When Roger Clemens struck out 20 Seattle Mariners, he summoned from the cobwebs of 1884 the dimly remembered names of Charlie Sweeney and One Arm Daily, the pitchers who first set the record he broke. Pete Rose chased but failed to capture the ghost of Ty Cobb, much as Roger Maris and Henry Aaron did battle with the Babe. And the World Series Champion Red Sox of 1918 eerily prefigured the ill-starred crew of 1986: in 1918, the last time Boston won the Series, they did so in six games, winning the opener 1-0 behind southpaw Babe Ruth; that opening shutout was matched in 1986 by southpaw Bruce Hurst, whose name is an anagram for Ruth’s, and Hurst’s Red Sox came within one strike of winning in six games.

Baseball history lives. It is a seamless web in which every act on the field or off connects with a myriad of others, enriching the storehouse of legend that nurtures the game and the nation.

This collection of articles, essays, stats, and lore is dedicated to the proposition that baseball’s past is every bit as exciting as its present. That past is not merely what happened in 1886 or 1936—it is also the events of 1986; it is yesterday’s box scores perused this morning; it is today’s game, history aborning. In the eternal hot stove league of the mind, Branch Rickey and Rickey Henderson are soulmates, Christy Mathewson and Tom Seaver duel at checkers, and Fred Merkle wraps a consoling arm around Bill Buckner.

These flights of fantasy are hardly less fantastic than some of the game’s historical verities, such as the astrological keys to baseball success (no fooling: read John Holway’s “Diamond Stars”) or the weirdly kindred couple of Hack Wilson and Roger Maris (see Don Nelson’s “A Tale of Two Sluggers”). If the 1986 Cy Young Award winner in the National League, Mike Scott of the Astros, has had a fantastic season by winning 18 games, what adjective does Webster’s hold for the year when Hoss Radbourne won 60? (See the piece by Frederick Ivor-Campbell.) If great hitting is what turns you on, get a hold of this one from Bill Mead’s “The Year of the Hitter”: In 1983 Lonnie Smith, then with the Cardinals, missed the National League batting championship by a scant .002; if he had been warped back to 1930 with his .321 average, he would have found himself ranking seventh—not in the league, but on his own team.

History is not all that’s on display in these pages. There is analysis by such giants of sabermetrics—Bill James’ coinage for the mathematical and statistical study of baseball—as David Neft, Pete Palmer, and James himself. There is nostalgia (remember Harry Perkowski? Van Lingle Mungo?). There is opinion (let’s go back to eight-team leagues; today’s players are better than the old-timers; old-time ballparks were better than today’s). There are amusements (a ballparks quiz, an acrostic puzzle). And there is outstanding research underlying the whole volume.

When I developed The National Pastime for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in 1982, the organization had been splendidly served for a decade by the Baseball Research Journal, created and edited by L. Robert Davids. It was Davids whose idea SABR was and whose untiring efforts made that idea take hold. A masterful researcher, he is represented in this volume with a piece on the youngest major leaguers, one of several articles reprinted from SABR’s original annual publication.

What is SABR, anyway? It is a group of over 6,000 people of diverse backgrounds, united by their love of baseball and their desire to know more about it. Some are active researchers who pursue their areas of interest through one or more of SABR’s committees, like minor leagues, or statistical analysis, or records, or biographical. Others simply like the SABR publications or the camaraderie of the regional and national meetings.

Who is a typical SABR member? The writers in this book, former ballplayers, club.and league officials, doctors and lawyers and butchers and bankers. And you are, too, or you wouldn’t be reading this; all that separates you from us is a membership. After you’ve read and enjoyed this book, as I’m sure you will, see the back pages for the lowdown on what is, to these admittedly biased eyes, baseball’s best bargain since the bleacher seat.

JOHN THORN has been a SABR member since 1981 and served as SABR’s first Publications Director.

In spite of its exorbitant cost and monumental ugliness, the modern-day, multi-purpose stadium—with or without a dome—has become the urban icon of our times. This is bad, both for our cities and for our games. It is bad for cities because it perpetuates their division into functional zones, making impossible that concentrated and simultaneous mix of activities that for millennia has been the hallmark of urban life. It is bad for our games because it manages to combine extraordinary lack of character with seating arrangements and playing surfaces that are unsatisfactory for both football and baseball.

Twenty-five years of these mega-buildings have persuaded nearly everyone but those responsible for building them that they are a blight upon our cities and upon our games. The time has come to abolish these monsters, and to restore the aesthetic, urban, and athletic sanity of the single-purpose sports facility. We need to make both less and more of our baseball parks: they need to be less monumental in scale and intention, and they need to be more suited to baseball and more civic in character, built at a scale that contributes to and promotes the richness and variety of traditional urban life.

To be specific, here are five reasons why the traditional 40,000 seat urban ballpark is good for our cities and good for baseball:

1. Because its size is in part a function of the size of the city block it occupies, it reinforces the traditional urban pattern of streets and squares.
2. Because it is typically near public transit lines, it reduces the amount of automobile traffic generated by ballgames.
3. Because of its relatively modest scale, it is more hospitable to adjacent activities (including residential neighborhoods), and it can be built with standard construction techniques, making it less costly to build.
4. Because of all these factors, the result is ballparks and playing fields with idiosyncrasies and character. This also results in neighborhoods with identities: Wrigley Field and “Wrigleyville,” Ebbets Field and Flatbush, Fenway Park and Back Bay.

On the other hand, here are five reasons why the 60,000 seat multi-use stadium is bad for cities and bad for baseball:

1. Because it is unconstrained by the standard unit of urban design (the block), it is typically an island in a sea of parking, mandating exclusive automobile access, and destroying traditional urban spatial patterns.
2. Because of its size and parking requirements, it discourages adjacent development, except for other anti-urban mega-projects of similar scale: convention centers, high-rise hotels, and amusement parks.
3. Because it is conceived as either a dome or as a state-of-the-art technological marvel, it is typically more than twice as costly to build as the traditional park. When it is built to accommodate football as well as baseball, parking requirements (and their costs) increase by as much as 250 percent.
4. Because of its size and the fact that it is not designed for any sport in particular, seating patterns are good for neither football nor baseball, and seats are far removed from the playing field.
5. Finally, the result of all of these factors is stadiums that could be anywhere, and uniform dimension playing fields devoid of idiosyncrasies and character.

Today, more than ever, cherished patterns of urban living and the game of baseball require a disciplined defense against the multi-purpose stadium and the violence it does to our cities.

Toward that end I went to work on a proposal for Bill Veeck Park, not as a prototype that could be plopped down anywhere (and certainly—though the point may now be academic—not as an alternative to either Comiskey Park or Wrigley Field), but as a site-specific project intended as a model for how urban ballparks and their environs should be conceived.

The site for this project is a parcel of land on the near south side of Chicago, which has already been designated by the city for development as a multi-use stadium. The city chose the site in part because of its proximity to both public transportation lines and major expressway connections. Right now, it is the site mostly of abandoned railyards, although a few live railway lines remain as constraints upon the use of the site. None of the adjacent buildings’ illustrated in my drawings exist; they are part of my proposal.

Bill Veeck Park is a 44,000 seat, natural grass, baseball-only facility that takes its form in part from existing constraints: The Chicago Transit Authority tracks beyond right field; the St. Charles Airline, a freight line, that runs below the bleachers in left field; the Chicago River beyond the third baseline, and 18th Street beyond the first baseline. The obtuse angle in center field implied by the adjacent tracks dictates that left field and left-center field be deeper than right field; and the necessity of entering through the center field tower entry at about 40 feet above grade provides the opportunity to create loge-like box seating atop the right field wall, some 35 feet above the playing field.

In addition to the center field tower (which would contain team offices, some executive suites, and a scoreboard), fans enter from the right field corner and from behind home plate. On the south side of the park—replete with a statue of Bill Veeck—is Bill Veeck Square, the point of arrival by both CTA train and taxi service. On the north side of the park is the grand stair and ramp, which brings pedestrians and fans who use the north parking lot up over the railroad tracks and into the park. I am proposing to relocate Claes Oldenberg’s Bat Column to one of the mid-level terraces. In the event of pennants clinched or World Series won (admittedly uncommon here in Chicago), the square and the terrace would lend themselves to spontaneous but manageable civic celebrations.

How does this proposal differ from older traditional urban ballparks? Mainly, it has to take automobile access into account. Bill Veeck Park is accessible by City and Regional transit lines, as well as by water taxi from the Loop, Nevertheless, if adjacent neighborhoods are to be protected from the traffic that the ballpark will inevitably generate, it is necessary to provide parking facilities at a ratio of about one space per seven seats. But instead of the typical modern solution of the stadium as an island in an ocean of parking, my design calls for linear parking to the north and to the east. (The parking to the east could also double as overflow parking for Bears games held in nearby Soldier Field.)

How about the economics of a modern, traditional ballpark? Robert Baade, professor of economics at Lake Forest College and a specialist in sports stadium financing, documents impressive evidence that the construction of large-scale mega-stadiums is motivated by reasons that have little to do with economic sanity. He puts it rather succinctly: “The history of recent stadium construction is written in red ink.” He makes a persuasive argument that stadium development per se is not profitable, but that a smaller scale ballpark done as part of a larger adjacent development—like the one I’m proposing—might be not only an aesthetic and urban improvement, but economically feasible as well. My plan calls for a combination of low-rise high-density housing and commercial and office space, as well as civic and institutional buildings and public open space. Most of the buildings range from three and a half to six stories; a few are as tall as twelve stories. You can get a good idea of the proposal from the diagram in the lower right of the master plan drawing.

The people who are currently responsible for the planning, financing, and construction of professional athletic facilities seem to have a mental picture of modern stadiums beneath which are captions like “state-of-the-art technology” or “world-class facility.” But America is becoming saturated with virtually identical world-class facilities. It is no small irony that almost any one of the more modest ballparks of the early 20th century contributed more to the uniqueness of its city, to its city’s sense of place and identity, than any of the new superstadiums. I know of no one who is enamored of these newer stadiums, except for planners, developers, politicians, and architects.

This architect hopes that this demonstration project can help to change current thinking. I believe that Bill Veeck Park illustrates a reasoned and reasonable alternative to current practice. It has always been, and will always be, necessary for ballpark design to satisfy pragmatic and economic criteria. But the current paradigm is wrong. Bill Veeck Park is right. It is right economically. It is right for our cities. And it is right for baseball.

PHILIP BESS is an architect in Chicago. He would like to thank the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, and its chairman Robert Amico for providing workspace; Notre Dame students Jeff Smith, Mauricio Salazar, and David Gester for their assistance.

(Click images to enlarge)

SEATING ANALYSIS

• A) 44,000 seat ballpark @ $1500/seat = $66 million
• B) 50,000 seat ballpark @ $1500/seat = $75 million

Ballpark “B” provides 6,000 extra seats for $9,000,000. (Building costs alone—figure does not include additional parking costs or debt service.)

If every fan spends $20 on tickets, parking, and concessions, filling the additional seats would generate 6000 x $20 = $120,000/game.

• $9,000,000 (cost of construction) / $120,000 (extra seat revenue) = 75

Team would have to sell out Ballpark “B” 75 times in order to cover the principal building costs alone.

DOME COST ANALYSIS

1) Assume that a dome built in 1987 would add $700/seat to building construction costs (excluding debt service and dome maintenance).

2) Assume that revenue lost for a weather-induced postponement = $20/seat.

3) $700 / $20 = 35

Team would have to have 35 postponements of a full house in order to cover the principal costs of a dome. Since teams in a bad year will suffer 2-3 rainouts at home, the financial advantages of a dome (when debt service and maintenance costs are included) become highly doubtful.

COMPARATIVE COST ANALYSES

Costs for 80,000 seat multi-use stadium:

• Land costs: $25,000,000
• Infrastructure improvements: 68,000,000
• 80,000 seat stadium at $2019/seat: 161,520,000
• Parking on 60 acres (20,000 spaces required):
  • for 8,700 cars @ $1500/car surface parking: 13,050,000
  • for 12,300 cars @ $6000/car structure parking: 73,800,000
• TOTAL: $341,370,000

Costs for 44,000 seat baseball park:

• Land costs: $25,000,000
• Infrastructure improvements: 68,000,000
• 44,000 seat ballpark @ $1500/seat: 66,000,000
• Parking on 54 acres (6500 cars required):
  • for 6,500 cars @ $2000/car surface parking: 13,000,000
• TOTAL: $172,000,000

Figures based upon the following assumptions:

1. Cost of domed multi-use stadium at $2019/seat (4th quarter, 1984)
2. Cost of single use open air ballpark at $1500/seat
3. 70 acres of land at $25,000,000
4. Infrastructure improvements at $68,000,000
5. Parking requirements of 1 space/4 seats (football), 1 space/7 seats (baseball)
6. Parking costs of $1500-2000/space (surface), $6000/space (structured)

Several members of the Texas pitching staff were sitting in the clubhouse one afternoon discussing the importance of fielding. They were quick to agree with Los Angeles manager Tommy Lasorda’s assertion that a good­fielding pitcher can help himself win another two games a year. “It’s really very simple,” said Burt Hooton. “It’s a question of a pitcher’s very function: not putting too many runners on base.”

“As soon as you release the ball,” put in Dave Schmidt, “you’re a fielder.”

“When Ed Halicki was with the Giants,” said Charlie Hough, “he was told he’d be sent down after his next start. Then he found himself protecting a one-run lead in the ninth. Somebody hit a liner at him, and he barehanded it and threw to first for a double play. He went on to win the game. He wasn’t sent down.”

“Fernando Valenzuela is the best I’ve ever seen at fielding grounders hit right at him,” said Hooton. “Unlike most of us, he gets his glove all the way down. He’s not as great at covering first.”

“But that’s the most important thing a pitcher can do on defense!” said Dave Rozema.

Hence, the critical and evocative drill that starts every spring training. The play is the very essence of spring: grounder to first, pitcher covering. It’s as simple as three to one.

“It’s gathering time, like a class reunion,” says former major league pitcher Jim Kaat (see sidebar below). “All of a sudden, you’re in the home room, with nineteen or twenty pitchers talking about what happened during the winter.”

And working on the 3-1 play, it’s a drill pitchers practice before they work a single game, a play they repeat until they see it in their dreams. That’s because Lasorda and the Rangers were right about pitchers winning games with their gloves, and there’s probably no play they make more often than the 3-1 putout.

The drill takes longer than any other because of the number of players involved. All the pitchers-veterans, rookies, minor-leaguers up for a quick look-participate, along with three or four first basemen. A weathered coach bats out grounders.

“It’s a more difficult drill for the pitcher than for us first basemen,” says Chris Chambliss, who starred for the Indians, Yankees and Braves, “because none of them run it as often as each of us does. They’re not as accustomed to the play. Besides, during the game they’re thinking of getting the batter out, and I’m thinking of playing defense.”

Games can turn on how fast a pitcher reacts. “I learned to break for first on any ball hit to the right side of the infield,” says Kaat, who won more Gold Gloves (16) than any pitcher. “When a hitter beats a pitcher, nine times out of ten it’s because the pitcher didn’t get a jump.” Kaat used to head for a spot ten to fifteen feet down the line from first base. Then he’d turn sharply left and race parallel to the line. If all went well, he’d catch the first baseman’s toss a couple of steps ahead of the base. Then he’d look for the base and touch it with his right foot to avoid colliding with the runner. “If you practice it enough,” says Kaat, “you’ll get your footwork down like a hurdler.”

Of course, the play is not as simple as the neat 3-1 on our scorecard. For one thing, the throw doesn’t always go from first baseman to pitcher. A bunt or slowly topped grounder can be fielded by either player. (If both converge on the ball, the second baseman should cover first, but for some reason, he rarely participates in the spring-training drill.) Also, the first baseman’s throw to the pitcher may not be perfect. “I look for bad throws because I know I can handle the good ones,” says Phil Niekro of the Braves, Yankees, and Indians. Niekro also doesn’t panic about tagging the bag. Pitchers usually err when they look for the base before they have the ball.

The play looks simple enough when the ball is hit sharply to the first baseman, who then flips an underhand throw, chest-high, to the pitcher a couple of steps before he reaches the bag. Things start getting complicated, both in practice and games, when a ball is hit any distance to a first baseman’s right. An underhand toss won’t get the job done in such instances; the throw must then be sidearm or overhand and may not be right on the money.

A 3-1 play figured in the most exciting Series finale ever played. The Yankees were leading the Pirates 7-5 in the eighth inning of the 1960 Series’ seventh game, with Pittsburgh runners on second and third and two outs. When Roberto Clemente hit a chopper to the right of first baseman Moose Skowron, a standard 3-1 should have ended the inning. Unfortunately for the Yankees, Bobby Shantz, the best-fielding pitcher of his time, had been replaced by the sluggish Jim Coates. When Coates was slow covering first, Clemente was safe, a run scored and the stage was set for a three-run homer by Hal Smith. The Pirates eventually won 10-9. Yankee fans are still fuming . over manager Casey Stengel’s decision to replace Shantz with Coates.

Fielding would be tough enough for a pitcher if the 3-1 play were all he had to make. It’s not. The pitcher has to break to his left fast enough to cut off a drag bunt down the first base line; if the ball gets by him, it’s invariably a hit. Sometimes the 3-1 play doesn’t occur because the first baseman doesn’t get to a slowly hit ball in the hole. The second baseman does, and the play goes to the pitcher, 4-1. Another corollary to the 3-1 play is the 3-6-1 double play. The first baseman fields a ball in the hole and throws to the shortstop covering second. With the first baseman out of the play, the shortstop then relays to the pitcher covering first. In this case, the pitcher somehow catches the ball as he’s looking back over his left shoulder. Then he has to find the bag. Strange things can happen. On May 24, 1985, Hough induced Boston’s Rich Gedman to hit a double-play ball with the Rangers leading the Red Sox by one run in the ninth, one out, and men on first and third. Gedman hit a one-hopper to first baseman Pete O’Brien, who threw to shortstop Curtis Wilkerson covering second. Then Wilkerson relayed to first. Hough caught the ball, stepped on first to end the game-and tripped over the bag.

Most of the time a pitcher’s fielding is no laughing matter. There’s often a direct correlation between good fielders and big winners. Consider some of the most respected fielders to pitch in the last ten years. Tom Seaver. Jim Kaat. Fernando Valenzuela. Phil Niekro. Ron Guidry. By no coincidence, all of them may be Hall of Fame candidates.

Here’s what a pitcher can do to help his team win a game. On June 28, 1974 the Cubs were leading the Expos 2-1 in the ninth, with Montreal runners on first and third and one out, when Ron Hunt tried to lay down a suicide squeeze bunt. He popped it up along the first-base line, and Cub pitcher Rick Reuschel dove for the ball and caught it just a few inches off the ground. Then he threw to first to double up a runner and end the game. Not for nothing is Reuschel considered the best-fielding active pitcher in baseball.

Here’s what a pitcher can do to win a big game. In the fifth game of the 1964 World Series, the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, a righthander who always twisted toward the first-base line on his follow-through, was hit on the buttock by a liner off the bat of the Yankees’ Joe Pepitone. The ball caromed over to the third-base line. After spinning around Michael Jackson-style, Gibson ran the ball down, retrieved it, and threw out Pepitone in what became the game’s pivotal play. “It didn’t seem like much at the time, but I still don’t know how I did it,” says Gibson. Other pitchers often contribute to losses by dropping throws from their first baseman. That’s what happened to the Cardinals’ Dave LaPoint in the 1982 World Series.

The only play a pitcher is likely to make as often as the 3-1 putout is the throw to first, second or occasionally third on a bunt situation. It’s a play that doesn’t come easily. After all, the pitcher is accustomed to being totally in charge before throwing the ball. Look at him out there: standing on the rubber, taking a deep breath, assuming the proper grip, throwing when ready. Suddenly, the ball’s in play and he must field it, turn, sight the base and throw quickly-all without getting a good grip on the ball. Often his throw is hurried. Often it’s off. In one of baseball’s strangest ironies, the man who holds the ball and initiates the action comes unglued.

“On a bunt situation the most important thing is the first three steps,” says Kaat. “Coming off the mound, the pitcher should take three strong strides. The closer he gets to the ball, the smaller his strides should be, so that he can get his body under control. While listening to his catcher tell him which base to throw to, he should get his hand up to the throwing position as quickly as possible. That way the fielder he’s throwing to can see the ball, and the pitcher can make a better throw. Finally, he should spin off his back foot and take a little crow-hop before throwing. That gets his body under control and his momentum going toward the base.”

There are other defensive jobs a pitcher must familiarize himself with. Like backing up third or home if a play is being made there. The idea is not to stand near the catcher or third baseman, but near the fence; that way, a pitcher can reach overthrows that kick to the side as well as those that go through the fielder. This is the sort of little­-appreciated defensive work that wins games.

Holding runners on base is another defensive skill the pitcher must master. Actually the term “pickoff” is mis­understood. The idea isn’t as much to pick off a runner as it is to keep him close to the base. To put it another way, a pitcher who picks off fifteen runners a season but allows thirty to steal may not be as valuable as a pitcher who picks off two or three but allows none to steal.

Not that a pickoff can’t be useful. Tied 3-3 with the Blue Jays, the Orioles were forced to use a reserve infielder, Len Sakata, as their tenth-inning catcher. Three Toronto players reached first. None stole second, or even tried to. Tippy Martinez picked off each one.

White Sox great Wilbur Wood would throw to first so many times the runner would be lulled to sleep. Most often the key ingredient isn’t the throw to first as much as the quick throw home. The pitchers who do this best are those who don’t waste time. They come to the “stop” position on their windup with their weight on their back foot, so they won’t have to rock back before throwing. And they minimize the leg kick and throwing motion. A pitch that reaches the plate in 1.2 seconds or less won’t yield many stolen bases because the average catcher can get the ball to second in 2.0. The total of 3.2 is quicker than most baserunners with a lead can get from first to second.

Finally, there’s the business of handling grounders like any other infielder. Hall of Famer Whitey Ford was so adept at fielding balls up the middle that his shortstop and second baseman could play unusually wide of the bag. In short, Ford affected the entire Yankee infield. Tom Seaver often takes thirty minutes of fielding practice, working not only on catching the ball but making the difficult turn-around throw to second. The most difficult fielding play a pitcher makes on grounders is the high bouncer hit over his head. Bob Gibson made one of these back-to-the-plate plays, turned almost all the way around in mid-air and threw a basketball chest pass to first. Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean called it the best fielding play he ever saw. “You have to think about the ball being hit to you, want it,” says White Sox scout Bart Johnson, a former big-league pitcher. “Then you have to know what to do with it. Look at how well-trained the Detroit and Bal­timore pitchers are; after they’ve fielded the ball, they get rid of it as quickly as anyone.”

All of which is mere prelude to the real blood and guts of fielding the pitching position: staying alive. Let Johnson describe the starkness of it all. “We pitchers always get a kick out of third base being described as the hot corner,” he says. “Hot corner? If the third baseman crept in fifty feet from home plate, people would say, ‘He’s nuts: He’ll get harelip.’ We pitchers are fifty feet from home every time we follow through!”

Every pitcher has been hit on some part of his anatomy by a line drive or hard-hit ground ball. Most escape without serious injury. All live in fear of experiencing the same fate as Cleveland’s Herb Score. Once boasting a fastball reminiscent of Bob Feller’s, Score was hit in the face in 1957 by a line drive off the bat of the Yankees’ Gil McDougald. Score was never the same again. Nor was the White Sox’ Wood after his kneecap was shattered by a Ron LeFlore liner in 1976.

Pitchers have their best and worst moments contending with these shots. Before fielding Luis Salazar’s sharp one-hopper early in 1985, Yankee reliever Dave Righetti made a 180-degree turn on his follow-through. Then he caught the ball between his legs. “All that was,” Righetti said truthfully, “was protecting myself.” Even more memorable was a play Gibson made on Orlando Cepeda. A Cepeda line drive shattered Gibson’s leg. Gibson picked up the ball and threw out Cepeda. Then Gibson was carried to the hospital. Talk about profiles in courage. For years there’s been a lively debate about how a pitcher should prepare for hard-hit balls at him. “You show me a pitcher following through in good fielding position and I’ll show you a pitcher who ain’t following through,” said Dean. Actually, there have been some pitchers like Seaver who naturally finish the delivery square to the hitter and glove held high. “It’s a delicate balance,” says Kaat. “You don’t want to alter a pitcher’s motion to the point where he isn’t throwing his best stuff, but you do want him to protect himself.” For his part, Kaat resisted the temptation to wear a huge glove. He might have better protected his face that way, but he probably would have restricted his mobility. Kaat wore a small but supple mitt and took his chances.

The bottom line is that every pitcher can protect himself only so much in the face of 150-mph liners. He needs some luck, too. That’s why pitchers think less about their hospital bill and more about the 3-1 drill. It’s straight­forward. It’s sociable. And it’s safe.

THE POISE OF JIM KAAT

In 1959 a big teen-aged kid out of Michigan named James Lee Kaat ambled onto a major-league field for the first time, wearing the uniform of the Washington Senators. In 1983 a 43-year-old Jim Kaat played his last major-league game, for the St. Louis Cardinals. In between he made an excellent case for selection to the Hall of Fame. Kaat had pitched an unprecedented twenty-five years over four decades in the big leagues, won 283 games, helped to popularize the quick-pitch delivery, and revolutionized training methods by continuing to throw between starts. But Kaat will be equally well remembered for his fielding. He won 16 Gold Gloves-more than any other pitcher. He could make all the plays in the field, and he could explain how to do them, too. That’s why he went on to coach the Cincinnati Reds pitching staff in 1985.

“A pitcher’s got to be aware that almost every time the ball is hit, there’s someplace he’s got to be other than the mound,” says Kaat, who is now in broadcasting. “Ball hit to the right side: Cover first. A single: Back up the second baseman so that the first baseman can stay on the bag and prevent the runner from taking liberties. Base hit with a man on first: Back up third. Base hit with a man in scoring position: Back up the plate.”

Among the greatest-fielding pitchers of all time, you can make an equally strong case for either Bob Gibson or Jim Kaat. Gibson is celebrated for spectacular plays; Kaat prided himself on perfecting the more routine but also more frequent plays. No one made the 3-1 putout better. No one moved faster to his right coming off the mound. And certainly no one thought more intelligently about fielding. Asked which play he remembers most fondly, Kaat cites the three 3-1 plays he and Minnesota first baseman Harmon Killebrew made on the Dodgers’ speedy Willie Davis in a 1965 World Series game. He’s also proud of the many grounders that he turned into double plays.

Not that Kaat couldn’t make spectacular plays, too. He once raced over to the dugout to make a sensational grab of a foul ball his catcher had lost sight of. And a memorable series of events brought Kaat’s fielding to the world’s attention in the first place.

“There was a game in 1962 when I was hit in the mouth by a high-bouncing grounder,” he says. “The play cost me six teeth. The next time I pitched, two ground balls were hit back to me-sharp one­hoppers-and I got them both. People took note.” He won the first of his 16 consecutive Gold Gloves that year.

Like most of the good-fielding pitchers, Kaat was an excellent athlete. “Growing up, I was always one of the smaller kids, and I had quick reflexes and good coordination,” says Kaat, who excelled in basketball, golf and handball as well as baseball. “When I reached my full height (6’5″), I still had these qualities.” Of equal importance, Kaat had an agile mind. Long before it was fashionable, he was giving up red meat and stressing strength, flexibility, and stretching exercises in his training.

While other pitchers were haphazard in their fielding practice, Kaat rehearsed every play he’d have to make until it became second nature. And as a coach he made sure his pitchers did likewise. ‘We had a drill,” he says, “in which pitchers used a cloth-covered ‘Incrediball.’ They hit it at each other as hard as they can from fifty feet. It sharpens their reflexes.”

It’s obvious that Kaat’s influence on fielding will be felt long after the end of his playing career.

Jiminy Christmas! By the great heavenly stars! Was Rickey Henderson born to steal bases?

You bet your sweet ephemeris he was.

Henderson was born Christmas Day 1958, a good day to be born if you want to grow up to be a big league base stealing champion. For that makes him a Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 19). In fact, he was born almost exactly 99 years after Hugh Nicol, the flying Scot, who set the old record (that still stands) of 138 back in 1887. Nicol was born New Year’s Day 1858. Another Capricorn speedster, Max Carey (born January 11, 1890), led the league in steals ten times.

Since 1876, 197 big league stolen base crowns have been won, and Capricorns have captured 29 of them, well above their fair share of 16.

But look at Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) like Bert Campaneris: They’ve won 31, twice as many as they should be expected to win.

Down at the other end of the list, the poor Cancers June 20-July 22) have won only three of the 197 titles. Latest to do it was Willie Wilson in 1979. Now there’s a man who seems to have figuratively outrun his stars.

What are the chances of such a distribution—31 on the high side, three on the low—occurring by chance? To find out, I asked Pete Palmer, statistician and co-author of The Hidden Game of Baseball. Pete punched some numbers into his computer and came up with the answer. This could indeed have happened by chance—once in ten million times.

Note that the top six signs account for 75 percent of all titles, the bottom six only 25 percent.

Note also that winter babies (Pisces, Capricorn, Aquarius) account for 71 titles, summer babies only 26, or about one-third as many.

Why?

I don’t know why, I just know that they do.

Palmer questions whether repeat winners should be allowed, saying they skew the averages unfairly. Personally, I feel that a Luis Aparicio, with nine titles, deserves more weight than a Topsy Hartsel, with one. So we decided to do it both ways—total championships and total individual champions—and let the reader take his choice.

Pisces leads the total titles list with 16 percent. It also leads the total individual champions list with 14.5 percent. However, since the second list is less than half as large, the odds go down dramatically. It is far harder to toss 90 heads out of 100 than to toss nine heads out often. The percentages are the same, but the odds are vastly different.

Anyway, the odds on individual winners came to 40-1. Statisticians say anything over 20-1 is “significant.” So, using even conservative numbers, the data pretty well rule out chance as an explanation.

Numbers like these intrigue me. A stubborn Scorpio, I began checking data in a dozen categories-Presidents, congressmen, Academy Award winners, Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and on and on.

Of course, I was especially anxious to check the old wives’ tale that Scorpios make the best lovers and wrote to Masters and Johnson to see if they had any data on that. They replied huffily that they don’t lend themselves to such research. A pity. Science will always be the poorer for it.

Meanwhile, you don’t have to believe in astrology to read statistics, and the data I found made me pause and scratch my head and ask “why?”

I should say that I also did a thorough study of biorhythms and sports, checking over 1,000 performances in baseball, football, tennis, track and field, boxing, and swimming. I must report that I found absolutely no statistical confirmation of this seemingly scientific but—I’m convinced—fraudulent theory. If anyone wants to bet on the World Series, the Super Bowl, or a heavyweight title fight on the basis of biorhythm alone, let him see me. I’ll be glad to take all the money he has.

On the other hand, astrology, which smacks of unscientific magic, produces numbers far outside what the law of averages says is normal. It seems downright unfair that a man’s birthday can give him an advantage in stealing bases or hitting home runs, but then life has always been unfair. Athletes are not typical of the rest of us. They’re taller, heavier, have better eyesight, better muscle tone, superior hand-eye coordination, etc. They also differ, I now must add, in their birthdays.

Table 1: Base Stealing Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Big League Stars

Palmer was also skeptical, so like a good SABR member, he decided to do some scientific checking. He ran a massive computer study on all 9,388 men who had played major league baseball from 1909 through 1981. His read-out produced an almost perfect sine curve of births arranged along the calendar year:

If you want to grow up to be a big league player, Palmer found, you’d be wise to plan to be born roughly between July 20 and Christmas, that is from Leo through Sagittarius. The best time of all is late summer. Virgo (Aug. 24-Sept. 23) has produced 921 players, or 18 percent more than normal. In fact it leads at every position except shortstop and third base.

The worst time to be born is early spring, as an Aries (March 21 to April 20). Only 681 big league players were born then, 11 percent below normal, and 35 percent less than those born Virgos.

Incidentally, this is almost the same result I got in a study of pro football players in 1977. Virgo was way out in front, Aries next to last.

Suppose you throw 9,388 darts at a large round dart board divided into twelve slices and spinning furiously. Assuming that all the darts hit the board, what is the chance that 921 will land in one section and only 681 in another?

The chance, Palmer found, is over 700 million to one!

Of course, not all slices of the zodiacal pie are exactly the same size. Cancer has 32 days, Pisces 29.

And births are not distributed equally throughout the calendar. However, authorities disagree on which are the high-birth months and which the low. One study says Gemini (May 22-June 21) has the least births, Aquarius Jan. 21-Feb. 19) the most. But another study is just the other way around.

At any rate, the difference is not great, 15 percent at the most. It hardly explains why Pisces has more than ten times as many stolen base championships as Cancer.

But, strangely, Palmer found, although Virgos get on the team more than anyone else, once they’re in uniform, they don’t particularly excel. They’re about average in combined batting average and home runs among hitters, as well as ERA and won-lost records for pitchers.

About the only outstanding Virgos in big league annals are Ted Williams, Roger Maris, Frank Robinson, and Larry Lajoie. Virgos are supposed to be painstaking perfectionists. If that’s true, it certainly describes Williams at least. And if there is any validity to these data, then Ted, who had to overcome so much—five years at war, a difficult home park, a variety of injuries—apparently had to overcome his stars as well.

Batting Champs

Palmer’s study reveals another anomaly. Aries, the least likely to get on a team, are collectively the best hitters once they do land a job. Their combined batting average is .267. The average for all signs is .262. Leo (mid-summer) has the worst average, .259.

In fact, the batting average curve is almost the exact opposite of the total players’ curve, with above average figures in the late winter and early spring (Pisces through Taurus) and average or below average figures for the rest of the year.

My own study of 208 big league batting champs, 1876-1987, confirms Palmer’s findings: Two spring signs, Aries and Taurus, are among the tops in producing batting champions. Late winter and early spring are the high periods. All other signs, except Sagittarius, are average or below.

(If Scorpio Stan Musial had been born one day later, his seven titles would have put Sagittarius out of reach—for the present, at least.)

Stan is not the only champ to overcome his stars. The 1985 king, Willie McGee, is also a Scorpio. Wade Boggs has won four titles so far for the next-to-last Geminis. And Bill Madlock won four for last-place Capricorn, which proves, perhaps—as the astrologers admit—that the stars impel, they don’t compel. Long shots do come in. I just wouldn’t bet on them, that’s all.

Let’s look at the favorites. Taurus, Sagittarius, and Aries make up 25 percent of the zodiac but account for 36 percent of all batting championships, over half of all .400 hitters, and more than half of the lifetime 3,000-hit men. Two of the three, Sagittarius and Aries, have produced the six longest batting streaks of this century—Sagittarians Cobb (twice) and DiMaggio, and Aries Rose, Sisler, and Holmes.

The quintessential baseball Aries is Pete Rose. Who can forget the image of Rose barreling into catcher Ray Fosse to win the 1970 All-Star Game, a scene as indelibly engraved into the baseball psyche as the famous photo of Cobb flying into third with spikes flashing?

Aries are the “I am,” take-charge egotists of the zodiac; they supposedly love the spotlight and usually hog it in conversation and everything else. Aries lead all other signs in winning Academy Awards (Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Spencer Tracy, William Holden, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liza Minelli).

Capricorns come next to Sagittarius in the calendar, but they rank at the bottom among batting champions, with only nine. One of those was Elmer Flick, who won in 1906 with a .306 average, second lowest winning average ever.

Table 2: Batting Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Home Runs

Home run champions show a strong preference for being born in the autumn and winter. All of these signs, except Capricorn, are average or above. All the spring and summer signs, without exceptions, are average and below.

The best sign of all for power hitters is Libra. Out of 220 home run titles won or shared since 1876, Libras have won 34, five times as many as last-place Gemini. Libra Mike Schmidt alone has won eight crowns. Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, and Chuck Klein each won four, and Ed Mathews two.

Thanks to Schmidt, Libra has now vaulted into first place, overtaking the mighty Aquarians—Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Ben Oglivie—who had been kings of the sluggers until Schmidt brought the age of Aquarius to an end.

Darrell Evans is another one who overcame the accident of birth. He’s not only the oldest home run champ, he’s a Gemini, the least likely sign to lead the league.

The greatest slugger of all, Josh Gibson (962 home runs), was a Sagittarius. Sadaharu Oh is a Taurus.

As the chart shows, autumn through winter (Libra through Pisces) is the best time to be born if you want to grow up to be a home run champ. But the month-to-month swings are too erratic to sustain any simple seasonal theory; Aquarius, with 28 home run titles, for example, comes right after Capricorn, with only 13. There is obviously something else at work here besides the earth’s journey around the sun. If it is not astrology, whatever it may be deserves some serious study.

April 8, 1974 was a particularly good day for Aquarians. If Hank Aaron had let his eye stray from the sports pages for a moment, he would have read in Sydney Omarr’s syndicated horoscope column the following forecast for himself:

Advancement indicated. Views are vindicated. You receive compliments from professional superior. You make significant gains. Profit potential increases…. Standing in the community is elevated.

That night Aaron went out and hit his million-dollar 715th home run, the one that broke Babe Ruth’s record.

Table 3: Home Run Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Pitchers—ERA

Pitchers show a different profile altogether.

Palmer found that there have been more Virgo pitchers in the big leagues than any other sign, just as there are more Virgos in general. Capricorn has produced the fewest pitchers.

Yet, Virgos are only average as a group once they get on the team. Sagittarians, like Steve Carlton, have the best combined won-lost record, as well as the best combined earned run average. Cancers have the worst won-lost mark, Geminis the worst ERA.

My own study of ERA champs shows that Pisces Steve McCatty and J.R. Richard have pitched their sign into first place among individual winners, edging Aries (Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, Cy Young) by 28 to 27. The two signs incidentally come next to each other on the calendar—late winter and early spring.

Yet, again, the month-to-month differences are so large they rule out an easy seasonal explanation. Aquarius comes right before Pisces on the calendar, but it’s dead last in ERA titles, with only seven.

Aquarian Nolan Ryan was really bucking the stars when he won in 1981. However, Aquarians are the only sign to produce one man who won all three titles—ERA, home runs, and batting. His name of course was Babe Ruth. (But note that Babe gave up pitching and took up slugging full time. Did his stars impel him?)

For four straight years, 1982-85, Cancer produced one of the two ERA kings—Rick Honeycutt, Alejandro Pena, Rick Sutcliffe, and Dave Stieb.

Table 4: ERA Champions by Sign, 1876-1987

Pitchers—Strikeouts

Power hitters differ astrologically from singles hitters. Do power pitchers, the strikeout kings, also differ from finesse pitchers, the ERA champs?

They sure do.

I haven’t counted all the individual strikeout titles won, but on the list of the ten top strikeout pitchers of all time, four are Scorpios—Walter Johnson, Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson and Jim Bunning. A fifth Scorpio, Bob Feller, would surely be on the list, perhaps at the top of it, if he hadn’t lost his four best years in the Navy. Two Scorpio youngsters will probably join the list within fifteen years—Dwight Gooden and Fernando Valenzuela.

Nolan Ryan, the all-time champ, is an Aquarius, the only one in the top ten. The entire list, as of Opening Day 1987, is below.

Will the day ever come when big league scouts will carry a book of horoscopes along with a stop watch and the other tools of their trade?

Charlie O. Finley, boss of the Oakland A’s, dabbled in astrology, though perhaps he was more interested in the astrologer, a beautiful redhead named Laurie Brady, than in astrology. At any rate, Brady predicted in 1970 that the A’s would win the division crown in ’71 and then the World Series three years in a row. They did. In ’76 Finley asked her to do daily charts on every player on the roster. Manager Chuck Tanner promptly threw them in the waste basket. Perhaps he should have read them: That year the A’s failed to win the division for the first time in six seasons.

Only one player has ever admitted to using astrology: Wes Ferrell, who won 20 games six different times for the Red Sox and Indians in the 1930s. An Aquarius, Ferrell “freely admits that his fortunes are governed by the stars,” Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich wrote in july 1938. “Astrology rules his life. He is a confirmed disciple and credits astology with curing the soreness in his arm when all other methods failed including the ministration of medical and bone specialists, quacks and voodoo doctors.”

Povich continued: “On the days the stars say they are in his favor he will be the picture of confidence on the pitching mound. He says that several years ago when he was with Cleveland he had his horoscope read and a re-check of his season’s victories revealed that he had won ball games on days when the stars were favorable and had lost games when, according to the horoscope, the days were due to be ‘bad.’

“He makes no bones about his faith in astrology. He points out that it was more than a coincidence two years ago at Griffith Stadium when, on the same day, Joe Cronin was beaned and Rick Ferrell suffered a broken finger. ‘It was a bad day for people born in the sign of Libra,’ said Wes, ‘and the chart showed it. Both Cronin and Rick were Libra babies.'”

Did it work? Well, Ferrell won 193 big league games, including 25 in 1935 to lead the league.

Table 5: All-Time Strikeout Leaders Through 1986

Note: The leading strikeout pitcher until 1987, with 4490, is Japan’s Masaichi Kaneda—who is a Leo.

Reading List

If astrology can predict the future, it should be able to “predict” the past. I went to two astrologers—Laurie Brady of Salem, Massachusetts, and Maude Chalfant of Washington—and gave them the birthdays of several athletes and asked them to describe the men, knowing nothing else about them. Then I asked them to tell what might have happened to each on a particular day in his career. Their readings follow. See if you can guess who the men were. Answers at the bottom.

I. Born: February 6, 1895. A very emotional chart. He either had an explosive temper or explosive energy, so if he were a baseball player, I would think he was one ofyour home run hitters, or a heavy-weight boxer.

He had sort of a tormented life, lots of problems. There were definitely problems in his natal home. His father or mother sat on him real hard. There was probably quarreling in the home, or a separation or divorce or loss of parent. He was extremely independent and hard to manage. There’s a very heavy emphasis in the House of Show Business, and Sports in general. He probably loved kids, and I would imagine he had many love affairs.

EVENT: October 1, 1932. I’m wondering, was this person having some health problems? It could be a chart where a person was retiring, or the end of his career was coming. It could have been home runs if this was a baseball player.

II. Born: August 30, 1918. He is terribly independent, probably was very hard to manage. He might have been frustrated, had to control himself, or was made to control himself. He has a fiery way of thinking, and fire in his hands. Anything to do with the hands would be good for him. I’m sure he had emotional problems, probably drinking problems, although I could be very wrong. There’s a strong emphasis on his House of Self-Undoing.

He’s precise, a Virgo, very exacting in details about everything. He has a quick mind, but he might have been sarcastic in his speech. He could have acted like a dictator to his friends. This is a psychic person, I’m sure, very sensitive.

III. Born: October 25, 1923. A terribly intense person, fixed and stubborn, but very sweet-natured, likeable, and very lucky. He might be a quarterback if he’s in football. He would be a power hitter if he’s in baseball.

EVENT: October 3, 1951. I think this event was a very happy one. The moon was touching Venus, meaning that sweet things were coming to him or being stirred up. Jupiter in his House of Work also means good things. Uranus, the planet of Change and Surprise, was exactly over his Pluto (energy). So, whatever this was, it was probably unexpected and very strong and explosive. And very fateful. It’s kind of hard to read whether it was pure luck or whether it wasn’t.

IV. Born: April 14, 1941. This is a strong, strong person. Super strong. A lot of self-confidence. He was born with it. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew what he wanted.

He’s aggressive. He was born with that too. And stubborn. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. He rushes into things, just shoots out and does what he thinks he has to do.

When he’s playing, he’s totally into it. His whole being—his brain, his body—are all working for one thing. He’s got tons of physical energy. His friends would think he’s courageous. His enemies would consider him pushy.

Sometimes he can be very strong-willed, rebellious, anti-social, when Mars hits him. All of a sudden he can turn into a really raging person. These are tendencies from birth; he may have mellowed since then. If his energy were all kept inside him, he’d probably hurt people. But he releases it physically in sport.

I would think he’s extremely dextrous. His timing is excellent. He moves like a panther. He moves beautifully.

He’s got a quick mind, like a hair trigger, Really, really fast mental chemistry. He had sort of a conflict with his relatives. he’s quarrelsome and independent. He was kind of noisy as a child, or could have been.

He would also have to learn the value of sexuality. I think when he was younger he would rush into love affairs. But I think he’s outgrown that. He’s very charming and attractive. he may not be beautiful, but he’s bewitching. He has this inner charm. It’s more than just charm. I see a little gleam in his eye.

But he’s better off when he does things on his own. Any mates would probably be jealous of him. He’s dominating, and he attracts people who have a lot of needs, especially females, very sexual, who want a lot and are very demanding. He’s sort of restless at home, a high-tension person, lots of nervous energy.

He’s creative, though he might put it all into his sport. He’s a lot more intellectual than people know.

I think he has a powerful position, because he has such drive, such energy. He needs power. He likes to be on top. If he were in politics, look out!

I like him, whoever he is. I would want to stay away from him with a ten-foot pole, as a female. But I think he’s dynamite. He’s a real power.

EVENT: August 1, 1978. I get the feeling there has been a lot of strife going on. He may have been very aggressive in the few days just before this. He’s so damn strong, you’d think he could overcome almost anything that goes wrong. But he may have been a little disappointed. Things may not have turned out the way he wanted them to.

V. Born: May 18, 1946. He’s a Taurus, which is a fixed, sort of placid, slow-moving person who is very interested in money. He’s very lucky with money. He might be a little erratic with it, but I think he will make good money.

He probably has tremendous energy and heavy hands. I’m sure he’s very charming. Probably women like him. He could be flirtatious and have lots of affairs.

He’s really introverted, except for his moon that brings him in front of the public. I think he’s ambitious and driving hard for what he wants, and the public pulls him out.

I suspect he’s a little hard to handle because of that stubborn Taurus sun: “Don’t tell me what to do.” He probably loses his temper very easily. He might have a tendency to flare up and speak more angrily than he means to. He’s probably impulsive and quarrelsome.

EVENT: October 18, 1977. A terrific massing of planets in his House of Work. The north node of the moon—the lucky part—the moon itself, the sun, Pluto, and Venus—which usually means nice things and gifts—are all in his House of Work. This was just a fantastic day with all those planets—half of all his planets—all in one place. On the whole, I would think this was a fortunate event.

VI. Born: November 22, 1950. I’d say he’s a sweet person, talks sweetly and thinks sweetly, perhaps idealistically. He probably likes to talk a lot, is jovial, likes people. He could be a good story-teller. Women like him.

A lot of energy. And he has the Saturn-Mars square found in a lot of boxers, so I would say he has power also.

EVENT: September 23, 1978. This is so complicated, I can’t make a flat statement whether it was good or bad. But it was of great significance, because there were aspects after aspects (of the stars) hitting his chart that day. There could be something very surprising about this event.

Saturn is right on the edge of his House of Career. Saturn is the planet of the ending of things, so this was very significant in his career and his life.

Was he hurt, or could there have been anything involving a hospital in this situation?

There was something mysterious, something about this whole thing. It may be that he had a sense of mysterious things happening around him that he felt very strongly. I sort of lean to something very disappointing, but I can’t quite back it up.

But there’s a strong emphasis on hospitals and health.

Answers to Reading List

I. October 1, 1932: Babe Ruth’s “called the shot” home run.

II. August 30, 1918: Ted Williams (I didn’t give an event date.)

III. October 3, 1951: Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world.”

IV. August 1, 1978: Pete Rose’s hit streak ends.

V. October 18, 1977: Reggie Jackson’s three World Series homers.

VI. September 23, 1978: Lyman Bostock is shot to death.

This article proposes a way to measure this value. This measure is certainly not perfect (no sport measurement is), but it is useful for comparing lifetime achievements. The overall rating starts with a Batting Factor, to which a Running Factor and a Fielding Factor are added, with adjustments for conditions in various years. Then the overall rating was calculated for all players with at least five years’ experience as a regular major league shortstop and who had a majority of their good years since 1900. Cal Ripken was included in this list even though he had played only four years as a regular shortstop through 1985.

Batting Factor

John Thom and Pete Palmer in their outstanding book, The Hidden Game of Baseball, use “On Base Plus Slugging” (OPS) as a measure of batting achievement. This is the best simple, overall statistic for batting in a given year. It is defined as the On Base Average (OBA) plus the Slugging Average (SA). Here, a true “average” is needed, so the Batting Factor (BF) is defined as OPS divided by 2 or   

OBA + SA
2

Of course, SA=TB/AB where TB = Total Bases and AB = At Bats.  Ideally, OBA should be  

H + BB + HPB + RBE
AB + BB + HPB + SF

where H = Hits, BB = Bases on Balls, HPB = Hit by Pitched Balls, RBE = Reached Base on Error and SF = Sacrifice Flies in those years when they have not been charged as a time at bat. However, RBE is not available in standard baseball statistics so the common version is OBA =

H + BB + HPB
AB + BB + HPB + SF

For some years, HPB was not included in the official statistics, so for those years OBA =

H + BB
AB + BB + SF

Using these definitions, a player’s batting factor for a particular year is defined as BF_iy =

OBA_iy + SA_iy
2

where “i” stands for a particular individual and “y” is a particular year.

In order to compare players from different periods, an adjustment must be made for the year in which the player performed. Obviously, it was easier to achieve a high BF_iy in 1930 than in 1968. The adjustment is based on relating BF_iy to the comparable data for all of the league’s batters that year.  Thus, BF_Ly =

OBA_Ly + SA_Ly
2

where “L” stands for the league and the data includes all non-pitchers. This takes into account the change due to the introduction of the Designated Hitter in the American League in 1973.  An arbitrary norm of BF_L = .375 has been used.  The specific number is arbitrary, but that doesn’t matter because the final results are relative comparisons and not absolute numbers. For these years where HPB is not in the official statistics, this decreases BF_Ly  by an average of .003, so for these years BF_L = .372. Therefore, the final

where BF_L is either .375 or .372 depending upon whether HPB is included in or excluded from the official statistics.

Running Factor

Speed is a plus factor in many ways in baseball. Unfortunately, the only available statistics are Stolen Bases (SB) and Caught Stealing (CS), and for many years Caught Stealing was not included in the official statistics.

So, one must start with what is available. A stolen base is a way of extending a hit. With no one on base, there is no difference between a batter stretching a single into a double and someone hitting a single and stealing second base. However, the former gets two TB in computing SA and the latter gets only one. So net stolen bases (SB – CS) can be viewed as an addition to TB in calculating SA.  Since SA = TB/AB, the base stealing adjustment would be SB – CS / AB.

But SA is one of two components of the Batting Factor.  The other, OBA, is not affected by base stealing.  Because the player’s Running Factor (RF) is an increment to the Batting Factor, it should be

However, this running factor has two limitations.  The first is that a stolen base affects only the one runner, whereas an extra-base hit can advance other runners.  On this basis, the running factor gives too much credit to the player. On the other hand, there is more to running than stealing bases. This formula does not credit a player’s speed for:

• taking an extra base on someone else’s hit or out;
• putting pressure on the defense, resulting in additional RBE’s and errors on stolen base attempts;
• putting pressure on the opposing pitchers by threatening to steal, sometimes disturbing the pitcher’s concentration, and often giving the next batter confidence that he can expect more fast balls;
• avoiding grounding into double plays.

Since these factors are hard to quantify, it is assumed here that they justify the extra credit that the running factor gives a base-stealer. If the necessary data could be produced they would probably show that the upward adjustment factors are somewhat greater than the reverse, and that this formula for RF slightly penalizes the great running shortstops.

RF_iy could also have been adjusted by the average amount of base stealing in a league year the same way that BF_iy was adjusted. However, RF_iy is a very small component of the player’s total rating, and the adjustment factor would have been tiny (less than one percent of the final rating in every case) so, for convenience and ease of computation, it was not included.

One adjustment was necessary. The years where CS data were not available had to be included. In these cases an average base stealing rate of 75% was assumed, which is a reasonable historical figure for players who do a lot of running. It overstates the success rate for players who rarely attempt to steal, but in those cases the effect of the overstatement on the running factor is quite small. A 75% rate means CS = SB/3 and thus, RF_{iy =}    

for years when CS data are not available.

Fielding Factor

Since the start of major league baseball more than 100 years ago, Fielding Average (FA) has been the usual statistical measure of fielding performance. Unfortunately, FA isn’t a good indicator of fielding ability. The positive elements of FA – putouts (PO) and assists (A) – are satisfactory, but the negative element – errors (E) – is only one of two actual negative fielding elements.

The second is that a poorer fielder doesn’t reach a ball that a better fielder would have reached or doesn’t make a throw quickly enough or doesn’t field a bad hop that someone with quicker hands might have fielded. These missed opportunities occur far more frequently than do actual errors and, therefore, are more important in evaluating fielding performances. Unfortunately, there is no direct measure of these missed opportunities.

In an attempt to measure this indirectly, baseball people for many years have used some form of range factor, usually defined as

PO + A
G

where G is games played, or Total Chances Per Game: 

PO + A + E
G

This concept was introduced by Al Wright in 1875. It was revived by Irwin M. Howe, the statistician for the American League, who ranked A.L. fielders this way in 1914. Subsequently, Branch Rickey and many other baseball executives used these measures to evaluate players. This author used the concept in 1969 in The Baseball Encyclopedia and Bill James has used it in his Baseball Abstracts.

There are two problems with this way of measuring fielding. The first is that its usefulness varies greatly by position. The principle works quite well for shortstops and third basemen. It is not as good for second basemen because they are more dependent on other players than are shortstops or third basemen. For example, the second baseman more often covers second base on steal attempts and most often is the middleman on double play attempts.

For outfielders, this approach is not very good. Putouts by outfielders are significantly affected by the stadium dimensions and by the fact that two outfielders can often reach the same ball so that an outfielder playing alongside a slower teammate will tend to have more putouts than one playing next to a speedy ball hawk. Assists by outfielders are even more unreliable because runners will often not try to advance on the great throwing arms.

For first basemen, this way of looking at fielding is a poor measure. The assists-per-game system is interesting, but it varies with the style of the first baseman. Some first basemen prefer to throw to the pitcher covering the bag on nearly every grounder they field, while others prefer to run to the base and these players do not get an assist. Moreover, much of a first baseman’s defensive skill is in handling poor throws from the other infielders, and total putouts provide no indication of this skill.

For catchers, these measures are useless. Range is simply not a factor. The catcher’s percentage of throwing out opposing base-stealers provides some indication of his throwing arm, but even this is often more a reflection of the pitcher than the catcher. Most importantly, the catcher’s primary defensive skill is handling pitchers, and no one has yet devised a statistical measure for this.

The second problem with these measures is that they are based on the implicit assumption that all fielders at one position get the same number of opportunities to make a putout or assist per game played. This, of course, isn’t true. Even for shortstops and third basemen, the nature of the pitching staff and chance factors will produce some variation in number of opportunities. As a result, these range factors can vary significantly from year to year. However, with the addition of a few modifications discussed later, the range factor does provide a valid measure of a shortstop’s lifetime fielding performance.

The Fielding Factor (FF_iy) calculation starts with the Fielding Range (FR_iy), defined as FR_iy = 

PO_iy + A_iy
G_iy

Of course, all data are for games played at shortstop only. To make this as valid as possible G_iy should be complete game equivalents, or defensive innings played at shortstop divided by 9. This distinction is inconsequential for Joe Tinker or any of the early twentieth-century players. It is, however, very important for a player like Mark Belanger, who was often pinch-hit for and who sometimes entered the game only as a late-inning defensive replacement.

The proper way to calculate G_iy would have been to look at every boxscore where more than one shortstop played for a team and estimate the number of innings played by each. This was done for 1984 and 1985, but it was too monumental a task for the entire project, so for all other years G_iy was figured by analyzing the final season fielding data for everyone who played shortstop for the team and year in question and estimating the number of complete game equivalents for each.

One effect of the pitching staff on a shortstop’s opportunities can be measured and dealt with. If the pitchers strike out a large number of opposing batters, all the fielders will have somewhat fewer opportunities. For this paper, an adjustment was made if the Pitchers’ Strikeouts (PSO) for the team (T) in question exceeded the average for the other teams in the league that year by 0.5 per game or more. It was then assumed that one-sixth of the reduced opportunities would have gone to the shortstop.  Thus, where this adjustment was necessary, FR_iy = 

where  Nl_y  is the number of teams in the league that year.

The next step was to convert the absolute measure, FR_iy, into a Relative Fielding Range (RFR) by comparing the individual data to the league average. Thus, RFR_iy =

This also includes the necessary adjustment for conditions in different years. RFR_iy  is a measure of the number of PO + A per game that this shortstop was able to get compared to the average of his peers in his league for the year in question. This was related to the Batting Factor by simply assuming that each extra putout or assist prevented an opponent’s single and, therefore, is the equivalent of a batter’s single. Thus, the increment to the player’s SA is  

where AB_LY is the total number of At-Bats for the league that year, including pitchers, and the “9” is the number of positions in the batting order. Similarly, the effect on OBA is the same except that Plate Appearances is substituted for At-Bats. Therefore, the Fielding Factor is

Longevity Factor and Lifetime Rating

In trying to calculate a shortstop’s lifetime rating, an important question was – which years should be included? The first and easiest decision was to include only years where the player was the regular shortstop.

However, if that had been the only decision, those players who had many years as a regular shortstop and who continued to play regular shortstop even when their performance declined late in their careers would be penalized while those whose performance tailed off even more and who were switched to third base or first base or who lost their regular jobs completely would not be penalized.

This problem was addressed in two ways. First, if a player’s yearly rating (BF_iy + RF_iy + FF_iy) declined significantly after reaching the age of 35 or after completing ten years or more as a major league regular shortstop, those final declining years of his career were not included. Second, an arbitrary Longevity Factor (LF_i) was awarded based on the number of years actually included in the Lifetime Rating. For each year more than ten, the player was awarded .005 and for each year less than ten .005 was subtracted. Thus, the Lifetime Rating, LR_i =  

where Y is the number of years included and Σ_y means the sum of each year’s factors.

Results

The Lifetime Ratings and the main components, of those ratings are shown in the accompanying table. The results are evident from looking at the table, but a few observations are in order. The first is that anyone who can play five years as a regular major league shortstop is an excellent baseball player, regardless of his ranking on this list. Another thing to note is that several of these players, including Ernie Banks, Harvey Kuenn, Buck Weaver and Toby Harrah, spent much of their careers at other positions. The data shown in the table reflect only their years at shortstop.

The most obvious feature of the results is that they support the reputation of Honus Wagner as the greatest shortstop of all time – and by a wide margin. In fact, Wagner is first in Batting Factor, second in Running Factor and fifth in Fielding Factor – a remarkable all-around player. Behind Wagner are two other Hall of Famers from the game’s earlier years, Dave Bancroft and Bobby Wallace. Looking further down the list, an obvious conclusion is that the Hall of Fame electors have not been as stupid as some of their critics have charged. The 14 shortstops enshrined in Cooperstown are all in the top 19 eligibles on the list. The people who complained about shortstops such as Wallace, Tinker or Maranville being enshrined were, once again, relying on batting statistics only. Moreover, these data suggest that Ray Chapman, Donie Bush and Dick Bartell should join them in Cooperstown.

Finally, we return to Ozzie Smith and his contract. Maybe the Cardinals, like the Hall of Fame electors, aren’t so dumb after all. How many other active players would rank in the top five on an all-time list at their position? The only other player who would probably make such a list is Mike Schmidt, and he is in the same salary range as Ozzie Smith, even though Schmidt, at age 36, may be in the twilight of his career.

DAVID S. NEFT is co-author of The Sports Encyclopedia – Baseball and The World Series.

(Click images to enlarge)

Zane Grey possesses “no merit whatsoever either in style or in substance,” wrote Burton Rascoe, the brilliant but acerbic New York literary critic. And this was the view of another critic, Heywood Broun: “The substance of any two Zane Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp.”

The public disagreed. According to the authorized biography of Grey written by Frank Gruber in 1970, the 85 books he wrote sold 100 million copies. Millions more saw the 100 movies based on his books.

Most of Grey’s books were about the American West, but those he wrote about deep sea fishing and on his world travels were widely read as well. Often forgotten is the fact he wrote numerous baseball stories that gained wide popularity among young readers. Grey’s short story “The Redheaded Outfield” is one of the most famous and widely read baseball stories ever written. Published by the McClure Syndicate in 1915, it was reissued in 1920 along with 10 other baseball stories under the title The Redheaded Outfield and Other Stories.

It is not surprising that Grey wrote about baseball. He started to play as a youngster in Zanesville, Ohio, where he was born January 31, 1875. It has been suggested that he was forced to excel in sports to overcome the stigma of the name his mother had given him, Pearl Gray. Eventually he dropped the Pearl and assumed his middle name, Zane, and at the same time changed his surname from Gray to Grey. As a teenager he was recognized as one of Zanesville’s better young pitchers. Equally adept as a ballplayer was his younger brother, whose unusual first name, Romer, seems somewhat prophetic for one destined to attain a degree of fame as an outfielder in professional baseball.

When the Gray family moved to Columbus in 1890, the brothers’ baseball horizons broadened. Both joined the Capitols, a strong amateur nine, for whom Pearl soon became the star pitcher. A scout for the University of Pennsylvania watched him defeat Denison College of Granville, Ohio, whose star pitcher was Danny Daub, a future major leaguer. Penn offered him a baseball scholarship, and to satisfy his dentist father he decided to enter the dental school. After barely passing his entrance examinations, he began his college career in 1892. His graduation in 1896 was by the slimmest of margins.

Undistinguished as he was in the classroom, he more than made up for it on the diamond. He played college baseball for four years, first as a pitcher and then as an outfielder. In 1896 he helped Penn defeat the New York Giants in an exhibition game, and then in the last game of the season he hit a home run with one man on in the last of the ninth to defeat the University of Virginia. Helped financially by his father and by Romer, who had already started his professional baseball career, Grey set up a dental practice in New York City in 1896. Since the income from his practice was small, or possibly because he much preferred baseball to dentistry, he continued to play baseball in the succeeding summers. The entire story of Grey’s professional baseball activity is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Biographer Jean Karr writes that he played in the Eastern, Tri-State, and Michigan State Leagues, but cites no years and no cities. Gruber’s book paints another picture. He wrote: “Pearl was sorely tempted to turn professional but he knew it would be the end of his dream of becoming a writer.”

According to the Grey obituary in The Sporting News, he played for Wheeling in the Iron and Oil League in 1895, Fort Wayne of the Interstate League in 1896, and Toronto of the Eastern League in 1899. SABR members Vern Luse and Robert Hoie have uncovered some pertinent data. Luse found an item in Sporting Life, April 15, 1896, reporting that Pearl Zane Gray had signed with Jackson of the Interstate League. Hoie has found he played for Newark of the Atlantic League in 1898, batting .277 in 38 games. The haziness of his baseball career notwithstanding, his exposure to the game was such that it was only natural he should write about it. His first substantial check came from The Shortstop, published by A.C. McClurg of Chicago in 1909. Another success was The Young Pitcher, in which the author, transformed into “Ken Ward,” is the hero and brother Reddie Grey is the shortstop. A few years later he wrote “The Redheaded Outfield,” starring Red Gilbat, Reddy Clammer, and Reddie Ray of the Rochester Stars of the Eastern League.

Two of the redheads were trouble personified. “Gilbat was nutty and his average was .371. The man was a jack-o-lantern, a will-o-the-wisp, a weird, long-legged, redhaired phantom.” Clammer was a grandstand player “who made circus catches, circus stops and circus steals, always strutting, posing, talking, arguing and quarreling.” Reddie Ray, on the other hand, “was a whole game of baseball in himself, batting .400 and leading the league.” “Together,” wrote Grey, “they made up the most remarkable outfield in minor league baseball.”

The story revolves around a single crucial game between the Stars and the Providence Grays, a game in which the Stars’ manager Delaney (first name not given) flirts with apoplexy before it is over. First, Gilbat is playing ball with some kids four blocks away and is rounded up only as the game is about to start. In an early inning Clammer is forced to make a one-handed catch (a no-no in those days) because his other hand is filled with the peanuts he is munching on. Then Gilbat, enraged by some remarks about the color of his hair, leaps into the stands to battle the hecklers and is put out of the game. In the sixth Clammer crashes into the wall in making one of his circus catches and is knocked cold. “I’ll bet he’s dead,” moans Delaney. He revives but is through for the day. With no substitutes available for Gilbat or Clammer, the Stars are forced to play the last three innings with just one outfielder, Reddie Ray, “whose lithe form gave the suggestion of stored lightning.” It comes down to the last of the ninth, the bases are full, the Stars are down by three and Reddie Ray is at the plate. He smashes one to right center for an inside the park home run and victory for the Stars.

“My Gawd!” exclaimed Delaney, “wasn’t that a finish! I told you to watch them redheads.”

Such was the Redheaded Outfield in fiction. In fact, it was the outfield of the 1897 Buffalo Bisons of the Eastern League, not of the Rochester Stars. In the story Gilbat, Clammer, and Ray make up the redheaded trio; in fact, their names were Larry Gilboy, Billy Clymer, and Romer (R.C. or Reddie) Grey, the author’s younger brother. In the story the harassed manager is one Delaney; in fact, the manager was Jack Rowe, a hard-bitten veteran of the baseball wars who had been a member of the famed Big Four (with Dan Brouthers, Deacon White, and Hardie Richardson) of Buffalo’s National League days. Such a dramatic game as described by Grey was never played by the 1897 Bisons. Closest to it was a game played against Scranton on August 5 when the Bisons rallied in the last of the ninth for a comeback win. Clymer and Grey participated in the rally with hits, but the tying and winning runs were driven in by non-redheaded third baseman Ed Greminger.

In the story Grey calls it the greatest outfield ever assembled in the minor leagues; in fact, that would be stretching the truth. But who can say it was not the most unusual? People who know about such things tell us there is one chance in 19 of being a redhead, which makes the emergence of three redheads in one outfield on one minor-league team the longest of long shots.

Perhaps not the greatest, but they were good nonetheless. “Fast and sure, both in the field and at bat,” wrote a Buffalo reporter. The headline in the Express after the Bisons’ opening day win at Springfield was: “REDHEADS GREAT PLAYING!” In the game account we are told that “the redheaded outfield distinguished itself by covering every inch of ground,” and that “Gilboy stood the fans on their heads with a spectacular onehanded catch off the bat of Dan Brouthers.” In game two of the season, Bill (“Derby Day”) Clymer was the star, “catching seven balls that were labeled for hits.” On May 8 at Scranton, Gilboy made an acrobatic catch, called “far and away the best catch ever seen at Athletic Park.” After a game at Wilkes-Barre, a writer called them great, “as good as any outfield in the game,” then added: “Clymer and Gilboy were really sensational. They made some of the most startling plays ever seen in Wilkes-Barre. Both have evidently been with a circus.”

When the Bisons opened at home on May 16 against Rochester, they were in first place with an 8-3 record. The highlight of the first game was a miraculous onehanded catch by Clymer, which he topped off by doing a complete flip-flop. On Memorial Day, Clymer provided the one bright spot in what the Express described as an “execrable game” by the Bisons, by snaring a long drive off the bat of McHale of Toronto and then crashing into the fence, just as in the Grey story. According to the Express, “It was the most thrilling out seen here this season.” Clymer was applauded to the skies when he came immediately to the bat (as so often happens after a spectacular fielding play), and he responded by slashing a hit to left. Not to be outdone by Clymer and Gilboy, Reddie Grey, on June 26 in a game at Rochester, raced to right center to make a one-handed catch of a sinking liner hit by Henry Lynch. His momentum was so great that he turned head over heels after he made the catch.

And so it went all season, with visiting players and managers marveling at the play of the three redheads.

And they were far from slouches at the bat. Gilboy, while not a long-ball hitter (one triple and two home runs for the year), was a gem of consistency. He hit safely in 28 of the first 30 games and then after a couple of blanks proceeded to hit in 14 straight games. For the season he totaled 201 hits (second only to Brouthers’ 225), scored 110 runs, hit 44 doubles, stole 26 bases, and batted .350.

Reddie Grey, called by the Express writer “the perambulating suggestion of the aurora borealis,” played every inning of the Bisons’ 134 games, batting .309, with 167 hits, 29 doubles, 13 triples, and 2 home runs. In a game against Scranton in which he was the hitting star, he was, in the quaint practice of that day, presented with a bouquet of flowers as he came to the plate. He responded by doubling to left. Clymer, the most brilliant of the three in the field, was the weakest with the stick. He batted just .279 on 154 hits, but his extra-base totals were strong — 32 doubles, 5 triples, and 8 home runs. Five of his homers came in a twelve-day period beginning on August 12 and caused the Express writer to inquire: “We wonder what oculist Clymer has seen?” Clymer’s fielding average was phenomenal for those days — .969 with just 14 errors. As for the others, Grey fielded .915 and Gilboy .913.

Spurred by the redheads, the Bisons were in the pennant race most of the year, holding first place as late as August 14. A late August slump, however, saw them drop to third by the end of the month. This was where they finished, a disappointing 10 games behind first-place Syracuse and four games behind Toronto. As the team began to fade, so did the early-season euphoria. After a loss to Toronto, the Express said, “There are players goldbricking and the fans know who they are.” And then the next day, after another loss: “The infield played like a sieve. Could some players be playing for their releases?” First baseman and captain Jim Fields was abused so severely from the stands after making an error that he asked Manager Rowe for his release, which was not granted. In September, after three straight losses to Springfield, the Express writer, warming to the task, wrote: “The Eastern League is a beanbag league, just where the Bisons belong. They are playing the type of baseball that made Denmark odiferous in the days of Hamlet.”

The 1897 season, which had started on such an optimistic note, came to a merciful end on September 22 with gloom and pessimism pervading the atmosphere. Owner Jim Franklin complained that he was losing money (“This has been no Klondike for me”), the press was vitriolic, the fans were disgruntled, the Eastern League was rocky, and the Western League of Ban Johnson was casting covetous eyes on Buffalo. (Editor’s Note: Actually, Buffalo did join the Western League in 1899.)

But spring has been known to wash away the depressions of falls and winters, and so it was in Buffalo as the 1898 baseball season approached. But what of the fabled redheaded outfield of 1897? Surprisingly, it was destined for a one-year stand. Clymer, who had been with the Bisons since 1894, was the first to go, being shipped to Rochester on March 11. Five days later the Express announced: “A Chromatic Deal — Grey for White.” In an even exchange of outfielders, Reddie Grey had been sent to Toronto for Jack White. Only Gilboy remained. Not only was he coming back, but he was to get a raise, as well. Word from his home in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, was that “he had spent the winter as one of the leaders of the gay [old connotation] society.” When he arrived in Buffalo in early April, the Courier noted that “the most prominent thing on Main Street was Gilboy’s summer dawn hair, topped with a white hat.”

Billy Clymer remained in the game for many years as a player and manager, returning to Buffalo in 1901, 1913, 1914, and from 1926 to 1930. This writer recalls him clearly, as he managed the 1927 Bisons to a pennant — strutting, chest out, argumentative, flamboyant, just as Reddy Clammer had been in the Zane Grey story. Clymer’s managerial record is remarkable. He managed 23 complete seasons and parts of six others, all in the minors, compiling 2,122 wins and 1,762 losses for a percentage of .546. He won seven pennants and had an equal number of second-place finishes. Counting only the complete seasons, his record shows just three second-division finishes. He died in Philadelphia, December 26, 1936, at the age of 63. The Macmillan Encyclopedia shows he played just three major-league games, those with Philadelphia of the American Association in 1891. Reddie Grey played in the Eastern League with good success until 1903, performing for Toronto, Rochester, Worcester, and Montreal. With Rochester in 1901, he led the league in home runs with 12. In The History of the International League: Part 3, author David F. Chrisman picked him as the league’s most valuable player for that year.

According to the Macmillan Encyclopedia, Grey never played in the major leagues. This is disputed by SABR member Al Kermisch, who maintains that Grey played a game for Pittsburgh on May 28, 1903, but was confused with another Grey and therefore has not been listed as a major league player. [Editor’s Note: This situation was remedied long ago, and Reddy Grey does have his entry in the MLB Player Registers.]

Once out of baseball, he followed his father and brother into dentistry, but eventually gave it up to become his brother’s secretary, adviser, and companion on his world travels. A strong fraternal relationship existed between Romer and Zane throughout their lives. Zane never forgot that it was R.C., along with his father, who helped him financially when he was setting up his dental practice in New York and that it was R.C. who gave him encouragement and monetary assistance when he was struggling to establish himself as a writer. Zane showed his esteem for his younger brother by naming his first son Romer. R.C. died in 1934 at age 59, one year before Zane too passed on.

Little is known about the third member of the redheaded triumvirate, Lawrence Joseph Gilboy. He lasted with the Bisons only until May 27, 1898, when he was released outright because, in the words of owner Franklin, “He was worse than useless when he got on the lines.” He signed with Syracuse, played only a few days, was released, played for Utica and Palmyra of the New York State League and for Youngstown of the Interstate. There is no record that he played after 1898. It was a strange and abrupt ending to a career that had started so brilliantly. There was a note in the Express that he was entering Niagara University to study medicine. The school cannot find that he ever enrolled. Such is the story of three minor-league outfielders who would have long since been forgotten, were it not for the color of their hair.

Related link:

• A fuller account of Zane Grey’s many professional clubs may be found here at John Thorn’s Our Game blog.

There is no question that, overall, modern athletes are superior to their predecessors. Athletes today are bigger, stronger and faster. If Johnny Weismuller, on his finest day in the 100-meter freestyle race, had swum through a timewarp into the 1972 Olympics, he would have found himself eight seconds behind Mark Spitz. Jesse Owens would not come within two feet of the longest jump by modern star Carl Lewis. Glenn Cunningham would finish a couple of hundred yards behind Sebastian Coe in the mile run. In this century, most record times and distances have been improved by 15 to 25 percent, and several by much more.

Why, then, is baseball the one major sport in which measurable numerical records have endured for many decades? This, I hope to prove, is not because today’s players are inferior; it is because the game is so different and the level of competition today is so much higher.

Advocates of the modern player list a number of factors that have made the game more difficult, particularly for hitters: Night baseball, relief specialists, the slider, bigger gloves, increased media pressure, cross-country travel and jet lag.

Supporters of the oldtimer often cite expansion as a reason for the watering down of talent in the big leagues. “By sheer numbers,” wrote. one, “one-third of today’s (players) wouldn’t be in the major leagues if it weren’t for expansion …”

And that’s where we have them. A statement like that fails to consider the impact of the United States population – which has tripled in this century – on baseball’s level of competition.

The accompanying graph introduces the “Level of Competition Index ” (LCI), which indicates the relative degree of difficulty of a man making it to the major leagues at a given time and, simultaneously, reflects the depth of talent in the majors.

LCI is arrived at by dividing the number of major league baseball players at a given time by the number of pro baseball candidates (in millions) at the same time. The number of players is defined as the number of major­-league-level teams in existence (according to The Baseball Encyclopedia, Macmillan) times 25, the current standard. roster size. (Yes, rosters were smaller in the 1800s and early 1900s.) Pro baseball candidates, for the purpose of this computation, are defined as “United States males aged 20-39 years,” for which the data have been supplied by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Since the census is taken only every ten years, population estimates for the intervening years had to be made based on each particular decade’s rate of growth.

Therefore, an LCI of 25.0 means that there were 15 major league players per one million “candidates.” The lower the LCI, the higher the level of talent.

Table 1: United States Males, Aged 20-39 Years, 1870-1980

Source: US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census

Since 1876, the advent of what is usually recognized as major league baseball, the highest LCI ever recorded occurred a century ago. The addition of four teams to the existing American Association in 1884, plus the single­-year existence of the eight-team Union Association, gave the big leagues 28 teams and brought the LCI to a whopping 78.9. The lowest LCI ever was the 16.0 mark of 1900, one year before the American League claimed major league status.

With the inception of the current two-league format in 1901 – the beginning of the “modern era” – the LCI stood at 31.2. That number shrunk slowly but steadily for half a century, dropping to 25.1 in 1910, 23.1 in 1920, 20.5 in 1930, 19.0 in 1940 and 17.5 in 1950, before levelling off to 17.8 in 1960. (While overall population had grown 18.5 percent in the 1950s, the 20-39 age group actually decreased in number due to the low birthrate of the Depression years.)

The 1960s saw the formation of eight new teams – the Los Angeles Angels and the new Washington Senators in 1961 (the old Senators had moved to Minnesota and become the Twins); the Houston Colt .45s and New York Mets in 1962, and the Kansas City Royals, Seattle Pilots, Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in 1969. (The Colt .45s became the Astros in 1965, the Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, and the Senators became the Texas Rangers in 1972.) With this 50 percent expansion of the big leagues, while the talent pool increased by only 13.4 percent during the decade, the LCI jumped to 23.8, the highest since World War I.

The maturing of the “baby boom” generation, however, swiftly reversed that effect over the next decade. The male 20-39 age group grew by an astonishing 40.6 percent during the 1970s, while the number of major leaguers – with the addition of the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays in 1977 – increased only 8.3 percent. This set of circumstances brought the LCI back down to 18.1 by 1980, or about the same as the immediate pre-­expansion levels. And with the continuing population growth since the last census, it is altogether probable that the LCI is right now at the lowest point since 1900 – which means that the level of talent in the big leagues today is the highest of this century.

Table 2: Number of Major League Baseball Teams, 1876-1984

This, of course, takes into account only factors of population and expansion. There are other bases to touch.

As many people have pointed out, baseball was, for many years, virtually the only sport in which a talented athlete could hope to perform for financial gain. There are at least two counters to that contention.

First, only a select few players really made a decent living playing ball in those days; there were no dreams of multi-million contracts. For example, a star sandlot player of the 1930s (my father) told me he had to refuse a minor league contract offer because he could not live on $20 a month. The point is, many good athletes couldn’t afford to consider a pro sports career, baseball or otherwise.

Second, probably most of the potential baseball players who have opted for other pro sports are either basketball players or skill position football players – and the vast majority of those athletes would not have been allowed to play baseball between 1887 and 1947 because they are black. This leads us to the integration factor.

We have already established that, based on population data alone (“sheer numbers”), the number of major leaguers per million candidates has dropped from 31 in 1901 to 18 in 1980. But were those 31 of ’01 the best baseball players in existence? No, they were the best white players. Meanwhile, of the 18 in 1980, perhaps 12 are white.

So, considering the integration factor on top of the population factor, we can say that only about two-fifths of the 1901 players would be good enough to make it to the big leagues today. (And with the much-improved overall caliber of the modern athlete, that fraction would be much smaller.) In a normal distribution (bell) curve of baseball ability, the line separating non-players and minor leaguers from major leaguers is moving farther and farther to the right.

What this tells us is that, by today’s standards, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, et al, were hurling against lineups of mostly minor-league-level hiters and Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby and company were batting against mostly minor-league-level pitchers. These Hall of Famers would have excelled in any era, but their individual statistics were embellished by the low levels of talent of the rank and file players of their times.

This leaves us only to speculate: What kind of numbers could have been put on the board by the likes of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Steve Carton and Tom Seaver had they played under similar conditions as these oldtime heroes?

Frank Bancroft, the new manager of the Providence Grays, was having second thoughts. Had he done well to leave Cleveland, where he had been treated kindly and where, the previous season, he had led his club to a respectable fourth-place finish in the National League? In late January 1884, in a letter to Harry Wright, his friend and predecessor as manager of the Grays, Bancroft hinted his distaste for the Rhode Island city, and wondered if he might find himself under too many bosses with the Grays.

Perhaps Bancroft’s grumbling was simply new-job jitters. As manager, he would be expected to produce a profitable team—a manager in the 1880s managed his club’s scheduling and business matters as well as its players. But Bancroft, although he was not yet thirty-eight years old, was known for his financial genius. In four years of managing National League clubs in Worcester, Detroit, and Cleveland, none had finished a season higher than fourth, but all had turned profits for their owners.

Now, with a good team-one that in its six years in the league had never finished lower than third, one that in the two previous seasons had contended strongly for the championship—surely with a team like this he could earn not only money but maybe even a pennant for his new bosses.

Whatever his private fears, Bancroft in public looked toward the 1884 season with optimism. His team was essentially the one that the previous year had finished a strong third, only five games behind the champion Boston Red Stockings. The club had lost its right fielder, John Cassidy, to the Brooklyn club in the rival American Association, but in his place it had signed Paul Revere Radford, a promising young Bostonian who had broken into the majors the previous season with his hometown team, and who could pitch as well as play the outfield.

All the other Grays regulars were club veterans. One, in fact—center fielder Paul Hines—had been with the team since it entered the National League in 1878. In his first three seasons with Providence he led the club in batting (leading the league in 1878), and had been every year among the Grays’ two or three best hitters. As a fielder he was known for his fine eye and spectacular catches, especially of low line drives.

Two regulars had joined the Grays the year after Hines: veteran first baseman Joe Start and, late in the season, rookie second baseman Jack Farrell. Start, when he joined the Grays in ’79, was already thirty-six. He had played in the old National Association, the first professional league, and before that, as an “amateur” star with Brooklyn’s Atlantics and other clubs going back to 1860. Now, in 1884, at age 41 the league’s oldest player, Start was still a fine fielder and, next to Hines, the Grays’ most consistent hitter. He was the team captain, a responsible position in those days when a nonplaying manager (like Bancroft and, before him, Harry Wright) sat in the grandstand and conveyed through his captain whatever instructions he had for his players. Jack Farrell, after a rocky beginning (he twice led league second basemen in errors), developed into one of the league’s surest fielders and led all keystoners in fielding average for 1883.

Three Grays regulars were in their fourth year with the club in 1884. Third baseman Jerry Denny, whose major league career began with the Grays in 1881, had developed into something of a slugger, tying for second in league home runs (with 8) in 1883. But he was better known for his fieldings: Though known to throw the ball away upon occasion, he was splendid at stopping and catching it. Able to field the ball with either hand, he became—and remains today—the all-time leader of major league third basemen in his career averages of 4.2 chances and 1.6 putouts per game.

Also joining the Grays in 1881 were the battery of Charley Radbourne (most sources today omit the final “e,” but Old Hoss signed his name “Radbourne”) and Barney Gilligan. Gilligan came to the Grays after two years as catcher and outfielder with Cleveland, but Radbourne, though two years older than Gilligan, at age 26, was a virtual rookie. He had played six games in the infield and outfield for Buffalo in 1880, but he never pitched a major league game until he joined Providence. He quickly developed into one of the league’s most respected box artists, and in 1883 carried the team’s pitching, starting or relieving (four times) in 50 of the Gray’s 58 victories. Overall, he pitched 632 innings in 76 games, winning 49 and losing 25.

Manager Bancroft was confident that Radbourne would not be as overworked in 1884, even though the league was expanding its schedule from 98 to 112 games. Charlie Sweeney, a young pitcher/outfielder from San Francisco, was overwhelming batters in California winter ball. Though he had seen limited service with the Grays since joining them in 1882, Bancroft planned to alternate him in the box with Radbourne in 1884.

A second San Franciscan, catcher Vincent (Sandy) Nava, also broke into the majors with Providence in 1882. His heritage has been variously assessed over the years. Harry Wright, who signed him for the Grays, described him as a “Spaniard”; others have called him Portuguese or Cuban; his death certificate gives his father’s birthplace as “America” and his mother’s as Mexico; contemporary press accounts hinted that he was black. Whatever his race and ancestry, he caught well, and formed with Sweeney the Grays’ “California battery.”

The 1882 season saw not only the major league debuts of Sweeney and Nava, but also of left fielder Cliff Carroll, a hunting buddy of Radbourne and, like Radbourne, a resident of Bloomington, Illinois. Sporting Life described him as the best man in baseball at beating out a bunt.

The regular team of1884 was rounded out by shortstop Arthur Irwin, who came to the Grays in 1883 after three years in the league with Worcester. (One of Bancroft’s finds, Irwin played shortstop for him at Worcester in 1879, when the team was in a minor league, and the next year, when the team graduated, nearly intact, to the National League.) Irwin was a native of Toronto, but for many years had made his home in Boston. He was a daring though sometimes reckless baserunner, and like Carroll was known for his ability to bunt hit.

In addition to the eleven regulars, Providence had signed two extra catchers—Miah Murray, another Bostonian, and Charlie Bassett, a student at Providence’s Brown University—anticipating a “breaking up” of catchers under the new league rule permitting overhand pitching for the first time. Bassett, who would join the Grays after Brown finished its baseball season in June, was also an infielder, and became the Grays’ general utility man late in the season when injuries and illness afflicted the team. Murray caught only seven games in 1884, and Bassett none at all, as Gilligan and Nava proved more durable than expected.

Manager Bancroft’s confidence in pitcher Sweeney seemed well placed. He pitched well in the month of exhibition games that preceded the opening of the championship season—so well, in fact, that Radbourne must have wondered if he were about to be superseded by the brash twenty-one-year-old as darling of the fans.

Not only Sweeney, but the Grays as a team were impressive in preseason play. After defeating Brown University in Providence on March 29, the club traveled south to Hampton, Va., and rolled north through April, flattening every minor league and American Association club in its path. The Grays’ only preseason loss was a forfeit to Brooklyn on April 21, when Sweeney insisted on throwing overhand although the game was being played according to American Association rules, which forbade deliveries in which the pitcher’s arm came higher than the shoulder.

The Grays kept their momentum as the regular season began. After a close opening day loss to Cleveland on May 1, they won seventeen of their next eighteen games, with winning streaks of five and twelve games. The California battery of Sweeney and Nava worked the opening game and thereafter were generally alternated, as Bancroft had planned, with Radbourne and Gilligan. The pitchers matched won-lost records through May 24 (when both stood at 8-1) before Radbourne began to pull away from Sweeney with a victory on May 26 which Sweeney followed with two losses.

On May 22 the Grays had for the first time moved into the league lead ahead of Boston. Though the two successive losses dropped them back into second place for a day, Radbourne’s two victories (morning and afternoon) on Memorial Day, and a third the day after, brought the Grays to the end of May in first place by a few percentage points. Boston regained the lead three days later.

Providence and Boston were by geographical proximity natural rivals, and their struggle for first place intensified the rivalry. The teams did not play each other the first month of the season. By the time they met in Providence on June 6, Boston was a game ahead of the Grays, but would slip into second place in percentage if they should lose the game. Excitement ran high, and the crowd of nearly 4500 that packed the Grays’ Messer Street grounds included from 300-1500 fans (news accounts varied) who had traveled by train from Boston expecting a close and exciting game. They were not to be disappointed.

One Boston writer, recalling the 1884 Providence-Boston games a decade later, called them “the greatest ever played between two clubs in the history of base ball.” This first game set the tone for the seventeen the clubs would play that season. In a monumental pitchers’ duel, Radbourne and Boston’s “Jumbo” Jim Whitney overpowered batters for sixteen innings without giving up an earned run. Darkness ended the game in a 1-1 tie. It turned out to be the league’s longest game that year, and was hailed by one writer as “the most memorable in the history of the national sport.” Boston still led the league.

The next day the teams played in Boston, but the league lead returned to Providence as the writers revised their judgment about baseball’s most memorable game. Whitney unexpectedly was sent in to pitch again, and again permitted no earned runs, striking out 10 men. But Providence’s Sweeney was the hero of the game, striking out 19 Boston batsmen for a new record (since tied but not surpassed), as the Grays defeated the Reds 2-1 on unearned runs.

The Grays returned to a jubilant welcome in Providence that evening, complete with a torchlight parade and a banquet. But the jubilation was short lived: Providence lost its next four games to Boston, falling four games out of first place, before Radbourne pulled out a 4-3 win in the fifteen-inning series finale.

Though they could not know it, the Grays had passed the low point of their season. For all the troubles to come, they would not again be further than three games behind the league leader. With the fifteen-inning victory over Boston they began another of their winning streaks—this one ten games—which included Radbourne’s fourteen-inning 1-0 three-hitter against Detroit.

The game that ended their winning streak—a no-hitter by Larry Corcoran in Chicago on June 27, the third of his major league career—seems to have taken the wind out of the Grays’ sail. By the time they next played Boston on July 11, though they had pulled to within two games, they were becalmed in a ten-game stretch of .500 ball.

And they played no better against their arch rivals, splitting their six games with Boston and ending the series still two games behind. Because Sweeney had developed arm trouble, Radbourne was now pitching nearly every game; against the Reds he pitched the first three games, winning two. A “phenomenal” acquired from the Worcester club, Joseph “Cyclone” Miller, pitched well in the fourth game but lost a close one, 4-3. Radbourne lost the fifth game, on July 16, and that evening was suspended by manager Bancroft for “insubordination” and lackadaisical play. Although Radbourne’s overall record to that date was good (24-8), half his losses had come in the previous two weeks.

With Radbourne out, Miller became the starting pitcher for the next two games, winning the first with Sweeney’s help in the ninth (to conclude the Boston series), and giving way to Sweeney in the second inning the next day against New York in a game Providence went on to win. Sweeney’s arm trouble seemed to have cleared up. It wasn’t his arm that would bring him down. The next day, July 19, Providence introduced its second phenom of the month. Pitcher Ed Conley, a frail amateur up from the Woonsocket, Rhode Island, “OSRC’s” (for Orcutt’s Sure Rheumatic Cure, which supplied their uniforms), stunned Harry Wright’s Phillies with a two-hit 6-1 victory.

Two days later, on Monday, July 21, during an exhibition game in Woonsocket against Conley’s old team, Sweeney (who was not playing) began drinking between innings in the dressing room. When the Grays returned to Providence after the game, he and Nava remained behind, and failed to show up for practice in Providence the next morning before a game with Philadelphia. Sweeney finally appeared at one o’clock and, taking manager Bancroft aside, said to him: “If you want to know why I was not here this morning I will tell you. I was drunk last night and did not get home.”

Despite Sweeney’s defiant attitude, Bancroft decided to give him his first start in two weeks. But he put Miller in right field to be available for relief if necessary. (Until 1891, substitutes could not be brought off the bench into a game unless one of the starting nine was injured or became ill.)

Sweeney pitched without will or effort, and it was only the Grays’ strong fielding that held the Phillies to two runs in the first four innings. At the start of the fifth, Bancroft asked captain Joe Start to have Sweeney and Miller exchange positions, but Sweeney refused, and continued to pitch the next two innings. In the seventh, Bancroft called Sweeney over to the stands and asked him directly to let Miller relieve him. Sweeney refused, said “I guess I’ll quit,” and left the field.

Providence completed the game with eight men—Miller pitched, and Carroll and Hines covered the outfield. They managed to preserve their 6-2 lead into the ninth, but then balls began to fall between the fielders and two runs scored. The rattled Grays began to commit errors, and by the time the inning was over Philadelphia had scored eight runs. Final score: 10-6, Phillies.

Sweeney was expelled from the team, and the league, that evening. (There is some reason to suppose Sweeney acted deliberately to provoke his dismissal. Once freed from his league contract obligations, he promptly signed with St. Louis of the outlaw Union Association for higher pay; winning 24 games for them in the half season that remained, he completed 1884 with a combined record of 41-15.)

Although the New York Times report of the Sweeney incident suggested that the Grays might have to disband, that option seems not to have been seriously considered by the club directors. When they expelled Sweeney, they also reinstated Radbourne, revising his contract to pay him extra for pitching Sweeney’s games in addition to his own. Radbourne, for his part (as baseball sage Henry Chadwick put it), “settled down to carry out his intention of ‘pitching the Providence team into the championship,’ and he did it splendidly, his work in the ‘box’ never before having been equaled.”

For the next two months, until the Grays felt they had the pennant well in hand, Radbourne played every game. Most of them he pitched, but in the four games when Miller or Conley was started in the box, Radbourne played in the field to be available for relief. He did relieve Miller once, preserving the Grays’ lead with four innings of no-hit pitching.

On August 7, in New York, after losing to the Maroons (also known as the Gothams, soon to be the Giants) 2-1 in 11 innings the day before, Radbourne came back to defeat them and begin the Grays’ longest winning streak of the season—twenty games—and begin for himself a major league record eighteen consecutive wins. (Only two pitchers have surpassed Radbourne in the hundred seasons since then: Tim Keefe in 1888 and Rube Marquard in 1912, both with nineteen.)

When the Grays traveled to Boston two days later for the first game of their final series with the Red Stockings, they entered the most crucial period in their race for the pennant. Boston, only a game behind the Grays, knew it could come out of the series with as much as a three-game lead over Providence. Boston’s pitching was impressive. In the first game, Charlie Buffinton faced only twenty-seven men in nine innings—the two Grays who hit safely were promptly retired on a pickoff and a double play. But Radbourne was invincible. He matched Buffinton’s pitching in the first game, which the Grays finally won in the eleventh, 1-0. In the second game, two days later, Boston scored a run, but Radbourne pitched his second two-hitter in a row and the Grays scored three runs to win. The next day Radbourne shut out the Reds for the second time in the series (4-0), and after a day’s rest (a rainout) he finished them off with a third shutout, 1-0. The Grays’ sweep left Boston five games behind.

For a time, Boston kept pace with an eight-game winning streak, but as Providence was now embarked on its twenty-game streak, and would win twenty-eight of twenty-nine games before easing up, the Reds were out of the race.

Radbourne’s endurance was as impressive as his effectiveness. In the two months following Sweeney’s departure he pitched thirty-five complete games (plus four innings of relief, winning thirty, losing four and tying one. Two of his losses came at the end of this marathon as he pitched a twenty-first and twenty-second consecutive championship game for the Grays.

Radbourne’s endurance and effectiveness are all the more remarkable in light of his agony in preparing for each game. Frank Bancroft, although he went on to other triumphs (culminating in a long, distinguished career as business manager for the Cincinnati Reds), never forgot 1884, and never tired of telling the Radbourne story. In an article he wrote for Baseball Magazine in 1908 he recalled Radbourne’s warmup exercises:

Morning after morning upon arising he would be unable to raise his arm high enough to use his hair brush. Instead of quitting he stuck all the harder to his task[,] going out to the ball park hours before the rest of the team and beginning to warm up by throwing a few feet and increasing the distance until he could finally throw the ball from the outfield to the home plate. The players, all eagerness to win, would watch “Rad,” and when he would succeed in making his customary long distance throw they would look at each other and say the “Old Hoss” is ready and we can’t be beat, and this proved to be the case nine times out often.

The Grays’ schedule called for them to play the final month of the season away from home. As the day approached for their departure they were variously honored by their fans. Before the game of September 2, for example, Radbourne and his catcher Gilligan were presented “life-size portraits of themselves, in crayon, handsomely mounted in heavy gilded frames.” A week and a half later, “Radbourne was given a great bunch of flowers, in which was a valuable envelope, while Farrell received a magnificent crayon portrait of himself, and a gold watch, chain and charm, the latter articles being valued at $185.”

The Grays rewarded their fans, too, with their splendid play. Their loss on September 9 which ended their twenty-game winning streak was doubtless a disappointment, especially as poor umpiring seems to have contributed to Buffalo’s two runs. But on the whole the Grays were awesome. On September 5, third baseman Denny hit “the best home run hit yet made on the Messer Street grounds. The ball went far above the roofs of the houses beyond the left field fence, and ere it had dropped Farrell was home and Denny nearly to second base. This won the game.”

When the team left for Cleveland in mid-September, Conley and Murray were brought along as the change battery. Miller and Nava were loaned for the remainder of the season to a military team at Ft. Monroe, Virginia.

On September 25, in Chicago, Radbourne missed his first game as pitcher or fielder since returning from his suspension on July 23. He pitched only five of the Grays’ twelve remaining games. With his two consecutive losses in late September, the whole team slacked off, winning only half of their final fourteen games. Nevertheless, they clinched the pennant two weeks before the end of the season when Boston, weakened by injuries, lost its third game of the week to last-place Detroit.

On October 15 the Grays’ championship season came to an end with a makeup game in Philadelphia. Radbourne pitched and won easily, 8-0, his eleventh shutout of the year. He started 73 games as pitcher and completed them all, winning 59, losing 12 and tying 2. Twice he came in from right field to relieve the starting pitcher and preserve his team’s lead; by today’s scoring guidelines he would be credited with two saves. (Saves, of course, were not calculated in 1884, and neither were pitching wins and losses. Radbourne, had he been asked, would simply have said he had pitched in 61 Providence victories. The 60-win figure that appears in baseball encyclopedias and record books was arrived at in the early years of this century by crediting one of his relief appearances as a victory in addition to his 59 complete-game wins.)

It was pitching and fielding that carried Providence to its .750 record of84 wins against only 28 losses. In batting and slugging, the Grays ranked only fifth among the league’s eight teams. Their .241 batting average was six points below the league average, and a full forty points below league leading Chicago’s .281. Paul Hines led the Grays in batting with .302. Sweeney in his half-season hit .298, and Start batted .276. Denny led the club in home runs with 6.

In fielding the Grays were much more impressive, their fielding average of .918 second only to Boston’s .922. Two Grays were at the top of the league in their positions: Joe Start led first basemen with .980, nine points ahead of his nearest rival; second baseman Jack Farrell ended the season in a virtual tie with Boston’s Jack Burdock at .922. Most impressive, of course, were the Grays’ pitching statistics. In earned run average (estimated in modern times), Providence pitchers led the league: Radbourne was first (1.38) and Sweeney second (1.55). The team’s 1.59 was nearly half the league average (2.98), and nearly a run less per game than second-ranked Boston (2.47). Sweeney gave up the fewest hits per nine innings of anyone in the league (6.23); Radbourne was second (with 7.00). Radbourne led the league in strikeouts with 441.

On their return to Providence October 17, the Grays were once again paraded and banqueted. With Sweeney, the hero of the previous celebration, gone, Radbourne was king. He rewarded his fans’ adulation by pitching a one-hitter the next day in an exhibition game against Cincinnati of the American Association—his final appearance of the year in Providence.

For Radbourne and the Grays there was one more triumph. Late in July Jim Mutrie, manager of New York’s Metropolitans, who were headed for the American Association championship, began to talk about how his team could beat any team in the older National League.

When Providence players heard this, they persuaded Bancroft to challenge the Mets to a postseason series to settle the question of league superiority. Mutrie accepted the challenge and, after much negotiation, a three-game series was scheduled for New York’s Polo Grounds, then located just north of Central Park, for October 23-25 (six months to the day after the Grays—without pitching Hoss—had defeated the Mets in three preseason games).

This October series looms in importance through the mist of a hundred years as the forerunner and prototype of America’s premier sporting event. But in 1884, even though some papers described it as a series to determine the championship of the world, the public remained unimpressed.

American Association teams were regularly defeated in exhibition games by National League clubs—although this pattern reversed itself in the next two years—and the Association champion Mets, before meeting Providence, had done no better than tie the Maroons, fourth place in the NL, in a series for the city championship. Furthermore, the weather turned windy and cold suddenly, dropping into the low fifties on the afternoon of the first game from a summer-like 76° the day before. Only 2500 spectators saw Radbourne shut out the Mets 6-0. Even that number dropped the next day, along with the temperature, as only 1000 fans saw Grays’ third baseman Denny win for Radbourne the second and deciding game, 3-1, with a home run over the center field fence.

As the outcome of the series had been decided and the weather remained cold, fewer than 500 fans showed up’ for the final game. The Grays, who were to split with the Mets the profits of the final two games, saw no profit in this small crowd and wanted to go home. When at last they were persuaded to take the field after being given the choice of umpire, they were given the game as well by the Mets’ sloppy fielding. Scorers lost count, but when darkness mercifully halted the game after six innings, Radbourne and the Grays were once again victorious, by a score of 11—or perhaps 12—to 2.

Henry Chadwick, reflecting on Radbourne’s success while pitching nearly every game, argued his example as a paradigm for all those pitchers who claimed to need rest every other day. But even Radbourne couldn’t maintain his 1884 pace beyond that season. The next year he pitched only two-thirds as many games as he had in 1884. And though he often pitched well thereafter, not once in his seven remaining major league seasons did he win even half the number of games he had won in his miracle year.

As for the Providence Grays, in 1885 they slipped below .500 and into fourth place for the first time in their history. Their fans deserted them, and at the end of the season the club was disbanded. Frank Bancroft,just a year after his greatest triumph, had for the first time managed a failure.

Hitting has been on the rise in ba8eball the past decade or so, and there is talk that today’s ball, the Rawlings Rabbit, has more spring than any hare of seasons past. This is shortsighted history. Let me tell you, Sonny, about a time there was hitting in the major leagues.

The 1930 season is remembered for Hack Wilson’s 56 home runs and 191 runs batted in, and Bill Terry’s .401 batting average. Great as those achievements were, they stand out more in historical perspective than they did in their own day. In 1930, lusty hitting was a democratic activity, shared by all.

In 1984, the American League batted .264 and the National League hit .255. In 1930, the American League batted—including pitcher batting—.288 and the National League came in at .303. If the senior circuit had been a player-Nat League, 6-1, 190, throws right, switch-hits—it would have finished tenth in last season’s batting race.

In 1983 Lonnie Smith of the Cardinals missed the NL batting championship by only .002; if he had been warped back to 1930 with his .321 average, he would have found himself ranking seventh—not in the league, but on his own team. The 1930 Cardinals had twelve .300 hitters, only eight of whom could play at a time.

Wilson, of the Cubs, and Terry, of the Giants, had to hustle to stay on top. Wilson’s 56 homers stand as the National League record, but his mark of 191 runs batted in is considered more impressive, and often is listed among baseball’s few unbreakable records. It may be, but in 1930 Chuck Klein of the Phillies wasn’t far behind, with 170, and Lou Gehrig of the Yankees led the American League with 174. Six major leaguers drove in more than 150 runs each that season, and thirty-two had 100 or more.

For the batting championship, Terry edged Babe Herman of the Dodgers, who hit .393, and Klein, at .386. As any good fan knows, no National Leaguer has batted .400 since Terry. What’s more, no National Leaguer has hit .390 since Herman, either, or .386 since Klein.

Klein was the quintessential also-ran that season: second in the league in RBIs, second all-time; second to Terry in hits with 250, tied for third all-time; second to Wilson in slugging with .687, sixth best all-time. As for homers, Klein set the National League record just the year before, with 43, and lost it to Wilson in 1930. Strictly a spear-carrier, that Klein.

We could go on with these statistics. For example, count the .300 hitters: thirty-three in the National League, thirty-two in the American, a record. Trouble is, the figures understate the case, because they include only men who played in 100 games or more. In 1930, lots of .300 hitters couldn’t crack the lineup. Some of them were pitchers, like Red Ruffing of the Yankees (.374), Erv Brame of the Pirates (.353), Chad Kimsey of the St. Louis Browns (.343), Red Lucas of the Reds (.336), and Firpo Marberry of the Washington Senators (.329).

The hitters splattered the 1930 season all over the record books, but it was a remarkable baseball year in other ways, too. It was the first year of the Great Depression, and the first year of Babe Ruth’s $80,000 salary. Night baseball began in the minor leagues, was an immediate sensation, and was denounced by major league owners as a blight and a fad. Gabby Hartnett of the Cubs was caught by a photographer while chatting with Al Capone, and Babe Herman twice was caught and passed by teammates on the basepaths. The Yankees traded a star pitcher because of a detective’s report, and the Cardinals staged one of the greatest pennant drives in history, the more dramatic because of the disappearance—kidnapping?—of a star pitcher.

Baseball was such the dominant sport back then that its stars, like it or not, had to provide copy for the sports pages during the offseason as well as the summer. None filled the role as well as Ruth, who by then was a public idol of gargantuan proportions. Dour men like Rogers Hornsby made news only with their bats, but Ruth’s ebullient personality and hearty living habits enhanced his reputation.

Ruth was holding out for $85,000 that spring, and Jacob Ruppert, the Yankee owner, grumped at the figure. “Ruth has taken more money from the Yankees than I have,” he said. One venture fell through, Ruth’s Home Run Candy running afoul of the thirty-five-year-old copyright on the Baby Ruth bar, which had been named after the infant daughter of President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland. But no matter. Without playing another game of baseball or lending his name to another product, Ruth said, he was assured of a comfortable income for life.

But Ruth did not feel comfortable as a holdout, and during spring training he yielded, accepting $80,000 a year for two years. It was a stunning figure, forty times the wage of the average worker, and it brought out the prophet in Edward G. Barrow, business manager of the Yankees. “You will never hear of another ballplayer getting that kind of money,” Barrow said. Never? he was asked. “I’m sure there will never be another one on this ballclub,” Barrow replied.

Next to Ruth, other players paled. Lefty O’Doul of the Phils also held out that spring. O’Doul had led the National League in batting the season before at .398, with 32 homers and 122 runs batted in. He demanded—think of it!—$17,000. Too much, his boss said; O’Doul already was pulling down $8,000, more than any other Phillie, ever. O’Doul, like Ruth, had to compromise.

Edd Roush of the New York Giants would not compromise. A .324 hitter in 1929 and a future member of the Hall of Fame, Roush held out all spring, and all summer, too; he didn’t play a game. Al Simmons, the Philadelphia Athletics’ slugger, threatened to do the same, and Connie Mack announced that Spence Harris, a minor league lifer with an American League career average of .249, would take Simmons’ place. While the Athletics were warming up on opening day, Simmons signed. The fans at Shibe Park roared when he appeared in uniform, and roared again when he came to bat in the first inning, with a man on base, and homered off George Pipgras of the Yanks. So much for the value of spring training.

While Ruth’s physical dimensions were fully the match of his accomplishments on the field, Wilson supplied a contrast. With short legs, size 5 1/2 shoes, and a huge torso, Wilson looked dwarfish, almost deformed. He was only 5 feet 6 inches tall, but weighed 190. His arms were large and muscular, his hands small. Even his nicknames were degrading; he was referred to as a gorilla, a sawed-off Babe Ruth, the Hardest-Hitting Hydrant of All Time, the Squatty Outfielder, the Pugnacious Clouter, the Abbreviated One, the Boy with the Mountainous Chin, none of which did much for his ego.

While Ruth went into the 1930 season with the dramatic flourish of his record salary, Wilson carried the humiliation of a dreadful inning during the 1929 World Series. Trailing the Cubs 8-0 in the fourth game, the Athletics scored ten runs in the seventh inning. Wilson, the Cubs’ center fielder, lost two balls in the sun, one of them falling for a single and the other for a three-run homer. The A’s went on to win that game and the Series, four games to one.

Wilson was said to have been a pathetic figure following the Series. But he was a cheerful and likable man, and at spring training in 1930 Wilson was the life of the Cubs’ camp. Cub players shouted “Wilson!” when fungoes were hit into the sun. Lampooning his own misplays, Wilson pulled the window shade in the hotel dining room, and asked the maitre d’ to dim the light so he wouldn’t misjudge his soup. Perhaps wishing to share in the fun, Calvin Coolidge visited Catalina Island, California, where the Cubs trained. The former President had little to say, but posed for photographers with a macaw on his shoulder.

From the season’s beginning, the hitting in 1930 was extraordinary, and was recognized as such. Not that baseball had been a pitchers’ game in the 1920s—far from it; neither league had batted under .280 since 1920, and the number of home runs more than doubled between that decade’s first and last years. But in 1930 there was even more of what the club owners obviously considered a good thing, since attendance had increased with hitting.

Rallies were immense, and pitchers absorbed terrible punishment; it was not yet the custom to relieve short of disaster. On May 12, in Chicago, the Giants scored six runs in the second inning and seven in the third, helped by a home run by Mel Ott and two doubles by Fred Lindstrom. Larry Benton, the New York pitcher, carried a 14-0 lead into the fifth inning, and little seemed amiss when Cliff Heathcote homered for the Cubs; 14-1.

In the Cub sixth, Wilson and Gabby Hartnett walked, and Clyde Beck homered; 14-4. In the seventh, Heathcote led off with his second homer, and, after one out, Wilson homered to right. So did Charley Grimm. Les Bell flied out and Hartnett fanned for what would have been the third out, but Shanty Hogan, the Giant catcher, dropped the ball, and then threw it wildly, Hartnett reaching second. Beck homered again; 14-9. At this point John McGraw decided that Benton was weakening. McGraw brought in Joe Heving, who gave up six hits and three runs, but no homers. The Giants won 14-12, the Cubs having run out of time.

In late May, the Yankees and Athletics played three doubleheaders in four days, and the hitters gorged. Ninety-nine runs scored, and there were twenty-four home runs, eight of them by Ruth and three each by Gehrig and Philadelphia’s Jimmie Foxx. As if the sluggers were swinging a massive pendulum, all three doubleheaders were swept, and no game was close—15-7 and 4-1 for the A’s, 10-1 and 20-13 for the Yankees, 10-6 and 11-1, Yanks again.

In a devastating road swing in July, the Athletics scored ninety-seven runs in eight games, winning all of them while averaging twelve runs and fifteen hits a game. They scored ten runs in one inning at St. Louis, then, the next day, nine runs in the first three innings. In Chicago, Foxx hit a ball clear over the left field stands at Comiskey Park, the first player to do so.

The Senators, who had led the AL on Memorial Day, fell back, and so did the Yanks. Walter Johnson, the Washington manager, was appalled at the slugging and scolded his pitchers. Johnson was forty-four and hadn’t pitched for three years, but he thought he could do no worse than the younger men, and said he might pitch relief. Owner Clark Griffith talked him out of it. In truth, the Senators’ pitching staff was excellent, compared with others: Washington was the only team in baseball that yielded fewer than four earned runs per game that season.

Ruth was hitting so many home runs that he predicted he’d wind up with about 75. He might have, but on July 2 he jumped for a ball, caught a finger in the outfield screen, and lost the nail. The team doctor said the Babe would be out for a while, but he played the next day, his finger bandaged. Two days later, he hit his 32nd home run, putting him more than twenty games ahead of his pace in 1927, when he hit 60. But Ruth’s slugging tailed off; he finished with 49 homers.

The Yanks were managed in 1930 by Bob Shawkey, and were watched surreptitiously by a detective, who was hired by Ruppert and traveled with the team, socializing with the players without letting them know he was snitching on them. Waite Hoyt, a pitcher who enjoyed night life, was traded to Detroit early in the season after the detective reported he was staying out even the night before pitching assignments. The Yankees could have used Hoyt, even with a hangover; their pitching was dreadful, and they finished a distant third.

The Cubs were the pick of the National League, but Hornsby broke his ankle and the race was close. Everyone expected the Brooklyn Dodgers, 70-83 in 1929, to improve in 1930, but not to contend. They did both. These were the Daffiness Boys, the Robins of veteran manager Wilbert Robinson. The Dodgers made errors in horrendous clusters, and, led by Herman, tended to squelch rallies with baserunning blunders.

On May 30 Herman, leading off first base, stood and watched while Del Bissonette’s towering fly ball cleared the right-field screen at Ebbets Field. There was no chance that the ball would be caught, but Bissonette thought it might hit the screen and was running hard, as Herman should have been. Bissonette was declared out for passing a runner on the bases; his hit was registered as a single. On September 15 Herman did it again, this time depriving Glenn Wright of a home run.

On June 15, the Cardinals presented the Dodgers with three early runs on an outfield misplay. But the Dodgers fought back with five errors of their own, two of them by second baseman Mickey Finn, who fielded as if he had swallowed his name. Andy High, a Brooklyn castoff who was to haunt his old team all season, followed two of the errors with a triple, and a subsequent error with a home run. Dazzy Vance twice hit Taylor Douthit with pitches, but in the ninth decided to pitch to him, Dodger errors having placed two Cardinals on base. Douthit tripled, and the Cardinals won, 9-4.

Even while excelling, the Dodgers managed to err. At Pittsburgh on June 24, they managed to conclude the sixth inning with 10 straight hits, the last one a single to center on which Al Lopez was thrown out at the plate. Never mind; Brooklyn opened the seventh with a double by Wally Gilbert and a homer by Herman. That made twelve straight hits, a record even when done the Dodger way.

Perhaps aware that he could depend on the Dodgers to do themselves in, Pirate Manager Jewel Ens stuck through that awful sixth inning with his starter, the pitcher with the rhyming name, Heine Meine, who then departed, having yielded 14 runs and 19 hits, the last 10 of them in a row.

For hitting, no team was the superior of the Phillies, except whomever they were playing. In the nightcap of a doubleheader on July 23, the Phils attacked the Pirates with 27 hits, including two home runs by Don Hurst. Not enough; the Pirates won, 16-15, on a homer by Pie Traynor in the thirteenth inning. The Phils scored 15 runs the next day, too, against the visiting Cubs—who, alas, tallied 19.

An extraordinary number of high-scoring games were played that season on the home grounds of the Phillies, and it was no coincidence. The Phils played in Baker Bowl, a decaying museum of a stadium with a right field wall so close, according to Ray Benge, then a Phillie pitcher, that “standing on the mound it looked like you could reach back there and thump it.”

It was 280 feet to the right field corner, 300 feet in the right-center power alley. Today’s most inviting wall, the Green Monster in left field at Fenway Park, Boston, is distant by comparison at 315 feet—and short, too, at 37 feet, 2 inches. Baker Bowl was built in 1887, and whoever designed it should have invented the skyscraper instead. The stadium was rimmed with a high wall, and in right field a screen was put on top of that for a total height of 58 feet. Even the clubhouse, in center field, was two stories tall. The Phils dressed on the top floor, with a commanding view of the patchy green surface. “Down on the field it was like a hole,” Benge recalls.

Particularly for pitchers. “You just had one way to pitch,” according to Benge. “That was to the righthand side of the plate, outside to lefthanders, inside to righthanders. You wanted the righthanders to pull, but a lot of them wouldn’t do it. They’d punch the ball to right and ping it off the wall.”

One of the best pingers was Pinky Whitney, the Phils’ third baseman. “I hit a bunch of pop flies against it,” Whitney says. He batted .342, including 41 doubles, and batted in 117 runs.

On the Phils, that was good but not exceptional. The team scored an average of 6.13 runs a game, and batted .315. They had two strong lefthanded pull hitters in Klein and O’Doul, and both of them batted over.380. Together, Klein, Whitney, and O’Doul drove in 384 runs and scored 367. What would such a team do to the league?

The Phils’ answer, in 1930, was: bring up the rear. They won 52 games, lost 102, and never threatened seventh place. Phillie pitchers allowed a record 6.71 earned runs a game, about two more than a very bad pitching staff yields today, and Phillie fielders led the majors with 239 errors, 50 or so more than the most butterfingered of today’s teams.

Between the Phils and their opponents, the overall batting average at Baker Bowl that season was .350. Klein hit .439 at home, .332 away. The tall right field barrier was made for doubles, both live and by ground rule, the latter coming when balls punched through the rusty metal wall and rattled to the ground behind, lost forever. Klein hit 59 doubles himself, and, playing right field, stymied many an opposing batter by becoming a ricochet artist. He had 44 assists, enough to divide in two and lead the league twice.

The Phils started the 1930 season with high hopes. Les Sweetland and Claude Willoughby had pitched well the season before, and Sweetland pitched a shutout to open the Phillie season. But he soon foundered, and poor Willoughby never got started. “He had pretty good stuff,” Whitney recalls, “But when he had to pitch, he couldn’t pitch. It was all-day baseball.” Indeed, Sweetland and Willoughby held down so much combat duty on the mound that local sportswriters wove their names into a patriotic song:

My country, ’tis of thee
Sweetland and Will-ough-by
Of thee I sing.

For obvious reasons, sportswriters nicknamed Willoughby “Weeping Willie.” He won 4 games that season and lost 17, with a 7.58 ERA. Sweetland was 7-15, 7.71.

Baker Bowl, since torn down, was not the only stadium of that era to favor hitters. In addition, gloves were small and primitive by today’s standards, and pitching was less sophisticated. The slider was not in general use, and relief pitching was not used as effectively as it is today. Batting averages were boosted by a rule that counted as a sacrifice any fly ball that moved a runner up, and scoring by a rule that counted as a home run any drive that bounced into the stands.

Although these factors help explain the hitting of that era, they do not account for the extraordinary surge of 1930. Nor can it be said that major league hitters just had a hot year. Batting overwhelmed the minor leagues, too. Joe Hauser of Baltimore hit 63 home runs to establish an International League record that still stands, but it wasn’t enough to win him a promotion to the major leagues, or even to earn him recognition as the best first baseman in the league. That honor went to Rip Collins of Rochester, who had only 40 homers but batted .376 with 180 RBIs.

According to survivors, the fuel behind the hitting binge of 1930 was in the ball. The stitches were low, almost countersunk, which kept pitchers from getting a good grip. The insides had been gradually pepped up for a decade, and in 1930 they reached such superball resiliency that Ring Lardner called it “a leather-covered sphere stuffed with dynamite.”

Benge, the Phillie pitcher, first noticed that his infielders looked slow. They were, but the 1930 ball darted past even the fastest glovemen. Some were not so lucky. Fred Lindstrom of the Giants, a good enough third baseman to make the Hall of Fame, was knocked unconscious by a batted ball—not a line drive, but a grounder.

Lindstrom, too, noticed a difference early in the season, but from a happier perspective. He was hitting extraordinarily well, and so were his teammates. Indeed, Lindstrom batted .379 that season, far above his norm, and the Giants’ team average was .319.

Pitchers were intimidated. Joe Tinker, a star infielder for the Cubs a generation before, noted that many pitchers were not following through. “Pitchers are afraid to get off-balance for fear they’ll get killed when the ball comes back at them,” Tinker said. “Sakes alive,” recalls Benge, “that ball was so lively you’d throw it and look for a mole hole to get in.”

The hitting prompted a lively debate. Ruppert, of all people, wanted less of it, although he had benefited greatly from the lively ball as the owner of the Yankees and the employer of Ruth. “I should like to see the spitball restored and the emery ball, too,” Ruppert said, adding this scornful comment about a proposal designed to boost hitting even more: “Why, they have suggested someone hitting for the pitchers. Now, isn’t that rich?”

John J. McGraw, nearing the end of his long managerial career with the Giants, suggested that the ball be deadened and the pitching distance reduced by a couple of feet. Otherwise, he said, no one would want to pitch. “Youngsters in the amateur ranks and on the sandlots no longer have ambitions to become pitchers,” McGraw said. “They want to play some other position in which they can get by without being discouraged.”

On the status quo side of things was Joe McCarthy, the Cubs’ manager, who noted that the fans seemed to like high-scoring games. McCarthy, of course, had Wilson on his team.

The rabbit ball was not the only subject of controversy. Innovation comes hard to baseball, and in 1930 the major leagues grappled with all sorts of radical ideas. American League teams put numbers on the players’ backs, but the National League held out; true fans were supposed to recognize their heroes at a glance.

Broadcasting of baseball games had begun in 1927, but three years later most teams still spurned it, fearing that fans would not buy tickets if they could listen free at home. The St. Louis teams adopted a middle ground: Allow broadcasts, but keep them dull. As the price of admission—it had not yet occurred to club owners that they could charge radio stations for the privilege—St. Louis broadcasters agreed to give a straight play-by-play, with no commentary. “This should be mutually satisfactory to both the fans and the magnates, for there are some announcers prone to wander far from the actual occurrences on the field,” reported The Sporting News, which little knew how truly it spoke.

The most radical notion of all was night baseball, although it was not really a new idea. An amateur game was played under the lights in 1880, just a year after Edison invented the light bulb, and in 1896 Honus Wagner played a night game as a member of the Paterson, New jersey, team of the Atlantic League. The exhibition was staged by none other than Ed Barrow, by 1930 the dignified business manager of the Yankees and a staunch opponent of night baseball—a position to which he was still clinging fifteen years later with the same prescience he brought to the subject of baseball salaries.

Legend has it that the first night game in Organized Baseball was played on May 2, 1930, at Des Moines, Iowa. In fact, Des Moines, of the Class A Western League, was beaten to the punch by Independence, Kansas, of the Class C Western Association. On April 28, the illuminated Independence Producers beat Muskogee, 12-2. Four days later, Des Moines played under what a local sportswriter called “33,000 candle power of mellow light,” and scored 11 runs in the first inning en route to a 13-6 drubbing of Wichita. The game was attended by Cy Slapnicka, a Cleveland scout, who reported that he “did not see a man flinch from a ball, either batted or thrown.”

The fans certainly did not flinch; more than 10,000 attended. The minor leagues, which had resisted night baseball for so long, now rushed to embrace it. By the end of May, twenty teams had lights or were installing them. Attendance doubled and tripled; it was a financial boost that the minors badly needed.

Cities that continued to hold out were scorned. Four of the six teams in the Piedmont League had lights by mid-July. The two that did not, Henderson and Raleigh, were not drawing as well at home, and asked for a visitors’ cut of the gate receipts while on the road. The other four teams not only refused, but told Henderson and Raleigh to install lights or get out of the league. So much for tradition.

But the majors held fast. The only owner who favored night ball was Sam Breadon of the Cardinals, and his trial balloon was popped by Phil Ball, owner of the Browns and of the stadium where both teams played. The Browns could have used a boost; they drew barely a million fans that decade. But Ball was not alone. In the face of declining attendance during the Depression, this astonishing denial of self-interest was sustained by all sixteen teams until 1935, when the Reds installed lights and played the first major league night game.

Of course, the major leagues did not intentionally discourage fans. Teams were attracting thousands of new patrons with Ladies’ Days, a promotion so successful that the Chicago Cubs, for one, had to cut it back. One day in the heat of the 1930 race Wrigley Field was virtually taken over by 31,000 ladies, all admitted free. But the owners, then as now, feared that change would alienate the “true fan,” whoever he might be.

In 1930, the Cubs’ true fans included men prominent in Chicago’s flashiest business, bootlegging. Al Capone was a Cubs fan, and so was his rival, Bugs Moran. The Cubs used to put on an entertaining pregame show, with fancy fungo hitting and a razzmatazz infield drill, and the gangsters came early to see it. “They used to come out and watch us practice,” recalls Charley Grimm, the Cub first baseman. “They’d sit right behind our bench, and there was never a peep out of them.”

One day, however, Capone peeped at Gabby Hartnett, the Cubs’ catcher, and Hartnett walked over to Capone’s box to autograph a ball. A newspaper photographer happened to catch them, and the picture—the Cubs’ star catcher smiling alongside the country’s most notorious gangster—appeared in newspapers throughout the U.S. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was outraged; he summoned Hartnett for a scolding and ordered the league presidents to forbid any conversation between players and spectators. Landis also told the teams to stop announcing the next day’s starting pitchers, since that information was useful to gamblers, but sportswriters successfully protested that stricture, pointing out that if the judge really wanted to keep gamblers in the dark he should keep the schedule a secret, too.

There was plenty to gamble on. The National League was enjoying a tight race among the Dodgers, Cubs, and Giants, and in August the Cardinals crowded in. They had improved their pitching by trading for Burleigh Grimes, who frightened batters by throwing at them and got them out with a spitball, mean but legal. The spitter had been banned in 1920, but seventeen pitchers who already used it in the majors were given a grandfather clause. By 1930, only four were left; Grimes, at thirty-six, was the youngest.

The Cardinal hitting was fearsome. George Watkins hit .373, a record that still stands for rookies, but he was platooned in right field with veteran Ray Blades, who hit .396. Landis made the Cards keep a young catcher, Gus Mancuso, who had run out of options, and injuries to Jimmie Wilson, the regular catcher, forced them to use him. Mancuso merely hit .366.

These players, however, were not the Cardinal stars. Frankie Frisch, Chick Hafey, Jim Bottomley, and Taylor Douthit combined to drive in 411 runs.

But the Cardinals were somewhat undisciplined. They returned home in early August from a discouraging and raucous road trip, Manager Gabby Street having fined several players for what The Sporting News called “indiscrepancies,” and seemed out of contention. On August 9 they were twelve games out, in fourth place. But they took a home series from the Dodgers and took heart for the stretch drive with Brooklyn, the Cubs, and the Giants.

Zigging and zagging, the Dodgers lost nineteen of twenty-seven games, falling to fourth place, and then won eleven straight to regain the lead in September. All four contenders were thundering. With ten games to play the Cards crept to within a game of the Dodgers, and came into Brooklyn for three games. The Cubs, only a game and a halfback, meantime tangled at the Polo Grounds with the Giants, who trailed by five and a half.

The Dodgers had the home crowd and the momentum of their winning streak, while the Cardinals suffered the sudden disappearance of one pitcher and a freak accident to another. The vanishing pitcher was Flint Rhem, of Rhems, South Carolina, a hard enough thrower to have won 20 games in 1926 and a hard enough drinker to have been farmed out in 1929. The Cardinals restored him to grace in 1930, and Rhem went into the Brooklyn series with six straight wins.

Rhem did not return to his hotel room the night before the first game, did not show up at the ballpark the next day, and became an object of concern. He reappeared a day later, and immediately was pressed by newsmen as to his whereabouts.

“He was befuddled,” recalls his roommate, Bill Hallahan. But Rhem was not without imagination, and he seized upon a newsman’s chance question to spin a tale appropriate to the era:

I was idling outside the hotel, went Rhem’s tale, when this big, black limousine pulled up. A fellow beckoned me over, and when I came alongside these guys pulled guns and forced me into the car. They drove me to a secret hideaway and forced cups of raw whiskey down my throat.

Oh cruel fate. “Imagine kidnapping Flint Rhem,” says Hallahan, “and making him take a drink!”

The same night that Rhem disappeared, Hallahan caught two fingers of his right hand in a taxi door. The injury was to his glove hand, and the next day, as Hallahan puts it, “I had the catcher throw the ball lightly.” Hallahan threw the ball hard enough himself to have a no-hitter for 6 2/3 innings. But the Cards had as much trouble with Dazzy Vance, who fanned 11. The game was a tare classic of pitching and defense, with Dodger bumbles thrown in.

Herman stopped a Cardinal rally in the fourth with a brilliant catch. With two out in the Cardinal sixth, Sparky Adams was perched on third. He dashed for home and had it stolen, but Vance cut short his windup and fired the ball at Hafey, who was batting. It hit him: Dead ball, batter to first, runner back to third. Watkins, the next batter, fouled out.

In the Dodger eighth, batter Finn missed a hit-and-run sign: the runner, Harvey Hendrick, was out at second. Finn then singled, tried to stretch it and crashed into Charlie Gelbert, the Cardinal shortstop. Gelbert was knocked cold; Finn was safe but woozy. He tottered off second base and Hallahan picked up the loose ball and tagged him out.

With runners on first and second and none out in the home ninth, the Dodgers worked the right combination: a bunt, followed by a single. Trouble is, the bunt was popped to catcher Mancuso, who doubled the runner off second, and the single was wasted.

The Cardinals broke the scoreless tie in the tenth as pinch-hitter High doubled, went to third on Hallahan’s bunt, and scored on a single by Douthit. In the home half, Brooklyn loaded the bases with one out; Lopez grounded hard to the left of Adams, who was then playing short. Adams knocked the ball down, picked it up and flipped it to Frisch, who made a lightning pivot and barely nipped Lopez at first. Ebbets Field,recalls Hallahan, lapsed into sudden silence. The race was tied. The Giants meantime shoved the Cubs back, 7-0, on a three-hitter by Carl Hubbell.

The Cards won the next two with the Dodgers, and now had a two-game lead with seven to play. They won six of them, one a smooth 9-3 effort by Rhem at Baker Bowl. The Dodgers kept losing and finished fourth, behind the Cubs and Giants.

Pitching had largely decided the final games, and it dominated the World Series as well. Lefty Grove and George Earnshaw of the Athletics won the first two games, yielding only three St. Louis runs; the Cards’ Hallahan and Jesse Haines won the next two, the A’s scoring only once. Neither team scored in the fifth game until Foxx homered off Grimes in the ninth. Earnshaw, having pitched seven innings of that game, came back to pitch all nine innings of the sixth and final contest, won by the A’s, 7 to 1. The team batting averages were among the lowest on record—.197 for Philadelphia, .200 for St. Louis.

But who can blame the lumbermen if, after a long season of unprecedented exploits, their arms at last grew weary and their bats slow? Put October out of your mind; 1930 was The Year of the Hitter.