The baseball season of 1890 was a tumultuous season on and off the field. It was the year of open battled in the Brotherhood War, with the players forming their own league and fielding a full schedule of games in competition with the established National League and American Association. Franchises shifted leagues, cities hosted multiple teams, and new cities joined the ranks of the major leagues. It was great for fans. The surfeit of baseball games gave them many choices in attending games and lower ticket prices as the competing organizations vied for fan support.

On the field, rosters were shuffled as never before. Many major leaguers jumped to the Players League and the National League. In addition to trying to reacquire some of their stars, clubs made raids on Association teams. But one team was relatively immune to all this—the lowly Louisville Colonels.

Louisville had a mixed history in organized baseball going back to 1876 when they were a charter member of the fledgling National League. Some of the luster dimmed two years later when they quietly dropped out of the league in the wake of the gambling scandal that shook the franchise in 1877. But in 1882 the Kentucky city was again a charter member of a new major league, the American Association. For several years Louisville was a respectable club that occasionally contended for the pennant. But by the end of the 1880s they were a perennial second division club, typically out of the race by the Fourth of July.

Until 1890. That crazy year of three major leagues—players jumping from roster to roster and baseball wars being fought on the field and in the press—ended with Louisville’s capturing their first and only big league pennant. The story of Louisville’s rise to the top of the American Association was all the more remarkable since they rose from the cellar in 1889. This is not the story of a bad team catching a few breaks, it is the tale of a woeful squad catching lightning in the bottle for one glorious season.

The opening day roster contained past-their-prime veterans Pete Browning, Guy Heckler, and Dude Esterbrook along with pitchers Red Ehret and Scott Stratton and a cast of unknowns, except for Chicken Wolf, a solid performer in the outfield. Stratton and Browning had contentious dealings with owner Mordecai Davidson before signing their 1889 contracts. Davidson had assumed the club presidency the previous season when he bought out several other club directors over a disagreement about spending money to acquire better ball players to improve the club.

Davidson was against it. His tight-fisted approach toward players and club fiscal management was not merely a reflection of a robber baron mentality. It was well-grounded in the reality that the Louisville club was pitifully undercapitalized and operated by a group of owners that, while individually comfortable financially, did not possess personal wealth sufficient to build a contending squad.

The Colonels opened with six straight losses and ended the first road trip at 3-14. On the ensuing home stand things did improve. The 5-8 record included what would be the season’s longest winning streak, three games. The third win in the streak was also the last the club would experience for close to a month. Louisville was swept in Cincinnati and Columbus before boarding a train for Philadelphia. The Kentucky boys were due in Philly on June 3. However, they were a no-show. Likewise June 4. Nobody knew where they were. The papers derided the squad with a headline of “Lost Again.” Finally, they arrived in Philadelphia on June 5 as victims of the Johnstown Flood. It seems that the train carrying the team was stuck in high water in extreme western New York, and was unable to communicate with the outside world because the telegraph lines were down. Once in Philadelphia they returned to their losing ways, dropping four games in both Philadelphia and Brooklyn.

Back in Louisville, Davidson was busily trying to sell players or the franchise to survive the financial disaster that was building. He was unsuccessful in finding a local buyer for the club in Louisville and had been called on the carpet by the Association president for attempting to dismantle the squad. As part of his effort to save some cash, Davidson instituted a system of fines for various player misdeeds on the diamond. The players naturally rebelled at these measures and demanded the fines to be rescinded. Davidson refused. When threatened with the players’ refusal to take the field in Baltimore, he blithely instituted fines for refusing to play.

On June 14, 1889, the first major league players strike started. Six Louisville players declined to report to the park in Baltimore. They were pitcher Red Ehret, catcher Paul Cook, infielders Guy Hecker, Dan Shannon, and the Old Gladiator himself, Pete Browning. After some cajoling by Association leaders and assurances that the league would investigate the players’ grievances, the Louisville six returned to the field after missing one game.

On the field the team completed the 21-game road trip with a perfect 0-21 record and returned to the bluegrass with a 23-game losing streak intact. After dropping three more to St. Louis they scored an easy 7-3 victory over the Browns to end the horror at 26 games.

Unhappily, the remainder of the season was not any better. The Colonels finished with a 27-111-2 record for a measly .196 percentage. The offense had turned in a middle-of-the-pack record, but the fielding and pitching ranked among some of the worst ever. In July 1889, some of the local stockholders bought out Davidson. They released Hecker and Browning, and hired Jack Chapman as manager. Chapman was making a return trip to Louisville since he had been the manager of Louisville’s original entry in the National League in 1876.

No doubt about it, Chapman had his work cut out for him. Opportunely, help was on its way. Chapman used his extensive knowledge of the baseball world to sign newcomers Harry Taylor, Herb Goodall, Tim Shinnock, and Louisville native Charlie Hamburg. All would play key roles in the Colonels’ 1890 rise. Just as important was what was happening to the competition. The Players League signed over a quarter of the players on the American Association’s reserve lists. Hardest hit were St. Louis, Baltimore, and the Athletic Club of Philadelphia. Stars like Charlie Comiskey, Henry Larkin, and Lave Cross jumped to the new league. Louisville lost five players, but none had hit over .260 the previous season, and they didn’t figure to be much of a loss.

In addition to player movement, Louisville was helped by franchise movement. The National League, trying to shore up its ranks to compete with the Players League, induced Brooklyn and Cincinnati to jump from the AA to the NL. Brooklyn had won the AA pennant in 1889 and Cincinnati was one of the stronger contenders in the Association. So, by opening day 1890, Louisville found itself with a younger squad, new leadership, in a league that had lost its strongest clubs, and its competitors crippled by Players League raids.

Louisville, now nicknamed the Cyclones by the local press due to their fast start and a twister that swept through Louisville that spring, found themselves in first place after the first two weeks of the season. This rarefied atmosphere was so alien to the players that they slipped to 27-25 through June and were in fourth place, nine games behind the Athletics. A 20-game home stand to start July began with 12 straight wins, including three over the Athletics, and saw Louisville vault into first place by percentage points ahead of Philadelphia. Through August Louisville continued to play at .600 clip as teams fell out of the race. By late August they were seven games in front of second-place St. Louis. A 16-8 September led to an early October pennant-clinching victory over Columbus.

They had done it! Louisville became the first team to go from worst to first in a single season. The Cyclones finished with an 88-44 record, a 61-game improvement over the previous season. Certainly the unusual environment in the major leagues was a major contributor to the rise of the team, but they still had to win the games on the field. Louisville did so by improving every aspect of their game. They increased their run production by 28% while the Association as a whole declined 11%. They turned in a league- best batting average of .279, led by Chicken Wolf’s league-leading .363. On defense they cut their opposition runs to 588 from 1,091 the previous season. In 1889 they committed the most errors in the league and had the second-worst fielding percentage. In 1890 they were the best in both categories.

The worst-to-first story continued for the pitching staff, too. In 1890, Louisville won the most games, surrendered the least runs, and dropped their ERA over two runs a game. Walks declined 40%. Scott Stratton turned in a 34-14 season with an ERA of 2.36. He led the league in ERA and winning percentage. Red Ehret chipped in with a 25-14 record and trailed only Stratton with a 2.58 ERA.

By capturing the American Association pennant, Louisville earned a berth in the World Series against NL pennant winner (and 1899 AA pennant winner) Brooklyn.

The series opened in Louisville in wet, cold weather. When they moved on to Brooklyn it was worse. After seven games each team had three wins and a tie. Since the weather forecast called for snow in Brooklyn, the teams postponed the deciding game, with a vague agreement to settle things the next spring. When the Players League collapsed, tensions between the AA and NL heightened and the series was never completed.

In the ensuing season, Louisville quickly settled back into the second division, where they would reside for most of their remaining years in the big leagues. But there was that one shining season when the presence of a baseball war, new ownership, and career years by a group of overachieving players vaulted Louisville to the top of the baseball world.

David Ortiz retired at the end of the 2016 season with 10,091 career plate appearances in the major leagues, 8,861 as a designated hitter, putting him atop the leaderboard for DH appearances over Harold Baines (6,618). (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

Before Ron Blomberg stepped into the batter’s box on April 6, 1973, as the major leagues’ first Designated Hitter (DH), he sought the advice of one of his Yankees coaches, Elston Howard, on how he should take on this new baseball position. Howard advised him,“Go hit and then sit down.”1 Blomberg drew a walk. That first DH trip to the plate was the realization of a revolutionary baseball concept.

The Nineteenth Century: The First DH Proposal

The DH may have been a revolutionary concept, but it was by no means a new one. The idea of a player hitting for the pitcher every time his turn comes up had its roots in the late nineteenth century. The seeds were sown in 1887 when rule changes permitting substitutes in the game were explored.

Two players, whose name shall be printed on the score card as extra players, may be substituted at any completed inning by either club, but the retiring player shall not thereafter participate in the game. In addition thereto a substitute may be allowed at any time for a player disabled in the game then being played, by reason of injury or illness, of the nature or extent of which the umpire shall be sole judge.2

One week later, Sporting Life reported:

A strong fight will be made, it is believed, at the coming annual meeting of the American Association against the proposed new rule allowing two extra players’ names to be printed on the score card, and giving a club power to substitute one of the extra players for another during a game. …Concerning the rule a Boston writer says: “What is the use of the new rule? The old time-honored fashion of playing the game was that of having nine players on either side, with the privilege of substituting a fresh player for a wounded one.”3

It is hard to fathom this in today’s baseball world of 25-man rosters, platoons, righty-lefty switches, pitch counts, et cetera. However, nineteenth century norms can’t be viewed by today’s standard, but must be put in the context of over 125 years ago when baseball was still in its infancy. It would appear that the Lords of Baseball were hesitant to tinker with what they felt was the very foundation of the game: nine versus nine. This resistance to change became the way of the game of baseball.

That didn’t stop the baseball executives from proposing changes. Four years later, the following appeared in Sporting Life:

Messrs. Temple and Spalding; Agree That the Pitcher Should be Exempt From Batting.

Temple favored the substitution of another man to take the pitcher’s place at the bat when it came his turn to go there. Mr. Spalding advocated a change in the present system and suggested that the pitcher be eliminated entirely from the batting order and that only the other eight men of the opposing clubs be allowed to go to bat. …

Every patron of the game is conversant with the utter worthlessness of the average pitcher when he goes up to try and [sic] hit the ball.4

A month later, it was still a matter of discussion:

The propositions to exempt the pitchers from batting, to permit managers to coach from the lines, to carry unfinished games from one day to another, etc., will receive no positive endorsement or recommendation to the League from Messrs. Reach and Wright.5

However, it was defeated by the smallest of margins as reported:

We came very near making it a rule to exempt the pitcher from batting in a game, under a resolution which permitted such exemption, when the captain of the team notified the umpire of such desire prior to the beginning of a game. The vote stood 7 against to 5 for. I looked for it to be the reverse, but Day and Von der Ahe, whom I depended on, voted otherwise.6

Early Twentieth Century DH Efforts

The fact that the early pioneers of the game considered the DH raises an important question—why the interest in letting another player hit for the pitcher? The answer to this question can be seen by examining the evolution of the pitcher during the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1863, there were frequent changes to the pitching motion and distance as well as the pitcher’s location. These changes included the following:

• Pitching Motion: The rule in 1845 stated that the pitcher threw underhand and had to keep his wrist stiff. Subsequent changes were made to the rules in 1872, 1879, 1884, 1885, and 1887. The last change in 1887 stated that the pitcher must start his delivery with one foot on the back line of the pitching box.
• Pitching Distance: The pitching distance in 1863 was set at 45 feet from the front line of the pitcher’s box to the rear of home plate. Subsequent changes in the distance were made in 1881, 1887, and 1890 (Players’ League only). The last change enacted in 1893 set the pitching distance to its current 60 feet 6 inches.
• Pitcher’s Location: Perhaps, the finesse of baseball’s detail can be seen by studying the changes in the pitcher’s location during the nineteenth century. The pitcher’s location was marked prior to 1893 by a rectangle. The size of the rectangle was set in 1863 with subsequent changes in the size in 1867, 1879, 1886 and 1887. In 1893, the rectangle was replaced by a slab. The slab was changed in 1895 to its present day size of 6 inches wide by 24 inches long.7

The pitcher morphed from the player merely serving up the ball to put it in play into the most important defensive player on the field. So, as baseball evolved in the nineteenth century, the pitching position developed into a full-time occupation requiring full concentration, to the detriment of those players’ offensive skills. Thus the pitcher became the player who concentrated on only one aspect of the game: throwing a baseball to a hitter with the intention of getting an out.8

Do the baseball statistics back up the above supposition? As Figure 1 shows, pitchers had a batting average of .235 in the 1870s. During the 1880s, their average slipped .027 to .208, as pitching became a more vital and important aspect of the game. For the same two decades, non-pitchers’ averages, as shown in Figure 2, decreased from .273 in the 1870s to .257. This represented a decrease of .016. Looking at Figure 3 which compares pitchers and non-pitchers hitting, it is noted that the difference in the two groups increased from .038 to .049. When one considers the number of at-bats involved (see Figures 1 and 2), the decline is significant enough that it may have caused the baseball executives to consider taking the bat out of the pitchers’ hands.

Even though the rule change was defeated and pitchers continued to bat, the idea of the designated hitter didn’t go away. By examining the data presented in the Figures, one can easily see why the baseball executives wanted to exempt pitchers from hitting. While both pitchers’ and non-pitchers’ batting averages went up in the 1890s, the difference in their two averages increased to .064.

In the middle of the 1900s, designated hitter talk again was raised. Non-pitchers batted .269 while pitchers’ averages fell to .190 in the years 1900 to 1905. The difference in their averages further widened to .079. The suggestion of a designated hitter was made by Connie Mack, who would become one of the icons of baseball and a Hall of Famer. The following was published in Sporting Life more than a century ago (but the argument is still the same in the twenty-first century!):

WHY THE PITCHER OUGHT TO BAT

The suggestion, often made, that the pitcher be denied a chance to bat, and a substitute player sent up to hit every time, has been brought to life again, and will come up for consideration when the American and National League Committee on rules get together.

This time Connie Mack is credited with having made the suggestion. …

Against the change there are many strong points to be made. It is wrong theoretically. It is a cardinal principle of base ball that every member of the team should both field and bat. Instead of taking the pitcher away from the plate, the better remedy would be to teach him how to hit the ball.

A club that has good hitting pitchers like Plank or Orth has a right to profit by their skill. Many of the best hitters in the game have started as pitchers.9

This Sporting Life article is interesting and deserves a discussion of several points. First and foremost, the article again showed that baseball was steeped in tradition. The writer invoked baseball’s orthodoxy when he termed the substitution idea “wrong theoretically” and against a “cardinal principle of baseball.” The article mentioned two “good hitting” pitchers, future Hall of Famer Eddie Plank and Al Orth. Plank had a major league career 1901–17 and had a batting average of .206 (331 hits in 1,607 at-bats). Plank’s average of .206 compared favorably to overall pitchers who averaged .180 as a group 1900–19. Orth was a better hitter than Plank: a .273 batting average (464 hits in 1,698 at-bats) 1895–1909. For the time period 1890–1909, pitchers batted .199, far below Orth’s .273! The final point the writer makes is that pitchers should be taught how to hit the ball. We have the hindsight of looking back over the last hundred-plus years and we know that didn’t really happen. As Exhibit 1 clearly shows, pitchers’ batting averages continued to decline and major league baseball finally adopted the Designated Hitter rule in the American League for the 1973 season.

During the first decade of the 1900s, the proponents of the pitcher taking his turn at bat even used exaggeration to try to win their argument. Sporting Life published the following article in June 1908:

While there is no official record of the longest hit made in a professional game of base ball, Jack Cronin, the Providence pitcher, claims the distinction of accomplishing this feat, and his contention is backed up by Manager Stallings, of the Indians, who saw him do the trick. Cronin made his mighty swat in the city of Minneapolis in 1900, when he was a member of the Detroit (American League) team, which was at the time managed by Stallings. According to Stallings, the sphere traveled a distance between 700 and 800 feet before it fell to the ground and Cronin had time to walk around the bases two or three times before the ball was recovered. Cronin made the homer off Red Ehret, who was pitching for Minneapolis.10

A review of Cronin’s (not related to the author to the best of his knowledge) record at Baseball-Reference.com disclosed that he hit three homers during the season. It should be noted that the American League was considered a minor league during the 1900 season. This story had to be a gross exaggeration when one realizes that this was during the Deadball Era. Home runs were a rare occurrence and a good number of the home runs were inside-the-park ones. The article may well have been a gambit to forestall any talk of the pitcher no longer hitting. Pitchers who can hit 800-foot home runs should hit, right?

Also, during this time, pitchers themselves didn’t want to give up hitting. The following quotes pitcher Addie Joss:

“If the rule makers ever put through a rule to substitute a pinch hitter for the pitcher when it is the twirler’s time to bat,” says Addie Joss, who pitches for the Cleveland Naps…“there is going to be a mighty howl of objection raised by the slabmen. If there is one thing that a pitcher would rather do than make the opposing batsmen look foolish, it is to step to the plate, especially in a pinch, and deliver the much-needed hit. There is no question that the substitution of a good hitter in the pitcher’s place would strengthen the offensive play of the club, but at the same time the rule would mean that the twirler be considered absolutely nothing but a pitching machine. … There is hardly anything the fans would rather see than a pitcher winning his own game with a safe drive. This is true, there are mighty few real good hitters among the twirlers, but at the same time the rest of us want to get all the chances there are to wallop the ball, and here’s hoping they never pass the rule.”11

Joss, a Hall of Fame pitcher, had a major league career that spanned from 1902 to 1910. He won 160 games to 97 losses for a .623 winning average and an excellent ERA of 1.89. However, he was a far better pitcher than batter. His batting average was only .144 (118 hits in 817 at-bats). He wasn’t even a “good hitting pitcher.” Pitchers in the decade of 1900–09 had an average of .181 as per Figure 1. That was .037 better than Joss’s average. In the article, Joss is quoted that “the rest of us want to get all the chances there are to wallop the ball.” He got his chances to “wallop the ball” but only hit one home run in his major league career. Probably not the best candidate to argue that pitchers should hit!

Babe Ruth’s byline appears on an article in the February 1918 issue of Baseball Magazine entitled “Why a Pitcher Should Hit—My Ideal of an All-Around Ball Player.” When Ruth (or his ghostwriter, as most of Ruth’s writings were ghostwritten) wrote this article, he was a member of the Boston Red Sox and a full-time pitcher. “The pitcher who can’t get in there in the pinch and win his own game with a healthy wallop, isn’t more than half earning his salary in my way of thinking.”12 Ruth was not a proponent of specialization in baseball. In the same article, he wrote, “It seems to me that too many pitchers have the notion that they can’t hit. Most of them don’t hit, and I believe it’s because they think they can’t”.13

Figure 1 substantiates Ruth’s claim as pitchers only batted .180 in the decade 1910–19. The claim is further validated by looking at both Figures 2 and 3 that show that non-pitchers batted .083 higher in the same period. Ruth also offered this theory as to why pitchers were poor hitters: “There is no discounting the fact that a pitcher is handicapped by not taking his regular turn against the opposing twirlers. A man needs that steady training day in and day out to put a finish on his work.”14 However, at this time, clubs were realizing that a pitcher’s true value to his team was his pitching ability and not his hitting ability. Therefore, teams wanted pitchers to focus their time on becoming better pitchers rather than better hitters. Since they were not sharpening their hitting skills, their averages were continuing to decline and made Ruth’s statements right on target.

The outlaw Federal League was aware of the limited offensive capacity of pitchers in the lineup during this period. The league executives discussed the use of a “Designated Hitter” for the 1914 season during its winter meetings.15 However, nothing happened as a result of those discussions.

The 1920s ushered in the “live ball” era and batting averages for non-pitchers as well as pitchers increased as shown in Figures 1, 2, and 3. Non-pitchers’ batting averages increased from .263 to .293 from the 1910s to the 1920s. Pitchers’ averages increased a little less from .180 to .204 in the same time period. However, the difference in pitchers’ and non-pitchers’ average widened from .083 to .089, a trend that would continue. Also, the 1920s ushered in the era of the home-run hitter as Babe Ruth made his everlasting impact on how the National Pastime was played!

Figures 4 and 5 present pitchers’ and non-pitchers’ home run stats over the decades. There are some interesting changes when you compare the 1910s (Deadball Era) to the 1920s. Non-pitchers hit 5,206 or 120.04% more home runs in the 1920s than the 1910s while pitchers slugged 156 or 44.44% more home runs in the same time period. Since the pitchers’ numbers are smaller than the non-pitchers, this skewed the pitchers’ percentage. Therefore, in order to fairly compare the home runs hit by pitchers and non-pitchers, it is necessary to calculate Home Run per Plate Appearance for both.

As Figures 4 and 5 disclose, non-pitchers’ Home Run per Plate Appearance increased from 1 home run per 202 plate appearances in the 1910s to 1 home run per 89 plate appearances during the 1920s. This represents an increase of more than double the Home Runs per Plate Appearance (2.27 times as many). But if one examines pitchers’ home runs per plate appearances in the same two decades, there was an increase from 1 home run per 436 plate appearances for 1910s to 1 home run per 227 plate appearances during the 1920s, or merely 1.94 times as many. The non-pitchers increased their home run frequency by 17% more than the pitchers did.

During the Roaring Twenties, Babe Ruth and his home run hitting made him a bigger-than-life hero to the American public. Americans were captivated by the home run and wanted more offense in the National Pastime. This might explain why John Heydler, President of the National League, jumped on the DH bandwagon. He discussed what at the time was termed “the ten-man rule” at the annual major league meeting held in Chicago on December 13, 1928. Heydler did not mince words: “We have pitchers in our league—I don’t know how many in the American—that when they come to the plate they are absolutely a dead loss; gum up the play; gum up the action.”16 He went on to substantiate his claim when he said: “In looking over the averages, I have taken our League, and I am pretty sure it is true of the other League, out of the lowest 51, 47 were pitchers. The year before 57 out of 62 were pitchers.”17

Sam Breadon, majority owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, agreed with Heydler in principle but did not like the idea of the extra hitter because it would create more specialists. He stated “We have a specialist now, he is the pitcher.”18 Instead, he proposed: “I do think if we could give the manager the choice of whether he would have his pitcher hit each time at bat, or he can pass that time and let it go to the next man, that would eliminate that dead end of the ball game.”19

After the matter was discussed, Commissioner Landis asked for a motion. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Nationals of the American League, made the following motion: “I move it be tabled.”20

A 1929 editorial cartoon ridiculing Heydler’s “tenth man” idea, showing the dejected pitcher heading back to the bench, muttering “coises” (curses), and the hitter saying the only job “easier than this is Christmas tree decorators.”

It may have been a tabled motion, but it did receive publicity during that winter’s “Hot Stove League.” The cartoon opposite is from the Hartford Daily Times.21 Griffith aside, there was some support at the time for Heydler’s idea. Though the idea was tabled, several National League managers indicated that they would try the “ten-man rule” on their own during spring training games. Heydler advised the teams not to do so. He stated that if pitchers were to bat during the regular season, it would be important for them to bat during the spring to get ready.22

Future Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson had voiced his approval for the rule change in the year prior to Heydler’s “discussion” at the joint meeting of the major leagues.23 Johnson wasn’t really a bad hitting pitcher. He slugged 24 home runs with a .235 batting average in his 21-year major league career.24

Even though his motion was not taken up by the owners, Heydler remained a staunch advocate of the DH concept. He indicated that he was waiting for the right time to present it to the major league rules committee again.25 However, it appears Mr. Heydler never found that right time, because he never again “pitched” the idea.

The subject of the DH lay dormant during the 1930s. The concept was again reported by The Sporting News in its “Caught on the Fly” column in the January 2, 1941, issue:

A long discussed experiment—elimination of the pitcher as a batter—will be given its first test next spring in state tournaments to be conducted by the National Semi-Pro Baseball Congress. … The proposal provides for use of a pinch-hitter each time for the pitcher, without removing the hurler from the game. Advocates contend the change would speed up play and by assuring pitchers of a rest after each inning, the hurling would be strengthened and at the same time the weak end of the batting order would be bolstered.26

This sounds familiar even today, doesn’t it?

The DH Becomes an American League Reality

Nothing came of the 1941 experiment and the concept again went into hibernation until the 1960s when pitching had become the King of Baseball. American League batters only had a .230 batting average in 1968 and Carl Yastrzemski led the league with a .301 average. The good hitters were not “stacked up” in the National League as they hit only marginally better than their AL counterparts. In fact, there were only six batters who batted .300 or better in both major leagues. The powers that be in major league baseball realized that fans liked to see good hitting more than good pitching. In an effort to revitalize the sport, the International League, a Class AAA minor league, started using the DH in its games in 1969. Before long, four other minor leagues were trying it also, but at the conclusion of the experiment, the American and National leagues could not agree on its implementation. The American League voted in favor of the rule change while the National voted against it. A compromise was agreed upon: the American League would use the Designated Hitter for three seasons beginning in 1973. After that trial period, both leagues would either employ the DH in their games or return to the pitcher being a hitter.

After the three-year experimental period, the American League didn’t want to abandon the DH. The reason was simple according to John Thorn, official Historian of Major League Baseball: increased offense meant higher attendance in the American League.27 Regardless, the National League still didn’t want to adopt the DH rule.

Living with the AL and NL Split

This arrangement didn’t present a problem during the season since there was no interleague play prior to 1997, except for the All-Star Game and the World Series. During the Fall Classic, everything—and I do mean, everything—around the game is magnified to the utmost degree. The DH Rule is no exception. MLB has made three attempts to reconcile the difference between the two leagues for World Series play. The first attempt was to deny “the revolution” and the DH was not utilized at all during the World Series from 1973 through 1975. Conservative-minded baseball management probably figured that this would be a three-year experiment and then just go away. Baseball purists didn’t want to tinker with the Fall Classic for the sake of an experiment in only one league.

But once the American League decided to keep the DH, it was necessary for baseball to recognize that fact. A compromise was hatched that would do so but also acknowledge the National League’s way of doing things: the creation of what could be termed The Even-Odd Era from 1976 through 1985. In this era, the DH was employed in the World Series during the even-numbered years and the pitchers hit for themselves in the odd-numbered years. Many felt that this gave an advantage to the American League teams in the even-numbered years and the National League teams in the odd-numbered years.

The next compromise was what could be called The “When In Rome, Do As The Romans Do” Era. It began in 1986 and is still in place to the present day. When a World Series game is played in the American League stadium, the DH is allowed, and when a game is played in the National League stadium, the DH Rule is not followed.

When interleague play started in the 1997 season, the major leagues adopted this same methodology to keep consistency in the game with regard to the DH issue. Any other decision would have probably caused more debate and friction between the two leagues.

Even though the DH was used in World Series games beginning in 1976, the DH was not utilized in the All-Star game until 1989. The only reason that can be surmised is that the pitcher was usually pinch hit for anyway in the All-Star Game. More players could get in the game pinch hitting for the pitcher than utilizing a fixed DH. Pitchers from both leagues who batted in All-Star games from 1973 through 1988 went 0-for-16 with 11 strikeouts.

The DH was first utilized in the 1989 All-Star game under the same “When in Rome” rule that MLB used in World Series play. The first DH in an All-Star game was a National Leaguer, Pedro Guerrero, and the first American League DH was Harold Baines. These two players were exact opposites as far as hitting was concerned! While Guerrero was the first actual DH in an All-Star Game, it was also his first appearance as a DH in any major league game. To further add to the DH lore, he came to bat again in that game which was his last appearance as a DH in the major leagues. Baines, on the other hand, was a DH frequently during his career. In fact, he had 6,618 plate appearances as a DH, second only to David Ortiz.

The “When in Rome” rule was in effect for the 1989 through 2009 All-Star Games. During that period, pitchers hit a dismal .111 (1 for 9). The DHs did better, hitting .266 (21 for 79). However, the hits were not evenly distributed between the two leagues. The American League hit for higher average at .297 (11 for 37), while the National League DHs batted .238 (10 for 42).

Beginning with the 2010 All-Star Game, the DH is used in every All-Star Game, regardless of whether the game is played in an American or National League park. During this current era, DHs haven’t really been yielding hot bats. Through the 2016 All-Star Game, the National League has hit for higher average than the American League. National League DHs have batted .222 (6 for 27) while American League DHs have managed only a paltry .125 (3 for 24).

What is the Future of the DH?

The provision in the DH Rule that states that a team does not have to have a DH raises an interesting point. At the end of the three-year experimental period, 1973 through 1975, it was possible that the DH was going to be adopted for all Organized Baseball. If that were so, the key was whether the wording of the rule would remain the same. If it did, the National League could have “their cake and eat it too!’ The wording of the rule left the use of the DH up to the club and/or manager.28 Since the National League was totally against the use of the DH, the wording of the rule made life easy for the teams in the league—they could just choose not to use the DH. It was that plain and that simple. So, what was decided? The classification of the designated hitter rule was changed from “experimental” to “optional.” This meant that any league can adopt the DH by a majority vote of its members. When it was “experimental,” it required a 75% majority to adopt it.29

The last vote by the National League to adopt the DH was conducted during baseball’s summer meeting of 1980. It was 5 votes against, 4 in favor and 3 abstentions. The abstentions counted as no votes, so the National League didn’t adopt the DH. It is interesting to note that an owner’s fishing trip may have affected the vote.30

There is one thing that has definitely intensified over the forty-plus years since Ron Blomberg stepped into the batter’s box on that April day in 1973. The debate whether the DH should be a part of the game has gotten stronger. In the past year, there has been a change in the thinking of the National League with regard to the adoption of DH. This is based upon two factors. The first is a decline in offense which seems to be a recurring factor. Remember that the DH was introduced in the American League in 1973 to counter the decline in offense during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Secondly, there have been costly injuries to high profile and highly paid pitchers, like Adam Wainwright, while batting.

The DH debate really heated up during 2016 as a result of three things that have occurred, involving the Commissioner, the fans, and players.

First, Commissioner Rob Manfred indicated at the January 2016 quarterly owners meeting that the DH could be adopted by the National League as early as the 2017 season. A week later he backtracked and stated that NL pitchers will likely continue to take their turn at bat for the foreseeable future.31

Second, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown created a new exhibit this past year, Whole New Ballgame, using interactive touchscreens to address several issues dealing with today’s game. One of the issues is the DH. The Hall of Fame is using Twitter to create a dialog for it. The Hall tells people to “Use #IThinkTheDH, #yesDH or #noDH to tell us why the DH is good or bad for the major leagues.”32 A review of the tweets shows that fans seem to be evenly divided on this issue. For every fan that says the National League should adopt the DH for uniformity between the leagues, another fan will argue that the American League should abolish the DH and go back to the National League way of things. To cloud the issue even further, another fan will favor keeping the current setup.

Lastly, San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner lobbied to enter the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game festivities in San Diego. Bumgarner is among the best-hitting pitchers in the major leagues at the current time. At this time of this writing, he leads all active pitchers with 14 career home runs. This total places him 21st on the list of career home runs by a pitcher (since 1913). Bumgarner is already a World Series hero and has become one of the premier pitchers in baseball today. So, why his fascination with hitting and entering the Home Run Derby? Perhaps Glenn Stout offered a good explanation in his book The Selling of the Babe when he wrote:

Hitting a baseball square and then watching it go over a fence is almost transcendent. Once experienced, it is never forgotten. Pitching, for all the power and authority one can feel while blowing a fastball past a hitter, doesn’t offer the same return. Its joys are primarily cumulative. Of all sports, the feeling that comes from hitting a home run is singular, and in baseball, particularly hitting, which includes so much inherent failure, so much that is dependent on the ball finding space between fielders, only the smacking of a long home run, which renders everyone else on the field irrelevant, seems to justify all the previous disappointments.33

Back and forth the DH debate will be ongoing. As John Thorn stated, “The subject will keep percolating, which is the way some folks like it.”34 So this aspect of the game, which has created two distinct styles of baseball, the American League and the National League, will be with the National Pastime for the foreseeable future.

JOHN CRONIN has been a SABR member since 1985 and serves on the Minor League Committee as a member of the Farm Club Subcommittee. He is currently researching pre-1930 farm clubs. Cronin is a lifelong Yankee fan with a special interest in Yankee minor league farm teams over the years. He is a CPA and a retired bank executive, who has a BA in History from Wagner College and an MBA in Accounting from St. John’s University. Cronin resides in New Providence, New Jersey, and can be reached at jcroninjr@verizon.net.

Author’s Note

The author thanks Sean Forman and Mike Lynch of Baseball-Reference.com and Cassidy Lent, Reference Librarian, of the Bart Giamatti Research Center for their assistance in obtaining information and documents utilized in this article. The author would also like to especially thank John Thorn for his advice and counsel in the research and writing of this article.

Notes

1. George Vescey, Baseball A History of America’s Favorite Game (New York, New York: Random House, 2006), 181.

2. Sporting Life, November 23, 1887, 2.

3. Sporting Life, November 30, 1887, 1.

4. Sporting Life, December 19, 1891, 1.

5. Sporting Life, January 30, 1892, 2.

6. Sporting Life, March 12, 1892, 12.

7. Robert Schaefer, Baseball Catchers website, “19th Century Pitching and Catching Rules,” http://bb_catchers.tripod.com/catchers/19c_rules.htm accessed on July 27, 2016.

8. For a more detailed discussion on the evolution of the pitcher, please see Adam Dorhauer, The Hardball Times, “The DH and the Essence of the Game,” http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-dh-and-the-essence-of-the-game, accessed on September 10, 2016.

9. Sporting Life, February 3, 1906, 4.

10. Sporting Life, June 1908.

11. Sporting Life, March 26, 1910, 16.

12. Babe Ruth, “Why a Pitcher Should Hit—My Ideal of an All ’Round Ball Player,” Baseball Magazine, February, 1918, 336.

13. Ruth, op cit.

14. Ruth, op cit.

15. Marc Okkonen, The Federal League of 1914-1915 Baseball’s Third Major League (Society for American Baseball Research: 1989), 9.

16. Minutes of Joint Meeting of the Major Leagues held on December 13, 1928, page 91, Bart Giamatti Research Center Archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

17. Minutes of Joint Meeting of the Major Leagues held on December 13, 1928, page 92, Bart Giamatti Research Center Archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

18. Minutes of Joint Meeting of the Major Leagues held on December 13, 1928, page 95, Bart Giamatti Research Center Archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

19. Minutes of Joint Meeting of the Major Leagues held on December 13, 1928, page 96, Bart Giamatti Research Center Archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

20. Minutes of Joint Meeting of the Major Leagues held on December 13, 1928, page 97, Bart Giamatti Research Center Archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

21. Hartford Daily Times, January 18, 1929, Designated Hitter file at the Bart Giamatti Research Center Archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

22. The Sporting News, February 14, 1929, 5.

23. The Sporting News, December 20, 1928, 1.

24. http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/johnswa01.shtml accessed on July 29, 2016.

25. The Sporting News, January 30, 1930, 5.

26. The Sporting News, January 2, 1941, 9.

27. Personal interview with John Thorn on August 10, 2013.

28. The Sporting News, November 22, 1975, 42.

29. The Sporting News, December 27, 1975, 40.

30. http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=9473803 accessed on July 15, 2015.

31. Ken Davidoff, “Rob Manfred suddenly changes tone on DH in the NL,” New York Post, January 30, 2016.

32. Matt Kelly, “The Fans Speak Out,” Memories and Dreams, Volume 38, Number 2, 10.

33. Glenn Stout, The Selling of the Babe (New York, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016) 106.

34. Email correspondence with John Thorn on March 19, 2016.

Ticket purchase receipt to Game Five of the 2004 World Series — had it been played at Yankee Stadium. (Photo by Jeb Stewart)

Even for a confident Yankees fan (are there any other kind?), the 2003 offseason began with troubling signs. True, Brian Cashman found a way to obtain Alex Rodriguez, who had seemed destined to bolster Boston’s already impressive lineup just days earlier.

However, the losses of starting pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, both of whom signed with Houston, damaged the pitching staff. Their replacements, Javier Vázquez and Jon Lieber, were above-average starters, but neither had pitched in the playoffs before, let alone in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium in the cool air of October. By contrast, Boston had two aces in Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling, both of whom had already turned in dominant performances against the Yankees in the postseason.

And all season, there was no good statistical reason for anyone to believe New York was better than Boston. True, the 2004 Yankees had a team OPS+ of 111, which was essentially the same as the Red Sox’ collective OPS+ of 110.1 However, there was a marked difference in the quality of the teams’ pitching staffs, as the Yankees posted a below-average team ERA+ of 96, while Boston had a superior team ERA+ of 116.

Boston’s record of 98-64 was slightly better than its expected record (96-66), considering the team’s +181 run differential, so there is no evidence that the Red Sox underachieved during the season. However, the Yankees’ 101-61 record far exceeded its expected record (89-73), as revealed by the team’s more modest +89 run differential. The real surprise in 2004 was that New York won the AL East championship by three games over Boston. But if anyone believed the Yankees should have been favored over the Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS, such an idea was fool’s gold.2

In hindsight, Boston’s advantages seem obvious. But on October 16, 2004, I had a ticket to see my beloved Yankees in Game Five of the World Series in St. Louis. With a three-games-to-none lead over the Red Sox in the ALCS, there was no need to think I didn’t need to pack. My only real concern at the time was that Houston, with Carlos Beltran playing out of his mind, was going to beat the Cardinals to ruin my trip. To believe that Boston might come back and overcome such a large deficit was not only unthinkable but unprecedented, at least in major-league baseball. When it mattered, the Yankees had always beaten the Red Sox.

I’ll never forget that wonderful October day in 1978 when I sprinted home from school to watch Game 163 – in effect, an AL East playoff game3 – on a 13-inch black-and-white TV with snowy reception. Bucky Dent’s name will always be infamous in Boston because of that game. And while Aaron Boone’s home run in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS was still fresh in every fan’s mind, the 2004 ALCS now seemed destined to be decided in just four or five games.

But Games Four and Five became recurring nightmares for Yankees fans. I could not bring myself to watch either game in its entirety in writing this essay. I remember enough as it is.

In Game Four, with the Yankees leading in the bottom of the ninth, Kevin Millar worked a walk. Pinch-runner Dave Roberts stole second, Mariano Rivera then blew the save, and David Ortiz homered to win the game for Boston in the 12th inning. The following morning, I dragged myself out of bed and drove to my office. One of our secretaries walked up to my door and shouted, “How’d you like that Red Sox game?!” I glared and closed my door without responding.

Game Five was nearly six hours of identical torture. Once again, Rivera blew a save and the Yankees lost, this time in 14 innings. I walked into work even more exhausted and grumpier, only this time with the sickening feeling that the Yankees were going to blow the ALCS. Deep down, I knew I would be selling my World Series ticket.

Of course, everyone remembers Game Six as the “bloody sock” game because of Schilling’s heroics. My enduring memory of that game was Yankee reliever Tom “Flash” Gordon throwing up in the bullpen with the Yankees trailing, 4-2.4 Gordon knew too. And the Yankees lost.

I rationalized some hope for Game Seven. After all, the Yanks had won two games over the Red Sox to clinch the pennant in ’49, had beaten Boston in that playoff back in ’78, and had won Game Seven in 2003. But I knew the Red Sox were the better team. They destroyed Kevin Brown and Vázquez in short order, which sucked the energy out of the crowd at Yankee Stadium, and the series was over.

I did have the brief fortune of selling my World Series ticket at a profit to a Red Sox fan in my office, but that proved to be fool’s gold too as the baseball gods weren’t finished having fun with me. There was no Game Five because Boston swept St. Louis, so it turned into a phantom ticket, and I had to return his money. The Cardinals then made me return the actual ticket to get my money back. With a nonrefundable fee of $10 per ticket, it ended up costing just that much. I still have my ticket receipt, which has a World Series logo on it, though I’m not sure why I haven’t burned it. I suppose it’s to remember Bart Giamatti’s rueful words about the game of baseball being “designed to break your heart,” which is really what makes it the best game there is. Baseball broke mine creatively in October 2004.5

JEB STEWART is a lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama, whose favorite pastime has always been taking his sons, Nolan and Ryan, and his wife, Stephanie, to the Rickwood Classic each year. He has been a SABR member since 2012 and is co-president of the Rickwood Field SABR Chapter. He is an executive committee member on the Board of the Friends of Rickwood Field and is a regular contributor to the Rickwood Times. He also edits the Friends’ quarterly newsletter, “Rickwood Tales.” He has written several biographies for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Bill Nowlin for encouraging me to write this essay. Aside from reliving my suffering, my biggest concern was being viewed as a heretic by Yankee fans everywhere for even considering contributing to a book about the 2004 Red Sox. Of course, I quickly realized that Yankees fans are unlikely to find out, so please don’t tell on me. Thanks also to Miles Millon, who is probably the youngest Red Sox fan I know. Like most fans, he inherited the memories of Boston’s long history of suffering from his father. And while he experienced a taste of that himself in 2003, he has shared four World Series championships with his father since then. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that part of my motivation for writing this essay was to disprove Bill Chapman’s theory that I am incapable of saying anything positive about the Red Sox. My wife and I traveled to Boston a few years ago and Bill C was a great guide.

Although the 2004 ALCS made me miserable, I do take great comfort in knowing that having the Red Sox defeat the Yankees, win the World Series, and end the Curse of the Bambino was probably the best year of Bill N’s, Miles’, and Bill C’s baseball fandom. So, I’m glad about that. Well, almost.

Notes

1 All statistics and team records were taken from Baseball-Reference.com.

2 My own belief that the Yankees would win the series was completely rooted in the history between the teams, as well as New York’s success during Joe Torre’s tenure. However, the glaring statistical disparity between the pitching staffs, as well as the Yankees’ improbable regular-season record, exaggerated the strengths of New York relative to Boston. Not surprisingly, the Red Sox had won the teams’ regular-season matchups, 11-8. With all these warning signs, if there was ever a team that was primed to blow a 3-games-to-none lead it was the 2004 New York Yankees. Similarly, if there was ever a team that was built to overcome such a deficit it was the 2004 Boston Red Sox. Even so, the fact that the greatest closer in the history of baseball had the opportunity to send the Yankees to the World Series twice, but blew saves in back-to-back games, is not something anyone can explain.

3 Both Keith Jackson of ABC Sports and Frank Messer of WPIX described the game as being a playoff in their broadcasts, which are available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C47bgmpLmPk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IowgfzVsXGA.

4 Memory is a funny thing. Before I started this project, I was positive that Gordon got sick in the bullpen during Game Four or Game Five, and I had seen it on the TV broadcast. Since I could not find evidence that this happened by watching Gordon warm up in either game in the portions of the broadcasts I watched on YouTube, I turned to newspapers.com and found an article confirming that Gordon got sick during Game Six. Bob Klapisch, “Lack of Heart, Bad Ideas, Too Much for Yankees’ Dollars to Overcome,” Hackensack (New Jersey) Record: October 22, 2004: S-1. I am speculating, but I assume that I read this report shortly after the series ended and confabulated the memory because I still cannot find video evidence that it ever happened.

5 I was tempted to write that I finally understood Giamatti’s essay on a visceral level after the Yankees collapsed in 2004. However, most baseball fans get their hearts broken every season, and some years are worse than others. The 2001 World Series – not the 2004 collapse – remains the worst defeat of this Yankee fan’s baseball life.

When Phil Niekro, the Braves’ ace knuckleball pitcher, mad four wild pitches in the sixth inning of the second game at Houston on August 4, 1979, he set a new modern major league record. The baseball record books also list Walter Johnson with four wild pitches in the fourth inning of a game between the Senators and the White Sox at Chicago on September 21, 1914, but that is erroneous. Johnson, who won that game 6-1 in 13 innings, may have had four wild pitches in that game but certainly did not register four in the fourth inning. He had only one wild pitch in that inning and it led to the only run the White Sox could garner off him the entire afternoon. Following is the play-by-play of the White Sox half of the fourth inning as it appeared in the Chicago Daily News on September 21:

Collins dropped a single in short left-center. Daly was called out on strikes. Collins stole second. Foster threw out Schalk, Collins advancing to third. Collins scored on a wild pitch, tying the count. Roth grounded out, Morgan to Gandil. One run, one hit.

Del Unser Becomes Pinch-Homer Specialist

Del Unser of the Philadelphia Phillies hit four pinch-hit home runs during the 1979 season. Three of the circuit drives came in consecutive pinch-hit appearances to set a new major league record. Ironically, Unser was pretty much of a ping-pong hitter when he broke into the majors with the Washington Senators in 1968. He hit only one home run in 635 times at bat that year. He did not hit that first home run until his 462d time at bat in the big leagues. He finally connected off Jim Nash of the A’s at Oakland on August 20, 1968. It came in the first inning – a liner over the right field fence.

So far, none of Del’s major league pinch-hit home runs has come with the bases full. If he can add a grand-slam pinch-hit home run to his list, it will be quite an accomplishment for the Unser family, since his dad, Al Unser, performed the feat for the Tigers against the Yankees on May 31, 1944. With the score tied 2-2 in the bottom of the ninth at Detroit, Al batted for Joe Hoover and hit Walt Dubiel’s first pitch into the left-field stands to give the Tigers a 6-2 victory.

First Game of 1979 Series Not First to be Postponed

When the first game of the 1979 World Series scheduled for Baltimore on October 9 was postponed, it was officially announced that it was the first time that the first game of a World Series had been called off. The officials who made that determination somehow overlooked the 1918 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. That was the year that the baseball season was curtailed because of the war and the World Series was scheduled to open at Chicago on Wednesday, September 4. Rain, however, caused postponement of the game and it was played the next day, September 5, with Babe Ruth pitching the Red Sox to a 1 to 0 victory over the Cubs and Hippo Vaughn in a great battle of southpaws.

Silver King’s No-Hitter One of a Kind

On June 21, 1890, Charles F. “Silver” King of the Chicago Players’ League club held Brooklyn hitless but lost the game, played at Chicago, by a score of 1-0. King did not receive credit for a record book no-hitter since his team elected to take first bats. The game was over after Chicago batted in the first half of the ninth inning, leaving King with only eight hitless innings. King’s effort, however, deserves special mention. It was the only no-hitter of any kind in the one-year operation of the Players’ League, and therefore it makes it the only no-hit game ever pitched in the majors at a distance of 51½ feet. When many star players broke away from the National League and American Association in 1890 to start their own major league, they decided they wanted more hitting in their games and moved the pitcher back 18 inches from the existing 50-foot distance. Eighteen inches doesn’t sound like much but it produced the desired results.

The Players’ League topped the other two leagues in offensive categories. Only 32 shutouts were registered in the Players’ League compared to 53 in the National and 49 in the Association. The following figures disclose the offensive superiority of the 1890 Players’ League over its rivals:

Federal League Came Close to Playing Night Ball

During the last month of the 1915 season, the Brooklyn Federal League club came close to playing a regular season night game. With the club going nowhere and attendance falling rapidly, even with a 10 cent bleacher admission, the Brooklyn club announced in early September that a lighting system would be installed in Washington Park and that the last series of games scheduled for Brooklyn between the Tiptops and the Buffalo Blues would be played at night. On September 11, work was begun on the pillars upon which the immense electric lights would be placed, and on Tuesday, September 28, announcement was made that the last of the eight-foot towers was completed and all that remained to be done was to install the lights. The Brookfeds had just returned from a western trip that day and the first night game was scheduled for the next day, September 29. 

Technical difficulties developed, however, and the next day the management conceded that it would be impossible to have the lights ready for that game or for any of the remaining league games since the Federal League season was scheduled to close that Saturday. It was then hoped that the Brookfeds could play a night exhibition game with the league champions later on but that, too, failed to materialize since the club disbanded on Saturday, October 2, and even the final doubleheader with Buffalo which was to close the season that afternoon was abruptly cancelled. The players scattered for their homes and when an exhibition game was played at night at Washington Park on October 26, it was between two semipro teams. Of course, there was optimism that night ball could be played in 1916, but it was not to be since the Federal League went out of business at the end of the 1915 campaign. 

The 1889 Strike of Six Louisville Players

One of the first strikes in major league history took place in Baltimore on June 14, 1889, when six players of the Louisville club of the American Association went on strike against their owner-manager Mordecai H. Davidson. The Louisville club was mired in last place and in the midst of a long losing streak. The day before, Davidson had fined Dan Shannon $25 for a fumble and wild throw and Paul Cook $25 for stupid base-running. But it all came to a head that day when Davidson announced that if the club did not win that afternoon every player would be fined $25. The players who refused to play that day were Shannon, Cook, Guy Hecker, Pete Browning,

Harry Raymond and Phil Ehret. The Louisville club had to pick up three Baltimore amateurs in order to put a team on the field that day. They were Mike Gaule, John Traffley and Charles Fisher. The Orioles had a 5-0 lead in the second inning when rain broke up the game. The next day the same make-shift team lost to the Orioles 4-2 in five innings, the game again being stopped by rain. The following day the striking players went to Bill Barnie, the Oriole manager, for guidance. Barnie, one of the most respected individuals in the league, advised the players to end their strike and assured them that their grievances would be taken before the American Association directors at the proper time.

The fines that Davidson levied totaled $1,435 against the eight players in less than a month.  The fines were deducted from their salaries and most of the players, instead of drawing any pay, were actually indebted to the club.  Browning, for example, owed a sum of $225.  While most of the players were highly indignant, Browning was philosophical about his fines but he did object to being fined $1.00 for the loss of a bat stolen at Baltimore. The bat was his own and he didn’t think he should be fined for the theft of an article that belonged to him. Davidson had no trouble keeping track of the fines since he was a bookkeeper by trade. He had left his long-time job as a bookkeeper with a furniture outfit and invested his life savings to go into the baseball business.

The Louisville club really had a terrible road trip. They lost all 21 games played and earlier in the trip were even missing for a few days as a result of the Johnstown flood. On June 4, the Louisville Commercial made light of the missing ball club, noting:

The Athletics failed to lower Louisville’s average yesterday. The game scheduled to be played at Philadelphia did not take place because the Wandering Jays are waterbound somewhere between Columbus and the Quaker City. There is not much sympathy for them here. In fact, if the entire team had been standing in front of the Johnstown reservoir when it broke last Friday evening, the majority of the people of Louisville would have viewed the calamity as just a visitation of Providence.

The Louisville losing streak reached an all-time major league record of 26 before it ended and Davidson finally announced he was turning the franchise back to the league, which in turn sold it for him to a group of local investors. As promised the striking players, the league directors met at Louisville in a special meeting on July 5 and decided to rescind most of the fines levied against the players by Davidson, except for the fines assessed to those players who refused to play in Baltimore. Davidson repeatedly refused to reimburse the players but the new owners eventually repaid the players out of the purchase money due Davidson. Louisville finished out the season deep in last place with a record of 27 wins and 111 defeats.

Toward the end of the 1889 campaign Jack Chapman, who had managed the Louisville National League club in 1877, was hired as manager. With the turmoil caused by the organization of the Players’ League in 1890, and the wholesale shift of players among the NL, AA, and PL, Chapman turned his team completely around. In fact, they won the Association pennant with a record of 88-44, the only major league club to ever go from last place one year to first place the next. In the process they gained 64 games, the best gain in games by a pennant winner in one season in major league history.

Harry Schafer’s Phantom Fielding Records

Baseball record books include the name of Harry C. Schafer, Boston National League flychaser in 1877, for two records for outfielders. His name leads the list of those who had four assists in nine-inning game. The other entry shows him with the major league record of 11 chances in a nine-inning game for right-fielders. Both entries are for the game of September 26, 1877, between Boston and Hartford played at Boston. That would constitute quite a day for a right-fielder, particularly in that era, but the truth of the matter is that Schafer did not have a single fielding change in that game, which was won by Boston by a score of 14 to 4. The only plausible explanation is that the box score checked by the record book researcher may have had Schafer’s totals transposed with those of catcher Lew Brown. Schafer batted eighth and Brown ninth. Brown had seven putouts and four assists, the exact totals that Schafer has been given credit for.

Ellis Burton’s Baseball Record

When switch hitter Ellis Burton homered from both sides of the plate in one inning for Toronto of the International League on May 3, 1961, two of his teammates were future managers of world championship teams. Sparky Anderson, who won titles with Cincinnati in 1975 and 1976, was at second base for the Leafs, while Chuck Tanner, manager of the 1979 champion Pittsburgh Pirates, played left field.

The game was played at Toronto and was the home opener for the Maple Leafs. A crowd of 10,171 turned out for the contest with the Jersey City Giants. The Leafs went into the bottom of the eighth inning with a slight 5 to 3 advantage but broke the game wide open with an explosive 10-run inning to give them a 15-3 victory. Burton connected twice, one a grand slam, and catcher Tim Thompson also hit a home run with the bases full. The two drove in all ten runs during that inning. Burton’s first home run of the eighth inning was hit off righthander Hector Maestri and went over the right-field wall, scoring Anderson ahead of him. His second homer went over the leftfield fence off rookie lefthander Gerry Davis, and scored Steve Ridzik, Billy Moran and Anderson. Sparky had reached base both times in the inning on walks.

Fischer’s Last Major League Pitch a Homer

Bill Fischer, current pitching coach for the Cincinnati Reds, threw his last major league pitch for the Minnesota Twins on May 22, 1964, and it resulted in a home run by John Orsino to give the Orioles a 6-5 win at Baltimore. The Twins went into the ninth inning with a 5-4 lead. Jerry Arrigo, who had relieved starter Jim Kaat in the sixth inning, opened the ninth by fanning both Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell. But Sam Bowens tied the score with his second home run of the game on a two-strike pitch. After Arrigo threw three straight balls to Orsino, he was replaced by Fischer, who had set a major league record in 1962 when he hurled 84-1/3 innings without giving up a base on balls. Fischer got one strike over and Orsino hit the next pitch for a home run to win the game.

Four days later he was placed on the voluntary retired list and the next year he was back pitching in the minors. May 22 was not a particularly lucky date for Fischer. A year earlier – May 22, 1963 – he was pitching in relief for the Kansas City Athletics in the 11th inning of a 7-7 tie against the Yankees. Mickey Mantle was the first batter and he broke up the game with one of his hardest hits ever. With the count 2-2, Mantle leaned into Fischer’s next pitch for a tremendous home run that just missed going out of Yankee Stadium. The ball crashed against the edge of the right-field roof, which towered 108 feet above the playing field.

The Day Don Heffner Beat the Black Sox

At the end of the 1930 International League season, Don Heffner, then a 19-year-old slick-fielding infielder with the Baltimore Orioles, joined an all-star team of major and minor league players for the annual fall series with the Baltimore Black Sox, one of the top Negro teams in the country. The games were played at the Maryland Baseball Park, home of the Black Sox.

On Sunday, October 19, 1930, the Black Sox defeated the All-Stars in the first game of a doubleheader for their fifth victory over the Stars in as many games. Submarine hurler Webster McDonald bested Eddie Rommel, a member of the world champion Philadelphia Athletics, 1-0 in a tight pitching duel. The second game hurler for the All-Stars was to be a minor league pitcher by the name of Jim Boswell. He did not show up, however, and as Joe Cambria, manager of the All Stars, was trying to work out the pitching problem, young Heffner approached him and volunteered to pitch.

He informed the manager that he had pitched in high school and thought he could hold his own against the Sox. Although skeptical, Cambria was impressed by the nerve of his frail-looking infielder and agreed to give him a chance. It being late October, the game lasted only five innings before darkness called a halt to the proceedings, but Heffner surprised everyone by blanking the hard hitting Sox, 1-0. He gave up only two hits and walked one in winning a pitching duel from Pud Flornoy. It was the only game that the All-Stars won from the Black Sox that fall. In fact Heffner accomplished something that a few big-name hurlers were unable to do over a three-year period. The list of pitchers who had fallen before the Sox included the likes of Lefty Grove, Howard Ehmke, George Earnshaw, Roy Sherid and Jack Ogden.

Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert: The Wild Sage of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson
by Timothy M. Gay
Simon and Schuster (2010)
$26.00, hardcover. 368 pages 

“If Jackie Robinson was the father of equal opportunity in baseball, surely Satchel Paige was the grandfather,” Larry Tye declares in one of the many provocative passages in Satchel. I don’t necessarily agree with this statement, because Paige was too independent and self-centered a figure ever to truly represent any social movement. He was also almost forty years old when Branch Rickey decided to break the color line in 1945, so clearly Paige was born too early. Although I take issue with Tye’s occasional unnecessary denigration of the roles of Rickey and Jackie Robinson in taking the first steps toward the racial integration of baseball, I can still recommend Satchel as a good read and a probing study of a man who from the most modest beginnings became almost a household name. 

Tye, whose previous credits include a valuable book about Pullman porters, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (2004), does a fine job of getting to the core of what made the man born Leroy Robert Page in Mobile, Alabama, in 1906 tick. I am struck by the similarity in the story of Paige and the stories of two slightly older icons of twentieth-century American culture, Louis Armstrong and Babe Ruth. All three were great natural raw talents who needed the supervision provided by juvenile institutions before they could fulfill their promise. Paige, who probably got his nickname from carrying many bags on a pole as a Mobile railroadstation porter, was not yet twelve years old when he was arrested for stealing trinkets from a five-and-dime store. His mother, Lula, cried when she heard the news, but she had her hands full trying to support six older children on a washerwoman’s wages without any support from her absentee husband. 

It was from his mother that, Tye tells us, Paige inherited some of his style and native wit. It was Lula who may have changed the family name to Paige because the other spelling “looked too much like page in a book” and who advised her seventh child (she would have five more later on), “If you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it won’t sound good to you, it won’t sound good to anyone else.” 

During his five years of incarceration at the segregated Alabama Mount Meigs Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers, Paige joined the choir, learned the basics of dealing with white society, and perfected many of his baseball skills. Babe Ruth had his Brother Matthias in Baltimore and Satchel Paige had as his mentor coach Edward Byrd, who taught him the fundamentals of baseball, like how to use his tall frame and high leg kick to best hide the baseball. (I wish Tye had told us more about Byrd.) 

In 1923 Paige was released from Mount Meigs with a letter stating that “inmate has an excellent record at this institution.” And shortly thereafter began his remarkable career in segregated black baseball. Tye does a good job of describing the chaotic conditions Paige encountered, first with the black minor-league teams he played for, the Chattanooga Black Lookouts and the New Orleans Black Pelicans, and then in 1927 with his first team in the black major leagues, the Birmingham Black Barons, for which he played off and on for the next four years. 

It was actually more off than on, because the club’s owner knew he had a great drawing card in Paige and rented him out many times to semipro and barnstorming teams. Paige’s mound exploits and colorful wandering lifestyle soon made him a legend not just in black communities but wherever baseball fever was high. 

In the early 1930s, Paige’s primary employer became the Pittsburgh Crawfords, founded by the cunning and charismatic Gus Greenlee, who also operated the Crawford Grill, what Tye calls the Harlem Cotton Club of Pittsburgh. (For some reason Tye chooses not to use the usual spelling “Crawford Grille”—a hot spot, incidentally, where Duke Ellington met his great future collaborator Billy Strayhorn.) “In Pittsburgh, the redhaired, cigar-chomping Gus Greenlee did it all,” Tye explains in an instructively jam-packed sentence, “hijacking beer trucks, bootlegging, buying off politicians, masterminding gambling, and assembling a black baseball dynasty called the Crawfords.” 

Greenlee couldn’t hold Paige’s services for long, however, and by 1933 he was playing for an interracial team in Bismarck, North Dakota. Then in the summer of 1934 he pitched for the House of David team at the Denver Post integrated tournament, and then it was back to Bismarck in 1935. Tye tells these stories with aplomb and good narrative drive. In 1937 Paige played for a team sponsored by Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. “Games were played exclusively on weekend mornings or afternoons, and they were hot as well as wild,” Tye writes, adding one of the more gruesome stories in the biography about Trujillo’s massacre at this time of more than 15,000 Haitians who, living at the border of the Dominican Republic, had the misfortune of giving the wrong pronunciation for the Spanish word for parsley. 

It is to Tye’s credit that he does not ignore the many black sportswriters who were critical of Paige’s teamjumping. Chester Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier, the most prestigious of the black weeklies, called him “as undependable as a pair of second-hand suspenders.” 

Shortly after his Dominican experience Paige journeyed to Mexico, where he came down with a mystery arm ailment that threatened to curtail his career. The ministrations of one of the great personages in the Negro Leagues, Frank “Jewbaby” Floyd, trainer for the Kansas City Monarchs, slowly restored Paige to health. (More is needed to be known about the dark-skinned Floyd and how he developed his politically incorrect nickname.) 

The second stage of Paige’s Negro League career began with the backing of J. Leslie “Wilkie” Wilkinson, the co-owner of the well-regarded Monarchs and earlier the founder of the first racially diverse baseball team, the All-Nations Team of World War I vintage. Without going into depth about the issue, Tye does mention that Wilkinson’s co-owner, Thomas Baird, was a member of the Kansas City chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Until Bill Veeck signed Paige for the Cleveland Indians in 1948 and again for the St. Louis Browns from 1951 to 1953 and later had a role in Paige’s pitching for the minor-league Miami Marlins, Wilkinson was the only owner toward whom Paige felt a real loyalty. “He gave Satchel fat paychecks when all he could deliver was fat pitches” is how Tye felicitously phrases the roots of Paige’s affection. 

As noted earlier, the one area where Tye’s account strikes a false note is in his criticism of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson. They weren’t saints, of course, and their ambition and self-possession earned them many enemies in both white and black baseball. It does seem a gratuitous slap for Tye to write in describing Robinson’s brief period as Paige’s Monarch teammate in 1945, “Satchel had little use for Jackie and he was not alone.” Tye also errs when he says that Robinson was a Monarch second baseman; he was a shortstop in Kansas City, though he came to realize that he didn’t have the arm for that key position. 

There are other nagging errors in Tye’s book that have not been corrected in the paperback edition. The biggest one is that he has the second Joe Louis–Max Schmeling bout occurring shortly before Paige broke into the majors with the Indians in 1948 when of course it was 1938 when the Brown Bomber avenged an earlier loss to the German heavyweight with a first-round knockout. Tye also makes a reference at one point to a Sports Illustrated article from 1949, but the magazine was not founded until 1954. And in praising the Monarchs for playing games under the lights as early as 1930, he exaggerates how long it took white owners to follow suit. It was five years, not fifteen, when the first major-league night game was played (hosted by Larry MacPhail’s Cincinnati Reds in 1935). In his copious bibliography and notes, Tye somehow has omitted David Zang’s indispensable biography Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer (1996). He does mention that Moses Fleetwood Walker and his younger brother Welday Wilberforce Walker predated Jackie Robinson’s appearance in the majors by more than sixty years, but he doesn’t seem to realize that the extreme black nationalism of Fleet Walker’s post–playing career attracted no followers. 

On balance, though, Tye’s Satchel is a very worthy contribution to both the literature of baseball history and biography. He has drawn a memorable portrait of an earthy, contradictory man who once said that he “wasn’t married but I’m in demand” but in fact was married three times, once to two women in different countries. “What his teammates did not really grasp was that Satchel Paige was an introvert,” Tye explains. “There are two places to hide if you are shy: off on your own or at the center of a crowd. Satchel did both.” 

Satchel Paige shares top billing with Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller in Tim Gay’s Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert. The writing in Gay’s opus is much more pedestrian than in Tye’s book, and for the most part it presents a chronicle of the many barnstorming tours that Paige, Dean, and Feller engaged in with their “all-star” aggregations. Certainly the reader who wants deep insight into Paige should consult the Tye volume, but every now and then Gay turns a phrase or digs up a source that should be valuable to baseball researchers. 

He cites, for instance, an army superior’s description of Dizzy Dean, who lied about his age in order to enlist: “That boy couldn’t pour piss out a boot with directions on the heel.” In the early 1950s, when Dean went to Hollywood to serve as an adviser on the biopic The Pride of St. Louis (my vote for one of the worst baseball-themed movies ever), he was thrilled to receive $50,000 as his fee. “Jeez, they’re gonna give me 50,000 smackers just fer livin’!” When, two days into the shooting, Dan Dailey, cast as Dizzy, had a nervous collapse and production was halted for two weeks, Dizzy quipped, “He’s only been me for two days, and already he’s nuts!” 

Gay also provides some tantalizing tidbits about other barnstorming teams of the 1930s and 1940s. One was led by Earle Mack, one of Connie Mack’s sons, and another was led by one-armed Pete Gray, the St. Louis Browns outfielder whose presence in World War II baseball provided integration activists with vivid evidence that white owners would rather hire disabled white players than fully abled black ones. Gay informs us that on one of Pete Gray’s tours he competed against a one-armed black player. 

There is no great insight in the bulk of Gay’s book, and his dismissal of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the stock racist in so many histories is not helpful. We could have used some hard evidence on how he tried to stop interracial barnstorming, even though there is no doubt that he did try. And Gay’s treatment of Branch Rickey is no better and has some unfortunate errors. The biggest is that Rickey gave tryouts to aging Negro Leaguers at the Dodgers’ Bear Mountain spring-training headquarters in 1945 as a “publicity stunt” when in fact he was outraged when the black activist journalist Joe Bostic barged into the camp with the players. Rickey tried them out only to avoid being branded indifferent to the cause. 

Just when I thought that only duty would force me to finish Gay’s book, a genuine highlight came near the end, when Bob Feller opened up to him about his memories of playing interracial baseball with Paige after the Second World War. Where Larry Tye in Satchel was largely dismissive of Feller’s dour, self-centered personality, Tim Gay presents a more nuanced picture of Feller, even if he bluntly called his All-Star games against Paige “racial rivalry” games and felt the customers liked to see black–white competition. 

Feller could indeed be stubborn and prickly, and Paige and Jackie Robinson at separate times sued him for not living up to his contractual obligation to pay them their fair share of the exhibition proceeds. It must be remembered that major-league ballplayers were very underpaid in the 1940s and that barnstorming augmented their meager salaries. Gay notes that Stan Musial commented that he would have made more money barnstorming than playing in the 1946 World Series! The author also valuably augments the Feller section of his book by citing his 1957 TV interview, with Mike Wallace, in which the recently retired pitcher uttered strong criticisms of baseball owners for their penurious ways. 

Near the end of his book Gay quotes an author unfamiliar to me, Robert Cole: “Black–white exhibitions . . . had an edgy, almost forbidden quality—a little like sneaking off to an all-night jazz club on the wrong side of the tracks.” I wish more of the book had captured that flavor instead of being a litany of the runs and hits in games played. It may be heretical to say in this age of statistical overload and political correctness, but what is needed in future studies of the pivotal era of mid-twentieth-century baseball is greater probing into the depths of the participants as they played the exhibition games joyfully, demonstrating by their example on the field, and without trying to prove a political point, what cooperation off the field might mean.

LEE LOWENFISH, a member of SABR since 1978, is author of “Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman” (Nebraska Press, 2007), for which he won the 2008 Seymour Medal. His first book, “The Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball’s Labor Wars”, originally a collaboration with the late Tony Lupien, has recently appeared in a third, expanded edition (Nebraska, 2010).

ROOTS OF THE GAME

Early in the 19th century, athletic clubs formed in America to promote leisure and exercise. Two “fraternities” were spawned from these clubs, the “sporting” fraternity and an offshoot called the “base ball” fraternity. During the 1830s, amateur “town ball” clubs were formed, many in the Northeast. A variation on “town ball” was called the “New York game,” and the earliest set of published game rules, the Knickerbocker Rules, was written on September 23, 1845, by William R. Wheaton, a member of the Knickerbocker club. An early use of the statistical box-score was during a game between the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Nine. (The New York Nine prevailed by a 23–1 score.) In the years that followed, the “New York game” persisted over other forms of “town” ball, largely due to the influence of the fast-growing New York press during the middle of the 19th century. These early amateur games were often followed by elaborate parties. But in Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Ed Rielly states that “as soon as the New York Knickerbockers organized and started competing against other teams, spectators began betting on the outcome. Betting quickly became a problem, as the chance to win a wager fostered a desire to limit one’s risk by predetermining the outcome.”1 Winning and losing took on a different tone as the stakes, literally, went up.

By the early part of the 1850s, baseball had become increasingly organized. In 1856, the game was christened the “national pastime” in the New York Mercury, a newspaper of the era. In the year that followed, the amateur baseball clubs banded together to form the National Association of Baseball Players.

THE NEW YORK CITY MUTUALS AND THE BEGINNING OF CORRUPTION

After the Civil War, the good will of the game began to fade as amateur teams focused more and more on winning, and owners sought out the best talent and paid them “under the table.” Fixing or “hippodroming” of games fostered predetermined outcomes. In 1865 the first documented report of baseball corruption appeared. Three members of the New York City Mutuals, whose leader at that time was William Magear Tweed, conspired with a gambler to throw a game to the Eckfords of Brooklyn.

TAMMANY HALL, “BOSS” TWEED, AND CORRUPTION

The Society of St. Tammany was initially a fraternal organization run along the lines of a social club, but in the 1830s the Society grew more political in nature. The “hall” in the name was a reference to the headquarters of the organization. “Boss” Tweed became the head of the Tammany Hall political machine in 1863. As a member of many boards and commissions, he controlled political patronage in New York City and was able to ensure the loyalty of voters through the jobs he could create and dispense on city-related projects. The powerful cadre that surrounded Tweed was known as the “Tweed Ring,” and the extent of the corruption fostered by the Ring had never been seen in New York City. They controlled elections by bribery and the fraudulent counting of votes, filling elective offices with their cronies. Office-seekers could not get elected without Tweed’s support. The “Ring” wanted to exercise political power, but they also wanted to enrich themselves at the public expense. One infamous example: in 1858, the city allocated $250,000 to build a new courthouse behind City Hall. Upon completion in 1871, the final tab came to a staggering $12,000,000 with 75 percent of that total used as graft for fraudulently contracted bills. The courthouse stands today—with a recent complete renovation—as a monument to the corruption that Tammany Hall foisted on New York City.

For Tammany, baseball was another avenue for pursuing financial gains. The corruption uncovered in the 1865 Mutuals/Eckfords game was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Henry Chadwick, a journalist whom many consider the “father of baseball,” started writing about the game in 1857. Daniel E. Ginsburg in The Fix Is In noted that “Chadwick was the unquestioned leader in pushing for an end to corruption in baseball. He risked libel suits constantly as he worked to expose gambling related corruption in the game and clean up the sport he loved.”2

THE BEGINNING OF PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

Even the sterling 1869 barnstorming season across the country by the Cincinnati Red Stockings (not beaten in 64 contests) was touched by the fingers of corruption. Tammany affiliate John Morrissey, leader of the Troy Haymakers and a famous pugilist who won the National Boxing Championship in 1853, was said to have placed a wager of over $50,000 on a game between the undefeated Red Stockings and his Haymakers. According to Ginsburg, Morrissey was so concerned with losing his money that he instructed his team to quit the game if they felt they might lose.3 Sure enough, after Troy had tied the score at 17 in the fifth inning, Troy seized an illegitimate opportunity to walk off the field. Although they forfeited the game, there was no mention of Morrissey having to fork over any cash. A few years later, Morrissey became a member of the anti-Tammany Hall movement.

Steven Riess wrote in Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era, “amateur and professional baseball always had close links to Tammany Hall. Several prominent politicians got their start in politics through Tammany sponsored baseball teams.”4 The teams provided a means to attract ambitious, athletically inclined young men to politics. By 1869, Tammany was contributing generously to the upkeep of the Mutuals, who were all on salary, making them a truly professional team. When the New York City Council voted the team $1,500 towards a trip to New Orleans in 1869, Tweed countered with $7,500 from his own pocket, another way to secure votes.

Interest in professional baseball grew, and the first professional organization, The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, a.k.a. the National Association (NA), was formed at a March 17, 1871, meeting held at Collier’s Café on Broadway and 13th in New York City. The league was run by the players, an undisciplined group with little business acumen, and it lasted only until 1875. John Thorn in Baseball in the Garden of Eden writes, “the low state of the National Association (NA) after the 1875 campaign could be chalked up to rampant corruption and drunkenness, as well as to radically unbalanced competition that permitted Boston to win the championship four years running.”5

The National League was formed at a meeting in the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway, between Bleecker and Bond, on February 2, 1876. William Hulbert, a midwesterner and the self-appointed mastermind behind the transference of the NA to the National League, felt that there was too much corruption in the Eastern teams. Under a ruse to gather representatives from some of the NA clubs, Hulbert claimed that he wanted to discuss some thorny problems that were undermining the game. Ironically, a locked hotel room was the venue for the introduction of the National League.

In 1877 the first major-league scandal took place, involving four ballplayers from the Louisville club. Although two of the players had previous ties with Tammany, there are no hard facts to suggest that Tammany had played a major role. There were more scandals in the ensuing years, but none necessarily perpetrated by Tammany Hall.

THOMAS NAST AND THE FAll OF TWEED AND TAMMANY

Seemingly, Tweed could not be touched. There was one man, however, who felt that Tweed was a detriment to society and had to be stopped. Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, was that man. Nast’s most notable drawings include his rendition of a fat, jolly Santa Claus, as well as the Republican elephant and the Democratic Party’s donkey. But his greatest contribution was his full-bore attack on Tweed and his associates. Thomas Nast was an artist who realized that with his drawings, he could expose Tweed and fight his corrupt politics. “Tweed could not believe that his mighty sword was being taken down by a pen and lamented, ‘I don’t care what the papers say! A lot of people can’t read a single word! But oh, those drawings! Anybody can understand what they mean.”’6 Tweed did what he knew best and tried to buy Nast out for a reported sum of $500,000, to no avail.

Nast made life miserable for Tweed. His initial attempt to sketch him (in September 1868) ironically coincided with The New York Times drawing attention to the corruption of the Tweed Ring and Tammany Hall. Nast would eventually get his sketch and publish his first cartoon focusing on Tweed in April 1870. By June 1871 he would be depicting Governor John Hoffman as a cigar-store “Indian” being pushed by Tweed and his henchmen as a commentary on the fact that Tammny would be backing Hoffman in the 1872 US presidential election. As John Adler reported in Doomed by Cartoon, the day after the cigarstore image appeared, The New York Times called attention to Nast’s latest shot at the Ring. “Harper’s Weekly should be in everybody’s hands. The current number contains one of Nast’s best drawings-a drawing which would alone gain a large reputation for its designer.”7

In September 1870, the Times began attacking Tammany, and by 1871 was in full swing to expose the depth of corruption that existed in Tammany Hall. Edward Robb Ellis in his book, The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History, reported the headline which was the opening salvo against the Tweed Ring and subsequently, Tammany Hall. “THE SECRET ACCOUNTS ….PROOFS OF UNDOUBTED FRAUDS BROUGHT TO LIGHT…. WARRANTS SIGNED BY HALL AND CONNOLY UNDER FALSE PRETENSES.”8

Tweed was finally brought into court in January of 1873, but the trial ended with a hung jury. His second trial later that year was prosecuted much more diligently and Tweed’s cronies were kept out of the jury pool. Ultimately, as told by Ellis, Tweed was found guilty of 102 offenses and sentenced to twelve years in prison but served only one—in living quarters fit for a king. On the day that he was released, he was rearrested on a civil charge and sent to the Ludlow Street jail where he lived in a two-room suite that actually belonged to the warden. Minimum security was the order-of-the-day. Tweed lived the life of Riley. One afternoon in December 1875, accompanied by two security guards, Tweed took a carriage ride to his family’s brownstone on Madison Avenue. Then, in an elaborate getaway scheme which cost him $60,000, he walked out the back door to a waiting wagon which spirited him to a rowboat on the Hudson River. He hid out in the Palisades for three months and was then escorted to Staten Island where he hopped a schooner to the Everglades in Florida. He was picked up by a fishing boat that took him to Cuba where he boarded a ship to cross the Atlantic and landed in Vigo, Spain on September 6, 1876. Unfortunately for Mr. Tweed, he was traced to Spain. Although there were no photographs of Tweed that could identify him, the Spanish authorities amazingly recognized Tweed from a Thomas Nast caricature and turned him over to American authorities. Once back in the Ludlow Street jail, the broken Tweed caught a cold and eventually died of bronchial pneumonia on April 12, 1878. The two Tammany bosses who succeeded Tweed, “Honest John” Kelly through 1886 immediately followed by Richard Croker, brought along their own versions of corruption which were different from Tweed’s but no less damaging. Rev. Charles Parkhurst was a leader in the temperance movement and a longtime social reformer. Oliver Allen, in New York, New York, points out that Parkhurst’s observations, after a personal three-week tour of the Tenderloin (an area of New York City where vice and corruption flourished), persuaded the state legislature in 1894 to initiate an inquiry.9 The Lexow Committee, designed to embarrass Democrats aligned with Tammany, launched a thorough investigation of Tammany’s ties to New York vice and corruption.10 The committee unearthed evidence that the police were engaged in vice operations and were responsible for rigging elections and for police brutality. Another result of the Lexow Committee findings was the defeat of Tammany Hall in the 1894 municipal election. Sensing that the tides were turning against him, Croker resigned and sailed to England where he stayed for three years.

“BIG BILL” DEVERY

Tammany’s grip had been loosened, but the change in regime was not complete, and some of the leaders to rise after Tweed’s ouster also had ties to baseball. One was the corrupt police chief, William “Big Bill” Devery, whose motto was “See, hear and say nothing; eat, drink and pay nothing.” The reform police commissioner in 1895, Teddy Roosevelt (TR), vowed to nab a few upperechelon Tammany members, including Devery, but TR even had to fight members of his own party who were corrupted by the Tammany faction of the opposing party. He lasted only one year as commissioner. (Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise as he went on to become the President of the United States.) Devery eventually became instrumental in bringing an American League baseball team to New York. Ban Johnson, American League president, had been denied a New York team for two years, but Devery would change that. Johnson had brought his Western League to major league status on a par with the National League by offering a cleaner brand of baseball. By its second year of existence, the American League fielded teams in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Washington. But Johnson felt that he desperately needed a New York team in order to survive. Tammany Hall, in control of the city’s real estate, thwarted every attempt on the part of Ban Johnson to establish a suitable site to erect a ball park.

In 1895, Andrew Freedman—a close friend and business partner of Tammany boss Croker—became owner of the New York Giants. As stated by Frank Graham in his book, The New York Giants: An Informal History of a Great Baseball Club, “For eight years Freedman ruled the Giants and almost completely wrecked them. Had he not been restrained he would have wrecked the league as well.”11 Freedman and Croker worked together to block Johnson’s efforts to plant an AL team in New York.

But the unpopular Freedman irritated the other team owners when he attempted to syndicate the game into what would be known as the National League Trust. As Graham further reported, “Common stock would be used in payment for the eight clubs with New York to receive 30 percent, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Boston, 12 percent; Philadelphia and Chicago 12 percent, Pittsburg 8 percent and Brooklyn 6 percent.”12 Al Spalding, another “father” of baseball and an integral part of its early development, could not stand by and watch this travesty unfold. By way of an improperly held election in the spring of 1902, Spalding bluffed Freedman into thinking that his bold attempt to refashion baseball to fit his own needs had succeeded only in splitting the league wide open and that further measures on his part were bound to fail. As a result of this, Freedman promised to resign as soon as he could find a suitable buyer.

Meanwhile, another faction existed in Tammany Hall that was able to circumvent the efforts of Freedman to block Johnson and the AL. Devery and “Pool Room King” Frank Farrell were able to locate a rocky site for Johnson on Broadway between 165th St. and 168th St. The ballpark on the site would become known as “American League Park,” or more commonly “Hilltop Park.” Farrell and Devery became the first owners of the American League New York franchise that we now know as the New York Yankees. They purchased the Baltimore Orioles on January 9, 1903, for $18,000 and moved the team to New York City.

JACOB RUPPERT

George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery had the top-selling beer 1877–1888, with Jacob Ruppert Sr.’s Knickerbocker beer trailing just behind.13 After his son Jacob Ruppert Jr. took over the running of the brewery, as reported by Glenn Stout in Yankees Century, Knickerbocker needed a little push to grab the top spot in the market. Ruppert the younger joined Tammany, and his membership helped put him where he wanted to be: Number One. Knickerbocker was poured in every Tammany held bar in the city, and Ruppert eventually dominated the market.14 Tammany recognized Ruppert’s rise by giving him a spot on the finance committee alongside Andrew Freedman, the man reviled by National League team owners. Ruppert was then tapped by Boss Croker to run for Congress in order to cultivate the much needed and rising German vote. Ruppert followed the Tammany line while serving four terms 1899–1907.

Upon leaving Congress in 1907, Ruppert immersed himself in his brewery business. Stout claimed that “he owned yachts, raced horses, bred dogs and collected exotic animals, jade, porcelain, first editions, and mistresses.” But he always had an interest in owning a baseball team, preferably the New York Giants. Giants’ manager John McGraw introduced Ruppert to civil engineer Captain Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, who made his fortune in the Spanish-American War, and then in Cuba. But the Giants wouldn’t be the team that Ruppert and Huston would acquire.

By 1914 the Highlanders/Yankees had fallen lower and lower in the standings, and Devery and Farrell were experiencing growing tensions in both their business and personal relationships. They were bleeding money, basically through a lack of any business acumen. American League president Ban Johnson, not wanting to see his New York franchise go under, set up a meeting with Farrell, Devery, Huston, and Ruppert to discuss the possibility of selling the franchise. A deal was consummated whereby Tammany Hall’s Bill Devery and Frank Farrell would sell their interests in the New York Yankees to former Tammany Hall Congressman Jacob Ruppert and Cap Huston for the sum of $465,000—quite a windfall from the $18,000 that they had spent on their charter.

By the late 1930s the influence of Tammany was beginning to wane, and the Society was officially disbanded in the 1960s. Jacob Ruppert, for his contributions to the game of baseball and the New York Yankees, was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2012.

TONY MORANTE has been a SABR member since 1995 and a baseball fan since 1949 when his father, an usher at the original Yankee Stadium, brought him to his first game. He started working in Yankee Stadium in 1958 as an usher and came aboard full-time in 1973 in the Group/Season Sales Department. Morante, with the encouragement of George Steinbrenner, instituted the Yankee Stadium Tour program and gave his first tour of the stadium in 1979. He is Director of Tours to this day. He serves as Vice-President of the Bronx County Historical Society and is writing a book about New York baseball.

SOURCES

Samuel Hopkins Adams, Tenderloin (New York: Random House 1959).

John Adler, Doomed by Cartoon (Garden City, NY: Morgan James Publishing LLC, 2008).

Robert F. Burk, Never Just A Game (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 1994).

Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford 1898).

Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City; A Narrative History (New York: MacMillan 1966).

Mark Gallagher, The Yankee Encyclopedia (West Point, NY: Leisure Press 1982).

Daniel E. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland 1995).

Warren Goldstein, A History of Early Baseball (New York: Barnes & Noble 1989).

Mark Gallegher, The Yankees Encyclopedia (West Point, NY: Leisure Press 1982).

Frank Graham, The New York Giants (Carbondale, Il., Southern Illinois University Press 2002).

Christopher Gray, New York Streetscapes (New York: Abrams, Inc. 2003).

Syd Hoff, Boss Tweed and the Man Who Drew Him (Syd Hoff 1978).

Noel Hynd, The Giants of the Polo Grounds (New York: Doubleday 1988).

Seymour J. Mandlebaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks 1990).

J. D. McCabe, Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1970).

David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball (New York: Donald J. Fine Books 1997).

George Washington Plunkitt, Honest Graft (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press 1997).

Steven A. Riess, Touching Base (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois: 1999).

William Ryczek, When Johnny Came Sliding Home (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 1998)

M.R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press 1932).

Richard Zacks, Island of Vice (New York: Doubleday 2012).

Notes

1 Edward J. Rielly, Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 110.

2 Daniel E. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 1995), 5.

3 Ginsburg, 10.

4 Steven A. Riess, Touching Base (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois: 1999), 55.

5 John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).

6 Syd Hoff, Boss Tweed and the Man Who Drew Him (Syd Hoff, 1978), 36.

7 John Adler, Doomed by Cartoon (Morgan James Publishing, LLC, 2008), 136.

8 Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History (New York: MacMillan 1966), 348.

9 Oliver Allen, New York, New York (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1990), 180.

10 Allen, New York, New York, 180.

11 Frank Graham, The New York Giants (Carbondale, IL: G.P. Putnam, 2002).

12 Graham, The New York Giants, 25-26.

13 Christopher Gray, “Where the streets smelled like beer,” The New York Times, March 26, 2012, RE6. www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/realestate/upper-east-side-streetscapes-empires-of-rival-brewers.html?_r=0.

14 Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson, Yankees Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin 2002), 67.

As a precipitating cause of this fratricidal struggle, baseball historians point to the distortion of historical records done by the Special Baseball Records Committee back in 1968. That year Commissioner William Eckert appointed the committee at the behest of the Macmillan publishing company whose exhaustive Encyclopedia project was in the works. Once credentialed, the committee met twice in 1968 and proceeded to revamp baseball records in the light of present day practices. Predictably, the committee’s temporocentric stance, based as it is on the wrongheaded assumption that the present is all that there is, upset many records, especially those of the 19^th century. In unbaring what they saw to be nearly 40 instances of erroneous record keeping between the years 1876 and 1920, the committee simply rewrote them in their zeal to pin modern standards on the past. One such correction had the committee awarding a 715th homer to Ruth, a ploy that stirred a hornet’s nest of protests from historically minded sportswriters. For one, Bob Lipsyte of the New York Times scored the “numbers gaming,” sneering that “First players, then entire rosters will be deleted from the record books,” including perhaps all references to the tabooed Chicago Black Sox!

Forced to back down, the committee beat a graceless retreat. Although Ruth’s 714 homer total stood the same, other examples of ham-handed tampering got into the Macmillan Encyclopedia, making that “official” tool a bad road map for any baseball historian seeking to reconstruct the early years of what was always a changing major league game. Indeed, only the fact that so few baseball historians seemed to be working the early years of major league history concealed the committee’s effrontery. For me, their crimes against historical canons lay buried for 15 years in the cold type of various editions of the Macmillan Encyclopedia. Recently, an assignment to do a one-volume history of the major league game sent me back to 19th century sources and alerted me to the statistical crime of these figure filberts. Comparing stats on early ballplayers culled from the official guides of their times with their “Big Mac” records alerted me to the doctoring job. At that point I was thankful that my earlier work on 19th century baseball had been published back in 1966, three years before the first “Big Mac” hit the stalls.

Thanking the gods for so dubious a blessing is to cast the impending battle between historians and statisticians in Olympian terms. Back when the world was young, as told in Greek mythology, Father Zeus spawned many children; included were the nine muses who were charged with gentling the lives of men. One muse, Clio, became goddess of history. In serving her, baseball historians have learned to respect the past by selecting data which fairly reflects the rules and lifestyles under which past peoples lived out their lives. In short, historians must reconstruct the past by keeping faith with the logic system under which their subjects lived.

Guided by such principles, baseball historians at their best recognize the different forms of the major league game and their flood of histories and biographies have far outnumbered those by any other sports historians, save chess writers. Moreover, baseball historians can take credit for securing the mighty hold which American baseball imposes on citizens of the Republic. However, they must gratefully share honors with statisticians who from the earliest times have also served Clio well. Some, like Chadwick and Jake Morse, were able historians in their own right. Paced by such records keepers as these, other figure filberts like Clarence Dow, Munro Elias, Ernie Lanigan, Frank Marcellus, C.S. Thompson, Seymour Siwoff and Bill James have formed a lengthy chain of statistician priests in service to the baseball history cause. Their labors raised baseball records and other sports records to awesome significance in our time. To be sure, these statisticians reflected the tenor of their times as banks, office buildings and the like were becoming symbolic temples, indicative of an all-out worship of measurements. So powerful did the quantification trend become that Japan now celebrates an annual statistical holiday in addition to an abacus holiday!

Nevertheless the soaring popularity of statistical measuring poses a threat and a challenge. The question is how to keep stats in a proper place and to prevent their over-ardent devotees from wreaking havoc with historical principles. Sooth to say, in some ways, the overblown claims of stat freaks have them resembling reincarnated Gnostics. It will be recalled that the Gnostics were intellectuals of ancient Greece who took their cult name from the Greek word meaning knowledge. An arrogant lot, they regarded themselves as wiser than ordinary men and claimed that their intuitive insights gave them the monopoly on truth and certitude.

Sad to say, some modern baseball figure filberts seem hell-bent on smuggling the same kind of certainty into record-keeping. Thanks to box scores and measurements of prowesses like team standings, batting averages, saves, homer totals, pitching ratings, and a host of lesser devices, some number nuts think that they can recreate games in toto. Worse, by deigning to impose their own definitions of proper baseball on past eras of baseball history, they seek to define what form of baseball should apply to all times.

Call them heretics! It’s as if modern stat freaks have forsaken Clio for some idolatrous muse   of their own shaping. Call her Statistia, although she was not born of Zeus nor has she any place among the Olympians. Nor are baseball statisticians alone in panting after this bitch goddess. Sober social critics now warn that ours is becoming a numbers-worshipping society wherein family life, leisure, work, sickness, rearmament, and virtually any behavioral area, is subjected to the tyranny of statistical measurements. For one, Alvin Toffler spoke of our “blip world” of today whereby bits of information strike us in random fashion, telling us not to smoke, eat bacon, wear tampons, use unleaded gas and the like; however, counter “blips” flit by telling us to do precisely the opposite. Fearing the irrational consequences of this trend, the late C. Wright Mills wrote that “It is not too much to say that . . . the choice to reason in most men is destroyed as such rationality increases. . . . There is, thus, rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it.”

In Mills’s telling phrase “rationalism without reason” is embodied the dangers of the confrontation between Clio and Statistia. To rationalize without reason is to run the risk of turning consumers into cheerful robots who are easily seduced by the next statistical blip that comes along. Such blips abetted by television seemingly rob us of the qualitative sense of the past. Without a sense of the ever changing past we succumb to the bias of present-mindedness which statisticians seem to purvey. By contrast, a faithful work of history, concerned with the realities of past eras, is a refuge from the mindless horrors of quantifications; to read such a work is to receive a private and uniquely qualitative experience.

Certainly, baseball historians need to face up to dangers stemming from presumptuous statisticians. Forewarned is forearmed, and baseball students need to defend against notions of certainty and temporocentrism fobbed off by Statistia’s modern priests. One must take with a healthy dash of salt such utterances as James Michener’s in his book Sports in America where he exults that “one of the permanent delights of baseball is the minute accuracy of the mathematical data.” Likewise don’t swallow completely Bill James’s recent claim that statistics have “powers of language” or that they serve as “a literature and poetry,” or that “without their statistics, athletes . . . have no history,” or that “statistics give texture, form, focus and history to a conflict that is, on its own, devoid of context.” Likewise I would discount Paul MacFarlane’s paean; after seeking to rob Cobb of his 1910 batting crown, MacFarlane crowed that Sporting News readers “have known for decades that this paper provides the most accurate. . . news possible. The revisions in the Cobb and Lajoie records are in keeping with TSN’s philosophy.”

Happily a few apostates have backed off from earlier conversions to Statistia. For one, Len Koppett  recently admitted that stats have historical value, but not in themselves. Some things never get counted; baseball has always had its non-statistical dimensions. And the late Lee Allen, who succumbed to a temptation to change baseball records, told this writer in the last year of his life that past records ought not to be tampered with.

While freedom of religion also protects Statistia’s worshippers, violence done to baseball records is just cause for declaring war on perpetrators. What follows is a starter set of outrages which show how stat freaks have savaged baseball’s past by proclaiming their modernistic interpretations to be the only proper ones. But let not my love for Clio persuade you; rather hearken to each of the following crimes and judge for yourselves.

1. The Crime of Rejecting the National Association as a Major League

Any baseball historian must be mightily impressed by the National Association of 1871-1875 which profitably served American fans with first-rate baseball. However, the 1968 records committee airily dismissed the major league claims of this pioneer circuit on grounds that it had “erratic schedules and procedures.”

And what, pray tell, is a major league? To the objective historian the answer comes that such recognition depends on the times. A major league is one that is regarded as such by the fans of a generation; however, there are legal avenues to major league recognition, such as when the status is bestowed under one of the National Agreements. While no National Agreement existed in the    1871-1875 era, the fans of the times knew that the best players played in the Association. Moreover, the Association’s annual profits and salaries outstripped those of the National League for the first seven seasons of the latter’s existence. Nevertheless, the 1968 committee refused to award major league status to the National Association. Citing the circuit’s annual dropout problem and its lack of fixed playing schedules, the 1968 committee made its determination;

however, the group blithely afforded major status to the Union Association despite the fact that only five of its 13 clubs finished schedules in the circuit’s 1884 season.

More than likely the 1968 committee was motivated by major league politics as played out in the 1960s. In pandering to the values of present-day owners, it is probable that the committee took note of the Association’s player-run structure. It was a player-run league, with a player president, and its stockholder “owners” functioned mainly as patrons. That major league baseball was born of such parentage must have been anathema to modern owners and the sort of heritage one seeks to conceal. Especially would modern owners want to conceal another Association heritage – that of open access. In those days of the early 1870s any franchise could be admitted into the major league by merely paying a ten dollar fee.

2. Rewriting the 1887 Seasonal Records

Anyone familiar with 19th century baseball history knows that the decade of the 1880s was a wonderfully experimental decade. Recognizing this fact, no historian would agree with the notion that baseball is a changeless spectacle in which nothing new transpires.

In endeavoring to balance the pitching and hitting equation, rules-makers of the l880s tinkered constantly. In 1887 they hit on the idea of fixing a single strike zone for pitchers; in return, hitters got four strikes (if the third was called), and credit for a base hit for each base on balls received. While this radical change lasted only the 1887 season, it was official baseball and records dutifully reflected the interpretation.

So what did the 1968 committee do? Brushing aside the reality of baseball’s dynamic character, they robbed Cap Anson of a National League batting title fairly won, cutting him from .421 to .347; at the same time Tip O’Neill’s American Association leading figure of .492 was cut to .435.

Confronted by such wrongheaded tampering, historians are advised to use the “Big Mac” with great caution. A better source, certainly more faithful to standards of the times, is the Turkin-Thompson Encyclopedia. Of course the very best sources are the annual official guides. In 19th century times the Spalding, Reach, Wright & Ditson, etc., guides were “official.” How dare a modern pundit aver that his definition of “official” overturns those of the past?

The logic behind the 1968 committee action can be reduced to absurdity by asking why they did not go back and revamp all batting averages before the present-day custom of four balls was instituted; or rewrite records before 1887 when hi-low strike zones existed! Far out, you may say, but the Big Mac’ers did impose saves,  ERAs, RBIs and the like on 19th century players despite the fact that neither players nor fans played under such standards. One can only speculate if the Big Mac group, or some other certainty-minded figure filberts, will decide to rewrite all American League records since 1973, the year designated hitters came in!

3. Compressing the 1892 Split Season

Having bested the Players League in 1890 and the American Association the year following, the National League embarked upon its monopolistic, 12-club “big league.” Loosed in 1892, the 12 teams lugged heavy war debts and high payrolls. To stimulate profits, the owners voted to split the playing schedule into halves. Boston won the first, but Cleveland stormed from a fifth-place, first-half finish to win second-half honors. In a playoff series to settle the League championship, Boston swept to victory.

In brief outline this was the official major league scenario of 1892, but Big Mac stat freaks saw this as an abomination and simply merged the two halves into one in their coverage of the 1892 season. Ironically, in 1981 another split season occurred. This raises the interesting dilemma of how the stat freaks can accept the 1981 abomination without resuscitating the 1892 forerunner.

4. Tampering With Cobb’s 1910 Batting Title

While the 1968 committee’s tampering with Anson’s batting efforts and those of O’Neill, Jake Stenzel, Billy Hamilton and others may have escaped notice because of the remote time factor, a recent attempt by The Sporting News to divest the late Cobb of his 1910 title stirred  a tempest of controversy. In a banner story, Paul MacFarlane told a tale of chicanery that allegedly handed Cobb the title by a single point over Nap Lajoie. By discounting phantom hits allegedly credited to Cobb, MacFarlane dropped his average from .385 to .382 and reduced his lifetime hit total from 4192 to 4190.

But MacFarlane gave little consideration to the anti-Cobb sentiments of the time, or to Red Corriden’s failure to field seven bunts by Lajoie in his last game, or to reported bribery attempts by two St. Louis players who were anxious to see Cobb lose the title. Persuaded by factors, President Ban Johnson chose to award the title to Cobb; however, he also persuaded the Chalmers Company to award promised automobiles to both men for their batting heroics.

This case highlights the fact that record-keeping errors have always been rife. That this is still the case, even the conservative-minded C.C. Johnson Spink of TSN admitted, pointing to the 1978 American League records that contained 213 errors and three misspellings of names. So much for the “minute” accuracy of modern data. Indeed, who dares cast the first stone in the name of absolute accuracy.

5. Exaggerating Rose’s 1978 Consecutive Hitting Streak

The year 1978 also saw doughty Pete Rose of the Reds compile a 44-game hitting streak, a feat hailed by some temporocentric writers as a new National League record. But when baseball historian Marc Onigman demurred, pointing out that Rose must share his record with Willie Keeler, the old Oriole, who hit in the same number of games back in the late 1 890s, some statisticians waxed wrathful. Angered by Onigman’s disclosure, writer Dick Young and statistician Seymour Siwoff retorted that Keeler’s achievement was stone-age stuff. Siwoff even argued that one must regard major league baseball as falling into two separate eras – ancient and modern.

However, Onigman hoisted his assailants on their own petard by quoting a ruling by the 1968 Special Records Committee which decreed that “Major League baseball shall have one set of records starting in 1876, without any arbitrary division into nineteenth and twentieth century data.”

This confrontation was just another example of statisticians attempting to impose present-day standards upon all baseball ages past. There are others, including some sportswriters who touted the 1981 strike as baseball’s greatest, and others who touted the 1981 Oakland and 1982 Atlanta breakaway win streaks as the longest ever. In rebuttal, the great strike of 1890 certainly eclipsed the 1981 strike in longevity. As for the breakaway win streaks, the recent ones were overshadowed by the 21 victories compiled by the Union Association’s St. Louis Maroons in 1884; indeed, was not the 1869-70 breakaway gait by the Cincinnati Reds the ultimate one?

Revelations like these point to a menacing conflict between baseball historians and baseball statisticians. Something like a rapprochement between Clio and Statistia is sorely wanted, lest great harm be done to the baseball information enterprise. If baseball historians can be faulted for smugness and vainglorious claims of definitiveness, such sins pale before the terrible charge of distorting the past which can be laid at the feet of some statisticians. Words like hubris, effrontery, chutzpah are inadequate to describe such a crime. To assuage its stain and to restore the brotherly bond between historians and figure filberts, let the two factions meet to revise, the Macmillan Encyclopedia along historical principles. Such a summit meeting must take care to decide on the meaning of terms like “the first,” “official,” “major league” and “modern.” Once such guidelines are vouchsafed, figure filberts are free to continue worshipping Statistia. But only by undertaking such necessary reforms can the blasphemies against Clio, the Muse of History, be redressed. Meantime, while awaiting such unlikely penance from zealous numerologists, historians can only pray, “Forgive them, Father Zeus, for they know not what they do.”

Few single-game achievements are as highly-regarded as the cycle: “A single, double, triple, and home run (not necessarily in that order) hit by a player in the same game.”1 Since 1876, there have been 344 documented regular-season cycles in the history of major league baseball (excluding the Negro Leagues).2 Table 1 breaks down the players who achieved a cycle by the positions they played to start that particular game. What stands out is that not even one pitcher has ever hit for the cycle.3

It is important to point out that since 1973 in the American League and 2022 in the National League, pitchers have rarely batted thanks to the designated hitter rule (with the notable exception of the exceptional Shohei Ohtani). Thus, achieving a cycle is a feat limited to batters, and the baseball cycle has become a de facto “Batter’s Cycle” (BC). What about pitchers? What is (or what would/could/should be) a “Pitcher’s Cycle” (PC)?

The three primary objectives of the research described in this article are:

1. Devise a viable definition for a Pitcher’s Cycle.
2. Compile a list of all the Twins players who achieved a Pitcher’s Cycle.
3. Highlight the interesting aspects of the PCs and BCs accomplished by Twins players.

After checking the definition of the word ‘cycle’ in the dictionary, I devised the following definition for a Pitcher’s Cycle: At least one batter in each of the nine spots in the batting order struck out by the same player in the same game (not necessarily in order).4 Considering the primary objectives for batters and pitchers, this definition is equivalent to the Batter’s Cycle.

The primary objective of the batter is to reach base, an individual accomplishment that can be achieved by getting a safe hit, of which there are four types. The primary objective of the pitcher is to prevent the batter from getting on base—that is, to retire the batter—which can be accomplished individually by striking out the batter, who occupies one of the nine positions in the batting order.5

With a viable definition of a Pitcher’s Cycle in place, the next order of business was to ascertain the Minnesota Twins players who accomplished the feat, since the AL’s original Washington (DC) Senators franchise relocated to Minnesota after the end of the 1960 campaign.

RESEARCH PROCEDURE

Since a player needs a minimum of nine strikeouts to accomplish the Pitcher’s Cycle, the starting point was to generate a list of pitchers who amassed at least nine strikeouts in a game. This task is perfect for Baseball Reference’s Stathead search engine. I queried for Minnesota Twins pitchers with nine or more strikeouts in a game from 1961 through 2023, and learned that Twins pitchers fanned at least nine batters 482 times. I then examined the box scores and play-by-play accounts to ascertain which of these players accomplished the PC.

To find the Twins who achieved the Batter’s Cycle, I used the team-by-team list of cycles provided on MLB.com.6 For each Twin with a PC or a BC, I examined the game accounts in the relevant newspapers.

RESULTS

According to my research, there have been 17 Pitcher’s Cycles achieved by nine different Minnesota Twins players. Table 2 provides the basic information for each of the Twins PCs. Eleven Twins have hit for the cycle once each. Table 3 provides the fundamental information for each of them. For the remainder of this article the interesting aspects for selected PCs and BCs are highlighted.

1962: On August 3 at Tiger Stadium, Jack Kralick became the first Twins player to achieve a PC. With a 7–4 lead going into the bottom of the ninth, Kralick had given up just three hits, although two of them were homers—a three-run blast by Steve Boros in the second and a solo shot by Bubba Morton in the sixth. While Kralick had struck out nine Tigers, he still needed K’s in the fourth lineup slot (Rocky Colavito) and sixth (Boros) to achieve the feat of striking out every batter in the starting lineup (the simplest type of the PC). Colavito was the leadoff batter in the ninth, and Kralick struck him out looking. Then, after Norm Cash grounded out, Kralick atoned for Boros’s homer by striking him out—simultaneously ending the game and walking off with the PC. However, Kralick’s feat received no attention in the press, which instead expounded on the prodigious home run that Harmon Killebrew hit off Jim Bunning in the fourth inning, an alleged 530-foot drive over the left field roof.7 The only Washington Nationals player to have accomplished a PC was Walter Johnson, who performed the feat twice (1910, 1913).

1970: In the team’s 10th season, Rod Carew became the first Twin to achieve the BC. On May 20 in Kansas City, the Minnesota second sacker singled in his first at-bat and homered in his second, tying the score, 1–1. In his third at-bat he doubled. His first opportunity to complete the cycle came in the sixth, but he grounded out to the second baseman. He was successful in his next chance, belting an RBI-triple to center field in the eighth and increasing the Twins lead over the Royals to 7–4. Asked how he felt about hitting for the cycle after the game, Carew responded, “Lots of luck. That’s it, lots of luck.” He also added, “Maybe I’ll get a bonus. Do you think?”8 Prior to becoming the Twins, the Washington Nationals had four players who hit for the cycle—Otis Clymer (1908), Goose Goslin (1924), Joe Cronin (1929) and Mickey Vernon (1946).

1972: The second Twins player to accomplish a BC was Cesar Tovar. It was dramatic. Facing the visiting Texas Rangers on September 19, Tovar led off the first inning by legging out a triple to center field. He then scored on a single by Steve Braun, staking the Twins to a 1–0 lead. He grounded out (1–3) to lead off the third, then singled in the fifth and doubled in the seventh. Each of his three hits was off KC’s starting pitcher, Dick Bosman. Facing Paul Lindblad in the bottom of the ninth, with the score knotted, 3–3, Tovar stepped into the batter’s box with a runner on and two down. He drove the ball into the left field seats for a walk-off homer that simultaneously earned him the Batter’s Cycle and the Twins the victory. When asked about his performance after the game, Tovar responded with a question, “What is this cycle thing? Single, double, triple, home run—the cycle?” He then added, “No, I no think I ever hit for the cycle, not even in Venezuelan winter baseball.”9 Interviewed before the game, Tovar had said, “He’s gonna trade me. I know it. But I show Mr. Griffith I can still play. I show him. I show him everything.”10 With his Batter’s Cycle and walk-off homer, Tovar certainly did.

1974: Bert Blyleven collected his fourth and final Pitcher’s Cycle on September 21 in a game at Metropolitan Stadium against the visiting California Angels. He K’d Joe Lahoud looking, in the ninth to complete the PC. With temperatures in the low 40s for the 10:30AM game (played at that time as a courtesy to the University of Minnesota Gophers, who had a football game that afternoon at nearby Memorial Stadium), Blyleven used a heating pad between innings to keep his pitching arm from stiffening up. The right hander commented, “I’d prefer to be awake before I start pitching. But the cold air does clear your head pretty fast.”11 With his fourth PC, Blyleven equaled the AL record for PCs established by Sam McDowell in 1967. His time at the pinnacle was relatively brief, as Nolan Ryan picked up his fourth and fifth junior circuit PCs in 1976.

2007: Johan Santana equaled Blyleven’s record for most PCs by a Twins player on August 19 in a game against the Texas Rangers. In achieving his fourth PC, Santana struck out 17 batters, establishing a new Twins single-game record, eclipsing the previous mark of 15 shared by Camilo Pascual (1961), Joe Decker (1973), Jerry Koosman (1980), and Blyleven (1986). Santana struck out the side in the eighth inning, his final frame after 112 pitches. “I felt good, but at the same time we felt that [Joe] Nathan would be the right guy to go back out there and shut everything out,” said Santana. “He’s one of the best closers in the game and I trust him.” Santana’s previous high was 14 strikeouts, and as the scoreboard noted each of the new marks he was setting, the crowd’s cheering increased. After the game Santana said, “That was really good, especially the way everything ended up. We won by one run [1–0], and 17 strikeouts is always good. But to see all the fans getting into it, that’s pretty special.” Santana also added, “It’s a great accomplishment. It’s always good to do something like that, but I’m going to keep doing what I do and hopefully somebody in the future will break it too.”12

2008: Carlos Gomez began his Batter’s Cycle with a leadoff home run on a 1–1 pitch from Mark Buehrle on May 7 against the White Sox. The Chicago hurler atoned for the homer by whiffing Gomez in their follow-up encounter in the third. Gomez came out on top in their next matchup, belting an RBI-triple in the fifth to push Minnesota’s lead to 2–0. Then, in the very next inning, Gomez knocked Buehrle out of the box with an RBI double, boosting the lead to 7–0. His next trip to the plate came in the ninth. Swinging at the first pitch, Gomez bounced a single off pitcher Ehren Wassermann’s glove to complete the first Batter’s Cycle by a Twins player in 22 years After the game Gomez said, “You know, it’s amazing. Kirby Puckett— I’ve seen the video. He’s a good player. He’s an All-Star, and I can’t explain to you to be the first since Puckett to hit for the cycle. That’s unbelievable.”13

2009: Jason Kubel hit the jackpot with his Batter’s Cycle on April 17 in a game against the visiting Los Angeles Angels. Batting clean-up, Kobel performed reasonably well in his first three trips to the plate. His first-inning double knocked in a run, giving Minnesota a 1–0 lead. He singled in the third, but was cut down at the plate when he tried to score from first on Michael Cuddyer’s two-out two-bagger. In the sixth, he tripled and tied the game, 3–3, when he came around to score. In his fourth at-bat, in the seventh, he struck out swinging. The Angels, after having scored five runs in the seventh, tacked on an insurance run in the top of the eighth for a 9–5 advantage. The Twins staged a rally in the bottom of the frame; three runs were in, runners were on second and third, with one out. The Angels brought in a new pitcher, Jason Bulger, who fanned Brendan Harris, bringing up Justin Morneau. What transpired next is succinctly reported by the Associated Press—“Jason Bulger intentionally walked Justin Morneau to load the bases, a move that will fire any batter up. But Kubel stayed calm and let a curve ball go by for strike one. The next one was right where he wanted it, and it landed in the upper deck.”14 Kubel’s grand slam not only gave him the Batter’s Cycle, it propelled the Twins into an 11–9 lead, which Minnesota closer Joe Nathan converted to a victory with a one-two-three top of the ninth. After the game, Kubel commented about the choice to walk another batter in order to get to him: “It used to really fire me up, and I used to get myself out. So, I just stayed calm and just knew what the circumstances were and just went from there.”15

2019: Jorge Polanco swung from both sides of the plate and went 5-for-5 to collect the most recent Batter’s Cycle by a Twins player. Facing the Phillies on April 5, Polanco tripled in the first, singled in the third, and homered in the fifth batting left-handed. Then, batting right-handed, he doubled in the seventh, and singled in the ninth batting left-handed. Asked about his cycle after the game, Polanco said through an interpreter, “That’s cool, man. I feel very grateful…for that opportunity they’re giving me. They want my cleats in Cooperstown. That’s a pretty cool thing.”16

2023: Pablo López achieved the most-recent Pitcher’s Cycle for the Twins: a gem against the visiting Mets on September 10. Through eight innings, the Minnesota righty had struck out 14 batters, walked none, and allowed just two hits, but neither team had been able to cross the plate. So, as López had thrown 106 pitches (73 strikes), Twins manager Rocco Baldelli decided to turn the game over to the bullpen. New York put across a couple runs in the top of the ninth while the Twins were blanked in their half. Nonetheless, López earned the PC, and since he’d entered the game with 199 strikeouts on the season, he reached another milestone. After the game he said, “It feels really good. I think for starters, when you think 200 innings, 200 strikeouts, that’s one of the main goals every starter has going into the season.”17

CONCLUDING REMARKS

This research unearthed even more interesting items. Like Kralick, Dave Boswell achieved a PC with a game-ending walk-off strikeout. Dave Goltz holds the team record for most innings to complete his PC, with 9⅓, while Joe Ryan completed his 2023 PC in a record 3⅓. Like Tovar and Kubel, Larry Hisle homered to complete his BC. Finally, Table 4 shows the rankings of the 20 franchises that have been operating since 1961/1962. The Twins are tied for seventh in Pitcher’s Cycles and tied for first in Batter’s Cycles.

HERM KRABBENHOFT, a retired organic chemist, has been a SABR member since 1981. Among the various baseball research topics he has pioneered are: Ultimate Grand Slam Homers, Consecutive Games On Base Safely (CGOBS) Streaks, Quasi-Cycles, Imperfect Perfectos, Minor League Day-In/Day-Out Double-Duty Diamondeers, and Downtown Golden Sombreros. Herm is the author of Leadoff Batters of Major League Baseball (McFarland, 2001). He has received three SABR Baseball Research Awards (1992,1996, 2013). He is a lifetime Detroit Tigers fan—Zeb Eaton hit a pinch-hit grand slam on the day Herm was born.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With grateful appreciation, I heartily thank all those who have contributed to Retrosheet and Baseball Reference, thereby making their websites indispensable baseball-research enablers. I especially thank John Rickert for graciously writing a computer program using the Retrosheet database to generate a comprehensive list of all players who achieved a Pitcher’s Cycle during the 1901–2023 seasons, thereby ensuring that all possible PCs were identified. I also gratefully thank Jonathan Frankel for providing me with some of his superb strikeout research. And thanks to Pete Palmer, Jeff Robbins, Gary Stone, and Patrick Todgham for very helpful discussions.

NOTES

1 Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 237.

2 “Hit for the Cycle: Every MLB Player Who Hit for the Cycle,” baseball-almanac.com, https://www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/Major_League_Baseball_Players_to_hit_for_the_cycle.shtml, accessed October 3, 2023; “Cycles Chronologically,” retrosheet.org, https://www.retrosheet.org/cycles_chron.htm, accessed October 3, 2023.

3 Jimmy Ryan of the White Stockings completed his July 28, 1888, cycle as a pitcher after having started the game as Chicago’s center fielder; see: “Home Runs All Around,” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1888, 14; “They Hit the Ball Hard,” The (Chicago) Inter Ocean, July 29, 1888, 2; “Sluggers Outslugged,” Detroit Free Press, July 29, 1888, 4; “Was Waterloo Thus?,” Detroit News, July 29, 1888, 8.

4 “Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages,” https://www.google.com/search?q=cycle+meaning&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS971US972&oq=cycle&aqs=chrome.1.69i59j35i39i650j69i59l2j0i131i433i457i512j0i402i650j46i175i199i512j0i433i512j46i175i199i512l2.2605691715j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&bshm=rime/1, accessed “October 3, 2023.

5 It is appreciated that the pitcher’s battery mate, his catcher, must hold on to the third strike to actually retire the batter. But, even if the catcher drops the third strike and the batter reaches first base, the pitcher is still officially credited with a strikeout. It is emphasized that the Pitcher’s Cycle requires that nine different batters be struck out—at least one from each of the nine batting slots. It is pointed out that while the Pitcher’s Cycle does require a player to pitch at least 3 innings, it does not require the player to be a starting pitcher. Moreover, just like there is no limit to the number of at bats (plate appearances) it takes a player to achieve the Batter’s Cycle, there is no limit to the number of innings it takes a player to achieve the Pitcher’s Cycle.

6 Ed Eagle, “Players who have hit for the cycle,” MLB.com, August 28, 2023, https://www.mlb.com/news/players-who-hit-for-the-cycle-c265552018, accessed November 4, 2023.

7 “Killebrew’s Record Homer Aids Soaring Twins,” Minneapolis Star, August 4, 1962, 1; Joe Falls, “‘Killer’ 1st to Hit One All Way Out in Left,” Detroit Free Press, August 4, 1962, B1; “Killer Clears Detroit’s Roof With Mighty 530-Foot Shot,” The Sporting News, August 18, 1962, 10.

8 “Royals’ Metro in Awe as Carew Keeps Hitting,” Saint Cloud (Minnesota) Daily Times, May 21, 1970, 29; Tom Briere, “Twins Win 7th Straight,” (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, May 21, 1970, 31.

9 Tom Briere, “Tovar Homer Wins for Twins,” (Minneapolis) Tribune, September 20, 1972, 1C.

10 Dan Stoneking, “Tovar’s cycle ‘shows Mr. Griffith,’” Minneapolis Star, September 20, 1972, 1.

11 Larry Batson, “Blyleven and hot Twins cool California 8-1,” (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, September 22, 1974, C1.

12 Joe Christensen, “One Very Special ‘K’ Day,” (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, August 20, 2007, C1; Richard Durrett, “Santana wows Texas with 17 Strikeouts,” Times Record News (Wichita Falls, Texas), August 20, 2007, D1.

13 Joe Christensen, “Twins’ Gomez goes for cycle” (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, May 8, 2008, C1; “Gomez Singes Sox for Cycle,” Saint Cloud (Minnesota) Times, May 9, 2008, 1D.

14 Dave Campbell, “Kubel’s cycle powers Twins,” Saint Cloud (Minnesota) Times, April 18, 2009, 1D.

15 Dave Campbell, 2009.

16 La Velle E. Neall III, “One rose among the thorns,” (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, April 6, 2019, C3.

17 Tyler Mason, “Stewart hits 2-run double in 9th, Mets beat Twins 2–0 despite 14 Ks by Lopez,” Associated Press, September 10, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/mets-twins-lopez-stewart-ecad4d5f98f50d8a3af66f1f05f1b495, accessed November 03, 2023.