263 no-hitters thrown between 1901 and 2020, there were 238 nine-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s), four 10-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s), and 21 (nine-inning) perfect games.9 Because of their varying degrees of difficulty, this article will treat each category of no-hitter separately. Refer to Table 1 for summary statistics on each type of no-hitter.

As one would expect, most no-hitters are thrown in pitchers’ parks. That is, those with a one-year park factor for hits below 100. Only 25.5 percent of no-hitters (67 of 263) have been thrown in hitters’ parks.10

The data also show that the weighted neutralized batting average of the opposing lineup in perfect games is on average 2.8 points lower than in nine-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s). Likewise, the composite batting average is 3.5 points lower.

The summary data for ten-inning no-hitters suffer from a small sample size and are skewed by one particularly difficult 10-inning no-hitter, which will be highlighted later in the paper.

Top 20 Nine-Inning No-Hitters with Baserunner(s)

The Top 20 nine-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s) ranked by composite batting average can be found in Table 2. At the top of the list is the unlikely no-hitter thrown by Hideo Nomo at Coors Field on September 17, 1996.

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This notoriously extreme hitters’ park hosted 2,047 regular-season games between 1995 and 2020. Nomo’s no-hitter was the only one thrown at “Coors Canaveral” during that time. Amazingly, he turned the trick against the Rockies in 1996, the year in which the Denver ballpark was at its most severe for hits.11 Its one-year park factor for hits was a stunning 129 that season. Nomo’s extraordinary accomplishment was as much a conquest of Coors Field as it was the Rockies, since the Colorado club hit .343 at home and a paltry .228 on the road in 1996.

The lineup Nomo faced included five hitters who finished in the National League Top 20 in batting average: Ellis Burks, Eric Young Sr., Dante Bichette, Vinny Castilla, and Andrés Galarraga. Future Hall of Famer Larry Walker, a key member of the Blake Street Bombers, was out of action that evening because of lingering pain from a broken collarbone suffered three months earlier.12

Nomo used his fastball and a devastating split-fingered pitch to shut down the Rockies, who hit just three balls sharply all game.13 Not a single spectacular play was required in the field.14 Because of the wet conditions, Nomo abandoned his deceptive, whirling delivery in the later innings to stabilize his footing.15 The Rockies still struggled against him. Nomo ended the night by striking out Burks, a .344 hitter, on a filthy split-fingered fastball. He struck out eight and walked four Colorado batters.

One notable aspect of the Top 20 nine-inning no-hitters is that six of them occurred in the Deadball Era. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, since the first two decades of the twentieth century still featured a fair number of teams with solid batting averages. For example, Ernie Koob of the St. Louis Browns no-hit the 1917 White Sox, a 100-win team that went on to defeat the New York Giants in the World Series. Koob faced a Chicago lineup containing four players with a neutralized batting average greater than .300: Happy Felsch (.325), Shoeless Joe Jackson (.318), Eddie Collins (.306), and Buck Weaver (.301). In a bizarre twist, the game ended with Koob having been credited with a one-hitter. Following the game, the official scorer changed a first-inning hit by Buck Weaver to an error. The next day’s headline in the Chicago Tribune erroneously read “Koob Tames Sox in One Hit Game, 1-0.”16

The entry in Table 2 for the combined no-hitter by Babe Ruth and Ernie Shore does not contain a misprint; Ruth did in fact pitch zero innings in that 1917 game. After he walked the Nationals leadoff hitter, Ray Morgan, a heated argument ensued over two alleged missed strike calls by home plate umpire Brick Owens. Ruth punched Owens during the altercation and was ejected from the game, forcing Ernie Shore to come on in relief. After Morgan was caught stealing, Shore retired the next 26 batters in order.17

The first of Nolan Ryan’s record seven no-hitters ranks fifth. The 26-year-old fireballer completely shut down Kansas City at Royals Stadium on May 15, 1973, which was no easy feat. The Royals finished second in runs scored in the American League that year, fueled by a .277 team batting average in their new, spacious ballpark.

In the introduction, Max Scherzer’s two no-hitters in 2015 were used as an example of a common pitfall in evaluating no-nos. Scherzer’s 17-strikeout performance at Citi Field ranks 196th out of the 238 nine-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s) using the methodology outlined in this article. The Mets lineup had a composite batting average of only .232, roughly 16 points less than an average no-hitter of that type. However, his no-hitter against the Pirates at Nationals Park less than four months earlier ranked 37th all-time with a solid .269 composite batting average.

Ten-Inning No-Hitters

A list of the four 10-inning no-hitters tossed between 1901 and 2020 can be found in Table 3. George “Hooks” Wiltse of the New York Giants threw the most difficult of the four by an exceedingly wide margin. His 1908 masterpiece came against a Phillies lineup that had a robust composite batting average of .293. Even more impressively, Wiltse would have thrown a 10-inning perfect game were it not for circumstances reminiscent of Armando Galarraga’s lost perfect game more than a century later.18

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Wiltse had overtaken a fading “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity as the Giants’ number two starter that season, forming a dominant lefty-righty combination with Christy Mathewson. Together, the duo combined to pitch 720 2/3 innings and record the win in 60 of the Giants’ 98 victories.19

The heart of the Philadelphia lineup facing Wiltse consisted of John Titus, Sherry Magee, and Kitty Bransfield, all of whom finished in the Top 10 in the NL batting race in 1908. Bransfield was one of just five .300 hitters in the entire National League that season.

Wiltse twirled his gem on Independence Day morning at the Polo Grounds, the wooden ballpark that opened in 1890 for the New York team that played in the Players’ League.20 With its distinctive horseshoe shape, the Polo Grounds was the most extreme hitters’ park (for hits) in the National League in 1908.21 In theory, the Phillies hitters were far more dangerous there than they were in their home park, the Baker Bowl, which played as a pitchers’ park in 1908.22 However, the ballpark in Coogan’s Hollow proved to be of no help to the Phillies that game.23

Wiltse breezed through the Philadelphia lineup, retiring the first 26 men in order. The fielders behind him weren’t required to make any outstanding plays, although right fielder “Turkey” Mike Donlin made a nice running catch in the fourth inning.24 Wiltse, one of the best-fielding pitchers of his era, took care of two other difficult chances himself.25

With two outs in the top of the ninth inning and the game still scoreless, Wiltse faced his mound opponent, George McQuillan. On a 1-and-2 count, the Giants hurler threw a curveball that started outside and broke sharply to “cut the heart out of the plate.”26 Home plate umpire Cy Rigler, normally an excellent judge of balls and strikes, called it a ball.27 Even the Philadelphia Inquirer admitted Wiltse had “fanned” McQuillan.28 The plate appearance continued. The very next pitch from Wiltse hit McQuillan in the shoulder, and the perfect game was no more. The next batter, Eddie Grant, grounded out to end the inning.

After the Giants failed to score in the bottom of the ninth, Wiltse returned to the mound and retired Otto Knabe, Titus, and Magee in order. New York finally scored a run in the bottom of the 10th inning, giving Wiltse the first extra-inning no-hitter in the National or American League.29 The 28-year-old moundsman retired 30 of 31 batters, with the only runner reaching base on a hit-by-pitch immediately following a missed strikeout call by Rigler. The respected umpire later acknowledged he made the wrong call. “Every time I saw Charlie Rigler after that he gave me a cigar,” Wiltse recalled in 1953. “He admits (the disputed ball) was one of the pitches he missed.”30

Top 10 Perfect Games

A list of the Top 10 perfect games by composite batting average can be found in Table 4. Charlie Robertson’s immaculate outing against the 1922 Detroit Tigers leads the way with a .291 composite batting average, almost 19 percentage points better than the second-ranked perfect game, which was thrown by Catfish Hunter in 1968.

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One day after being shut out by future Hall of Famer Red Faber and his grandfathered spitball, the mighty Tigers expected to maul Robertson, an unheralded 26-year-old righthander making his fifth big league appearance. The Detroit lineup featured three sluggers who finished in the Top 10 in the American League batting race: Ty Cobb (.401), Harry Heilmann (.356), and Bobby Veach (.327).

Navin Field had a neutral park factor of 100 in 1922, although it was potentially more hitter-friendly during Robertson’s outing considering there was a large overflow crowd standing in the outfield. As it turned out, the fans in the outfield didn’t have a significant impact on the game. When Veach led off the second inning by sharply hitting a ball towards the roped-off area in left field, the Detroit crowd graciously gave way to allow Johnny Mostil to make an easy grab.31 The only standout defensive play of the game came two batters later when Harry Hooper made a “splendid running catch” on a ball hit by Bob Jones.32

The frustrated Tigers began to lose their cool once Robertson’s perfect game lasted into the middle innings. During his fifth-inning at-bat, Heilmann complained to home plate umpire Frank Nallin that the White Sox hurler was discoloring the ball. He continued to carp about it for the remainder of the game, as did Cobb, the Detroit player-manager.33 Cobb had first baseman Earl Sheely’s glove checked for evidence in the eighth inning, and in the ninth he had Robertson’s clothing inspected.34 Nothing untoward was uncovered. The unfazed Robertson retired the side in the final frame, including two left-handed-hitting pinch-hitters, to seal the perfect game.

“Had any student of baseball even dared to suggest that any pitcher could qualify to keep the Tigers away from first base and retire 27 men in order he would have been carted away to some state institution for the mentally unbalanced,” opined the Detroit Free Press.35 The writer’s hyperbole could be forgiven, because almost a century later those Tigers still possessed the highest weighted neutralized batting average (.291) of any lineup victimized by a perfect game—or any no-hitter for that matter.36

Hunter’s perfect game in 1968 is also noteworthy, considering the weighted neutralized batting average of the Twins lineup he faced was almost 40 points higher than the league-wide batting average (.230) in the “Year of the Pitcher.” Not only is it the largest such differential for any of the 21 perfect games, but it’s also the largest in all 263 no-hitters.

Bottom 10 No-Hitters

Although throwing a no-hitter is never easy, let’s turn our attention to those that were the least difficult to achieve according to the methodology outlined in this paper. A list of the 10 no-hitters with the lowest composite batting average can be found in Table 5. Two no-hitters stand apart from the others: Sandy Koufax’s perfect game against the Cubs in 1965 and Jimmy “Nixey” Callahan’s no-hitter against the 1902 Tigers.

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The September 9, 1965, game between the Dodgers and Cubs was one of the most memorable regular-season games in baseball history. Koufax struck out 14 Chicago batters en route to becoming the first pitcher to record four no-hitters in the American, National, or Federal League.37 His mound opponent, Bob Hendley, limited the Dodgers to just one unearned run on one hit and one walk. As of the end of the 2020 season, this thrilling contest still held the big-league record for the fewest combined hits (1) and baserunners (2).

The Cubs lineup, sporting a composite batting average of .166, was incredibly weak. Five of their starters were rookies, including 19-year-old Don Young and 22-year-old Byron Browne, who were both playing in their first major league game.38 Browne had spent most of the season playing single-A ball, and to make his debut even more challenging, he had only arrived in Los Angeles earlier that afternoon.39

The Chicago batting order had three easy outs, as Young and Browne combined to go 2-for-41 with the Cubs in 1965, and Hendley came into the game with a career .093 batting average. Only three batters in the starting lineup finished the season with a batting average over .239. To Koufax’s credit, he was dominant enough that day to throw a perfect game against any team. The heart of the Chicago lineup—Billy Williams, Ron Santo, and Ernie Banks—combined to go 0-for-9 with six strikeouts.

Callahan threw his no-hitter for the White Sox at South Side Park III, the most extreme pitchers’ park in American League history.40 Although the ballpark hosted only 721 White Sox games between 1901 and 1910, four of those games featured a no-hitter.41

Callahan easily handled a feeble Detroit lineup that had only three hitters with a neutralized batting average above .227. Tigers manager Frank Dwyer even let his weak-hitting starting pitcher, Wish Egan, bat for himself with the team trailing by three runs in the eighth inning, a move that was not uncommon in the early twentieth century.42 Egan struck out to end the inning.

Miscellaneous Observations on No-Hit Lineups

During the data analysis for this research paper, several interesting observations were made while inspecting the batting data of no-hit lineups.

Even casual baseball fans know that Nolan Ryan holds the record for tossing the most no-hitters (seven). But which batter has been the victim of the most no-hitters? That distinction is shared by three individuals, two of whom were teammates on the Philadelphia Phillies. Between 1960 and 1969, Johnny Callison and Tony Taylor played together in the same six no-hit lineups.43 Callison, a fine-hitting outfielder, went 0-for-18 with two walks and four strikeouts in the six no-hitters, while Taylor went 0-for-16 with three walks and five strikeouts. Their record was tied in 1977 when Bert Campaneris was no-hit for the sixth time.44 Campy went 0-for-19 with three walks and four strikeouts in the six no-hitters.

As of January 2021, the Internet was teeming with web pages that listed the record for the most walks in a no-hitter as 10. Yes, Jim Maloney did walk 10 batters in his 10-inning no-no against the Cubs in 1965, as did Steve Barber in his nine-inning combined no-hitter with Stu Miller in 1967. However, the record for walks in a no-hitter is 11, set in 1976 by Chicago’s Blue Moon Odom and Francisco Barrios in their combined no-hitter against the Oakland Athletics. Odom walked eight batters in the first five innings. When he issued his ninth free pass to open the bottom of the sixth, White Sox manager Paul Richards summoned Barrios from the bullpen. He walked two more over the final four innings. Odom earned the win and Barrios picked up the save in a 2-1 White Sox victory. Although the no-hitter may have been messy, the Oakland lineup had a respectable composite batting average of .256, which ranks 87th out of the 238 nine-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s).

The single-game record for walks by a batter in a no-hit lineup is three, held by seven players. The hitters (and pitchers) are: Earl Torgeson (Cliff Chambers) in 1951, Dale Long (Sam Jones) in 1955, Mickey Stanley (Steve Barber) in 1967, Reggie Jackson (Jim Palmer) in 1969, Steve Huntz (Dock Ellis) in 1970, Bill Hall (Justin Verlander) in 2007, and Juan Pierre (Francisco Liriano) in 2011.

The single-game record for strikeouts by a batter in a no-hit lineup is four, held by Tony Graffanino of the Milwaukee Brewers. He donned the Golden Sombrero in Justin Verlander’s 2007 no-hitter. Verlander struck out 12 and walked four in the game.

No batter in a no-hit lineup has ever reached base on a hit-by-pitch (HBP) more than once in a game. The only batter with two career HBP in a no-hit lineup is Bill Freehan, who was plunked on April 30, 1967, by Barber and again just over four months later in Joel Horlen’s no-no. The two hit-by-pitches weren’t out of the ordinary for Freehan, as the Tigers catcher led the major leagues with 20 HBPs that season.

For additional information on no-hitters, the reader is invited to visit NoNoHitters.com, an excellent website created by journalist and SABR member Dirk Lammers.

Hideo Nomo celebrates his no-hitter at Coors Field in 1996 (LOS ANGELES DODGERS)

CONCLUSIONS

This paper introduced a methodology for objectively comparing the difficulty of each no-hitter thrown in the American, National, or Federal League between 1901 and 2020. This mathematical model produced a short list of the most impressive no-hitters in that period.

Hideo Nomo’s nine-inning no-hitter at Coors Field in 1996 was one of the greatest pitching accomplishments in baseball history. The Rockies lineup that he no-hit had a composite batting average of .302. No other pitcher was able to throw a no-hitter in the 2,047 regular-season games played at Coors Field between 1995 and 2020.

Charlie Robertson threw the greatest regular-season perfect game in 1922 when he waltzed through a powerful Detroit lineup that included Ty Cobb, Harry Heilmann, and Bobby Veach. As of the end of the 2020 season, those Tigers still had the highest weighted neutralized batting average (.291) of any lineup victimized by a perfect game—or any no-hitter for that matter.

But who threw the greatest regular-season no-hitter since 1901? The author believes that distinction belongs to Hooks Wiltse for his incomparable 10-inning no-hitter and near-perfect game against a tough Phillies lineup at the Polo Grounds in 1908. In 31 Philadelphia plate appearances, the sole batter to reach base did so on a hit-by-pitch immediately following a missed strike-three call, an error later acknowledged by the home-plate umpire, Cy Rigler. Many believe that Armando Galarraga, the victim of another unfortunate umpiring error over a century later, deserves to be recognized for throwing a perfect game. So, too, does George “Hooks” Wiltse.

GARY BELLEVILLE is a retired Information Technology professional living in Victoria, British Columbia. He has written articles for both the SABR Games Project and the Baseball Biography Project, in addition to contributing to several SABR books. Gary grew up in Ottawa, Ontario and graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics (Computer Science) degree. He patiently awaits the return of his beloved Montreal Expos.

Author’s note

Shortly after beginning the data analysis for this article, I noticed that Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference.com listed one more nohitter than I was expecting—the 1901 Pete Dowling no-hitter. As luck would have it, this was mere days after Retrosheet posted the box score for it. This started me on my quest to solve the case of the lost Dowling no-hitter, and it culminated with the publication of the SABR Games Project article titled “June 30, 1901: Cleveland’s Pete Dowling tosses the American League’s first no-hitter — or does he?”

A spreadsheet containing the ranking of no-hitters based on this research paper’s methodology can be found here. Please note that new no-hitters will be added to this spreadsheet after the completion of each season. Gary can be reached at gbelleville@gmail.com.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to fellow SABR member Kevin Johnson for generating park factors for 1901-05 and for answering my questions about the Ballparks Database at Seamheads.com.

Notes

1. The pitching term “stuff” is not easily defined. However, the following definition is as good as any: “Stuff is a pitcher’s pitches, judged by how inherently hard those pitches are to hit.” Tom Scocca, “Here Is What “Stuff” Means in Baseball,” Deadspin, October 7, 2015, http://deadspin.com/here-is-what-stuff-means-inbaseball-1734592813, accessed January 29, 2021.

2. As of December 2020, Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference.com recognized 263 major-league no-hitters thrown between 1901 and 2020. However, Major League Baseball only recognized 262. The one discrepancy is the June 30, 1901, outing by Pete Dowling of Cleveland against the Milwaukee Brewers. This paper will include all 263 no-hitters. Gary Belleville, “June 30, 1901: Cleveland’s Pete Dowling tosses the American League’s first no-hitter—or does he?,” SABR Games Project, 2020, http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/june-30-1901-clevelands-petedowling-tosses-the-american-leagues-first-no-hitter-or-does-he, accessed January 26, 2021.

3. There were 261 no-hitters thrown in the 401,330 regular-season team-games in the National, American, and Federal Leagues between 1901 and 2020. Two no-hitters were thrown in the postseason (a perfect game in 1956 and a no-hitter in 2010).

4. This paper will only consider no-hitters thrown since 1901, the year the American League was first designated as a major league. As of December 2020, the Retrosheet.org web site didn’t provide box scores or event data files for the 1900 season.

5. The neutralized batting averages of the 1996 Colorado Rockies can be found at http://baseballreference.com/teams/COL/1996-batting.shtml#all_players_neutral_batting, accessed January 26, 2021.

6. It is not possible to generate meaningful one-year park factors for ballparks hosting a small number of games in a season. The San Diego Padres played three home games in Estadio Monterrey in 2018; an estimated park factor of 100 was used. The Houston Astros played two home games in Miller Park in 2008 because of Hurricane Ike; the Brewers’ 2008 park factor for Miller Park (98) was used for those games. The Braves played 29 home games in Fenway Park in 1914; the Red Sox’s 1914 park factor for Fenway Park (94) was used for those games. The White Sox played 28 home games at South Side Park III in 1910 before moving to Comiskey Park I; the 1909 park factor for South Side Park III (91) was used for the games played there in 1910.

7. Unlike some other websites, the park factors at Seamheads.com are not automatically divided by two to account for the fact that half of all regular-season games are played at home. For instance, a park factor for hits of 108 on Seamheads is equivalent to a Fangraphs park factor of 104. In this example, eight percent more hits were recorded at that ballpark than a league-average park. Likewise, a Seamheads one-year park factor for hits of 94 is equivalent to a Fangraphs park factor of 97.

8. The data used to generate the chart in Figure 1 (batting average by decade and number of no-hitters per decade) have a correlation of -0.73.

9. An extra-innings perfect game has never been thrown. Pittsburgh’s Harvey Haddix threw 12 perfect innings against the Milwaukee Braves on May 26, 1959, before the perfect game, no-hitter, and shutout were broken up in the 13th inning. He lost the game 1-0. Although he was initially credited with throwing a no-hitter, that decision was reversed in 1991 by Major League Baseball’s Committee for Statistical Accuracy. Their revised definition of a no-hitter (“a game in which a pitcher or pitchers complete a game of nine innings or more without allowing a hit”) resulted in the elimination of 50 no-hitters from the record books, dating back to the 1890 season.

10. No-hitters were thrown in pitchers’ parks 67.7 percent of the time (178 of 263) and in neutral parks 6.8 percent of the time (18 of 263).

11. There were three seasons (1995, 1999, and 2000) in which Coors Field was more extreme for home runs than 1996. However, 1996 was peak Coors Field in terms of the one-year park factor for hits.

12. Quinton McCracken substituted for Larry Walker in the lineup Hideo Nomo faced. Walker had broken his collarbone on June 9, 1996, crashing into the fence at Coors Field. He returned to action on August 15. Walker left a September 7 game against the Astros because of pain in his left clavicle, and he made his final plate appearance of the year on September 12. He was limited to use as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement for the remainder of the year. A healthy Walker won the NL MVP award the following season.

13. Bill Staples Jr., “September 17, 1996: Hideo Nomo No-Hits Colorado Rockies at Hitter-Friendly Coors Field,” SABR Games Project, 2017, http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/september-17-1996-hideo-nomo-no-hitscolorado-rockies-at-hitter-friendly-coors-field, accessed January 26, 2021.

14. Bob Nightengale, “NoooooooooMo,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1996, p35.

15. Associated Press, “Nomo Gets No-No,” The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction, Colorado), September 18, 1996, 23.

16. Gregory H. Wolf, “May 5, 1917: On Second Thought, It’s a No-Hitter for Ernie Koob,” SABR Games Project, 2017, http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/may-5-1917-on-second-thought-its-a-no-hitter-for-ernie-koob, accessed January 26, 2021.

17. Michael Clair, “Ernie Shore Once Threw a Quasi-Perfect Game…after Babe Ruth Punched an Umpire,” CUT4, June 23, 2015, http://mlb.com/cut4/ernie-shore-threw-quasi-perfect-game-after-babe-ruth-ejection/c-132245176, accessed January 26, 2021.

18. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers retired the first 26 Cleveland batters he faced. The 27th batter of the game, Jason Donald, hit a groundball in the hole to first baseman Miguel Cabrera, who threw to Galarraga covering first. Video replays showed that Donald was clearly out, but first base umpire Jim Joyce called him safe. It was ruled an infield single, breaking up the perfect game and no-hitter. The next batter, Trevor Crowe, grounded out to end the game.

19. Hooks Wiltse went 23-14 with a 2.24 ERA in 330 innings pitched in 1908, while Christy Mathewson went 37-11 with a 1.43 ERA in 390)3 innings on the hill.

20. This facility, known precisely as “Polo Grounds IV,” was originally named Brotherhood Park. It burnt down in April 1911 and was replaced later in the season by the steel-and-concrete version of the Polo Grounds (“Polo Grounds V”) that served as the Giants’ home until they moved to San Francisco following the 1957 season.

21. The Polo Grounds had a one-year park factor for hits of 107 in 1908. Its dimensions were 258 feet to right field, 277 feet to left, and 500 feet to straightaway center field. South End Grounds III, home of the Boston Braves, was the most extreme hitters park in the National League for runs in 1908.

22. Over its history, the Baker Bowl was generally considered a hitters’ park, especially for left-handed batters. While it greatly inflated home run numbers beginning in 1911, the Baker Bowl had a one-year park factor for hits of 96 in 1908. The Phillies hit .243 at home and .245 on the road that season. Not a single Phillies batter hit a home run at the Baker Bowl in 1908.

23. The Polo Grounds were built on farmland known as Coogan’s Hollow.

24. Joe Cox, Almost Perfect: The Heartbreaking Pursuit of Pitching’s Holy Grail (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2017).

25. “Wiltse’s No-Hit Game,” Sporting Life, July 11, 1908, 6.

26. “Giants Win Two Games,” Brooklyn Citizen, July 5, 1908, 6.

27. David Cicotello, “Cy Rigler,” SABR Bio Project, 2004, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/cy-rigler, accessed January 26, 2021.

28. “Wiltse Too Much for the Phillies,”Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1908, 24.

29. As of December 2020, the only previous extra-inning no-hitter in the big leagues (recognized by Retrosheet and Baseball Reference) was thrown in the American Association by Sam Kimber of Brooklyn against Toledo on October 4, 1884. The game ended in a scoreless tie when it was called on account of darkness.

30. Cox.

31. David Fleitz, “April 30, 1922: Charlie Robertson’s Perfect Game,” SABR Games Project, 2016, http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/april-30-1922-charlie-robertsons-perfect-game/, accessed January 26, 2021.

32. Jacob Pomrenke, “Charlie Robertson,” SABR BioProject, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/charlierobertson, accessed January 26, 2021.

33. Irving Vaughan, “Kid Robertson Flings Perfect Game for Sox,” Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1922, 23.

34. “Tigers Helpless before Robertson Who Pitches Perfect Game and Wins 2-0,” Detroit Free Press, May 1, 1922, 12.

35. “Tigers Helpless before Robertson Who Pitches Perfect Game and Wins 2-0.”

36. The second-highest weighted neutralized batting average (.287) of a no-hit lineup was in 36-year-old Hoyt Wilhelm’s nine-inning no-hitter of the 1958 Yankees at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. However, that ballpark’s one-year park factor for hits was a mere 94, so Wilhelm’s no-no ranks 35th in composite batting average (.270) out of 238 nine-inning no-hitters with baserunner(s). Memorial Stadium had a massive amount of foul territory. According to the Ballparks Database at Seamheads.com, its dimensions in 1958 were 309 feet down the lines, 405 feet to each power alley, and 410 feet to straightaway center field. Center field was even deeper during Memorial Stadium’s first four years (1954-57).

37. Koufax’s three other no-hitters ranked 48th (May 11, 1963, versus the San Francisco Giants), 118th (June 4, 1964, versus the Philadelphia Phillies), and 218th (June 30, 1962, versus the New York Mets) out of the 238 nineinning no-hitters with baserunner(s).

38. The three other rookies in the Chicago lineup were 25-year-old Chris Krug (playing in his 50th majorleague game), 23-year-old Don Kessinger (92nd major-league game), and 24-year-old Glenn Beckert (134th majorleague game).

39. Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 22.

40. Eric Enders, “Exploring Extreme Ballparks Past,” The Hardball Times, November 16, 2018, http://tht.fangraphs.com/exploring-extreme-ballparks, accessed January 26, 2021.

41. The White Sox played 718 regular-season games and three World Series contests at South Side Park III. It was the home of the Chicago White Sox from 1900 until June 27, 1910, when the team moved into Comiskey Park I. The other three no-hitters thrown at South Side Park III between 1901 and 1910 were by Jesse Tannehill of the Boston Americans (August 17, 1904 versus the White Sox), Chicago’s Frank Smith (September 20, 1908 versus the Athletics), and Cleveland’s Addie Joss (April 20, 1910 versus the White Sox). The ballpark was renamed Schorling’s Park in 1911 and it served as the home of the Chicago American Giants until 1940. Several no-hitters were thrown there during that period, including a near-perfect game by Frank Wickware of the Chicago American Giants against the Indianapolis ABCs on August 26, 1914. Both teams were part of the Western Independent Clubs circuit in 1914.

42. James Elfers, “September 20, 1902: Chicago’s Nixey Callahan throws American League’s first no-hitter,” SABR Games Project, 2017, http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/september-20-1902-chicagos-nixey-callahan-throwsamerican-leagues-first-no-hitter, accessed January 26, 2021.

43. The six no-hitters against lineups that included Johnny Callison and Tony Taylor were pitched by Lew Burdette of the Milwaukee Braves (August 18, 1960), Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves (September 16, 1960), Don Nottebart of the Houston Colt .45s (May 17, 1963), Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers (June 4, 1964), George Culver of the Cincinnati Reds (July 29, 1968 – Game 2), and Bill Stoneman of the Montreal Expos (April 17, 1969).

44. Bert Campaneris was victimized by no-hitters thrown by Jim Palmer of the Baltimore Orioles (August 13, 1969), Clyde Wright of the California Angels (July 3, 1970), Jim Bibby of the Texas Rangers (July 30, 1973), Dick Bosman of the Cleveland Indians (July 19, 1974), Blue Moon Odom and Francisco Barrios of the Chicago White Sox (July 28, 1976), and Jim Colborn of the Kansas City Royals (May 14, 1977).

In 1995, St. Catharines rebranded their team as the Stompers, a nod to the area’s wine-making. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

This paper will discuss how a conjunction of events led to the presence in or near the Niagara area of Canada of four minor-league teams for a brief period in the 1980s—90s. It will illustrate how the different cities dealt with their teams and also identify some significant changes that were occurring in minor-league baseball at this time.

Hockey and rowing are the usual sports of choice in Niagara. So how did it happen that for the period from 1989 through 1992 there were four professional baseball teams playing within or near Niagara? One was in Niagara Falls, New York; since it was not based in Canada, it will not be considered in this paper, but it was an easy drive across what was at the time a relatively open border. There were franchises in the Canadian cities of St. Catharines, Welland, and Hamilton. Hamilton is not really in the Niagara region, but it is just beyond its border so it is included in this paper. All four teams were in the Class A (short season) New York-Pennsylvania League. A league of that name began operation in 1890. In its current incarnation, the league dates itself from 1939, and bills itself as the oldest continuously operating Class A league.1 It currently has 14 teams located in the northeastern United States.2 St. Catharines had a Toronto Blue Jays farm team from 1986 until 1999. Welland had a Pirates farm team from 1989 to 1994. This was the first time that either of these cities had hosted a team in Organized Baseball.3 Hamilton had a farm team of the Cardinals from 1988 to 1992 and hosted professional baseball on several occasions before. It was a charter member of the predecessor of the New York-Penn League in 1939.4

St. Catherines Blue Jays (or Baby Jays)/Stompers (1986—99)

In 1985, the Toronto Blue Jays acquired the Niagara Falls, New York, franchise which had been a farm team of the White Sox. The Blue Jays wanted to move the team to Canada, fairly close to Toronto. St. Catharines won out over the nearby cities of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Welland, and Hamilton because St. Catharines promised to upgrade significantly the existing facility.5 The official name of the team was Blue Jays, but the sobriquet Baby Jays was quickly adopted by most people to distinguish the local team from the parent club which operated 100 kilometers up the road and received a large amount of press in the Niagara area.

The team played in Community Park, which was an established park with much history as the home of local high-level amateur baseball teams. It had all the basic requirements of a minor-league baseball park, but there was nothing fancy about it. The playing surface was a bit rough, but new lights were installed to meet New York-Penn League standards.6 In that first year, seating was in wooden high-school-style bleachers. It was part of a larger neighborhood park, hidden from street view by a high school building and a lawn bowling club. It wasn’t exactly a luxurious setting even by minor-league standards, but it was enough for St. Catharines to be awarded the team. The city had not previously considered the idea of hosting a professional baseball team, so this request came out of the blue. Several municipal councillors were pushing the idea of sports tourism—promoting tournaments for amateur teams. There seems to have been no discussion of how this professional team could fit into a program for economic development. From the city’s perspective, it was a small investment, and it had some local support, so the city provided a minimal sum to upgrade an existing facility.

In some places, there is consideration of a baseball stadium as an anchor for downtown redevelopment or economic development generally.7 This was never on the agenda in St. Catharines. Community Park is located at the juncture of a nice, middle-class residential neighborhood and a retail area with a series of car lots and strip malls. It is in the southeast corner of the city and not easily accessible from other areas. The Dairy Queen across the street from the stadium seemed to do increased business on game nights, but beyond that there was no notion of the stadium as an anchor for economic development.

The home opener was played on June 17, 1986. It came one day after the team’s first ever game, which it won in Batavia.8 The opener was a momentous occasion. The St. Catharines Singing Saints were there to provide entertainment. The 1930—31 Niagara District Champion Merritton Alliance Baseball Club was honoured. Leo Pinckney, the revered league president, and the requisite local politicians were in attendance. Mayor Joe McCaffery, who was well known for malapropisms, threw the ceremonial first pitch after paying tribute to the fact that the city would now be the home of a professional football team. The crowd of 2,191 cheered and the game was under way. The Blue Jays won their second game in a row for an auspicious start to an inaugural season.9

The team and the local sportswriters recognized that this was a first for St. Catharines, so there was a conscious effort to educate local fans about what to expect from a minor-league baseball team.10 The Jays provided a pull-out section in the local newspaper that introduced the players.11 The first few games got special coverage in the St. Catharines Standard. Throughout the season, the team’s games were covered in stories that usually appeared on the first page of the Sports section, sometimes relegating coverage of the parent club to an inner page.

Even halfway through the season, Jack Gatecliff, the acknowledged dean of local sportswriters, deemed this first season a success. Rick Amos, the youthful general manager, expressed pleasure with the average attendance of 1,200.12 The only cloud on the horizon was some concern about whether the team would be able to serve beer the following season.13

The long-term picture was less sanguine. Baseball did not have extensive roots in St. Catharines and the team never really became a fixture in the city. It was always one of the largest cities in the league, but attendance was never stellar. At the beginning, there was some community fund-raising but over the longer term business support for the team never developed. The city council took its cues from the local citizenry and businesspeople, and provided limited financial support, usually somewhat grudgingly.14 The new “stadium”—which amounted to improved spectator seating—was completed ahead of schedule and over the years the city came up with funds for improved concession stands, washrooms, and clubhouses, but when larger amounts, particularly requests for funds for a new stadium, were on the table, the council always drew the line.

In 1994, the team was provisionally sold to a group with plans to move it to London, Ontario. The league did not approve the move because of the additional travel that would entail, so the team stayed put, but an important signal had been sent.15

In 1995, the Toronto Blue Jays sold the team to a group of local businesspeople for a reported $1 million. The group included marketing guru Terry O’Malley, who planned to use his acumen to turn the team’s fortunes around.16 One of the marketing innovations was to rename the team the Stompers. St. Catharines is in grape and wine country and the logo was a stylized figure who was enjoying stomping grapes.

With John Belford as the team’s general manager, attendance jumped over 60%, from 31,000 in 1994 to 51,000 in 1995, and operating losses were reduced. There was a brief period of rejuvenation, but over the longer term this did not turn around the lack of interest in baseball in the city.

In 1998, the group presented a plan to city council for construction of a new stadium on an unused parcel of land in the downtown area. A member of the group felt that they were “virtually laughed out of the room.”17

Local residents had shown a limited interest in the team. The owners were making a very large financial ask to occupy a parcel of prime land to build a baseball diamond that would be used 10 weeks of the year. This proposal was never considered seriously. (The land was later used for a multi-use spectator facility which is home to the Niagara Ice Dogs minor hockey team and has seen a succession of minor-league basketball teams pass through.)

Alas, even this group could not increase interest in the team and suffered losses each year of operation. Finally, in 1999 the owners received an offer which was reportedly in the $2—3 million range from a group that wanted to move the team to the New York City area.18 Doubling or tripling their money in four years on an investment that had never yielded an operating profit was more than they could resist. The next season, the Queens Kings became a reality.

After 13 years, the team left St. Catharines with more of a whimper than a bang. There were a few regular attendees who lamented the demise of local professional baseball, and local sportswriters were predictably outraged.19 But the Stompers had never built a significant base among the general populace. There was little controversy or outcry about the team leaving; many local residents were no more aware of the demise of the team than they had been of its birth.

The remaining evidence of the existence of the minor-league team is a stadium on which minimal money had been spent to make minimal improvements. It is a reasonably good community ballpark which is currently the home of the Brock University Badgers baseball team and several local recreational leagues.

Hamilton Redbirds (1988—92)

Hamilton was the only one of the three cities that had previously had a professional baseball team. Canadian baseball historian Bill Humber refers to Hamilton as “one of baseball’s first strongholds in Ontario.”20 It was a member of the International League in 1886—90.21 It was also a charter member of the PONY League in 1939. PONY League stood for Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York; it became the New York-Pennsylvania League in the 1950s when Hamilton dropped out.22 Over the years, Hamilton had been the home of several professional baseball teams.23

The Hamilton Redbirds franchise was owned by Jack Tracz, who has been described, somewhat affectionately, as an “old-style baseball hack.”24 He embodied an emerging trend of minor-league team owners who wanted to make money, but were also attracted by the romantic dream of being involved in professional baseball. Growing up in upstate New York, he had been a St. Louis Cardinals fan, so he relished the idea of owning a farm team of his beloved Cardinals. At the same time, he was working to have a minor-league team in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area so that a major-league team moving to that area would have to pay him to liquidate his territorial rights.25

Tracz was happy to move his franchise from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Hamilton because of the poor playing field and clubhouse in Erie.26 In Hamilton, the team would be playing at Bernie Arbour Memorial Stadium in Mohawk Sports Park. This was a nice stadium which had long been used by the Hamilton Cardinals of the Inter-county Baseball League. It was upgraded for use by the Redbirds to a seating capacity of 2,700, portable clubhouse buildings were added, better lights were installed, and a paved parking area for 400 additional cars was built.27 However, its location in the southeast section of the city was not strategic to attract large numbers of spectators. The two major highways that now encircle this area had not been built at this time.

With a population of just over 300,000 in 1986, Hamilton was by far the largest city in the New YorkPenn League.28 It became clear fairly soon that this was likely what attracted Tracz because he wanted to establish a class A team in Hamilton to be positioned to obtain one of the expansion franchises which would soon be awarded by the class AA Eastern League.29

The Redbirds played their first home game on June 16, 1988, in front of an apparent over-capacity crowd of 3,271 who braved a chilly night.30 The way the game was described in the local press was a reminder of the difference between a relatively large city and the two smaller cities which are a part of this paper. The opening game in Hamilton was marked by four skydivers. Newspaper accounts do not mention any official opening ceremonies attended by civic dignitaries. Stories on the baseball team never made it beyond the sports pages to the front page of the newspaper as they did in the smaller cities in Niagara. Even in the sports pages, the training camp of the Tiger-Cats football team drew more ink than the Redbirds.

In early 1991, Tracz sold the team to a group led by Rob Hilliard.31 Hilliard was the same type of entrepreneur-romantic dreamer as Tracz. The new owner made a speech thanking his mother, his wife, and his children for understanding “a big kid [who wanted to] realize his childhood dream.” His father had signed a contract with the Phillies in 1941, but did his duty by enlisting after Pearl Harbor and never realized his dream.32

Hilliard made it clear from the outset that his plan was to use this team as leverage to secure an expansion franchise in the Eastern League, and he also made it clear that he would need a better stadium to accomplish this.33

The Centre for Canadian Baseball Research holds in its collection a manuscript titled “Double Vision: Let’s See Double A Baseball in Hamilton” (dated January 9, 1991) that provides an assessment of various Hamilton locations in comparison to the standards set out for a AA stadium. It also contains an assessment, prepared by a local university professor, of the economic impact of a AA team, and numerous letters of support from local groups. The provenance of the document is unclear, but it bears the Hamilton Redbirds logo on the title page. It is also unclear how this document was used, but it seems that someone cared enough about this to spend a significant amount of money to develop this document.

The ownership group recruited former Ontario politician and well-known baseball fan, Larry Grossman, to take the lead. There were a head-spinning number of different proposals for a stadium ranging in cost—$8 million34/$12 million35/$16—18 million36—to a stadium to be constructed by a private developer if he was given land by the city.

These proposals need to be set in context. The relative newcomer baseball franchise was making a multi-million dollar ask at a time when the city council had just turned down a request for $300,000 from the city’s long-time cherished football team, which was threatening to leave.37 The baseball group’s credibility was also not enhanced by the constantly-changing stadium plans.

Mayor Bob Morrow and members of the council’s Parks and Recreation Committee were generally sympathetic to the team’s proposals, but the full council seemed to have no appetite to spend millions of dollars on a facility for a new team when the existing team had not attracted the interest of large numbers of fans. The 1992 season was a good one for the Redbirds.

Their record of 56-20 was one of the best in professional baseball, and put them into the playoffs.38,39 To their surprise, they lost the first sudden-death game to the wild-card team and were eliminated.40 Their season ended in sadness on September 4, 1992, but not many realized that this would be the team’s last game in Hamilton.

At a reception on September 22, 1992, Mayor Morrow was discussing sports highlights in the city and referred to the Redbirds as leaders in the city moving forward. Immediately after the reception, the team owner informed Mayor Morrow that the team would be moving to Glens Falls, New York, for the 1993 season.41 Bernie Arbour Memorial Stadium is still there in Mohawk Sports Park, serving as the home of Hamilton’s entry in the Inter-county Baseball League.

Welland Pirates (1989—94)

The City of Welland finished second in the fight to land the Blue Jays’ short-season A franchise. This whetted the city’s appetite to search for another NY-P franchise. Its goal was to increase the entertainment value available to local residents as well as to increase the number of baseball and softball diamonds that were available for recreational use.

George Marshall, the city councillor who was chair of the council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, remembers preliminary discussions with a number of interested franchises, but eventually the courting became serious with Dr. Eric Margenau and Jay Acton, the principal owners of United Baseball.42 This group also owned the South Bend, Indiana, franchise in the Midwest League and was in the process of acquiring a franchise in the Carolina League.43 United Baseball exemplified the same ownership approach mentioned above in Hamilton. The purpose was to make money from the resurgence of interest in minor-league baseball while also allowing grown men to pursue their boyhood dreams of being involved in professional baseball. If you weren’t good enough to play, but had a few million dollars to invest, you could still live the dream.

United Baseball had operated a franchise in Watertown, New York, for three years, but had decided to move the franchise because of poor attendance and a lack of community support demonstrated by the refusal to upgrade the existing stadium.44 United was excited to move to Welland because it was a larger city supposedly with a baseball tradition, and the city had demonstrated a willingness to invest in a new stadium.45

The Welland Sports Complex was a brand new facility which included the stadium built for the team, two additional diamonds built for recreational use, and a large parking area. It was built in the north end of the city to satisfy local residents who had been complaining about a lack of recreational venues.

There was some local hyperbole about it being “the finest facility in the province next to the SkyDome” in Toronto and being the best facility in the minor leagues.46 The truth was that this was a new, good facility by Class A standards. It accommodated more than 2,500 patrons in a concrete grandstand with a nice concourse hosting concession stands.47 The large parking lot easily accommodated all patrons. It was clearly the nicest of the four stadiums in the area.

It also came with a total price tag in excess of $3 million.48 However, Marshall remembers the stadium being a fairly easy sell to the council for several reasons. The economy was weak and very little construction was taking place; this facility would provide construction jobs and be a stimulus to the local economy. There was general agreement that the city needed additional sports facilities, particularly in this area. There was considerable local support from sports associations and the local business improvement area. One of the major selling points was that the $3 million total cost of the complex was covered in part by grants from the federal and provincial governments, and donations of land and cash. Marshall estimates the net cost to the city at less than $500,000. In exchange, the city obtained a new recreational facility, which was badly needed in the north end, and city services extended to an area of the city that eventually led to a significant housing development, which served as an anchor for further development. This followed a model used by Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when it built a stadium which served as a catalyst to attract people to a previously under-used area of the city.49

The complex was located near a busy intersection between a major highway serving the Niagara area and a major street providing entrance to the city. The sports complex was touted as the driver that had stimulated the expansion of an existing hotel and the construction of a new hotel.50 Honestly, it was obvious that this area of the city was ripe for development with or without the baseball stadium, but the new stadium certainly didn’t hurt.

The city had the foresight to design the stadium as a multi-purpose facility. It has a large moveable stage and an oversize kitchen to accommodate various civic activities in addition to baseball.51

When the Welland Pirates played their home opener on June 17, 1989, everything was in place and ready to go—except the grass. The structural part of the stadium had been completed, but a very rainy spring had prevented the installation of sod on the field52. For the first month, the team had to play at a somewhat upgraded Burgar Park.53 The team played its home opener at Burgar Park with all the usual dignitaries in attendance. The result was a 9—3 win over the Niagara Falls Rapids. The opening-day crowd of 613 was disappointing, but this was attributed to the temporary venue and the cloudy weather.54 The team played its first game at the Welland Sports Complex on July 17, 1989. It was an exciting event which the home team won by a score of 5—1 before 3,162 fans.55 Though the Welland Pirates would be the city’s first professional sports franchise, the city does have a strong baseball tradition.56,57 However, there was an attempt to educate local residents about baseball including providing the information that the Pirates’ parent team was located in Pittsburg [sic].58

The relationship started out well with all sorts of kind words from both team management and the city. However, the relationship did not blossom well over the years. Between 1989 and 1993, the Pirates never had a winning season. Fans responded by staying away. In every year after the first, attendance for the season was in the bottom third in the league.59

By the beginning of the 1994 season everyone could see where this relationship was headed. The team’s five-year lease on the stadium expired at the end of the season. Even before the first hopeful pitch of the new season was thrown, the rumor was spreading that the team would be moving for next season into a brand new $8 million stadium in Erie, Pennsylvania.60

The rumor was confirmed at the New York-Penn League meeting shortly after the end of the season.61 All that remained were parting shots on both sides. The team owner opined that Welland was not a good baseball town and likely never would be. The mayor of Welland and others countered that the owners had delivered a sub-standard product in spite of city efforts to provide an excellent place to play.62

The situation of Erie, Pennsylvania, reveals a great deal about what minor-league baseball had become in the 1990s. Erie lost its NY-P franchise to Hamilton in 1988, in part, because of the quality of its stadium. Therefore, it set about building a new state-of-the-art facility, which attracted the Welland franchise in 1994. A perfect illustration of the musical chairs that baseball had become.

The demise of the Welland Pirates was similar to the story in the other two cities, with one significant difference: the stadium. The city was able to leverage federal, provincial, and private funds to construct a sports complex which included a high-quality multipurpose stadium and two recreational diamonds at a limited cost to the city. After the demise of professional baseball in Welland, the stadium continues to be home to baseball teams such as the Welland Jackfish of the Inter-county League, as well as a number of civic activities.

Conclusion

The saga of these few years says something about both team owners and the host cities with which they have a symbiotic, but sometimes troubled, relationship. City councillors and cynical residents see franchise owners as trying to sell empty dreams, with a clear intention to pass through town, bilking the local yokels and moving on to the next town, accumulating millions as they move around. The story told in this paper would suggest this characterization gives the owners way too much credit.

A better characterization of the owners in this paper would see them as vagabond carpetbaggers wandering from town to town attempting to peddle their wares with no understanding of their market. In St. Catharines, owners paid a significant amount for a franchise that had always had weak attendance and little local support. They did some small marketing fixes, and then made a major ask of a council that had always only grudgingly parted with small amounts of money, and were surprised when they were unsuccessful.

The story in Hamilton is similar. The owners took their baseball team into a football and hockey town and ultimately made a pitch for a larger amount of money than the council had just refused to give the city’s cherished football team. Again, no success.

The Welland story was a bit different. There, the city gave the owners exactly what they wanted in the form of a good stadium in a good location. The owners then made a lackluster marketing effort to sell an inferior product and blamed the local residents for not buying their product.

The owners in this story seemed to be like little boys with romantic dreams who had too much money and time on their hands, but no clear plan. Their only salvation was the fact that despite these franchises never turning a profit, as they moved around the country they continued to increase in value whenever they were sold. Maybe there was a method in these people’s madness, but it is a rather unintuitive way of making money.

The other part of this symbiotic relationship was host cities that seemed willing to accept, with more or less enthusiasm, the wares these vagabonds were peddling.

In an environment where cities would fight desperately for the right to host a professional baseball team, teams fell into the laps of these three semi-interested cities. None of these cities had a strategic plan with regard to professional sport that involved minor-league baseball. To the extent that any of them considered professional sport at all, their dreams were focused on hockey.

Welland was the only city that fit the opportunity into a broader plan for development of an area of the city. In Hamilton and St. Catharines, the stadiums were located in outlying areas with no real plans for development. There was discussion of a downtown stadium in St. Catharines, but it was deemed unworkable, and there was no real effort to make it work or to find a location that would benefit the city.

This kind of laconic involvement was acceptable in the early years of this story, when minor-league baseball was coming back from its collapse in the 1950s and franchises sometimes changed hands for nominal amounts.63 However, as franchises increased in value during this renaissance, parent teams or romantic investors could no longer hold onto teams on a whim. The local group that purchased the Baby Jays from the parent club for $1 million was confronted with the opportunity to sell the team for double that amount five years later. How could they turn down an offer like that for a team that had never turned a profit? In Welland the team was not sold, but the owner was given the opportunity to move from a city where attendance was relatively flat to a city which had just built a shiny new stadium. Teams that now had a value measured in the millions needed to turn a profit, and teams located in Niagara were not going to do that.

The story of these three cities indicates that Welland benefited because it was systematic in its approach and had a clear and well-considered goal. It was realistic in understanding that a minor-league team would provide enjoyment and a potential source of pride to local residents; it would not provide a major economic stimulus. Fans from all over North America flock to the shrines of Wrigley Field or Chavez Ravine. Fewer fans travel any distance to see minor-league baseball.

“If you build it, they will come” is a cute maxim inspired by a charming movie, but do not invest hard cash in it. Consider carefully the kind of stadium you want to build. In Welland’s case it wanted to build additional fields for recreational use anyway. It took advantage of a minor-league team to leverage funds and land from other levels of government and local businesses to build a sports complex that included two baseball fields for recreational use and a multi-purpose stadium suitable for a variety of civic events. When the team predictably left after five years, the city had a nice multi-use facility, built with minimal local funds.

It is difficult to see any plan in the actions of Hamilton and St. Catharines. Both cities spent relatively small amounts of money and ended up with marginally better baseball facilities paid for in part by the departed professional team. No attempt was made to think in broader economic development terms.

The sometimes uneasy relationship between a minor-league baseball team and its host city can be very advantageous. Cities frequently feel that they are taken advantage of by team owners, and this clearly has happened. However, this paper indicates that there can be situations in which the host city comes out very well. It is a matter of the host city having a plan that it can use to its advantage.

DAVID SIEGEL has been a member of SABR since 2006. After 40 years as a Professor of Political Science and administrator at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, he has now turned his attention to doing research on baseball. Contact: dsiegel@brocku.ca.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for this Journal, as well as John Belford, Doug Herod, Bill Humber, Joseph Kushner, George Marshall, Andrew North, and Elena North for their assistance in the preparation of the paper. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the author.

Notes

1. https://www.milb.com/new-york-penn/history (Accessed, September 28, 2019).
2. Baseball Reference, https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/ New_York-Penn_League(Accessed, September 11, 2019).
3. Robert Obojski indicates that Catherines (sic) had a professional team in the Ontario League which began play some time in 1930 and disbanded on July 22,1930. Bush League: A History of Minor League Baseball (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975), 376.) The Brewers are also mentioned in: Humber, Diamonds of the North, 208. It does not seem like too much of a stretch to exclude this short foray from consideration.
4. Steve Milton, “A League with Pizzaz,” Hamilton Spectator, June 14, 1988, F2; “A Look Back at Minor League Happenings,” Hamilton Spectator, June 14, 1988, F3; Humber, Diamonds of the North, 207; Humber, Cheering for the Home Team, 28; Obojski, Bush League,
5. Mike Hamilton, “Promise of New Stadium Enticed Jays to Locate its Farm Team Here,” The Standard (St. Catharines, Ontario), June 28, 1986, 7A; Mike Hamilton, “Plan for Baseball Stadium Unveiled,” The Standard, June 4, 1986.
6. “Park Lights Go up Today,” The Standard, June 2, 1986,
7. Arthur Johnson, Minor League Baseball and Local Economic Development (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
8. Mike Hamilton, “Baby Jays Make Successful Debut,” The Standard, June 17, 1986,
9. Peter Conradi, “Baby Jays Hatch a Win,” The Standard, June 18, 1986, 1; Mike Hamilton, “Blue Jays Set for Season Opener,” The Standard, June 16, 1986, 21.
10. Mike Hamilton, “Patience Needed to Baby Jays,” The Standard, June 7, 1986, 29; Jack Gatecliff, “Every Blue Jay in Catharines Has a Shot at Majors, The Standard, June 10, 1986, 21.
11. The Standard, June 28,
12. Jack Gatecliff, “Baby Jays Successful First Season,” The Standard, July 26, 1986,
13. Doug Herod, “City Hall Cool to Beer at Ballpark, The Standard, July 8, 1986,
14. Abigail Vint, “Councillors Anxious to Go to Bat for Stompers, The Standard, June 7, 1999, A3.
15. Bill Potrecz, “Stompers’ Final At Bat?” The Standard, June 19, 1999,
16. Bill Potrecz, “The Stompers Are Out at Home,” The Standard, June 2, 1999, A1,
17. Peter Conradi, “City Fiddles while Stompers Burn, The Standard, June 5, 1999, B1,
18. Bill Potrecz, “The Stompers Are Out at Home,” The Standard, June 2, 1999, A1,A7.
19. Editorial, “City Shouldn’t Just Let Team Go Stomping Off,” The Standard, June 5, 1999, A12; Peter Conradi, “Council Blew Chance to Save Stompers,” The Standard, June 12, 1999, B1,
20. Humber, Diamonds of the North,
21. Obojski, Bush League, 95, 97, and 100
22. https://www.milb.com/new-york-penn/history (Accessed, September 28, 2019).
23. Steve Milton, “A League with Pizzaz,” Hamilton Spectator, June 14, 1988,
24. Bob Andelman, Stadium for Rent: Tampa Bay’s Quest for Major League Baseball (McFarland and Company, , Publishers, 1993).
25. Andelman, Stadium for Rent.
26. Larry Moko, “The Redbirds Come Home to Roost,” Hamilton Spectator, June 13, 1988,
27. Larry Moko, “The Redbirds Come Home to Roost,” Hamilton Spectator, June 13, 1988,
28. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Canadian_cities_by_ census#1986 (Accessed, October 25, 2019).
29. Steve Milton, ”Franchise Fever Class AA in Birds Plan,” Hamilton Spectator, March 4, 1989.
30. Larry Moko, “It Was the Blue Jays in a Walk,” Hamilton Spectator, June 17, 1988, B2.
31. “Redbirds Sale OKed by League,” Hamilton Spectator, January 23,
32. Larry Moko, “Redbirds’ Dream: Affordable, Outdoor Entertainment,” Hamilton Spectator, February 21, 1991.
33. “Redbirds Make Pitch for AA Ball,” Hamilton Spectator, January 23,
34. Jim Poling, “Park Pitch for $588,000 on Mark …if AA Comes, Hamilton Spectator, August 26, 1992, B1.
35. “Committee Backs Proposal for $12m AA Ball, Hamilton Spectator, January 22,
36. Jim Poling, “Stadium Study Strikes Out with Morrow,” Hamilton Spectator, August 20, 1992, B1.
37. Ken Peters, “Big Bucks for Baseball,” Hamilton Spectator, June 24, 1992, A1,A2; Jeff Dickins and Jim Poling, “No Cash No Cats!,” Hamilton Spectator, June 11, 1992,
38. Only the Elizabethton Twins had a better winning average in 1992 (.742, 49—17, in the Appalachian League).
39. https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/league.cgi?id=408b8984 (Accessed, November 24, 2019).
40. Larry Moko, “Shocker,” Hamilton Spectator, September 5, 1992,
41. Larry Moko, “Redbirds Leave Town Blame City for Impasse on Stadium,” Hamilton Spectator, September 23, 1992.
42. Interview, October 10,
43. Wayne Redshaw, “Welland Pirates—A New Baseball Era,” The Tribune (Welland, Ontario), June 13, 1989, 2A; “New Partner,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989,
44. Wayne Redshaw, “Pirates Ran out of Shots,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989,
45. “Complex One Reason,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989,
46. Charles Muggeridge, “Details Are Finalized for Sports Complex Opening,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989, 1.
47. Wayne Creighton, “Sports Complex Can Be Used,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989,
48. Wayne Redshaw, “Welland Pirates—A New Baseball Era,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989,
49. Johnson, Minor League Baseball and Local Economic Development, Chapter
50. “Niagara Street Spinoffs Starting—Brunner,” The Tribune, June 21, 1989,
51. Wayne Crichton, “Sports Complex Can Be Used,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989, 11A.
52. “Field is too Wet to Lay down Sod,” The Tribune, June 8, 1989,
53. Ken Avey and Charles Muggeridge, “Batter Up at Burgar Park—For Now,” The Tribune, June 9, 1989, 1.
54. “Pirate Opener,” The Tribune, June 19, 1989, 5C; Wayne Redshaw, “Where Were the Fans for the Home Opener?” The Tribune, June 19, 1989,
55. Ken Avey, “New Stadium to Open July 17,” The Tribune, July 11, 1989, 3; John Sherwin, “Baseball Bosses Impressed,” The Tribune, June 18, 1989, 1; Ken Avey, “At Long Last…” The Tribune, July 18, 1989,
56. Wayne Redshaw, “Welland Pirates—A New Baseball Era,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989,
57. George “Udy” Blazetich, “A Welland Baseball Flashback,” The Tribune, June 13, 1989, 17A,
58. Ken Avey and Charles Muggerridge, “Batter Up at Burgar Park—For Now,” The Tribune, June 9, 1989, 1.
59. Bill Sawchuck, “Pirates’ Future in Limbo until Season is Over,” The Tribune, June 21, 1994, A-1.
60. Bill Sawchuck, “Pirates’ Fans Say Next Year Will Take Care of Itself,” The Tribune, June 2, 1994, B-5; Bill Sawchuck, “Pirates’ Future in Limbo until Season is Over,” The Tribune, June 21, 1994, A-1; Bill Sawchuck, “Pirates Moving to Erie, ” The Tribune, September 16, 1994, A-1.
61. Bill Sawchuck, “Pirates’ Move Stirs Little Discussion at League Meeting,” The Tribune, September 19, 1994, B-3.
62. Bill Sawchuck, “Pirates Moving to Erie, ” The Tribune, September 16, 1994, A-1: Joop Gerritsma, “Club Let Fans Down,” The Tribune, September 21, 1994, B-1.
63. This history is told well in: Obojski, Bush League, chapters 1 and 2; Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), chapter 20; Neil Sullivan, The Minors (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), chapters 12—14.

Star shortstop Dick Lundy was on the Hilldale team that played against the Boston Red Sox on September 14, 1918, just a week after the World Series ended. (HELMAR ART CARDS)

“Every one of the 16 Major League franchises that operated between 1901 and 1960 faced a black team at some point in their history.” So wrote Todd Peterson in his introduction to the book The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues.1

I have written quite a lot on the Boston Red Sox, including their being the last team in the American and National Leagues to integrate.2 I was intrigued, because I had not come across a time when the Boston Red Sox had played a Black team. I wrote Peterson to ask him what I might have overlooked. His answer proved to provide a window into a fascinating ballgame and bit of history.3

The game took place in Darby, Pennsylvania, on September 14, 1918. The two teams were Hilldale, the “crack colored team of Philadelphia” and the “Champion Boston Red Sox of the American League.”4 Hilldale was, per the Philadelphia Tribune, “the fastest colored team in the East.” The game was the last of their season, and the Red Sox had wrapped up their own season and the World Series a few days earlier.5

Neil Lanctot wrote that in 1918, Hilldale fielded an “all-professional lineup” and “finished the season with a 41-7 record, winning nearly 20 more games than in 1917.”6 The Hilldale club was not part of any organized league at the time, but compiled this record by barnstorming and taking on other teams that came to Darby.7

The game in question was played on Saturday afternoon, September 14, at Hilldale Park in Darby at 3pm. General admission was 50 cents per ticket; pavilion seats set patrons back 75 cents. One could take the #13 trolley from Walnut Street, Philadelphia, directly to the park. The Philadelphia North American reserved a degree of skepticism and characterized the team as a “nondescript team billed as the world’s champion Red Sox.”8 Apparently only four members of the world champion team took part.

Peterson did acknowledge that the visiting team was “Red Sox-ish.”9

Each Red Sox regular had pocketed $1,108.45 after the season was over. In addition to these Series shares, their salaries were paid to them through September 15.10 The three Red Sox players who were on this “Red Sox-ish” team were thus still on Boston salary on the day of the game at Darby.

Promoter Art Summers of Boston had booked the event and had planned to have the “war champions” go on to play elsewhere, “such teams of Steelton, Hazleton, Lebanon, Bethlehem, Hoboken, and Baltimore.”11 Among the prior games Summers had booked was one of his “All-American Club” against Hilldale on August 15. That game, nearly a shutout, was a victory for the “All-Americans,” declared by Philadelphia’s Evening Public Ledger to be “the first white club to defeat Hilldale this season.”12

As we shall see, this barnstorming outfit playing under the name “Red Sox” did not go unnoticed by American League president Ban Johnson.

LINEUPS

The Hilldale team was no pushover. Santop was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. His plaque calls him one of Black baseball’s “most powerful batters during the first quarter of the twentieth century.” Williams and Reese were both on the 1920 Chicago American Giants championship team. Lundy played Negro Leagues baseball for more than 20 years, a dozen of them with Atlantic City’s Bacharach Giants. Cockrell played professional baseball for 18 years, Lundy for more than 20 years, Downs for 10, Cummings for at least eight, and Fiall for at least six.

The Boston Globe described the game and the competing teams in one sentence summarizing the game: “With Strunk, Schang and Bush in the lineup and several other big league stars an All-Star club, calling itself the Red Sox, defeated Hilldale today, 4 to 3.”19

The Philadelphia Record published a game story running a few hundred words. It referred to the visiting team as “a team calling themselves the Boston ‘Red Sox’”20 The Philadelphia North American noted that Bush, Schang, and Strunk were the three on the visiting team who were “real honest to goodness Red Sox.”21

In their game accounts, only one of the newspapers made any reference or allusion to race. This would have been unnecessary for the Tribune, being “the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper reflecting the African-American experience.”22 Its readers would have known Hilldale to be a Black ballclub. The Globe article was, as indicated, very brief: just one sentence of text. The Globe did not acknowledge any forfeit. Why the word “forfeit” is employed will soon become clear. The Record box score showed the runs as Boston Red Sox 4, Hilldale 3, but placed an “X” in the bottom of the ninth inning for Hilldale.

THE GAME

The Red Sox scored once in the top of the first. With two outs, Magee walked. He was picked off first and ran to second, arriving safely since no one covered the bag. Burns drove him home with a single over second.

Hilldale took a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the first. Reese singled up the middle and was sacrificed to second base and then third. Bush walked Santop intentionally, Santop stole second. Lundy tripled to left-center.

Neither team scored in the second, but the Red Sox then added two in the top of the third. Young drew a one-out walk. Strunk hit one to right field and Young tried to score but was out “by yards.” But Young protested that Strunk’s ball had gone beyond the ropes in right field (the game clearly attracted a sizable crowd) and should be ruled a ground-rule double. Umpire Smith agreed and the runners were positioned on second and third. Then Magee hit one “into the centre field crowd” and it was 3-2 in favor of the “Red Sox.”

In the bottom of the fourth, Hilldale tied it. Santop walked, was sacrificed to second, and scored on Cockrell’s hit to center field.

There was no more scoring until the top of the eighth when Williams walked Strunk and Magee. Burns grounded to second and Magee was forced. Schang hit one to Cummings at first; he threw home and erased Strunk at the plate. Lennox tapped one back to the pitcher, who fell down, resulting in the bases becoming loaded. Williams then walked Jones on four pitches, forcing home the go-ahead run. It was 4-3 “in favor of the white folks” as the North American put it.23

Bush opened the ninth with a double into the roped-off fans in left. Young sacrificed him to third. A hard-hit ball to center was handled so well by Fiall that Bush had to hold at third base. Williams got out of the inning without a run scoring.

In the bottom of the ninth, Bush tried to use a “dead ball that had previously been thrown out of the game because of a kick made by the Sox players.”24 Hilldale team captain Santop grabbed the ball and “threw the ball far out of the lot.”25 A new ball was put into play, but “Bush deliberately sat down and ripped it on his spikes and after refusing to let Umpire Smith look at it.. .Magee.. .threw the ball in the woods.”

A third ball was brought forth by the umpire “and again refused by Boston.”26 After several minutes, Smith forfeited the game to Hilldale, rendering the final score 9-0.

The Tribune said it had been a hard-fought game: “The game was for blood, each team striving their utmost to down the other. The game bristled with inside stuff, fast fielding and sharp double plays.”

OTHER GAMES FOR THE “RED SOX”

The Summers-organized team played in a few other games.

On September 21, the Baltimore Drydocks and Shipbuilding Company “defeated a team made up largely of Boston Red Sox players, 4 to 3.”27 Only three sentences described the game, and the names of Bush and Strunk were the only two Red Sox players discerned. White Sox left-hander Dave Danforth pitched for the Drydocks.

A game at Lebanon included Burns, Bush, Meyer, Schang, Strunk, and Young, with others, billed as “All-Stars.”28 The Lebanon team included Rogers Hornsby, Bush’s former Red Sox batterymate Sam Agnew, and a player who was probably Del Pratt.

A news story that originally ran in the Detroit Free Press noted games in Hartford on September 22, and a game near Brooklyn.29 The Hartford game featured Bush pitching for the Pratt & Whitney team against another local team, Poli’s, which had as its pitcher none other than Babe Ruth. Bush won a 1-0 shutout when a ninth-inning error by the first baseman, mishandling Ruth’s throw to first base, allowed the winning run to score from third.30 The Brooklyn game was on September 29 in Glendale, Long Island and presented in the box score as “Boston Red Sox” versus “Farmers.” The Farmers team led, 1-0, until the Red Sox tied it in the top of the ninth, and then adding five more runs in the 10th, to win, 6-1. Bush, Mayer, Schang, and Strunk were the four Red Sox on the team. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle news story presented the team as Boston Red Sox without any quotation marks or qualifying language.31

I.E. Sanborn of the Chicago Tribune warned, “Members of the world’s champion Red Sox, who have been coining nickels and dimes out of their title [by] barnstorming in the east in defiance of the rule forbidding winners of world’s series to play exhibition games afterward, will find the national commission has a long memory.”32

Joe Bush, pitching for the “Red Sox” versus Hilldale, tried to use a damaged ball in the ninth inning. When that ball was thrown (literally) out of the game, he purposefully spiked a new ball, prompting Hilldale to call for a forfeit. (TRADING CARD DB)

DISCIPLINE AND AFTERMATH

Multiple news stories expressed concern about these postseason games. A widely-printed story datelined October 5 began: “Members of the championship Boston club, who, after the world’s series, engaged in a barnstorming trip under the name of ‘Red Sox,’ will be severely punished by the national commission, President Johnson of the American league declares.” The games had been played “in violation of the commission’s orders to disband at the close of the series.”33 Bush, Mayer, Schang, and Strunk were “under investigation.”34 The article also indicated that the Boston players might be deprived of the “individual emblems usually presented to the world’s series winners because of the part they played in staging the strike before the fifth game of the series.”

Detroit sportswriter Joe Jackson suggested that Red Sox owner Harry Frazee should perhaps take action himself: “He should, at the very least, be able to prohibit the use of the name of his property.” Jackson referred to the four players as “the alleged Red Sox.”35

The National Commission met in Chicago on November 16. The commission “voted to impose severe fines” on Bush, Schang, and Strunk “for playing exhibition games through the East, after the World’s Series, with a team advertised as the Boston Red Sox.”36

FINAL NOTE

Peterson’s book includes a listing of some 110 games between Black ball teams and either National or American League teams, covering 1885-1924. The games for each of the franchises are listed, with the following frequency: Philadelphia Athletics (40), New York Giants (15), Philadelphia Phillies (15), St. Louis Cardinals (9), Detroit Tigers (6), Cincinnati Reds (4), St. Louis Browns (4), Washington Nationals (4), Chicago Cubs (3), Brooklyn Superbas/Dodgers (2), Cleveland Indians (2), New York Yankees (2). Boston Red Sox (1), Chicago White Sox (1), Pittsburgh Pirates (1). Also listed are the Federal League’s Buffalo Blues, with 1 game. The only team not represented in the listing was the Boston Braves; they are, however, represented “at some point in their history” by a May 7, 1889, game against the Cuban Giants, played in Trenton, New Jersey.

One possible fly in the ointment was found after puzzling over the material at some length. On page 209, one can find a modification of Peterson’s assertion that opens this article. Rather than referring to “franchises that operated,” the listing relates instead to “organizations advertised and/or acknowledged to be intact Major League teams.” Thus, a misrepresentation by a promoter that a team was the “Boston Red Sox” when it simply had a few players who had been on that team was counted as a major-league team event.

The games listed as Cleveland Indians games were advertised as “O’Neil’s All-Stars,” presumably Steve O’Neill.37 This, of course, leads one to wonder how many of the other teams may have not truly been intact, but only advertised as such. In the case of the two New York Yankees games, for instance, the table indicates that no box scores were available. One of the games was said to have been played on November 5; how many of the 1912 team were still around? (The last-place team had played the final game on its schedule a month earlier, on October 5.) No box scores have been found for the “circa October” White Sox game either, for which no actual date has been determined.

There is, as always, more research to be done. Discovering this 1918 game which Hilldale played against the “Red Sox-ish” team did indeed lead down some interesting roads.

BILL NOWLIN still lives in the same Cambridge, Massachusetts, house he was in when he joined SABR in the last century. He’s been active both in the Boston Chapter and nationally, a member of the Board of Directors since 2004 (a good year for Red Sox fans). He has written several hundred bios and game accounts, and helped edit a good number of SABR’s books.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Todd Peterson and Neil Lanctot for comments on this article, SABR member Ed Morton, Megan E. McCall, curator of the Free Library of Philadelphia Map Collection. Thanks as well to the peer reviewers who read this article for the Baseball Research Journal.

Notes

1. Todd Peterson, The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2020), 2.

2. See, for instance, Pumpsie and Progress; The Red Sox, Race, and Redemption, ed. Bill Nowlin (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2010), and Bill Nowlin’s Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

3. In further correspondence with Todd Peterson via email during January 2021, Peterson provided details regarding “franchises that operated” during the years in question which played against Black teams. There was a pair of games between the Brooklyn Superbas on June 5 and 6, 1905, against the Cuban X-Giants and a series of six games in the second half of September in 1906 between the “home guard” Philadelphia Athletics and Brooklyn Royal Giants. After concluding a homestand on September 15, Connie Mack’s Athletics went to Chicago, but many of the regular players stayed home, including Bender, Coakley, Cross, Plank, and Seybold. This “home guard” team played a series of games in Atlantic City. On the latter, see for instance, “Has Connie Mack Given Up Hope,” Washington Evening Star, September 16, 1906: 55.

4. “Hilldale to Play the Boston Red Sox,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 14, 1918: 7.

5. The Red Sox had won the A.L. pennant and also the 1918 World Series against the Chicago Cubs, wrapping up the Series on September 11, a postseason championship season played a month earlier than usual due to the world war in progress. The Boston Red Sox had won four times in the seven years dating back to 1912. The Chicago Cubs had won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908. Partisans of neither team could have guessed that the Red Sox would not win another one for 86 years and the Cubs would endure a drought of more than 100 years, until 2016.

6. Neil Lanctot, Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910-1932 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007) 52.

7. For an overview of baseball barnstorming, see Thomas Barthel, Baseball Barnstorming and Exhibition Games, 1901-1962 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2007).

8. “‘Red Sox’ Forfeit Game to Negro Team,” Philadelphia North American, September 15, 1918. The paper noted wryly that the team had “in their line-up three players who actually represented Boston in the recent world’s series.”

9. Todd Peterson, e-mail to author, November 17, 2020.

10. “Each Sox Regular Receives $1108.45,” Boston Globe, September 13, 1918: 8.

11. “Red Sox to Play Hilldale,” Washington Herald, September 13, 1918: 9. They were called the “war champions” because the world war was still in progress. Summers had been promoting games in the region during the course of the 1918 season featuring the All-Star Internationals, described as “an aggregation that mainly is built up of former players who have had major and minor league experience.” See “Notes of the Amateurs,” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, June 29, 1918: 14.

12. “All-American Defeats Hilldale,” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, August 16, 1918: 3.

13. The only box score found was in the Record and it only provided surnames and positions. The game story provided a couple of clues as to given names of participant, e.g., Hilldale pitcher Tom Williams. Working with the Seamheads database and other sources, we feel pretty confident about the identities of all the players.

14. Listed in both the box score and game story as “Cochrall,” this is almost certainly Phil Cockrell, normally a pitcher for Hilldale.

15. Hilldale had three players named Johnson on the team. The player was likely Cecil Johnson. One was starting pitcher Daniel Spencer “Shang” Johnson. There were two infielders, both of whom are listed on Seamheads as playing third base. They were Cecil Johnson and future Hall of Famer Judy Johnson, 18 years old at the time, but not a regular on the team. Thanks to Neil Lanctot for weighing in as well with his best guess in an e-mail to author, November 29, 2020. Downs apparently replaced Johnson at some point during the game.

16. This is the way the team was listed in the Philadelphia Record box score.

17. Young played second base for the Detroit Tigers in 1918. Guesswork makes us believe that Lennox is former Federal League third baseman Ed Lennox.

18. We are not sure who Jones was. One would be tempted to guess Sam Jones, pitcher for the 1918 Red Sox, but he was not listed as one of the Red Sox players in the Tribune article, nor was he one of the Red Sox disciplined later in the year. It’s possible that another person entirely was playing under the name “Jones.”

19. “Red Sox All-Stars Win, 4 to 3,” Boston Globe, September 15, 1918: 13. The other Boston newspapers appear not to have devoted attention to the game.

20. “Patched Up Red Sox Forfeit to Hilldale,” Philadelphia Record, Septembei 15, 1918: 5. In the box score, there were no quotation marks around the name Boston Red Sox.

21. “‘Red Sox’ Forfeit Game to Negro Team.” It may be of some interest that all three (Bush, Schang, and Strunk) came to the Red Sox from Philadelphia in a trade on December 14, 1917.

22. https://www.phillytrib.com/site/about.html, accessed January 30, 2021.

23. “‘Red Sox’ Forfeit Game to Negro Team.” This was the only reference to race for either of the teams.

24. “Hilldale Holds Boston Red Sox,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 21, 1918: 7.

25. “Patched Up Red Sox Forfeit to Hilldale.”

26. “‘Red Sox’ Forfeit Game to Negro Team.”

27. “Joe Bush Loser in Close Game,” Boston Globe, September 22, 1918: 12.

28. “Bullet Joe Trims All-Star Club in Closing Contest,” Harrisburg Patriot, October 14, 1918: 7.

29. “Jackson Plays Ship Baseball,” Harrisburg Patriot, October 11, 1918: 17.

30. “Bush Shuts Out Poli’s in Hard Pitcher’s Battle,” Hartford Courant, September 23, 1918: 12.

31. “Boston Red Sox Beat Farmers in the Tenth,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 30, 1918: 14. The Brooklyn Times Union similarly referred to the team as the “Boston Red Sox with several member of other big league teams in their line-up.” See “Red Sox Go Ten Innings to Defeat the Farmers,” Brooklyn Times Union, September 30, 1918: 8.

32. I.E. Sanborn, “Comish Keeping Tab on Red Sox Who Break Rules,” Chicago Tribune, October 5,1918: 16.

33. See “National Commission to Discipline Red Sox,” Pittsburgh Press, October 5, 1918: 10 and “Slicker Red Sox Who Went Out Barnstorming Are In Bad,” San Diego Evening Tribune, October 5, 1918: 3.

34. The mention of Mayer is confusing. He was probably Wally Mayer, catcher for the Red Sox. The confusion comes from the September 21 Philadelphia Tribune article referring to “Meyer of the [Philadelphia] Athletics,” and catcher Wally Mayer was not with the Athletics, as a Philadelphia newspaper would be likely to know. The Christian Science Monitor explicitly named Walter Mayer. See “Boston Men May Be Disciplined,” Christian Science Monitor, October 7, 1918: 10. When the final discipline was meted out, it was only Bush, Schang, and Strunk who were fined. If it was Wally Mayer, we can’t explain why he was not fined as well.

35. “Jackson Plays Ship Baseball.”

36. “Penalize Red Sox Players,” Boston Post, November 17, 1918: 14, and “Strunk, Schang and Bush Disciplined,” Boston Globe, November 17, 1918: 14. The commission also reaffirmed the decision to withhold the awarding of the emblems.

37. Advertisement, Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 8, 1922: 4D.

What exactly was reversible (also sometimes referred to as “left-handed” or “ambidextrous”) baseball? Simply put, batters were given the option of running to either first or third base after putting the ball in play. Fielders were forced to take note of where the batter was going, and to adjust accordingly. If a batter chose to run to third base and reached safely, all offense in that half inning was reversed: other hitters in that frame would have to follow their teammate’s lead. For example, if the leadoff hitter singled and ran to third instead of first, the subsequent batter would need to run to third base on a single to left, and the runner might attempt to go from third to first on the play.

Though the results from the experimental contest in Berkeley garnered considerable publicity, the innovation proved divisive: Traditionalists felt reversible baseball was radical and unnecessary, while others, like Zamloch—the son of a world-famous magician and a noted vaudeville performer in his own right—argued that the new rule would add needed excitement to a game that had grown too predictable.

Whether due to its opponents or simply to inertia, reversible baseball never caught on. Still, as organized baseball struggles to re-invigorate the game in a challenging sports and entertainment marketplace, now is perhaps an opportune time to revisit the short history of Zamloch’s attempt to do exactly the same thing almost 100 years ago.

CARL ZAMLOCH: BALLPLAYER, COACH, AND MAGICIAN

Carl Eugene Zamloch was born on October 6, 1889, in Oakland, California. His father, Anton, a native Austrian, was a magician who performed throughout the western United States and by the end of the 19th century had become famous as “Zamloch the Great.”2 Carl learned sleight of hand under his father’s tutelage and sometimes performed in his act, but magic was not his only talent. He was also a pretty good ballplayer, and in 1912 won 36 games, including some for Missoula (Montana) of the Class D Union Association, pitching alongside his roommate, “Bullet Joe” Bush.3

Zamloch’s fine season led the Detroit Tigers to purchase his contract, and he broke camp with the team in 1913. His shining moment in the big leagues came on May 18, when he outpitched the great Walter Johnson but lost, 2–1, when the Nationals (aka the Senators) scratched across two unearned runs.4 Soon thereafter, he developed arm trouble and was sent to the minors—never to make it back to the majors, as it turned out.

In 1916, Zamloch was hired as the baseball coach at the University of California, winning the Pacific Coast intercollegiate baseball championship in his first year at the helm.5 After the college season ended, still interested in playing but unable to pitch regularly due to his arm woes, Zamloch joined Spokane of the Northwest League as a utility man. He flourished in his new role, putting up a .464 batting average in 56 at-bats. Over the next decade, he repeated this pattern often, leaving Berkeley once the collegiate schedule was completed and catching on with such minor league clubs as San Francisco and Seattle in the Pacific Coast League and Calgary in the Class B Western International League. His final stop as a regular player was in 1926 as player-manager with Twin Falls of the Class C Utah-Idaho League, where he batted .391 and was awarded a shotgun as the league’s Most Valuable Player.6 All told, Zamloch batted .316 for his career in over 1,600 at-bats.

In addition to his baseball pursuits, Zamloch had his own offseason vaudeville act.7 Occasionally, he combined his two interests: In a September 1919 Pacific Coast League contest, he delighted fans and players alike by performing magic. “Before he went in as a pinch-hitter, Carl Zamloch pulled one of his sleight of hand stunts by yanking a yard or more of hot dogs out of the shirt of [pitcher] Cy Falkenberg. Zamloch pretended that he was searching Cy for emory or sandpaper and Cy rather resented being pawed over, but he had to laugh when Zamloch finished his trick.”8

As the son of a showman, Zamloch had traveled extensively as a boy. As a coach, he saw many benefits of combining baseball with travel, both for his players and for the game itself. Throughout the 1920s, he organized summertime barnstorming tours of Hawaii and Japan for the Cal squad, as well as exhibition games in Berkeley against visiting Japanese teams.9 These tours to Japan fed the growing popularity of baseball there.

In 1927, Zamloch organized the new California Intercollegiate Baseball Association, initially consisting of Cal, Stanford, St. Mary’s, and Santa Clara. UCLA and other California schools would join later.10 It was Zamloch’s belief that college baseball needed a stronger organization and that focusing on intercollegiate competition would increase its popularity. His efforts proved lasting: the CIBA was the governing structure for conference play until the Pac-8 conference was created in 1967.

THE BIRTH OF REVERSIBLE BASEBALL

But helping the game grow internationally and strengthening the conference were just two of Zamloch’s ideas to expand baseball’s popularity. In early 1928, he announced his intention to employ reversible baseball in exhibition contests in the coming season. In Zamloch’s view, reversible baseball had several selling points:

1. More excitement for fans. “Baseball has not increased in popularity in comparison with our population. Football has made wonderful strides. I think that is partially because the fans cannot anticipate the play. In baseball we all know that when a man singles…he is going to first base. If we mix that procedure up a bit it ought to increase the interest.”12
2. Rewarding players for braininess. “By allowing a batsman to run either to first or third base, it makes for strategy and teaches the players to think.”13
3. Eliminating the advantage of batting left: “The way the game is played now, a right-handed batter is penalized for being a right-hander. He stands on the other side of the plate from first base. Then after hitting the ball his swing carries him a bit farther away from his destination—first base.… What is the result? A left-handed batter has every advantage on his side.”14

Zamloch initially hoped to use reversible baseball rules in the Bears’ annual early-season contest against the Pacific Coast League’s Oakland Oaks, but Oaks manager Del Howard wasn’t having any of it. “If these college boys want to play baseball with us we’ll entertain ’em, but if they want to play some funny game invented by Coach Zamloch, then that is something else again,” said Howard. “How do I know what they may do after running from the plate to third instead of first? Maybe the next rule calls for skipping second base, taking a cup of tea or reading a book or something. …I’m certainly not going to let the Oaks play left handed baseball.”15

Undeterred, Zamloch secured an agreement with the aforementioned Ambrose Tailors to play an exhibition using reversible rules. In the days leading up to the game, Bay Area newspapers and the wire services devoted considerable ink to the upcoming contest. Interest was high: Among the curious fans and media representatives who attended were former major leaguer Bill Rodgers, by then the manager of Little Rock in the Southern Association; Pittsburgh Pirates scout Joe Devine; and St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Taylor Douthit, whose brother Rolly patrolled center field for the Bears.16

Spectators were rewarded with an afternoon that the Oakland Tribune described as “an uproarious success in more ways than one,” and they didn’t have long to wait.17 In the bottom of the first, Cal catcher Walter Wyatt walked, went to third base rather than first; then stole second. Pitcher Gus Nemecheck came to the plate and promptly knocked the ball out of the park, “but from force of habit he started trotting toward first when the ball was hit and [he] was declared out just as the sphere sailed over the fence.”18 As noted in the Berkeley Gazette, Nemecheck thereby “won the honor of being the first person in baseball history to knock out a home run that wasn’t even a hit.”19

The Bears did not have a monopoly on reversible-induced misplays. “Three times during the game, [Tailors’ third baseman] Bill Marriott, former Oak and third sacker for Boston, was caught napping and runners were safe at third when Marriott started to throw the ball to first.”20

Other highlights noted in the Oakland Tribune’s account of the contest included watching the Tailors’ infielders attempt a “reversible double play” (second to third, presumably) and the reactions of passers-by “when they saw men being run from first to home.”21

Cal built a 9–4 lead through seven innings before the clubs agreed to revert to traditional rules. The Bears quickly blew their lead, falling behind, 10–9, before rallying in the bottom of the ninth to score two on a Rolly Douthit double for a walk-off 11–10 victory.

Both United Press International and the Associated Press carried short accounts of the contest that were picked up by newspapers nationwide, and pundits continued to debate reversible baseball’s merits for weeks afterward. Reviews reflected a wide range of opinion. The Los Angeles Evening Express opined that “Zamloch’s left-handed game would add an element of surprise, hidden thrill, genuine deception to a game that is now just one, two, three—you’re out.”22 The Oakland Tribune noted that “the change makes players use their heads as well as their arms and legs and calls for new techniques.”23 Former New York Giants star George Van Haltren, who had finished his career as player-manager for the Oaks from 1905 to ’09, was also a fan. “Reversible base-running would put more [suspense] into the diamond sport.”24

For every observer who found the change intriguing, however, there was another who thought it was a terrible idea. From the San Francisco Examiner: “The effort of Coach Zamloch… to make boarding-house hash out of the baseball rules, proved just the success that was expected. It succeeded in making a farce of the game. …Baseball has been getting along fairly well for quite a few years, thank you. Let’s confine “new ideas” to ping-pong or something like that.”25 The San Francisco Chronicle’s Harry B. Smith noted the confusion caused by the new rules and admitted, “I confess I cannot see where the pastime will gain from the new order.”26 Succinctly summing up the feelings of opponents, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stated: “Baseball has done well as it is. Let it stay the way it is.”27

While the idea of reversible baseball continued to generate occasional commentary from pundits in 1928, what it didn’t generate were actual games played under its rules. Contemporary press accounts noted that subsequent Cal exhibition games in February and March 1928 would use traditional rather than reversible rules, but provided few clues as to why. The most likely explanation is that Zamloch had difficulty getting agreement from opponents to play under different rules. By the 1920s baseball was already a sport steeped in its own tradition, and change didn’t come easily.

The last extensive discussion of reversible baseball in print appeared in April 1928 in a syndicated opinion piece authored by Detroit Tigers manager George Moriarty, a former teammate of Zamloch’s on the 1913 Tigers.28 Moriarty’s review of reversible baseball was more balanced than most, noting what he saw as some of the pros and cons of such a rule change. Interestingly, Moriarty credited Kid Elberfeld, shortstop for New York during the early days of the American League, for having come up with the idea of reversible baseball in 1906, although Moriarty noted that it was never tried.

AFTER REVERSIBLE BASEBALL

While Zamloch had abandoned the idea of reversible baseball by 1929, it is worth noting that he continued to promote innovation. An exhibition that spring against alumni featured what may have been the first ever field trial of “10-man baseball,”29 a rule change promoted by National League president John Heydler at the 1928 winter meetings that would add offense to the game by allowing another player to occupy the pitcher’s spot in the batting order. The idea would ultimately be adopted 44 years later by the American League and called the designated-hitter rule.30

Zamloch embarked on the final chapter of his baseball life late in 1930, when he became co-owner and field manager of the Oakland Oaks. After three mediocre seasons, he was fired. He eventually moved into the executive ranks for an oil company while also continuing to perform his magic act. His viewpoint that baseball needed to evolve never changed: In an interview in 1960, three years before his death, he said that games were too long. “I can remember when an average game never went more than an hour and a half. Many of them were faster. I hear lots of fans complaining,” Zamloch said. “Even if the answer is to shorten the game to seven innings, baseball has to do something about it.”31

Increasing offense, improving competition, promoting the sport internationally, shortening games. Zamloch was an early adopter of several ideas that have since gained ground with the baseball establishment as ways of enlivening the sport. As organized baseball debates potential rule changes to increase fan interest, maybe the powers that be should dust off his most radical proposal: reversible baseball.

A graduate of UC Berkeley, DAN SCHOENHOLZ is pleased to share the Berkeley-based story of Reversible Baseball with fans and researchers. Though this is his first BRJ publication, his baseball-themed poetry and fiction have appeared in Aethlon, the Journal of Sport Literature; his accounts of baseball roadtrips have appeared in the San Jose Mercury News; and his crossword puzzles, often peppered with baseball-related entries, have appeared in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. When not rooting on his beloved Oakland A’s, Dan serves as Community Development Director for the City of Fremont, California.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank John Cronin for his review and helpful comments on an early version of this article.

Notes

1. “Zamloch Wins ‘Goofy’ Ball Contest,” Oakland Tribune, February 16, 1928.
2. “Magician’s Bees Replace Black Art,” Oakland Tribune, April 3, 1927.
3. “California’s Coaches 2 Carl Zamloch,” Oakland Tribune, March 21, 1926. Bush went directly from Missoula to the major leagues, where he won almost 200 games in a 17-year career that included stints with the Philadelphia Athletics, Boston Red Sox, and New York Yankees. See also Kim Briggeman, “Missoula, ‘’Bullet Joe’ and Baseball History,” The Missoulian, October 23, 2008.
4. “Walter Johnson Wins 9th Straight from Detroit,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 1913.
5. “Carl Zamloch will Coach C.,” Oakland Tribune, February 10, 1916.
6. “Zamloch Named Best Utah-Idaho Player,” San Francisco Examiner, September 2, He also had a handful of pinch-hit at-bats while serving as player-manager of the Oakland Oaks.
7. “Zamloch on Stage as Vaudeville Star; Has Quit Baseball,” Great Falls Tribune, December 19, 1919.
8. “Notes About Players,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 1919.
9. The Bears traveled to Japan for exhibitions in 1921, 1927, and 1929 and to Hawaii in in 1923 and 1926. A visiting Japanese squad stopped in Berkeley for a pair of exhibition games in 1928. See, for example, “U.C. Ball Team Is Off on Trip to the Islands,” Oakland Tribune, June 21, 1923.
10. “California Colleges Prepare for Eight Club Ball League,” Oakland Tribune, October 5, 1926.
11. “Brief History of California Golden Bears Baseball,” Cal Baseball Foundation, https://calbaseballfoundation.org/team/cal-baseball.
12. “Sports by Harry Smith,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 15, 1928.
13. “New Baseball Game is Given Test by Bears,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1928.
14. “Players Test Backward Baseball,” San Bernardino County Sun, March 4, 1928.
15. “Outgoing Mail from Bob Shand,” Oakland Tribune, February 2, 1928.
16. “Notables See Bears Win New Ball Game,” Berkeley Gazette, February 16, 1928.
17. “Zamloch Wins ‘Goofy’ Ball Contest,” Oakland Tribune, February 16, 1928.
18. “Zamloch Wins ‘Goofy’ Ball.”
19. “Notables See Bears Win New Ball.”
20. “Zamloch Wins ‘Goofy’ Ball.”
21. “Zamloch Wins ‘Goofy’ Ball.”
22. “The Inside Track with Sid Ziff,” Los Angeles Evening Express, February 21, 1928.
23. “Zamloch Idea Adds Zest to Game,” Oakland Tribune, February 21, 1928.
24. “Players Test Backward Baseball.”
25. “2nd Guess,” San Francisco Examiner, February 17, 1928.
26. “Sports by Harry Smith,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 1928.
27. “Sports of All Sorts,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 22, 1928
28. George Moriarty, “Reversible Baseball Drawing Serious, Humorous Comment,” Lincoln Journal Star, April 20, 1928.
29. “Webb Alumni Play Bears in 4 to 4 Contest,” Oakland Tribune, February 7, 1929.
30. John Cronin, “The Historical Evolution of the Designated Hitter,” SABR Baseball Research Journal 46 No.2 (2016).
31. “Marathon Dodger Games Irk Fans,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1960.

Various terms, such as the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball (used by Baseball-Reference.com) or the Pythagorean Expectation (used in the Wikipedia article), have been used to describe the formula developed by Bill James in his Baseball Abstract annual volumes to predict the number of games a team “should” have won in a season based on the numbers of runs scored and runs allowed. The formula used currently by Base- ball Reference may be expressed as:

WP=1/{1 + (OR/R)1.83  }

where WP is the predicted winning proportion (i.e., wins divided by the sum of wins and losses), OR is opponents’ runs, and R is runs.

While Pythagorean predictions are shown widely, including on the Baseball Reference website and in the sabermetric literature, I have never come across an illustration showing how OR/R and WP are related, including quantifying the relationship of a change in R/OR with a change in predicted WP. In this regard, successive increases of 0.1 in R/OR starting from 1.0 are associated with declining increases in WP. For example, as R/OR increases from 1.0 to 1.1, predicted WP increases from .500 to .543, or by .043; and as R/OR increases from 1.7 to 1.8, predicted WP increases from .725 to .746, or by .021. The relationship between R/OR and actual and predicted WP is shown in Table 1, comparing modeled values of R/OR ranging from 1.0 to 1.8 and actual values of R/OR for pennant- winning teams ranging from about 1.0 to about 1.8. An R/OR value of 0.6 is included also to provide an example of how the formula applies to a very weak team.

In most cases shown in Table 1, the Pythagorean prediction of WP is very close to the actual winning proportion, and by extension, the Pythagorean prediction of team wins is usually very close (perhaps within three) to actual team wins. There are occasional outliers, illustrated here by Cincinnati in 1961, which won 10 more games than its Pythagorean prediction. Even though the Pythagorean predictions are usually highly accurate, the closeness of many pennant races, with the winning margin often being no more than three games, means that there have been many pennant races in which the actual winner and the Pythagorean winner have been different. In addition, outliers like that Cincinnati team add to the number of cases where the actual and Pythagorean winners have differed. And lastly, the introduction of division play in 1969, with postseason playoffs to determine pennant winners, has decreased greatly the probability of the Pythagorean pennant winner being the actual pennant winner.

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OVERVIEW OF ACTUAL AND PYTHAGOREAN PENNANT WINNERS

The actual and Pythagorean pennant winners for each season in the National and American Leagues from 1901 to 2020 are shown in Table 2. Calculations of Pythagorean won-lost records were rounded to whole numbers of wins and losses (reflecting the fact that actual won-lost records do not have fractions), and thus there are a few cases with ties for the Pythagorean pennant winner. From 1901 to 1968, before the introduction of division play, the actual pennant winner was also the Pythagorean pennant winner in the large majority of seasons.

A few notable differences in the history of actual and Pythagorean pennant winners are noted here. The Chicago Cubs won four pennants in five years from 1906 to 1910, and won the Pythagorean pennant in 1909, even though the great Pittsburgh Pirates team (110–42) won that actual pennant. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who won six pennants in the 10 years from 1947 to 1956, won six Pythagorean pennants in that decade, including five consecutive ones from 1949 to 1953. The Milwaukee Braves, who won pennants in 1957 and 1958, won four consecutive Pythagorean pennants from 1956 to 1959. And the Cincinnati Reds, who won one actual pennant in the 1960s (1961) won two subsequent Pythagorean pennants (1964 and 1965).

In the American League, the Cleveland Indians, who did not win an actual pennant until 1920, won three Pythagorean pennants in five years: 1904, 1906, and 1908. Three of their great players during those years, Hall of Famers Nap Lajoie, Addie Joss, and Elmer Flick, never played in a World Series. The Detroit Tigers, who won three consecutive pennants from 1907 to 1909, won the Pythagorean pennant in only the first of these three years. The Boston Red Sox won the pennant in 1915 and 1916, but the Chicago White Sox won the Pythagorean pennant in both seasons. Thus Boston won only two Pythagorean pennants from 1912 to 1918 (compared with four actual pennants), and Chicago won four Pythagorean pennants from 1915 to 1919 (compared with only two actual pennants). The St. Louis Browns, who won their only actual pennant in 1944, won the 1922 Pythagorean pennant with the best team in their history, led by Hall of Famer George Sisler, who also never got to play in a World Series.

The New York Yankees and Philadelphia Athletics, loaded with Hall of Fame players, dominated the American League from 1926 to 1931, with three pennants for the Yankees followed by three pennants for the Athletics. The Pythagorean pennant winners for those six years present a different picture: Cleveland (1926), New York (1927), Philadelphia (1928 and 1929), Washington (1930), and New York again (1931). The Yankees dominated the American League with 14 pennants in the 16 years from 1949 to 1964, but won “only” 11 Pythagorean pennants during those 16 years, with Boston (1949) and Chicago (1960 and 1964) also winning Pythagorean pennants.

From 1901 to 1968, there were 136 total seasons of National and American League play. These included 104 seasons in which the actual pennant winner was also the Pythagorean pennant winner, two seasons with a tie for the Pythagorean pennant, and 30 seasons (22 percent) in which the Pythagorean winner differed from the actual winner.

As noted earlier, the introduction of division play and postseason playoffs starting in 1969 changed things dramatically. From 1969 to 1993, with two divisions per league (East and West), there was one tier of playoffs to determine pennant winners. Since 1995, with three divisions per league (East, Central, and West), there have been two tiers of playoffs. (There was no postseason in 1994.) And since 2012, there has been a wild-card game before the two tiers of playoffs to determine pennant winners. In contrast to the 1901 to 1968 period, when the Pythagorean winner was also the actual winner a large majority of the time, since 1969 the Pythagorean winner has had to survive an increasing number of short postseason series to be the actual winner as well.

As a result, there are fewer cases of repeat winners since 1969, with only three cases of a team winning three consecutive actual pennants and Pythagorean pennants, all in the American League: Baltimore, 1969 to 1971; New York, 1976 to 1978; and Oakland, 1988 to 1990. Among the many cases of teams winning the Pythagorean pennant, but not the actual pennant, are the Chicago Cubs (1969 and 1970) and the Seattle Mariners (2001 and 2003). As a result Hall of Famers Ernie Banks and Edgar Martinez, and likely future Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki never had the opportunity to play in a World Series.

(Click image to enlarge)

During the 1969 to 1993 period, there were 50 total seasons of National and American League play. These included 28 seasons in which the actual pennant winner was also the Pythagorean pennant winner, three seasons with a tie for the Pythagorean pennant, and 19 seasons (38 percent) in which the Pythagorean winner differed from the actual winner. From 1995 to 2020, there were 52 total seasons of play. These included 19 seasons in which the actual winner was also the Pythagorean winner, five seasons with a tie for the Pythagorean pennant, and 28 seasons (54 percent) in which the Pythagorean winner differed from the actual winner. Thus seasons in which the Pythagorean winner differed from the actual winner increased from 22 percent before divisional play to 38 percent when there were two divisions and to 54 percent in the cur- rent three-division-plus-wild-card period.

LARGEST DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ACTUAL AND PYTHAGOREAN PENNANT WINNERS

The most interesting seasons in my opinion are those in which there was the greatest total change in the won-loss records of the actual and the Pythagorean pennant winners, the leading case being the 1970 National League. Chicago won the Pythagorean pennant by three games over Cincinnati (94–68 versus 91–71). Cincinnati, which won the postseason playoff to win the pennant, had a 102–60 record compared with 84–78 for Chicago. Thus there is a 21-game difference in the actual and Pythagorean won-loss records of these two teams.

The second largest change involves the great Philadelphia Athletics team of 1931, with a 107–45 won- lost record (and a winning average of .704), which won the pennant by 13.5 games. They outperformed their Pythagorean prediction by 10 games while the New York Yankees, the Pythagorean pennant winner, underperformed by six games.

Data for the 12 seasons with a total change of 10 or more games in going from the Pythagorean pennant winner to the actual pennant winner are shown in Table 3. Seasons with a tie for the Pythagorean pennant are excluded. As in Table 2, the actual pennant winner is listed first; however, the data shown in Table 3 start with the R/OR ratio and the corresponding Pythagorean won-lost record, then show the actual won-lost record to show how the season evolved compared with the Pythagorean prediction. Data are shown also on the team’s actual record in one-run games and extra-inning games, which may shed light on the change from predicted to actual performance.

It should be noted that with postseason playoffs starting in 1969, the actual pennant winner may have been outclassed in both its actual and Pythagorean won-lost records. One example of this is the 1987 American League season, when Minnesota, a very average team during the season (R/OR=0.98) won the American League pennant in postseason play. Toronto had a much better Pythagorean won-lost record than Minnesota (100–62 versus 79–83), and both Detroit (98–64) and Toronto (96–66) had much better actual won-lost records than did Minnesota (85–77).

What accounts for the large changes shown in Table 3? Not surprisingly, teams that had a better actual won-lost record tended to do well in one-run games, and teams that had a better Pythagorean record tended not to do as well in such contests. (Data shown on extra-inning games are not discussed here because such records are subject to more random variation due to being fewer in number.) In the first season in the table, 1970 in the National League, the differences were pronounced. Cincinnati had a 27–15 record in one-run games (12 games over .500), while Chicago had a 17–21 record (four games below .500). Among the 12 seasons shown in Table 3, the differences ranged from pronounced to no appreciable difference. An ex- ample of the latter is provided by the 1987 American League season discussed above. The won-lost records in one-run games were nearly identical for Minnesota (24–22) and Toronto (27–24).

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It would be expected that differences in performance in games decided by more than one run also could account for some of the differences noted between actual and Pythagorean records. In this regard, data on games by margin of victory are shown below for Cincinnati and Chicago in 1970. Not only did Cincinnati do better in one-run games than Chicago (27–15 versus 17–21), but also in two-run games (22–9 versus 9–19), three-run games (17–10 versus 15–12), four-run games (14–5 versus 10–9), and five-run games (8–1 versus 7–8). Chicago did better only in games decided by six or more runs (26–9 versus 14–20). Among games decided by five or fewer runs (the large majority of games), the won-lost records were 88–40 for Cincinnati and 58–69 for Chicago. Cincinnati’s nickname—the Big Red Machine—gained prominence in 1970 when the team won 70 of its first 100 games. Perhaps “winner of close games” would have been more accurate, since Chicago scored more runs during the season than Cincinnati (806 versus 775).

LUCK AND SKILL

There has been a lot of research in recent decades on the role of luck in how well a team performs over the course of a season. The Baseball Reference website, in its tables showing detailed standings by season, includes each team’s actual and Pythagorean records and labels the difference between them as “luck,” and quantifies it as actual games won minus Pythagorean games won. Bill James, in his 2004 article “Underestimating the Fog” (BRJ, Vol. 33, pages 29–33) said that with regard to the assertion that winning or losing close games is luck: “it would be my opinion that it is probably not all luck,” suggesting that it was mostly luck. Examples of research focused on the role of luck over the course of a season include Phil Birnbaum in his 2005 article, “Which Great Teams Were Just Lucky?” and Pete Palmer in his 2017 article, “Calculating Skill and Luck in Major League Baseball.”1

Both Birnbaum and Palmer stress the fact that, for an average team with an 81–81 record, one standard deviation corresponds to 6.36 wins, calculated as the square root of (162 x .5 x .5). Rounding one standard deviation to the nearest whole number (six) means that an average team’s record would range from about 75–87 to about 87–75 about 68 percent of the time (reflecting the proportion of the area under a bell-shaped curve within one standard deviation of the mean). Two standard deviations correspond to 12.72 wins. Rounding two standard deviations to the nearest whole number (13) means that an average team’s record would range from about 68–94 to about 94–68 about 95 percent of the time (reflecting the proportion of the area under a bell-shaped curve within two standard deviations of the mean). Thus about five percent of the time, an average team’s record for a season would be 94–68 or even better, or 68–94 or even worse! (These results are identical to those for the results of flipping a fair coin 162 times, expressed as the numbers of heads and tails.) 

While a team with an 87–75 record might have been viewed traditionally as slightly above average and a team with a 94–68 record might have been viewed traditionally as a good team, the reality is not so simple because random variation plays a major role in a team’s performance for a season. For example, a comparison of two teams, one with a 100–62 won-lost record and the other with a 90–72 record yields the following. Their standard deviations in wins are 6.19 and 6.32, respectively. The standard error of the difference between these two values, calculated as the square root of (6.19 squared +6.32 squared) is 8.85. The difference in wins between the two teams (10) divided by the standard error of the difference (8.85) is about 1.13, frequently referred to as the z-score. A z-score of 1 or more means that there is a 68 percent chance that the 100-win team is actually better than the 90-win team. A z-score of 1.13 corresponds to a 74 percent chance. A z-score of 2.0 would correspond to a 95 percent chance that the 100-win team is better. It is a matter of judgment what z-score value is used and depends how much the researcher wants to avoid concluding that the 100-win team is truly superior when this is not the case. However, it is most prudent (as in the case of most medical research) to use the more rigorous standard: a z-score of 2.0 or more corresponding to a 95-percent-plus confidence level before concluding that the difference in records was not due entirely to luck.

It has seldom been the case that the actual and Pythagorean pennant winners differed in wins by nine or more (corresponding generally to one standard deviation or more) and never by as much as 18 or more (two standard deviations or more). The largest difference was in the 1987 American League when, as discussed earlier, the difference between Minnesota’s actual pennant-winning record and Toronto’s Pythagorean pennant-winning record was 15 wins. It may be noted that it is also extremely rare that the “best team” (not necessarily the actual or Pythagorean pennant winner) in a season can be determined. This is because a season (with “only” 162 games) does not provide a large enough sample size to conclude that a team is the best team in its league unless it wins 18 or more games than any of its opponents.

It should be stressed, however, that the Pythagorean pennant winners are the result of a statistical model. A team’s record is determined by the aggregate performance of its players (batting, base running, fielding, and pitching). But this is a two-stage process. Player performance determines, subject to some variation, the numbers of runs scored and runs allowed by the team, which in turn determines the team’s won-lost record. In each of these two phases, a team can under-perform, perform as predicted, or over- perform. All the calculations above, starting with the 6.36 standard error for an average team’s won-lost record, reflect these two phases. The Pythagorean pennant winners are predicted with a model that starts with the team’s numbers of runs scored and runs allowed, thus excluding the variation inherent in an actual baseball season. Thus it may be the case that standard errors calculated for Pythagorean pennant winners should be different (and somewhat lower) than for actual pennant winners. It is my guess that it would still be the case that only a small proportion of the seasons with different actual and Pythagorean pennant winners would differ by one standard deviation or more in their records and that seasons with differences of two standard deviations or more would be extremely rare (perhaps just the 1987 American League).

SUMMARY

The purpose of this paper has been to provide a general comparison of actual pennant winners and Pythagorean pennant winners for the National and American Leagues from 1901 to 2020. From 1901 to 1968, before the introduction of postseason play to determine pennant winners, the actual and Pythagorean pennant winners differed only 22 percent of the time in 136 seasons of play. The corresponding figure for the 50 seasons of play in the 1969 to 1993 period, with one round of playoffs to determine pennant winners, was 38 percent. For the 1995 to 2020 period, with two or more rounds of playoffs to determine pennant winners, the corresponding figure for the 52 seasons of play was 54 percent. There have been 12 seasons with different actual and Pythagorean pennant winners in which the total change in actual and Pythagorean won-lost records was 10 or more games. The most extreme case was in the National League in 1970 when Chicago won the Pythagorean pennant by 3 games over Cincinnati, but Cincinnati actually won 18 more games than Chicago did, a net change of 21 games. Finally, it appears that for all or virtually all seasons in which the actual and Pythagorean pennant winners differed, the differences between the two teams’ won- lost records fell within the range of sampling error on their won-lost records (using a 95-percent confidence level) and thus could be attributed to luck.

CAMPBELL GIBSON, PhD, is a retired Census Bureau demographer, with interests in baseball ranging from biography to statistical analysis. His first article in the Baseball Research Journal was “Simon Nicholls: Gentleman, Farmer, Ballplayer” published in Vol. 18 (1989). His article “WAA vs. WAR: Which is the Better Measure for Overall Performance in MLB, Wins Above Average or Wins Above Replacement?” was published in Vol. 48, No. 2 (2019).

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Phil Birnbaum, “Which Great Teams Were Just Lucky?” Baseball Research Journal, Volume 34 (2005): 60–68; Pete Palmer, “Calculating Skill and Luck in Major League Baseball,” Baseball Research Journal, Volume 46, 1 (2017): 56–60).

Biomechanical analysis in sports has been used for more than 140 years, including Eadweard Muybridge’s work in 1879. Muybridge created the Zoopraxiscope to analyze motion through photographs and motion pictures (Muybridge E 1882, Muybridge E. 1891, Rondinella L.F. et al.,1929). For the past 50 years, baseball coaches have used biomechanical analysis from movies of the baseball pitch to help improve pitcher performance (Bethel, 1967; Hulen, 1966; Petroff et al., 1966). High speed photography, stroboscopic photography and high-speed video cameras have been used to analyze pitching mechanics for over 40 years (Atwater, 1977; Elliott et. al, 1986; Escamilla et al., 2001; Hang et al., 1979; Pappas et al., 1985, Thurston,1984). High-speed cameras and the use of retroreflective markers worn on the major joints on the body for the baseball pitcher have been used to analyze baseball pitching for over 25 years to the present (Dillman et al., 1993; Escamilla et al., 2002; Escamilla et al., 2017; Fleisig et al., 1999, Solomito et al., 2017).

Over the past 10 years there have been several research studies that have utilized wearable sensors on the arm involving gyroscopes, accelerometers, and/or magnetometers to identify torque and other upper extremity biomechanical parameters related to baseball pitching (Camp et al., 2017; Koda et al, 2010; Makhni et al, 2018; McGinnis et al, 2012; Murray et al, 2017; Sagawa et. al, 2009). Objective testing that truly evaluates baseball ability is welcomed by professional, college, and high school coaches. Pertinent research findings and their practical applications are needed for coaches and players to help improve pitching ability (Reiff et al., 1971).

However, these sensors have only been utilized on the upper extremity and there are limitations to fixation, comfort, and practicality in the field. Coaches and analysts have requested more research advocating improved ease of use, and improved error compensation and analysis procedures to provide informative, concise, and easy-to-interpret metrics (Camomilla et al., 2018).

The XSens wearable full body motion analysis suit has been shown to reliably biomechanically analyze rehabilitation exercises, activities of daily living including walking and stair ambulation, as well as activities such as skiing and snowboarding (Karatsidis et al;, 2019; Konrath et al., 2019; Kruger et al., 2009; Slaipah et al., 2014; Supej et al., 2010). The Xsens inertial measurement suit is an acceptable unit to measure physical demand in workplace assessments such as complex lifting tasks (Poitras et al., 2019).

To date there are no known research papers that have analyzed the baseball pitch using a full body motion analysis suit such as the Xsens for kinematic analysis. This paper has two purposes: First, to present the procedures for a successful application of biomechanical motion analysis of baseball pitching utilizing a wearable sensor body suit. Second, to provide a descriptive analysis of the center-of-mass position of the pitcher’s body as related to the lead foot placement and pitching accuracy.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Participant
The volunteer participant was a male pitcher (Age 20; Height 1.96 m; Weight 102.1 kg; Throwing Arm; Right) from an NCAA Division III varsity baseball team. The research procedures were reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board. The participant was provided an overview of the procedures and provided written informed consent.

PROCEDURES

Set-up
A pitching mound, home plate, pitching target, and batting dummy were set-up in an indoor gymnasium at Eastern Connecticut State University. The distance of the pitching rubber to the back of home plate was placed at the NCAA regulation distance of 60 feet 6 inches (18.44 meters) from each other (Paronto and Woodward, NCAA, 2014). The participant threw from an indoor wooden pitching mound built to regulation height (10 inches/25.4 centimeters) with a gradual slope of 1 inch per foot (0.0254 centimeter per 30.48 centimeters) from a point 15.24 centimeters (6 inches) in front of the pitching rubber (all dimensions based upon NCAA regulations, see Paranto, NCAA).

A target area was designated on the canvas backstop to simulate the strike zone for a 1.75 meter (5-foot 9-inch) tall batter. The pitching target was placed behind home plate and measured 1.52 meters in height by 1.40 meters in width (Muhl Tech Pitching Target, MulTech, Wharton, Texas. See Figure 1).

Figure 1. Example images of pitching accuracy measurements. (Left) Example of a strike while throwing at the Lower Left Quadrant (LLQ). (Right) Example of a ball while throwing at the Right Upper Quadrant (RUQ). The baseball is outlined in for emphasis. Computer generated grid squares are 2″ x 2″.

A level and tape measures were utilized to ensure proper placement of the pitching target. The Designated Hitter Pro Model dummy (TAC Companies LLC, National Harbor, MD) was used to provide a more realistic pitching environment. The target area was subdivided into four equal quadrants of the strike zone. The quadrants were designated as Left Upper Quadrant (LUQ), Left Lower Quadrant (LLQ), Right Upper Quadrant (RUQ), and Right Lower Quadrant (RLQ). The pitching target area was 40.64 centimeters (16 inches) tall by 55.88 centimeters wide (22 inches) and each isolated quadrant area was 20.32 centimeters tall (8 inches) by 27.94 centimeters wide (11 inches). A 3-inch diameter circular white target was placed in the center of each quadrant, LUQ, LLQ, RUQ, RLQ. During the trials, only one of the quadrants was visible to the subject. The goal of the participant was to hit the center of the target in each quadrant.

Motion Analysis

The kinematic analysis of the body and center of mass of the subject was measured using an instrumented body suit (MVN Biomechanical Body Suit, Xsens Technologies, Enschede, Netherlands) containing 17 inertial measurement units. The sensors along with the measurements of the various limb segments created the 3-D body model.

The subject wore the Lycra body suit, with pockets allowing placement of the motion tracking sensors in the correct position on the subject’s body and to hold the data logger and battery pack. A headband, gloves, and foot pads were used to secure the motion trackers to the subject’s extremities. The gloves did not affect the ability of the subject to pitch normally. The sensor goes on the back side of the hand, not the palm or the fingers. According to feedback from the participants, the sensor did not affect the performance of throwing. The data from each sensor were recorded at 120 Hz and processed using the Xsens MVN Studio-Pro software package.

After the suit was put on, and the sensors, battery pack, and data logger secured in position, measurements were taken of the body height, shoe length, arm span, ankle height, hip height, hip width, knee height, shoulder width, shoulder height, and shoe sole height. These anthropometric measurements were taken as per XSens standardized protocol. A single-unit battery pack contains 3 Lithium Ion rechargeable cells, and when fully charged, the suit can be operational for continuous recording Z for up to 10 hours. The weight of the battery was 20.74 ounces or 1.3 lbs and placed on the posterior mid-thoracic region of the participant which had very minimal effect on the participant’s center of I gravity and throwing mechanics.

Prior to event recording, a complete and successful calibration phase was performed, following the Xsens calibration procedure. Connection between the recording laptop and Xsens hardware was done with the standard Bluetooth receivers provided with the Xsens system. Real time monitoring of the motion capture was also performed.

The biomechanical model consisted of 23 segments from the 17 sensors which created the accurate 3-D model for each individual participant. The sensors were translated to body segment kinematics using a biomechanical model which assumes the subject’s body includes body segments lined by joints. The Xsens system calculates the position, velocity, acceleration, orientation, angular velocity, and angular acceleration of each body segment and the center of gravity (COG). For each test trial, real-time standard video capture was also recorded at 29.97 frames per second at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (Canon, EOS 7, Japan) and placement of cards that indicated quadrant and pitch number were utilized for both the high-speed camera and the standard video camera.

A midline was defined as the center of the pitching rubber to the center of home plate. MATLAB software was used to better visualize the location of the lateral distance of the center of mass related to the lead foot placement and midline.

Speed and Accuracy Measurements

A standardized and recently calibrated Stalker Sport 2 radar gun (Applied Concepts, Inc./Stalker Radar, Richardson, Texas) was used to assess pitch speed. The radar gun was placed 2.44 meters behind and 10 degrees to the right of the participant.

A high-speed camera (240 frames/sec) at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (Sony, NEX SF700, Japan) was utilized to assess accuracy, and the x-, y-position of the ball was analyzed for each pitch relative to the center of the target and the resultant distance was calculated. The high-speed camera was placed orthogonal to the strike zone target and recorded the location of the ball when it hit the target. The camera was placed behind (1.54 meters) and 10 degrees to the left of the pitching subject. Still images of the moment of impact between the baseball and the strike zone target were taken from the high-speed camera and imported into a computer program (Adobe Illustrator, Version 23.0.3, Adobe, San Jose, California) where a 2-inch grid was placed over the strike zone target area (See Figure 1).

The grid was placed over the target area and verified by comparing the grid to physical measurements taken of the strike zone target area. Only the three most accurate and least accurate pitches were analyzed. Accuracy was determined as the resultant distance to the designated quadrant in the strike zone.

Pitching Protocol

Prior to data collection, the subject completed a 15-minute standardized warm-up throwing procedure that he typically performed before throwing off a mound. Prior to data capture, the participant pitcher threw 3 warm-up fast balls from the indoor mound into target number 1 right upper quadrant (RUQ). The participant then threw 10 times with the goal to hit the target in the center of the quadrant. The instructions were given for the participant to throw as fast and as accurately as he could perform with emphasis on accuracy. This was followed by the same procedure for each of the other three quadrants: Left Upper Quadrant (LUQ), Left Lower Quadrant (LLQ) and Right Lower Quadrant (RLQ). All pitches were performed from the stretch position to standardize the position of the body for each trial, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Subject in stretch position wearing the Lycra body suit and Xsens sensors.

The subject performed at least 40 pitches into the canvas backstop target, 10 pitches for each of the 4 quadrants. For each test trial, the subject was instructed to throw consecutively at one of the four defined quadrants. Pitches that completely missed the canvas backstop or hit the dummy batter did not count toward the 40-pitch total.

In addition to starting all throws from the stretch position, the participant aligned the middle of his shoe with a mark on the middle of the pitching rubber, which was itself aligned with the middle of home plate, in order to standardize the start position of each throw. The particular quadrant target circle was only visible for each of the conditions. The participant was allowed to rest as needed between pitches. The time between pitches for each quadrant was less than 60 seconds.

Results

The pitching mechanics were analyzed with visual observation, use of standard video, as well as the Xsens MVN Studio-Pro software package, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Xsens software visualization of the pitch from the stretch position to follow through.

Figure 4. Top view and side view of the center of gravity and fore foot position at the initial stretch position, front foot strike, and follow through.

(Click image to enlarge)

MATLAB was utilized to observe the trace of the center of gravity during the pitching sequence (Figure 4).

Figure 4 shows top view and side view of the center of gravity and fore foot position at the initial stretch position, front foot strike, and follow through. Following ball release for each pitch, the subject’s body fell towards his left side and the back, right foot came across and landed to his left side in order to maintain balance of having the center of gravity (COG) within the base of support of both feet.

The lateral distance of the center of gravity with respect to the midline and front foot at foot strike was obtained by plotting the position at foot strike, as shown in Figure 4. Table 1 shows for the three most accurate and three least accurate pitches, the pitching velocity, the lateral distance of the center of gravity to the midline, and the lateral distance of the center of gravity to the lead foot.

(Click image to enlarge)

The participant reported that he threw 90% of his full speed for each of his pitches. The participant’s least accurate pitches were low and to the outside relative to the center of the target of the respective quadrant. The combined amount of distance from the center of mass relative to the midline along with the position of the lead foot relative to the midline was 20, 22, and 25 centimeters for the most accurate pitches (Figure 4). The combined amount for the least accurate pitches were 30, 31, and 31 centimeters. The average pitching speed for the most accurate three pitches was 78.37 mph/126.12 kph. The average pitching speed for the least accurate three pitches was 78.27 mph/125.96 kph. The speeds were similar. Two of the most accurate pitches were in the right upper quadrant and two of the least accurate pitches were located in the right lower quadrant.

LIMITATIONS AND BENEFITS OF THE MOTION ANALYSIS SYSTEM SUIT AND HIGH-SPEED CAMERA

• Limitations. Battery life on the high-speed motion camera, sampling frequency low compared to shoulder velocity, time of data processing, place and complexity of data processing (Kosa et al., 2018)
• Benefits: Portability—the motion analysis suit and the high-speed camera can be utilized indoors or outdoors at a pitcher’s own team facility and mounds, ease of analysis—visualization of image following performance of the pitch, and convenience of set-up—the time for set-up for the pitcher may be lower than traditional motion analysis with retroreflective markers.

DISCUSSION

Many studies have investigated factors that could improve pitching accuracy and performance. A recent study (Fleisig, et al., 2017) showed that utilizing biomechanical motion analysis to identify flaws of the pitching motion, followed by instruction and a followup biomechanical analysis, was able to correct 44% of the flaws identified in 46 healthy baseball pitchers from high school, college, minor league, and major league levels. Studies analyzing the foot position on the pitching rubber and variable stride length did not necessarily correct pitching accuracy (Edwards et al, 1963). There also appears to be no significant relationship between shoulder proprioception and throwing accuracy (Freeston et al, 2015). To the authors’ knowledge, there has been little research on the lead foot position and pitching accuracy.

There is a dearth of literature on mechanics and pitching accuracy utilizing biomechanical motion analysis of the pitching motion. Qualitative analysis of baseball pitching technique using standard 60Hz camcorders cannot provide a complete and accurate profile of the mechanics (Nicholls et al., 2003). Our study appears to be the first that has utilized a full-body wearable sensor motion analysis portable suit to analyze the pitching motion related to pitching accuracy. Coordination in pitching involves the timing of various body motions such as trunk rotation, lower limb drive, and non-throwing and throwing limb movements. The ability to drive the body forward over a stabilized front leg was characteristic of fast pitchers (Elliott et al., 1988). This current study is the first we know of that analyzes pitching accuracy using center-of-mass tracking as related to the lead foot position. This is a preliminary proof-of-concept study that in the future can be expanded and improved upon.

CONCLUSION AND PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

The Xsens motion analysis suit, along with the described procedures within this study, could be used as an assessment process to identify flaws in the pitching motion. These identified flaws can be utilized by the pitcher and pitching coach to develop intervention to improve, reduce, or correct the flaws by being reassessed. The Xsens suit is portable and can be utilized for pitchers in the comfort and convenience of their respective pitching facilities, both indoors and outdoors, unlike many of the prior studies in which wall-mounted cameras and retroreflective markers are needed. This technology has the potential to provide the pitching coach and player with information that is concise, easy to understand and utilize, and allow them to implement interventions to optimize mechanics and to reduce variability. Also, biomechanical reassessment could help determine the efficacy of the interventions. These interventions may improve pitching performance and reduce the risk of injury for the baseball pitcher.

DR. PAUL CANAVAN is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU). He is a researcher and rehabilitation specialist with emphasis on injury prevention and sport performance enhancement. He is a SABR member and an accomplished scholar and has presented internationally in China, England, Turkey, Canada and recently at the 2019 National NSCA Conference. He has worked with athletes of all levels including collegiate and professional. Dr. Canavan’s research has been published in many high-quality research journals including Medicine Science in Sport and Exercise, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, and Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

Acknowledgments

The authors would also like to thank Guidance Engineering for use of the High-Speed camera and Xsens Motion Analysis Suit. We would like to acknowledge the Head Coach Baseball Brian Hamm and Pitching Coach Chris Wojick and the volunteer pitcher participants. We would also like to express our gratitude to Christian Gosselin and Ashley Kennison for their help with data collection.

Funding

Partial funding for this project was provided by Eastern Connecticut State University and Guidance Engineering.

Declaration of Interest

The authors have no conflict of interest related to this study. The authors have no affiliations or involvement with organizations with any financial interest related to this study.

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