The anonymity of this team is exemplified by the fact that not one player from the club is in the Hall of Fame. It is the only team with two successive league championships not so honored, excluding such recent teams as Oakland (1972-1974), whose players are not yet eligible for enshrinement. Modern fans might be hard put to name a single player from the 1939-40 Reds.

Ironically, the manager of those teams, Bill “Deacon” McKechnie, is in the Hall of Fame, but he probably wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for those two pennants. He won only two others in 25 years of managing.

The 1939-40 Reds had no real weakness. They had outstanding pitching, excellent fielding and solid, consistent hitting. “We felt if we got a run ahead we could win the game,” Lonny Frey, the second baseman, recalled recently. “McKechnie’s strategy was always to play for one run.”

In one-run games, of course, pitching is critical. The Cincinnati staff featured two righthanders having their peak years, Bucky Walters and Paul Derringer. Walters, acquired in a 1938 trade from Philadelphia, relied on a sinking fastball. He went 27-11 in 1939, earning the league’s Most Valuable Player award, and 22-10 in 1940.

“If he got by the first couple innings and got in a groove, he was awfully tough to hit,” Frey remembered.

Good as Walters was, Frey says if he had to pick one pitcher to win a big game it would have been Derringer. A control pitcher with a good fastball and curve, Derringer was 25-7 in `39 and 20-12 in `40. In a key game with St. Louis in 1939 Derringer struck out Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick and Johnny Mize in succession on nine pitches.

Gene “Junior” Thompson and Whitey Moore were the other primary starters. Thompson won 13 and 16 in his first two seasons before arm trouble shortened his career, and Moore added 13 and eight wins, respectively, those two years. The staff was stronger in 1940 with the addition of Jim Turner (14-7) and ace reliever Joe Beggs (12-3). Frey says the Reds could not have won the pennant in `40 without Beggs, an off-speed, sinkerball pitcher. “We won over 40 games by one run,” Frey pointed out. “We needed him.”

“We had pretty good hitting, plenty of speed and a great defense,” said Walters about his supporting cast. Citing the infield of Frank McCormick at first, Frey at second, Billy Myers at short and Bill Werber at third, Walters called them “all good, fast, smart ballplayers.” Eddie Joost was the utilityman.

Frey mentioned that he, Myers and Werber called themselves “The Jungle Club.” “We were loose and quick on the balls of our feet like cats,” he said. Frey was the leopard, Myers the jaguar and Werber the tiger. McCormick, at 6-4 and 205 pounds, didn’t fit the mold, but wanted to belong. Told by the trio that he would be accepted if he hustled for one month, the first sacker pressed them for the verdict one day in Boston. After teasingly dubbing him “Hippopotamus,” the besieged cats accepted him as “Wildcat.” Werber felt this infield unity was a big factor in the team’s strength.

McCormick may not have been a gazelle, but he could hit and field. In 1939 he led the league in hits (209) and runs batted in (128) while batting .332, second in the league. McCormick continued his assault on National League pitching in 1940, leading the league in at-bats (618), hits (191) and doubles (44) while socking 19 home runs, driving in 127 runs and batting .309. He was named Most Valuable Player in 1940. “Wildcat” paced the league’s first basemen in fielding both years.

Frey, who batted second, liked to work for walks and punch the ball to all fields. In 1939 he scored 95 runs and batted .291 with 47 extra-base hits. Though his average fell to .266 in 1940, he scored 102 runs and led the league with 22 stolen bases and afield paced all second baseman in putouts, assists and double plays.

Myers, according to Frey, was underrated and seldom made a bad play afield. In 1939 Myers enjoyed his best year at the plate, hitting .281. However, he slumped to .202 in 1940 and shared playing time with Joost.

Werber led off for McKechnie’ s one-run wonders and topped the league with 115 runs in `39, adding another 105 the next season. “He hit the ball where it was pitched and lined a lot of balls through the box,” Frey said. Werber had 35 doubles each season and was among the league leaders in stolen bases both years. He averaged about 300 assists the two seasons.

“In the outfield,” Walters recalled, “we had Wally Berger, Harry Craft – what a center fielder he was – and a good all-around ballplayer in right, Ival Goodman.” The aging Berger, though, was gone in 1940, replaced by rookie Mike McCormick. Jimmy Ripple was acquired from the Dodger system early in the `40 season and hit .307 in reserve. “He was an inspiring guy,” Frey recalled. “He gave us that little extra spark.”

On paper the flychasers were hardly inspiring. Goodman, who hit third, did have 37 doubles, 16 triples and 84 RBIs with a .323 average in 1939. “Goodie was a low-ball line-drive hitter,” said Frey, “and he had a great arm.” Other than Ripple, Mike McCormick was the only outfielder to have a good season in `40, hitting .300 as a rookie.

Cincinnati had great catching. The inimitable Ernie Lombardi hit .287 with 20 homers and 85 RBIs in 1939 while reserve Willard Hershberger hit .345. Though he batted .317 with 74 ribbies in 1940, Lombardi was slowed by injuries. Tragedy struck the club on August 2 in a Boston hotel when Hershberger, hitting .307, slit his throat in his room.

“Willard was a nice, easygoing fellow, but he could be moody,” Frank McCormick said later. “The night before he killed, himself, Willard obviously was in some emotional distress.

His eyes were all welled up with tears.” The team, Werber recalled, had just lost four or five close games, and Hershberger put the blame on himself. Werber spent a great deal of time with him in the last hours, trying to convince him that the losses were not his fault. “What did happen might have been anticipated,” Werber said, referring to previous suicides of Hershberger’ s father and uncle. “Hershie was simply an over-conscientious, sick kid, mentally and physically.”

Lombardi sprained an ankle in mid-September, leaving only green rookie Bill Baker available. To fill the gap the Reds activated 40-year-old coach Jimmie Wilson, who had caught just two games since 1937. Wilson backstopped 16 games down the stretch, hitting .243. More importantly, he played himself into shape for the World Series, in which he played a hero’s role.

In 1939 Cincinnati won the National League pennant with a 97-57 record, 4½ games better than St. Louis. The Cardinals’ offensive machine led by Mize, Medwick and Enos Slaughter hit .294 for the season to Cincy’s .278. However, Walters and company posted a 3.27 earned-run average, far better than St. Louis’ 3.59.

The World Series was another story. Joe McCarthy’s New York Yankees swept the Reds in four games to capture their fourth straight world championship. The Bronx Bombers hit seven home runs in the Series, but their pitching was also exceptional. After Red Ruffing out dueled Deninger in the opener, 3-1, on a four-hitter, Monte Pearson hurled a two-hit, 4-0 shutout, owning a no-hitter for seven and two-thirds innings. Long balls by Charlie Keller, Bill Dickey and Joe DiMaggio powered the Yanks to 7-3 and 7-4 victories in the final two games. The Reds were homerless for the Series.

Bob Considine, writing for International News Service, described the power differential: “The Reds made ten hits, but they were like light jabs on the face of a brooding fighter who is waiting only for a chance to score a knockout.”

Although blitzed by the New Yorkers, the National League champions had little trouble defending their title in 1940. They won 100 games and finished 12 games ahead of runner-up Brooklyn. The Reds batted a so-so .266, but the team ERA of 3.05 was light years ahead of the next best staff, that of the Dodgers, which posted a 3.50 mark.

At World Series time, McKechnie’s one-run wonders found themselves up against another American League powerhouse, the Detroit Tigers. The Bengals were led by Hank Greenberg (.340, 41 HR, 150 RBI), Rudy York

(.316, 33 BR, 134 RBI), Charlie Gehringer (.3 13) and Barney McCoskey (.340). Buck Newsom (21-5) and Schoolboy Rowe (16-3) led the pitchers. The Reds had not only Lombardi out of action, but reliable Frey, with a broken toe, as well.

However, Cincinnati refused to be steamrollered this time. The Deacon’s disciples came back again and again to win in seven games.

After Newsom beat Derringer, 7-2, in the opener, Walters evened things with a three-hit, 5-3 victory over Rowe. Ripple’s two-run homer in the third inning was the key blow. Del Baker’s

Tigers then regained the advantage with a 7-4 win. Pinky Higgins and York homered and drove in five runs between them.

Baker, writing a column on the Series for INS, predicted that his club would take the next two games in Briggs Stadium and avoid having to return to Cincinnati for games six and seven. “There isn’t much of that Cincinnati pitching staff that we haven’t walloped,” he wrote, “and we’re certainly not afraid to test the rest.”

Nonetheless, matching the performance of Walters in game two, Derringer stifled Detroit’s hitters in game four for a five-hit, 5-2 triumph. Goodman had two hits and two runs batted in to pace the Red attack.

The next day Cincinnati was caught in an emotional buzzsaw. Newsom, whose father had died after the Series opener, vowed to win for his dad and hurled a magnificent three-hit shutout for an 8-0 victory. Greenberg stroked two singles and an upper-deck shot to left, driving in four Bengal runs.

“Buck scraped the ceiling of baseball today,” Considine reported. “His fastball was virtually hurling down the third base line at those apprehensive Reds and pounding into Billy Sullivan’s catcher’s mitt with the boom of a bass drum.”

Returning to Crosley Field with their backs to the wall again, McKechnie’s players refused to quit. Walters pitched and batted the Reds to a 4-0 victory to even the series for the third time. Besides pitching a five-hitter, the former third baseman clouted a homer and drove in two runs.

Game seven was a classic matchup of great righthanders – Derringer and Newsom, the latter with only two days of rest. McKechnie was the master of one-run games, and his battlers came from behind one more time, scoring twice in the seventh inning on doubles by Frank McCormick and Ripple and a sacrifice fly by Myers for a 2-1 victory. It was the National League’s first Series win since 1934.

It was a splendid Series. As Associated Press reporter Judson Bailey wrote: “In retrospect the Series was so full of drama, joy and pathos that it might well have been a piece of fiction. It was a victory for the time-tested standards of baseball – that pitching is 70 percent of the game and that smartness is as good as strength.”

Heroes? For the losers, Newsom pitched three complete games in a week for a combined 1.38 earned-run average. For the winners, Werber hit .370 and provided field leadership. Ripple batted .333 and drove in six runs. Walters and Derringer won two games each.

Foremost was Wilson, who caught six games, hit .353 and contributed two singles and a key sacrifice in the finale. At age 40 he stole a base in his final game as a player. “Jimmie Wilson,”

Considine wrote, “the archaic catcher whose legs have taken a terrible pounding in this series, finished Monday’s game with a veritable stable of charley horses. His legs looked like gunnysacks of squash.” According to Werber, “It was an unusual exhibition of guts. He caught the final game or two with a charley horse in back of each leg, and each leg shaved and encased in tape. In addition, his catching hand was swollen, sore and enlarged.”

It had been a gutsy performance by the Reds, but the man behind it all was the Deacon, 54-year-old William Boyd McKechnie. McKechnie steered the course of the Reds from 1938 through 1946, the last nine years of a 25-year managing career.

As early as 1915 he had been player-manager for Newark of the Federal League. The former third baseman managed the Pirates from 1922-1926, taking the pennant in 1925. For two years, 1928-1929, he was the St. Louis Cardinal skipper, winning a championship in 1928. The Deacon managed the Boston Braves from 1930-1937, finishing no higher than fourth. McKechnie’s 25 years produced 1,898 victories in 3,650 games, a .524 percentage. Of his four pennant winners, the 1925 and 1940 teams won the World Series. He was admitted to the Hall of Fame in 1962, three years before he died.

His players at Cincinnati were almost universal in his praise. “We liked to play for him,” Frank McCormick said. “He was very understanding and sympathetic.”

“He has to go down in history as one of the great managers,” Thompson said. “He could get more out of a player than any manager I ever knew. He was like a father to all of us.”

Werber remembered him as an excellent manager, citing McKechnie’s intelligence, patience and knowledge of baseball and his personnel. Craft, a long-time manager himself, described the Deacon as a man with strong convictions. “He was straight from the shoulder and you always knew where you stood with him,” Craft said. “He was an excellent handler of men and a good percentage manager.”

Frey agreed that McKechnie was a good technical manager who got along well with his players. However, Frey was personally frustrated by his manager’s insistence that he become a pull hitter. Joost, too, was frustrated — by his lack of playing time.

McKechnie is the only member of the 1939-1940 Reds who has found a place in baseball’s pantheon of greats. They were a dominant team, the National League’s best between the Giants of 1936-1937 and the Cardinals of the mid-1940s.

Why are none of the players enshrined in Cooperstown? McCormick’s back problems prevented him from producing the sustained excellence required to make the Hall of Fame. Derringer, despite some great years, lacked the consistent stats, although he won 223 games over a 15-year career, with four 20-.win seasons. Walters wasn’t a full-time starter until he was 27 years old. He finished with 198 career victories.

That leaves Lombardi, whose teammates strongly support his bid for Hall of Fame recognition. Joost, Werber, Craft and Frey all feel he belongs in Cooperstown. Werber claims he measures up well with the Hall of Fame catchers and is “way ahead of most.” Craft says it’s a travesty that “The Schnozz” hasn’t been inducted.

Lombardi was a good handler of pitchers, and he had an outstanding arm. He was a line-drive hitter with power who drove the ball to all fields.

He seldom struck out. Although notoriously slow afoot, he won two batting championships, hitting .342 for the Reds in 1938 and .330 for the Braves in 1942. For his career he had a lifetime average of .306.

McKechnie is gone. McCormick is gone. Lombardi is gone. And so, too, are several of the others. But to knowledgeable fans the 1939-1940 Reds rank along with the best in baseball annals.

Alas, to no avail. Keepers of the records from the first held that Marquard had no case. It was true, they admitted, that under present scoring rules he had a point. But, they hurried to add, Marquard won his games in 1912, not today, and under the rules of 1912, he won only 19 straight.

Marquard may have gained some satisfaction when early researchers discovered he really had won 20 straight by reason of a victory in his last 1911 game, but this feeling suffered somewhat when another New York Giant southpaw came along in the next generation who put together an undisputed chain of 24 wins over a two-year period. That would be Carl Hubbell, and there is no gainsaying he screw-balled his way to a record that, as is said about too many records, may well last forever.

But to start at the usual place – the beginning – 1936 was an unusual year as far as the Giants were concerned. World’s champions in 1933 and late season goof-ups in the next two seasons, they began 1936 as though winning was as bad as stealing.

Something was wrong with the club, and there were some unkind enough to say that everything was wrong with it. Their pitching staff was a shambles. Slick Castleman couldn’t get started. Schumacher’s arm was ailing. Veteran Fred Fitzsimmons just wasn’t ready. Frank Gabler was a risk. Hubbell was overworked, although he had managed ten wins against six losses. The promising Al Smith had his bad days.

But it was more than pitching. The aging Travis Jackson had a bad knee and was covering fully as much ground as his shadow. Dick Bartell at shortstop was making wild heaves past first base. Burgess Whitehead wasn’t hitting. Sam Leslie was lumbering around first base on damaged legs. Mel Ott and Joe Moore, the old reliables, had both fallen into hitting slumps. Manager Bill Terry had to drag his battered frame out on the diamond. Their defense, to sum it up, was as full of holes as a carload of Swiss cheese.

It was a time of disaster. Strategy was a dirty word. If Terry made a move it was sure to be a big help to the ball club — the ball club the Giants happened to be playing. If a Giant made a hit, it was with two out and nobody but the coaches near the bases. If a Giant made an error it was just in time to hand the other gents the ball game. Terry was on the grill and his critics were building a gorgeous bonfire under him.

Giant fans surely were not optimistic over their team’s chances when they opened their July 17 newspapers to find the club bogged down in fifth place with an uninspiring 42-41 record, 10-1/2 games back of league-leading Chicago. The low point in the season’s fortune seemed to come in Hubbell’s last defeat of the season. Playing in Chicago on July 13th (not a Friday, but a Monday) when Carl held the home team to two measly singles yet lost a 1-0 game when Whitehead made a throw that was both ill-advised and far over Bartell’s head.

The New Yorkers moved on to Pittsburgh and, suddenly, everything was changed. Bill Swift started for Pittsburgh and headed for the showers within minutes as Moore, Ott and Hank Leiber unloaded three-baggers in the first inning. Brought on in relief, Big Jim Weaver was tagged for a fourth triple in the same inning by utility infielder Eddie Mayo. Hubbell, poised as a poplar, coasted to a 6-0 win. The fairy godmother had waved her wand and the mice turned into beautiful stallions.

It would be folly to claim that Carl Hubbell, alone, won the oennant that year for New York, but there can be no gainsaying he was a key factor; nay, more, he was THE key factor. As he swung into his 16-game winning streak the rest of the pitching staff braced. Game after game was won on strong pitching and timely hitting.

The defense stiffened. When a fielder made a circus catch it was just in time to save the ball game. Where Mancuso had been the only man who could make a hit when it counted, Ott, Moore and Ripple began slapping out the hits that brought in the runs at the right time. Bartell settled down to accurate pegging and hammered out a couple of homers when they did the most good. If a fielder made an error, he picked the proper time and made it when it didn’t count in the scoring.

Every managerial move Terry made turned out to be perfect strategy. He was once again the mastermind of 1933. Take the day the Giants bounded over the Cardinals to the top. Terry put Leiber in and he delivered the blow that won the game. Bill took Leiber out and inserted George Davis for his fielding. George saved the game with his brilliant catches. If Terry had tried that six weeks before, Leiber would have gone 0 for 4 and Davis would have fallen on his face chasing the first foul hit near him.

Within a week’s time, the Giants slipped into third place and from then on it was a three-way contest among New York, St. Louis and Chicago. By August 2, by which time Hubbell had won five straight, the Terrymen had won 15 of their last 19, a pace that had them within five lengths of the leaders. During the second week of August the Polo Grounders began a terrific gait that kept the pressure on Cards and Cubs alike and didn’t end until August 29, when the Gothamites lost to the Pirates after winning 15 in a row. At that point they had captured 35 out of their last 40 games.

New York Timesman John Kieran rhapsodized thusly in his “Sports of The Times” column:

Out of the fog that blurred their game,
  Up from the dark that wrapped them `round,
Through bitter weeks to happy days –
  Behold the Giants, pennant-bound!
In the fell clutch of batting slumps,
  Bludgeoned by Pirates, Cards and Cubs,
The Giants looked the part of chumps
  And played the role of diving dubs.
Clear from the fifth-place vale of tears,
  Gaining by inning and by inch,
Turning the rasping jeers to cheers,
  They came back slugging in the pinch.

It was the month of August that put the Giants over. In third place at the start of that month, they swept into a lead of 3½ games by the 31st and went on to win the 1936 NL Pennant. Carl won 26 games, 16 of which were consecutive victories. He lost one of two decisions against the Yankees in the World Series, but the next season he picked right up again and won his first eight games.

Hubbell’s figures, of course, were outstanding. Over the course of his two-year win streak he hurled the equivalent of 23 nine-inning games. He allowed, roughly 7 hits and 2 runs per game and fanned 4.5 and walked 1.5 men per nine innings. While he pitched only two shutouts he held the opposition to a single run in nine other games. That he usually finished what he started is indicated by his complete game record. Of the 22 games he started during this long stretch, he completed 19 and required relief only three times.

Terry didn’t hesitate to use his ace in a relief role as the occasion required. When Coffman found himself in a jam on July 19, 1936, Carl came on to pitch a couple of excellent relief innings and “saved” the game, as it would be called today. And he was used in the same capacity several other times.

His best rescue job came in his 24th win on May 27, 1937. Again called on to replace Coffman, with the score tied in the eighth frame, he retired three Cincinnati batsmen on infield grounders, and in the last session got three more on pop flies. No one reached first.

More than once Carl, not especially noted for his batting, helped his cause with timely hits. On July 30, 1936, he drove in the tying run, then checked the Cubs for the rest of the game. Again on August 8, his “blazing single” after two were out in the seventh led to the winning score.

Probably his most satisfying blow came in a late season 1936 game against St. Louis. The score was tied in the ninth inning, as you must have surmised, and there were men on second and third, with one man out and Hubbell due to hit. The book, of course, cried for a pinch hitter, but Terry had the bit in his teeth by this time, and he waved Carl to the plate.

Hubbell missed two mighty swings, then lifted a puny fly to Pepper Martin in short right-center, a pop that fell only a few yards back of the clay infield. Whitehead, rushing in from third after the catch, found himself blocked off the plate by burly Spud Davis and slithered past the scoring station without touching it. But Burgess twisted and squirmed and somehow managed to reach past Davis’ blocking legs and touch the plate an instant before the catcher grabbed the ball.

Any long skein of victories is bound to be marked by controversies, and this one was no exception. There was, for instance, the famous “balk” incident of May 19, 1937, when Carl was seeking win No. 22. The Giants and the Cards were again fighting it out, this time for second place, when they met in St. Louis.

Trailing by one run in the top of the sixth, Whitehead led off with a single and Hubbell sacrificed him to second. While pitching to Dick Bartell, Dizzy Dean half turned toward second base and then, without halting his motion, fired to the plate. Bartell lifted an easy fly to left for what should have been the second out, but Umpire Barr ruled out the play and called a balk on Dean for failing to pause a full second in his delivery.

Whitehead was motioned to third and, after the ensuing argument had subsided, Bartell, batting again, sent a line drive to right-center which Martin dropped. There followed a couple of base hits and the resultant three runs sewed up the game.

Dizzy was so upset at the turn of events he took to throwing “knockdown” pitches at any one who dared show up at the plate with a bat in his hands. The Giants soon tired of this foolish game and presently Jimmy Ripple challenged Jerome, the challenge was accepted, and both teams tangled in one of those free-for-ails that enliven every season.

National League President Ford Frick slapped $50 fines on both Dean and Ripple and threw in a sharp reprimand for the pitcher, pointing out that every one had been warned in advance that the balk rule would be strictly enforced and, further, that Dean had already committed two balks in the game in question, each time being warned by the umpire.

Unabashed, Dizzy, loose-tongued as Memnon, counter-attacked by offering $1,000 to anybody who would print what he thought of his league president. Further, he shouted, he would not — positively not – appear in the All-Star game that year. If Dean had lived up to that threat he would have done himself a tremendous favor. It was in that All-Star game that Earl Averill stroked a line drive that  broke Dizzy’s toe. As every one knows, Dean, rushing back into action before the toe mended, altered his pitching style to favor the injury and irreparably damaged his arm.

Brooklyn, the team that always gave Carl the most trouble, finally brought him down. On May 31st, before the second largest crowd in Polo Grounds history up to that time, the Dodgers combed him for 7 hits in the opening game of a doubleheader. They also drew 3 walks in the 3.1 innings he was on the mound. When he trudged down the center of the field in the middle of the fourth frame he was trailing 5-2. The final count was 10-3.

Between games of that twinbill there was a little ceremony.  Hubbell was awarded the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award for the 1936 season. The fat man who handed that award to him was none other than Babe Ruth.

In major league history, 121 pinch slams have been hit, 70 in the National League and 51 in the American. No one connected in the 19th century, when pinch hitting was at a minimum. Ironically, the first pinch clam was hit by a pitcher for the Cardinals, Mike O’Neill, in a game against the Braves on June 3, 1902. Mike, born in Ireland, was one of the four O’Neill brothers, the best known of whom was Steve. Another brother, John, caught that June 3 game for the Cards. The first AL pinch slam did not originate until September 24, 1916, when Marty Kavanagh, a utility infielder for Cleveland, hit a hard liner off Hubert “Dutch” Leonard of the Red Sox. The ball rolled through a hole in the fence and every one scored.

Who hits pinch homers with the bases loaded? Not necessarily the great sluggers. Of the top dozen career home run hitters, only Jimmie Foxx and Harmon Killebrew have connected as emergency batters with the bags full. Double-X did it twice, once in each league. Roy Sievers also blasted one in each league. Other two-timers were Vic Wertz, Bill Skowron, and Rich Reese in the AL, and Ed Bailey and Willie McCovey in the Senior Circuit. But the King of Swingers was “Round” Ron Northey, who went “Bingo” on three occasions while with the Cards and Cubs.

It is also noted that no less than five pitchers have come through with pinch, slams. In addition to O’Neill, there was Schoolboy Rowe, Early Wynn, Zeb Eaton, and Tommy Byrne. If pitchers can hit pinch slams, what kind of hurlers can serve them up? Looking over the list, it appears that relief hurlers are the chief victims. This seems only logical, considering that most substitute batters appear late in the game. Only five pitchers were burned twice: Don Mossi, Steve Ridzik, Dave Koslo, Satchel Paige, and Hank Borowy, who was bombed once in each league. Early Wynn was the only player to serve one up (to Bob Cerv in 1961), and to hit one himself (off Jack Gorsica in 1946).

Pinch homers with the bases loaded have been hit in each inning from the 2nd to the 12th. Twenty-eight were hit in the 9th, and 26 in the 7th. Even team managers got into the act. At least two of them looked over their bench and decided that they could do better themselves. Rogers Hornsby connected for his Cubs in 1931, and Phil Cavarretta also hit one for the Cubs shortly after he took over the helm in 1951. Cavvy belted it off Robin Roberts when the latter was at the height of his career. On May 26, 1929, Pat Crawford of the Giants and Lester Bell of the Braves both connected in the same game, the only time that has been accomplished.

The full list of players who have hit pinch hone runs with the bases filled is carried below. (* indicates 2nd game)

National League pinch-grand slams, through 1971

American League pinch-grand slams, through 1971

Assisted by Raymond Gonzalez and Leonard Gettelson.

The memories flow freely for the athlete-announcer of another era, and no amount of work around the house can make him forget those times long ago. From 1932 until advancing age and the demanding schedule of major league baseball forced his exit from radio, Jack Graney was THE voice of the Cleveland Indians. He was there during the time of Earl Averill, Joe Vosmik, Hal Trosky, Willis Hudlin, Mel Harder, and Johnny Allen; through the heady years of Bob Feller, Lou Boudreau, and Ken Keltner, and bowed out when Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, Larry Doby, and Al Rosen were at their peaks. He tells you it is hard to forget his days spent in baseball.

Possessing a crisp, stirring delivery, Graney was a master at setting a scene and his enthusiasm packed a sense of built-in drama. His ability to re-create a game from just a telegraphic report has never been paralleled.

“My association with Jack Graney was one of the finest I have ever known,” affirms his last broadcasting partner, Jimmy Dudley.

“He was a tremendous announcer and taught me many tricks of the trade. Jack had an exceedingly high-pitched voice which generated more excitement than anybody else’s I have ever heard. Had he a voice like Ted Husing’s, he might be considered today with the four or five greatest sports broadcasters of all time.”

Baseball broadcasting has undergone immense changes in the last 25 years. Until his last few years as an announcer, traveling with the team to broadcast the “away” contests was unheard of. Only the home games were broadcast from the scene; the away games being re-created by telegraphic report.

It took a special talent to broadcast an entire ball game from several brief slips of paper while at the e time maintaining a semblance of realism and authenticity. It was sitting at a table broadcasting an event occurring hundreds of miles away that truly tested the mettle of a good baseball announcer. With a unique talent that combined accuracy and an electric enthusiasm, Jack Graney perfected re-creations into a highly precisioned artform which resulted in a legion of admirers. He says he had an advantage over the broadcasters from other cities because he had played in, and was quite familiar with, every American League park. When the telegrapher handed him a note saying a ball had just been hit off the scoreboard in right center field in Boston, Jack knew exactly where the spot was located because he had bounced off the e wall numerous times during his playing days.

“Actually I disliked re-creations,” he reveals today. “It was a dizzy job and more than once I’d wake up in the middle of the night in nervous fright over what had transpired in the enclosed studio the night before. So much had to be remembered. If I mistakenly positioned a baserunner on third instead of second, or had two runners inadvertently switched around in the order they had scored, I’d get hundreds of letters saying `Why did you have

Trosky scoring in front of Averill when it was the other way around?”

Many Clevelanders can still recall the time Jack was re-creating a game between the Indians and the Senators with his partner Pinky Hunter. Washington was in a jam and elected to change pitchers. They brought in a lad by the name of Joe Krakauskas, who was not listed on the scoreboard. The two announcers tossed the pronunciation hazard around all evening, neither one landing on the right combination. In spite of minor embarrassments like this, Jack was a resourceful man at the mike. He has a “top baseball broadcaster of the year” trophy from the Sporting News to support that contention.

The baseball announcers of 30 years ago were held in greater esteem than are the broadcasters of today. It was such a novel treat to listen to a game direct from the field, which was the next best thing to being there, that the fans developed a strong personal regard for the radio reporter. In fact, most of the early “voices from the field” reached legendary heights during and after their broadcasting careers. There was Ty Tyson in Detroit, Fred Hoey in Boston, Rosey Rowswell of Pittsburgh, Arch McDonald from Washington, France Laux in St. Louis, Hal Totten and Pat Flanagan in Chicago, and of course, Jack in Cleveland. They were magic names from a part of radio’s past that has gone the way of the dance band remote and, needless to say, the tickertape re-creations.

The man who endeared himself to two generations of Cleveland baseball fans considers his current physical condition as “fair to middlin’, just fair to middlin’”. He underwent surgery for a benign brain tumor eight years ago and made a remarkable recovery. His nose, which was whittled apart in a serious automobile accident in 1934, is similar to what a small child might come up with if handed some putty and told to go to work. But there aren’t many who remember his nose being any other way.

Graney’s American League career spanned 14 seasons, 1908 to 1922. He was never a star, playing in the shadows of the spectacular Napoleon Lajoie, after whom the team was named, Tris Speaker, Addie Joss, Jim Bagby, Steve O’Neill and others. A lefthanded batter, his lifetime average for 1402 games was .250, but he led in doubles once and bases on balls twice. Being the lead-off batter, he was ordered to take two strikes for the ball club and “one for Graney,” which didn’t make hitting any easier. One year, though, he did manage to bat .299.

However inconspicuous he might have been as a player, Graney managed to carve out several firsts as a major leaguer. Back in 1914 he had the distinction of being the first to hit against a raw lefthander for the Boston Red Sox named George Herman Ruth. As the lead-off man, Jack was also the first big leaguer ever to appear at the plate with a number sewn on his uniform. He remembers one particularly satisfying moment when Philadelphia was dominating the League. “In this game in Philadelphia, Eddie Plank was pitching and the score was tied. We had runners on second and third and Lajoie was walked intentionally so they could pitch to me. But their game plan backfired when I tripled home three runs to win the game.” His eyes still twinkle when he recalls that brief moment of glory which transpired some 60 years ago.

He refers to baseball as “my whole life” and like so many oldtimers who came before their time, he gave the game more than he received from it. It was a National League umpire named Bob Emsile, a resident of St. Thomas, who first took notice of young Graney, who was then a pitcher on the local team. Emslie convinced the Chicago Cubs to take a chance on the Canadian, and after stopoffs in Rochester, New York, Erie and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he was sold to the Naps, and went to spring training with them at Macon, Georgia. It turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of his life.

“I threw batting practice one morning and was so wild, each batter stood up to the plate over five minutes before I served up anything in the neighborhood of a strike. When Lajoie came up to the plate I wanted to give it everything I had because he was the manager of the team and one of baseball’s greatest hitters. That’s all I could think about, the boys back in St. Thomas sitting around the coal stove talking about how Jack Graney struck out the great Lajoie. I reared back and threw the fastest ball I had ever pitched and instead of striking him out I knocked him out. The ball glanced off the side of his head and bounded up into the stands. The next day I was handed a ticket to Portland, Oregon, by Mr. Lajoie who insisted that all wildmen belong in the West.”

In 1908, Jack returned to the big league for good, this time as an outfielder. Lajoie didn’t want to take any chances. In this year, the Naps had George Stovall on first base, Lajoie on second, Tuck Turner played third, and the catchers were Nig Clarke and Harry Bemis. Handling the bulk of the pitching were Joss, Dusty Rhoades, and Otto Hess. Jack remembers that he slept for two days with his uniform on. Nobody could take it off of him, but then, nobody tried.

He remembers trying to sleep in the Pullman cars on many hot summer nights and hanging a damp sheet over a propped-open window in an effort to generate a breeze. And facing Walter Johnson, the toughest pitcher he ever hit against, an oath echoed by several hundred other batsmen during the glittering career of “the Big Train.” Johnson threw nothing but fast balls, “But they would jump sometimes three feet,” Jack shuddered, as he stretched his arms in a manner like the fisherman describing “the one that got away.”

They talk about the domination of the pitcher in modern baseball and the wide assortment of pitches, but it was no different 50 years ago. According to Graney, “They threw everything.” The spitter was prominent then.

So was the emery ball, and the shine ball, “which was outlawed when big Dave Danforth of the White Sox hit Tris Speaker on the head and almost ended his career.”

He remembers his roomie, Ray Chapman, and the day he was fatally struck by a pitched ball thrown by submariner Carl Nays during an August 1920 game at the Polo Grounds. Sitting on the bench, Jack watched the ball collide with Chapman’ s head and them bounce back to Nays on the fly. With fractures on both sides of his skull and a neck that was broken, Chapman did not have a chance. After they rushed the ill-fated shortstop to the clubhouse, Jack, in his haste to revive his dying comrade, tried to get him to write something, but in a state of unconsciousness and moaning incoherently, Chapman dazedly dropped the pencil to the floor. It was a tragic episode in Cleveland baseball history and upset several of the players to the point of taking leaves of absence in order to try to forget what had happened on that black August day in New York. Joey Sewell was quickly summoned from New Orleans to play short and the youngster helped spark the Indians to the 1920 pennant and world championship.

In 1922 at the antiquated baseball age of 36, Graney drifted away from the game he loved after managing the last place Des Moines outfit of the Western League for a half season to help his friend Jim Dunn, the owner of the Cleveland club. He turned to selling automobiles and until 1927, when Ford changed its model types from “T” to “A” and shut down its plants for over a year, he operated a successful Ford agency in Cleveland. Stockholding and shrewd investing became the favorite pastime of the rich and the poor in the devil-may-care 1920s. Enthused over the thought of making a quick kill on the stock market, Jack invested his savings and lived contentedly for two years until the great crash of 1929 crippled the country and “knocked the legs right out from under me,” as he says, shaking his head slowly. This was the nadir in the life of John Gladstone Graney. In an effort to recoup his losses, he re-entered the car business, this time as a used car salesman. But this was short-lived as the depression left everyone’s pockets empty and forced people to survive on the barest of essentials. Nobody was buying cars, not even used ones.

By 1932 radio had become a powerful asset to baseball’s coverage and popularity. It was one medium that had been unaffected by the “Great Depression.” Tom Manning had been broadcasting the Indians’ games since

1927 on the team’s flagship station, WTAM, but after the 1931 campaign, the radio contract shifted to WBK, and a search began for a new announcer. Several candidates were auditioned, none of them successfully, and when it was obvious the right mixture needed to be a polished sportscaster was not going to be found in the group of applicants, Ellis Vander Pyl, the best of the mediocre crop, was chosen to announce the Cleveland games. The selection proved a poor one, however, as the sponsor was dissatisfied and threatened to quit the account unless an adequate broadcaster were found. Aware of the dilemma, Billy Evans, the Indians’ General Manager, quickly summoned Graney, also having his troubles, and within a few hours the problems of both parties were solved. “Before my first broadcast,” he will tell you, “I was so nervous I almost changed my mind and ran out of the booth.”

Baseball broadcasting provided a new lease on life for Jack Graney, and he was always to say that broadcasting was the next best thing to playing. His biggest thrill in radio occurred in 1935 when he was asked by the Columbia Broadcasting System to cover the World Series between the Tigers and Cubs. He had been asked to do the 1934 classic but was forbidden by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis because he might show partiality since he had played in the Junior Circuit. Graney was the first of what has become a long line of major leaguers to broadcast baseball. Perturbed and angered that the Judge would hold this against him, Jack wrote the commissioner a letter clarifying that “my playing days are over. I am now a sportscaster and should be regarded as such.” In 1935, he received no static from Landis.

Graney broadcast thousands of games and went through six partners (Bud Richmond, Gil Gibbons, Lou Henry, Pinky Hunter, Van Patrick and Jimmy Dudley) before he retired. One of the important occasions he remembers best was when the Indians pulled into Boston’s Back Bay train depot amidst the jeers of partisan Red Sox fans in l948, the day before the two teams played off for the AL pennant. The sight was determined by the flip of a coin and Boston won, sending nightmarish thoughts of Fenway Park’s left field wall up the spine of every Indian. “Gene Bearden was elected to pitch because he had the best chance of keeping the ball low and preventing any ball from sailing over the wall. The game was scoreless around the second or third inning, when third baseman Kenny Keltner, with runners on first and second and no outs, strode to the plate in an obvious bunt situation. After failing in his first attempt to lay one down, Keltner drove the next pitch over the left field wall to make it 3-0. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” The Sox crumpled and the Tribe went on to take the World Series from the Boston Braves, four games to two, in what was Cleveland’s finest baseball hour.

“Yes, there are many memories,” he said in a wispy voice. The voice is unchanged, remarkably identical to the familiar echo so many thousands of fans identified with over a period of 21 years. From 1908, except for the spell between playing and broadcasting, until 1953, he was as much a part of Cleveland baseball as anybody.

“I always tried to give the fans an honest account,” he says in reflection. “It was a tremendous responsibility and at all times I kept in mind the fact that I was the eyes of the radio audience. I was like an artist trying to paint a picture. I never tried to predict or second guess, even though I had played the game. I just tried to do my best, and I hope my best was good enough.”

Don’t worry Jack, it was.

Sylvester “Syl” Johnson was born in Portland, Oregon on December 31, 1900. By the time Syl was eight years old, he and his younger brother Norman were regular players at the local sandlots. At that time, Sylvester preferred the duties as the team’s catcher, but his choice of position changed dramatically after a hot pitch smashed him in the mouth, knocking his teeth loose and his awareness out cold. Johnson quickly realized that he would be safer on the other side of home plate, as a pitcher. Syl’s father worked as a sawyer at a lumber mill near Portland’s Willamette River, and the father would soon receive his son’s assistance.

Sylvester contributed to the Johnson family till by dropping out of high school and working at a paper mill adjacent to his father’s. Moments after the bell rang at the end of his work day, Syl brushed the sawdust from his shoes and pedaled his bicycle back to the sandlots. He soon found himself playing semi-pro baseball for Portland’s financially powerful United Artisans. Johnson was immediately recognized for his side-armed fastball while he worked with the Advanced Junior Artisan team. Portland’s newspaper, The Oregonian, took notice of Syl’s skills on the mound and the youngster’s name appeared in press ink that would soon change his life forever. Throughout the AJA’s 1918 and 1919 seasons, young Syl cut every article from the newspapers and created a personal scrapbook resume of his baseball talents. In 1920, Johnson’s bicycle wheels crossed a bridge over the Willamette River to the Vaughn Street Park, the home of the minor-league Portland Beavers. With his scrapbook in hand, Johnson pleaded with Beavers boss Walter “Judge” McCredie for a chance to attend spring training with the club.

McCredie ordered his star pitcher, Harvey “Suds” Sutherland, to catch Johnson’s twirls during the short audition. After several fastballs were fired into Sutherland’s mitt, McCredie gave Johnson the invite he was hoping for.

Syl’s inexperience and lack of control soon forced the Judge to send the youngster away for some Canadian seasoning with the Vancouver Beavers shortly after the 1920 schedule began. Sylvester worked under the command of Vancouver skipper Bob Brown who taught Syl to control his wild right arm. McCredie reviewed Johnson’s progress and invited the skinny kid back to the Portland roster in 1921. The Portland pilot let Sylvester handle 304 innings in the ’21 season, and Johnson earned 12 wins and 26 losses.

Although his won-loss record worked against him, the skinny kid wasn’t completely at fault. Regardless of Johnson’s well-controlled golden righty, the Portland Beavers had difficulty scoring in 1921. Similar to 1920, the Beavers finished dead last. The McCredie family finally gave in to their bad luck, and booing Portland crowds, by selling the team to a former president of the Seattle Rainiers, William “Billy” Klepper.

Before making his permanent exit in November, Judge McCredie told The Sporting News: “I look for Johnson to be one of the best pitchers in the Pacific Coast League next season. Within five years he will be one of the greatest pitchers in the country. Just paste that prediction on the wall and see if I’m not right.”1 New boss Billy Klepper saw things differently when the topic of Syl was discussed. Prior to the sale of the Portland club, Detroit talent scout Eddie Herr took notice of Sylvester and another Portland twirler, Herman Pillette.

Herr contacted Detroit president Frank Navin and insisted that Johnson and Pillette were the finest hurlers on the West Coast. Bird dog Eddie attempted to sway McCredie in October, but Mack adamantly refused to give up Johnson. Navin met with Klepper in early December and acquired Johnson and Pillette for $40,000 in cash and eight players from the Detroit ballclub—Boss Klepper had pocketed a third of his Portland investment and an octet of Motor City players before the 1922 season began. Sylvester’s name made headlines around the country, getting top billing in the most famous baseball transaction of 1921, “The Johnson-Pillette Deal.” Sylvester’s first order of Detroit business involved a lengthy barnstorming tour with the Rochester Tribe from New York. Early into the trip, Johnson’s life changed forever.

During an exhibition game against the Tribe, Syl tossed a side-arm bullet to a Rochester batter who hit a line-drive boomerang back to the mound. The fateful ball slammed against Johnson’s right arm, crushing the bones joining his wrist and hand. Poor Syl believed that Ty Cobb would send him and his useless appendage back to Portland once the barnstorming tour was completed, but he didn’t. It seemed that Cobb agreed with Walter McCredie’s fervent faith in Syl Johnson. The Peach decided to keep the crippled kid on Detroit’s 1922 roster.

In July, Sylvester spent more time on the bench after part of his tonsils were removed. Weeks after he was given medical clearance to return to the game, Syl got cracked on the elbow after a fellow Tiger sent the boomerang ball back to the mound during batting practice. After he pitched the last game of the season, Johnson was credited with a 7–3 record. Days after returning to his hometown of Portland, Syl married his sweetheart, Ruth Heitsman. Johnson was invited back to the Tigers in 1923.

About a week before the season began, Syl accidentally let go of a bat during routine batting practice. It spun erratically from Johnson’s grip and landed on the leg of a fellow teammate: Detroit’s famous center fielder and Syl’s faithful boss, Ty Cobb.

On September 19, 1923, Syl experienced a bittersweet game against the Philadelphia Athletics. That day he smacked his first major-league home run. His luck ran out a few innings later while he took the mound and pulled ligaments in his golden righty. Johnson took the bench again. Sylvester finished the 1923 season with the Cobbmen, earning a 12–7 pitching record. Detroit then kept him on the roster in 1924 and 1925.

In June of 1924, Johnson threw the pitch that resulted in Babe Ruth’s 253rd career home run. The Peach’s faith in Johnson faded completely after another jinx found the pitcher in May of 1925. Johnson appeared in five games and earned himself a 0–2 record before his last game in Detroit stripes. Bad luck arrived in Comiskey Park’s batter’s box in the form of Bibb Falk while Syl was on the mound. Falk, who took Shoeless Joe Jackson’s leftfield position in 1921, slammed a line drive directly into Sylvester’s left eye.

Sylvester mentioned his catastrophic injury in a 1978 interview: “We had a big lead going in the ninth inning. Bibb Falk hit a line drive; hit me right there. Fractured eight bones. The ball rolled over to first base, … picked the ball up. Knocked me down. Just a line drive. A flash. So I got up. Fred Haney was on third base and he come over … and he got a hold of me. Blood was just pouring out. After that happened they thought I was through.”2

Falk’s liner knocked Syl back into the minor leagues in late June. After three weeks to heal in the Windy City, Johnson was shipped to California to play for the Vernon Tigers and answer to his new boss, Bill Essick. Syl suffered on the mound as the vision in his left eye adjusted. With his recovery and a scarred cheekbone, Sylvester turned in an atrocious 3–17 record in the PCL minors. At the end of the 1925 season, St. Louis Cardinals scout Charlie Barrett saw something interesting in Sylvester Johnson and he convinced Cardinal bosses Sam Breadon, Branch Rickey, and manager Rogers Hornsby to give the unlucky pitcher a chance on the 1926 roster. Barrett’s persistence worked, but Syl’s good luck turned sour in May after Cincinnati’s new first baseman, Wally Pipp, smacked one of Johnson’s bullets back to the mound. Sylvester sustained a broken toe on his right foot.

Unlucky Johnson took his familiar place on the bench while the rest of the Cardinals fought their way to the 1926 World Series. Just as Syl’s toe finished healing, more bad luck appeared after his teammate Bob O’Farrell hit another liner to Johnson during batting practice. Bob’s liner smashed several bones in Syl’s hand. Moments before the Cardinals clinched the NL pennant, Hornsby sent Syl back to Portland with a promise. Johnson recalled the details of Hornsby’s pledge in an interview recorded in 1978: “Rogers Hornsby said if you can’t do anything more for the rest of the year, you might as well go home. He said I guarantee you if we win the pennant, anything that anybody gets you get, too. I got the World Series check.”3

Hornsby and his Cards defeated the New York Yankees and Johnson got his first World Series ring, although he was missing from the St. Louis lineup. Sylvester had limited time on the major-league heap thanks to Lady Luck’s absence and two unforgiving line drives. The 1926 season produced an 0–3 record for Johnson in only 19 appearances. Two months after Syl slipped on his first World Series ring, Ruth Johnson gave birth to their first child, Beverly. Unwilling to gamble with Johnson in 1927, the Cardinals farmed Syl to their International League associates in Syracuse, New York.

Sylvester stepped into a Syracuse Stars uniform with hopes of better luck in the minors. With manager Burt Shotton at the helm, Syl quickly came back into his original form. In June, the Portland hurler threw a no-hitter against the neighboring Buffalo Bisons. When the season wrapped up, Johnson had an 18–13 record with the Stars. In 1928, the Cardinals noticed Syl’s improvement and invited him back to the St. Louis roster. Rehired Johnson worked closely with St. Louis’ new manager, Bill McKechnie. Syl was soon befriended by the Cards’ new catcher, Jimmie Wilson. With the undeniable talents of Johnson, Wilson, and the other stars on the roster, the Missouri club won the NL pennant in 1928. Johnson had finally earned a chance to pitch in a World Series, albeit briefly, as he threw two innings and allowed one earned run.

Syl finished 1928 with an 8–4 record in 34 mound appearances. Sylvester and Jimmie Wilson stayed in the Cardinals’ birdcage in 1929. At the age of 28, Johnson was noted as a reliable relief pitcher. That season, he pitched in more games than any other Cardinal., and after 42 appearances, he was credited with 13 wins and seven losses. His 1929 performance was the best season of his career, so St. Louis manager Gabby Street decided to make Johnson a starting pitcher rather than a reliever in 1930. The Cardinals cinched the pennant and another ticket to the World Series.

With Gabby steady at the helm of the St. Louis ballclub in 1931, Sylvester Johnson was designated as one of the team’s dependable starting pitchers. With the assistance of Syl and the other stellar twirlers on the St. Louis roster, the Cards captured another NL pennant. Syl cleaned up the last two innings during the first game of the World Series at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis but his relief came too late as the A’s won, 6–2.

Four days later, on October 5, a homicide took place at a Brooklyn speakeasy. The victim, Gustave Johnson, was killed in a World Series brawl while defending his namesake and favorite Swedish pitcher, Sylvester Johnson. A fellow patron, John Leonard, took a swing at Gustave for bragging about Syl. Gustave fell and hit his head on a marble table, which led to his death. Leonard was charged with murder while the proprietor of the speakeasy was pinched for violating the Volstead Act. In 2010, Syl Johnson’s offspring learned about the horrific incident that involved a man defending their father’s name and talents. All were shocked to hear the news for the first time, as each child explained that their father never mentioned any details or knowledge of the Brooklyn homicide linked to his title. Perhaps Syl himself never knew that his name was connected with one of the most violent World Series arguments in history.

With credit to Sylvester Johnson, Jimmie Wilson, and the intense talent that filled the Cardinals lineup, St. Louis beat the Athletics in seven games for the 1931 championship. Sylvester picked up a sharp pitching record of 11 wins and nine losses in 1931 and he looked forward to improving his low 3.00 ERA in 1932. But a few changes were waiting for him. In addition to his first assigned uniform number in the majors (23), Johnson shared the St. Louis mound with a new pitcher named Dizzy Dean in 1932. Unlike their successful season the year before, the Cards landed in sixth place with a 72–82 record. Johnson’s performance also reflected a dismal pitching record of five wins and 14 losses.

In January 1933, the Cardinals sold the 32-year-old Syl and left-fielder Ray Blades to their minor-league team, the Columbus Redbirds in the American Association. The deal became tainted after Cincinnati Reds president Sidney Weil noticed that Syl’s name was not included on St. Louis’ waiver list. In February, the Cardinals informed Johnson of the botched sale and he was instructed to report to spring training in Florida. Johnson’s majorleague service was far from over.

Cards manager Gabby Street assigned Johnson a substantial amount of relief work, while Dizzy Dean handled the brunt of the team’s pitching duties in 1933 season. After appearing in 84 innings, Johnson pulled an even 3–3 record. The calendar year of 1934 brought several changes for Johnson and his Portland family. In January, St. Louis sold him and veteran catcher Bob O’Farrell to the Cincinnati Reds. Syl would now be answering to O’Farrell as the Reds’ player-manager. Soon after the sale was completed, Cincinnati Syl got an interesting call from a trusted ally, Jimmie Wilson, who had been traded to the Phillies after the 1933 season.

Wilson, now the Phillies manager, insisted that Syl would be accompanying him to Philly. “He said I’m gonna take you back to Philadelphia with me,” said Johnson in a 1978 interview. “And I said oh, get outta here. Sure enough, series was over, I got called by Cincinnati. You’re traded to Philadelphia.”4 After appearing in just two games with Cincinnati, Jimmie Wilson handed his pal Syl a Philadelphia uniform as promised.

Wilson decided to put Johnson to work as a relief pitcher, even though Syl was one of the oldest hurlers on the squad. Old Jimmie would share the Philadelphia clubhouse with Sylvester for the next four years, using Syl primarily in relief. Syl welcomed the birth of his second child, Sylvester Jr., in 1935. Syl Sr. looked forward to spending time with his growing family once the ’35 season closed. Less than a month after the pitcher handed out cigars to his Philadelphia teammates, Johnson had another visit from Old Man Jinx in the Baker Bowl clubhouse: A hemorrhaging ulcer forced him off the schedule and the Portlander returned to Oregon.

Johnson reunited with the Phillies in 1936 and was later noted as one of the most profound relief hurlers on the squad. Fellow teammates nicknamed Johnson “The Fireman” after the twirler pulled seven doomed contests out of the flames. Regardless of Syl’s saving grace, the Phillies slipped into the cellar. The club turned in a frightful 54–100 record in ’36, sending them to last place. The following season barely brightened, as the team took one step out of the darkness, claiming seventh place in the NL. Sylvester stayed busy in 1937 as his manager and trusted comrade Ace Wilson assigned him the additional task of coaching first base.

Months before Philadelphia closed the ’37 season with a frown, Sylvester Johnson began a public crusade to create a pension plan for retired baseball players who devoted a decade of their lives to the game. The 36-yearold veteran justified his notable proposal by explaining the active pension plan exercised by retired major-league umpires. “Umpires are entitled to a pension after 15 years of service,” explained Johnson to the sportswriters. “Why shouldn’t a player receive the same reward? I’d like to see each ten year man become eligible for a pension of seventy-five dollars a month, with five dollars for each additional year of service. There are not many players with that length of service in the majors.”5

Old Syl tried to pitch his idea to Baseball Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis and the league bosses during the winter meetings of 1938, but his request fell on deaf ears. Nine years later, in April of 1947, Johnson’s bright idea found justice after Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler and Yankees boss Larry MacPhail created a pension plan for retired baseball players that were active as of 1947.

During the last hour of 1937, Sylvester celebrated his 37th birthday and was one of the oldest players on the 1938 Phillies roster, and the ninth-oldest player in the National League. Jimmie Wilson (born six months before Syl) shared the distinction as the other “old man” on the Phillies brigade. Though his age was against him, Johnson stayed active as a reliever for the Phillies in 1938 and 1939. Sylvester returned to Philadelphia to complete the 1939 season under the supervision of newly assigned manager James “Doc” Prothro. The Doc was unable to save the Phillies from a losing season as the club took last place in the NL with a 45–106 record. Johnson stayed consistent with an even 8–8 record in 22 appearances. Phillies president Gerry Nugent and pilot Prothro decided to keep old Syl with them in 1940. Not only was he the eldest player on the squad, he was noted as the fourth-oldest player in the majors. (Charlie Root, Jimmie Wilson, and Gabby Hartnett were the only players older than Sylvester.) 1940 was a bittersweet year for Syl for two important reasons: In January his third child, Judith, was born, and in April he suffered an internal hemorrhage in the Phillies clubhouse and was immediately admitted to Temple University Hospital. After he was released, Sylvester spent minimal time on the mound. Prior to his medical ailment, Doc named Sylvester team coach and his light duties as club instructor kept him busy until his final performance.

On September 14, 1940, Sylvester Johnson made his last major-league appearance, pitching the full nine against the Chicago Cubs at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. His grand finale produced the last recorded win on his pitching resume as the Phils took the game, 5–3. In his 19 years in both leagues, Sylvester handled 2,165 innings, appeared in 542 games, and struck out 920 batters. Since his efforts to create a pension plan were dashed in 1938, he had no choice but to look for work to support his Portland family, which continued to multiply.

During the month of December 1940, Syl’s wife announced that another child would be added to the Johnson roster. Three months after Johnson got the good news, the Phillies handed him his unconditional release. Rumors of other major-league clubs having their telescopes fixed on the old hurler trickled throughout the sports pages, but Sylvester had made up his mind to stay close to his family in Portland. Things worked out perfectly when Seattle Rainiers boss Emil Sick and new manager Bill Skiff presented Syl a contract to pitch in the Pacific Coast League. Sylvester happily bit the line since Seattle was close to home. In August 1941, Ruth Johnson gave birth to her fourth child, David, who was born with Down syndrome. The following month, Syl broke his elbow twirling pepper to a Hollywood Stars batter.

Before he took the rest of the season off, Johnson recorded 13 wins and seven losses. After the season ended, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. As fate would decide, 40-year-old Sylvester (with a wife and four children) was not eligible to participate in the war.

In 1944, Skiff promoted Johnson to the combination position of pitcher-coach. The Rainiers skipper made another adjustment to staff by adding an eight-yearold to Seattle’s payroll. With references provided by the new recruit’s father, Sylvester Johnson Junior took the assignment of team batboy for the Rainiers. Not long after the season began, Ruth Johnson was expecting another child. Syl Sr. actively coached Seattle’s pitching staff in 1944 and took the mound 13 times himself. During the last week of November, the Johnson clan welcomed a visit from the Portland stork who delivered baby number five, Sharyn.

In 1945, Johnson was named assistant manager to pilot Skiff ’s squad and earned a 6–3 pitching record after appearing in 23 games. After the 1945 schedule was completed, old man Johnson got a job offer from an old friend. In December 1945, Seattle sold Sylvester to the Vancouver Capilanos from the Western International League after Bob Brown (Syl’s old Beaver boss) came calling for the Portlander personally; he hired Syl to manage Canada’s Caps jointly with Eddie Carnett and Bill Brenner. Since Carnett and Brenner were 20 years younger than Johnson, old Syl felt out of place. The Capilanos’ disgraceful lineup matched their unsuccessful May record.

In June 1946, unhappy Syl took an interesting telephone call from Bill Skiff, who was recently dropped by the Rainiers and rehired by the New York Yankees as a chief scout (he had once managed in their farm system). By the end of June, Johnson decided to resign from Vancouver. It would be the last time that he would wear a minor-league uniform. Including his early years playing for the Portland and Vancouver Beavers, the Vernon Tigers, and the Seattle Rainers, Sylvester threw 1,336 innings over 248 minor-league contests. Skiff ’s contact with Syl continued and soon enough the old pitcher was hired as a New York Yankees scout working under Joe Devine in August 1946.

During his time off from the season, Sylvester stayed busy in 1947 bird-dogging on the West Coast for young players. He frequently visited Oregon and Washington colleges, snatching athletes worthy to play for the Yankees farm teams. In 1948, Johnson remained with the Yanks scouting team, scouring the local diamonds for new talent. In this era, there was a football team in New York also called the Yankees and owned by Dan Topping. During 1949, the he assisted the football Yankees, scouting to sign athletes for both teams. Johnson spent his time visiting fraternity houses, baseball diamonds, and football fields throughout the Coast.

Early in his scouting years, Syl purchased some property with his in-laws and started a berry farm in Gresham, Oregon. In 1954, he bid farewell to the Yankees and was hired as a talent scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sylvester was designated to his familiar territory of the western division (Washington and Oregon) and answered to division scouting boss Bill Brenzel. Syl remained a Dodger talent spy for eight years. The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, but Johnson stayed busy on the Coast. As the years progressed, Sylvester was invited to several old-timer games to meet with old teammates from the Portland Beavers and the St. Louis Cardinals.

In 1961, Sylvester finished his last year with the Dodgers and said goodbye to baseball. With 10 years earned in the minors, 19 years in the majors, and 15 years as a bird dog, Johnson had acquired a 42-year resume devoted to organized baseball. In 1981, a committee from the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame added Sylvester Johnson to their historic roster. Just after his 84th birthday, Syl Johnson passed away in Portland on February 20, 1985. Mrs. Ruth Johnson passed away in 2001, preceded by her son David W. Johnson in 1995.

MATTHEW M. CLIFFORD is a freelance writer from the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. He joined SABR in 2011 with intentions to enhance his research abilities and literary talents to help preserve the accurate facts of baseball history. Clifford has a background in law enforcement and is certified in a variety of forensic investigative techniques, all of which currently aid him with historical research and data collection. He has discovered and reported several baseball card errors and inaccuracies of player history to SABR, Baseball Almanac.com, Baseball-Reference.com and the research department of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His literary contributions have been added to the SABR Biography Project.

Photo credit

National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Notes

1 Kennedy, Lou. “Portland Will Lose Neither McCredies”. The Sporting News. Volume 72, no. 7, October 20, 1921: 8.

2 Eugene Converse Murdock Audio Interviews. Recorded 1978 in Portland, OR. Mears-Murdock Exhibit. Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, OH.

3 Murdock Audio Interviews.

4 Murdock Audio Interviews.

5 “Syl Johnson Campaigns For Pensions”. The New York Evening Post, November 17, 1937.

    There were two participants in the 1976 campaign who called attention to pinch hitting records and thereby stimulated this research. One was Jose Morales of Montreal, who set new season records for appearances (82), at bats (78), and hits (25). The other was little noticed Tommy Davis, the “have bat, will travel” veteran of 10 major league clubs. Usually thought of as a designated hitter, Davis went 8 for 21 as a pinch hitter in 1976 and has quietly built up a lifetime pinch hit average of .3 20, the all-time high. More about that later.

    First, a discussion of Morales and season marks. How good was the Montreal mauler in 1976? Well, his 25 hits in 78 at bats gave him a .320 percentage. For a heavy duty performer, this is a solid average.  However, it does not compare with several other performers of the past. For those players with at least 40 at bats, Frenchy Bordagaray batted .465 on 20 hits in 43 at bats in 1938, and Jose Pagan hit .450 on 19 hits in 42 at bats in 1969.

    What kind of hits did Morales have in 1976? He had only 8 extra base hits. His 5 doubles were no threat to the 8 collected by Vic Davalillo of the Cardinals in 1970, or the 7 by Dave Philley of the Orioles in 1961. Those were the years when Davalillo and Philley each collected 24 pinch hits, the record Morales broke with 25. None of those 25 hits went for three bases. While pinch triples are indeed rare, Ham Hyatt had 3 for Pittsburgh in 1909, and Davalillo had 3 in 1970.

    Morales had three timely home runs in 1976, but Johnny Frederick of the Dodgers had six in 1932, and several other players hit five in one season. Consequently Jose hit for 39 total bases, still a little shy of the 41 by Davalillo in 1970 and the 40 by Jerry Lynch in 1961.

    The Expo pinch hitter fared better as a run producer. He knocked in 24, only one off the record of 25 by Lynch in 1961 and Joe Cronin in 1934. The Red Sox Manager was particularly productive considering that he went to bat only 42 times. Of course, he had those two 3-run pinch homers, one in each game of a twinbill on June 17. Smoky Burgess batted in 24 runs for the White Sox in 1965, for the American League high.

    Morales had only 4 walks in 1976 compared to the record of 18 established by Elmer Valo for the Yankees and Senators in 1960.  Before leaving the season pinch hit records it would be appropriate to mention two outstanding performances. One is Dave Philley’s feat of collecting 8 consecutive pinch hits from September 9 to 28 in 1958 with the Phils. He added another in his first time up as a substitute hitter in 1959. The other notable feat was by the aforementioned Johnny Frederick in 1932. He collected 9 hits in 29 at bats, which is not that great a batting average (.310); however, 8 of his 9 hits went for extra bases, including 6 homers and 2 doubles. This gave him 29 total bases in 29 at bats for an even 1.000 slugging mark.

    Here are some of the top season marks by pinch hitters, with the asterisk indicating the record holder in a particular category.

    Moving now to career marks for pinch hitters, we find that Smoky Burgess, because of his long service as a substitute batter, is the leader in most departments. He appeared in the most games, 585, had the most at bats, an even 500, by far the most hits, 144, by far the most doubles, 27, and by far the most runs batted in, 142. In fact, he is the only pinch hitter with more than 100 RBIs. He had 16 pinch homers, but Jerry Lynch was tops there with 18. In his 18 years as a substitute batter, the amply proportioned catcher never hit a pinch triple. Ham Hyatt and Gates Brown each hit five.

    Burgess also scored very few runs, because once he got on base he was frequently pulled for a pinch runner. Of course, he was feared as a batter and he received 71 walks, but he is not the leader in that category. Elmer Valo, who had the season high of 18 bases on balls, got on base 91 times with free passes. Ironically, he got on base 90 times with hits, which is a very unusual career ratio.

    What was Smoky’s pinch batting average? Considering the great number of times he batted in the clutch, it was very good at .288.  This is shown by a listing of the ten players most frequently used as pinch hitters.

    Most of those averages seem pretty low for a player to continue to be called on in the clutch. One argument might be that if a batter hit especially well as a pinch hitter, a regular place would be found for him in the lineup. Then in the case of some one like Valo, he was inserted as much to get on base as to drive in a run. And Lynch, Brown, and Burgess could break up a game with a home run. Why are the most frequently used pinch hitters left hand batters for the most part?  Simply because they are two steps closer to first base. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are better batters.

    Lowering the plate appearances to around 150, we find a different set of subs hitting for average. More of these hit from the right side.  Tommy Davis, well traveled former NL batting champ, has the highest batting average (.320) in this expanded group, and Jose Morales, at the height of his career as a substitute batsman, ranks high on the list.

    Burgess still ranks among the all-time leaders in spite of his 500 at bats, but the pinch hitter who deserves the plaudits is Tommy Davis, who compiled his .320 mark in a period when batting marks were generally low. And he produced quietly and efficiently as he went from club to club and league to league.

    In the course of review of pinch hitting, enough information was obtained to correct one of the legends. Most of the stories on this subject state that John McGraw popularized pinch hitting by his use of Moose McCormick as a substitute batter. McCormick did not make any impression as a pinch hitter until 1912 when he collected 11 hits in 30 trips for the Giants. The real pioneer in pinch hitting was Dode Criss of the Browns. In 1908 he had 12 hits in 41 trips, which was almost double the use of any pinch hitter before. He also led the next three years.

    In 1909, Ham Hyatt made a big splash with the Pirates, getting three triples. In 1913 he had three pinch homers. Remember, that was the dead ball era. In 1913 Hyatt had 15 pinch hits, but the Phils had a batter named Doc Miller who went 20 for 56. That was the record for pinch hits which stood for almost 20 years. In 1917 Bill Rumler of the Browns got 16 hits in 71 trips. That was the most at bats for a pinch batter until Sam Leslie had 22 hits in 72 appearances for the Giants in 1932.

    Many of the pinch hit leaders were not well known players. Only occasionally will you see the name of a big star on the way up or down like Mel Ott, Bill Terry, Chuck Klein, Paul Waner, Sam Crawford, Eddie Collins, and Joe Cronin. Instead there will be players like Jack Bentley, John McCarthy, Herschel Bennett, Chubby Dean, Ron Northey, and Joe Schultz Jr. and Joe Schultz Sr., the unheralded but evenly productive father-son combination. Sometimes pitchers show up as pinch hit leaders. The obvious one was Red Lucas, who for many years held the record for most pinch hits. But there also was Al Orth, Lynn Nelson, George Uhle, Schoolboy Rowe, Red Ruffing, et. al.

    One final qualifier on research in this area. Pinch hitting records are very difficult to authenticate. In the early days substitute batters sometime didn’t even get into the box score. Occasionally pinch hitters stayed in the game after doing their initial stickwork. It was not always clear whether the one hit the batter collected was as a pinch hitter or as a leftfielder. Then there is the matter of a pinch hitter coming up twice in a big inning and possibly getting a hit his second time. Vic Davalillo did this during the 1970 season, but the second hit he made was taken away from him because “he was batting for himself.” This ruling has now been accepted by both leagues, so all those second at bats and hits are no longer considered pinch appearances and hits.  They should be deleted retroactively. What a mess! Gates Brown had one of these situations in 1963 when he hit a three-run double in a second PH appearance in one inning. So scratch 1 AB, 1 double, and 3 RBI from his record. Also, the Records Committee has ruled that when one designated hitter bats for another (usually when opposite throwing pitchers are switched), his first at bat in that capacity is as a pinch hitter. Those cases are not so easy to identify.

    The late Ford Sawyer of the Boston Globe did a lot of pioneering working on pinch hitting. Ernie Lanigan did some early work in this area. So did John Tattersall, but it took second place to home runs. The people working on the Macmillan Encyclopedia in 1969 made a tremendous effort. But discrepancies abound among individual efforts, the encyclopedias and the guides. This research effort has not been able to resolve all those problems, but in spite of the discrepancies, we thought a listing of the yearly leaders would be worthwhile and would give some recognition to the long neglected substitute batter. For the pinch average since 1920 we have tried to use a minimum of 20 at bats. However if one batter was 8 for 17 and another 8 for 21, we would be flexible and logical enough to list the batter with the best average.

The listings for each major league follow on the next pages.

NATIONAL LEAGUE PINCH HIT LEADERS, 1900-76

AMERICAN LEAGUE PINCH HIT LEADERS, 1901-76

All three teams slumped after July 17. In this article we will view ten players from each team as lenses through which to view the highlights of a campaign dotted with no-hitters,1 blockbuster trades, Black Sox foreshadowing, and a photo-finish pennant race.

Note that standings discussed in this article relate to games ahead or behind, rather than by percentage points.

CUBS CRESTING

After Hank O’Day’s Cubs finished fourth in 1914, Roger Bresnahan took over a team with two offensive mainstays. One, third baseman Heinie Zimmerman, hit .307 or higher in 1911, 1912, and 1913, and in 1914 led Chicago in batting average and slugging percentage. After the season, however, Zimmerman considered quitting,2 failed to win back fines he had paid for misconduct during 1914,3 and fantasized about playing for the Giants.4 Bresnahan “announce[d] … that Zimmerman would not be traded under any consideration”5 then tried to swap him for New York’s Larry Doyle or Cincinnati’s Heinie Groh.6

“In 1912, [Zimmerman] had married seventeen-year-old Helene Chasar, but the marriage quickly dissolved and in January 1915, she had sued for alimony, alleging that Zimmerman had sent … no support.”7 The case hounded Zimmerman, perhaps explaining his subpar 1915 season.

The second potent bat, first baseman Vic Saier, led the 1914 Cubs in walks and OPS; his hitting and health drove the rise and fall of the 1915 Cubs. Unlike Zimmerman, Saier had “a quiet winter … [and] is ready … for the season to start.”8

With Larry Cheney, who’d won 20 games each year from 1912–1914, and Hippo Vaughn, also a 20-game winner in 1914, Bresnahan had “a pitching staff … loaded with holdover contracts,”9 a key given the raids on NL and AL staffs by the Federal League. Bresnahan released George McConnell, who had twelve wins over four seasons, and kept Karl Adams, who briefly appeared with the 1914 Reds. McConnell would star for the Whales while Adams would struggle for the Cubs.10

Chicago moved into a first-place tie May 21 and occupied first place for all but eleven days through July 17. Statistics through that date show Saier providing slugging and George Pierce—who had notched 22 wins in the previous two seasons—offsetting Cheney’s mediocrity with good mound work. Jimmy Lavender won his debut, but hurt his ribs11 and went more than a month until his next start. Bert Humphries, hobbled in training,12 missed the season’s first seventeen games.

Lacking Lavender and Humphries, Bresnahan leaned on Vaughn and Cheney. Yanking George Washington “Zip” Zabel from the hill in the season’s fourth game, Bresnahan used both Vaughn and Cheney in a 7–4 loss. Heinie Zimmerman, kicked out of games more than any other NL player in 1915, “after being good for three whole days in succession, became peevish over being called out at second … and … tried to bean an umpire with a practice ball between innings.”13

In late April, Zimmerman began playing second base, and the Cubs commenced a season-high seven-game winning streak “in spite of the heavy handicap of a short-handed pitching staff.”14

Eleven days after the streak ended, Zimmerman, “threatened … with jail”15 over alimony, nearly blew a Humphries gem. Fielding a bouncer with a man on first, Zimmerman “started to throw to second, saw it was too late, then made a wild peg to first and lost both men.”16 Humphries, however, preserved a 1–0 win over New York.

Lavender returned to the rotation May 21, downing Boston 3–2 to push the Cubs into a first-place tie for the first time since opening day. Chicago swept the series with the defending champions as Zimmerman went 9-for-14 with six doubles and a homer.

Chicago slipped to second after losing two straight to Philadelphia between June 9 and 12, but Vaughn returned the Cubs to first after consecutive starts against Boston. He lasted just one inning in a 6–4 win, but after an off-day tossed a shutout. Cheney started and lost the third Boston game, which Zimmerman exited early with a spike wound.17

The loss kept the Cubs in a first-place tie, but a 19-inning 4–3 win over Brooklyn on June 17 gave Chicago sole possession of first, which it held through July 12. Zimmerman missed this game and the next three, the first four of a six-game winning streak jumpstarted by the extraordinarily long contest during which “Humphries’ hand was split”18 in the first inning. Humphries missed ten days.

Saier’s homer in the bottom of the fifteenth prolonged the June 17 contest; Chicago won on an error, rewarding Zabel for an amazing 18 1/3 innings in relief.

Saier’s power (a single, triple, and two homers) spurred the Cubs to a three-game sweep of Brooklyn. Baseball Magazine raved that Saier’s “tremendous drives seem to come just when they win or tie.”19

Zimmerman dramatically returned on June 24, after Chicago blew a 10–9 ninth-inning lead as St. Louis scored four. With one out in the home ninth, one in, and two on, he pinch-doubled, tying the game. A groundout advanced Zimmerman after which he swiped home “on one leg with the winning tally and made the final count 14 to 13.”20

After beating the Cardinals again, the Cubs had a season-high 4½-game lead, but, in the first of three bad streaks in little more than one month, Chicago scored just six runs in six games and lost four of them.

On June 28, after lollygagging, Zimmerman “was ordered out of the game and fined $100.”21 Replacement Polly McLarry made a key bottom-of-the-ninth fumble in the loss. The next day, Zimmerman filed for divorce after a failed reconciliation.22 The day after that, he was caught looking and ejected for throwing “his bat to the bench … there was nothing short of murder in the second degree in Zim’s eyes and attitude as he started after the umpire.”23 McLarry entered again and made another error, this one figuring in a 1–0 defeat.

On July 2, “the Great Zim … wrecked a splendid stop by a wild throw to first, giving the visitors a run in the fourth inning.”24 Tied 1–1 in the ninth, the game went Chicago’s way on Saier’s RBI single.

Grantland Rice noted similarities among, Saier’s, Ty Cobb’s, and Sam Crawford’s statistics although “no one had figured the quiet, retiring worker on the Cubs even close to their class.”25 Of his ex-teammate, Johnny Evers added, “When you … take fielding and all around work … there is no player … who is a better man than Saier.”26

Facing an eighteen-game road trip that began with a win at Pittsburgh, the first-place Cubs acquired New York’s Red Murray, who “favored … the Cubs because he suspects they are going to win the pennant this year and get a lot of bonus money.”27

The Cubs fell into a bad streak immediately, however, blowing a 7–1 lead at Brooklyn and falling 8–7 in ten. The Cubs scored twice in the first. “They might have had more, but Heinie Zim forgot how many were out and jogged into a putout…. When Saier fanned, with the call three and two, Zim started for second, but although he seemed to have the base stolen, he stopped when he saw Saier had missed … and … was run down.”28

Brooklyn swept four from Chicago, and New York then took two from the Cubs. In the July 12 Brooklyn game, Pierce “strained his side reaching for a high bounder”29 and would sit for eight days. Pierce, 9–1 at that time, was just 2–8 in his next ten decisions.

On July 13, Humphries blew a 3–0 lead against the Giants, yielding a pair of runs in the eighth and ninth in another tough New York City loss.

Chicago recovered to win three of five, capped by Cheney besting Philadelphia’s Pete Alexander 4–0 on July 17, the last day the Cubs shared first place.

SOX SURGING

At 70–84, the 1914 White Sox were Chicago’s only major league team with a losing record. The Sox finished 30 games behind Philadelphia, who would lose to Boston in the World Series; this was one impetus for Connie Mack to dismantle his last great Deadball team. Mack’s moves in turn effected a transformation of the White Sox.

Mack considered dealing 1914 AL Chalmers (MVP) Award winner Eddie Collins to New York, but Chicago owner Charlie Comiskey secured Collins, making “1915 … the dawn of a new era for the White Sox,”30 then announced an unknown minor-league skipper, Clarence “Pants” Rowland, as Chicago manager.

Collins moved one reporter to verse:

He’s a daisy, he’s a dandy,
He’s a wonder at the game,
He’s a corking second-baseman;
Every rooter knows his name.

He’s a peach at stopping grounders
As they skim across the dirt;
He’s chockfull of pop and ginger,
And he plays for all he’s worth.

He is just as good as Evers
When it comes to brain and wits,
And he is just as fast as Milan
At beating infield hits.

They may talk about Joe Jackson,
Tyrus Cobb and all the rest,
But when it comes to picking stars,
We’d pick Collins with the best.

Last year he won the Chalmers car,
He well deserved the same,
So, here’s hats off to Eddie Collins;
He’s a credit to the game.31

Other newcomers would soon join Collins, with “the greatest interest … in ‘Happy’ Felch (sic), the stalwart young outfielder from Milwaukee, who is expected to make good with the south siders.”32

Only a year older than Felsch, Buck Weaver, at 24, had completed three seasons as the Sox shortstop and tied for seventh in the 1914 Chalmers balloting. Interestingly, in an early association with gambling, Weaver “suddenly decided to become a business man. Before the impulse left him he purchased a billiard hall and barber shop on the south side.”33

Ex-Yankees manager Frank Chance liked how the Sox looked, saying, “Rowland has at his disposal a wonderful pitching staff, and the keystone defense—Eddie Collins and Buck Weaver … should form an ironclad infield.”34

In 1914, that wonderful pitching staff included Joe Benz, Eddie Cicotte, Jim Scott, and Reb Russell, with rookie Red Faber relieving more than starting. Rowland, who had first recommended Faber to Chicago, made him a starter. Less successfully, Rowland shifted Lena Blackburne from second base to third due to the arrival of Eddie Collins—the second Collins on the team along with outfielder Shano Collins.

Through July 17, Eddie Collins led the attack. Faber, already exceeding his innings thrown in 1914, and Scott each had ten more wins than losses.

Faber won the first two games of 1915, including a 16–0 rout of the Browns in which he himself had four hits and yielded just seven. St. Louis dealt with Collins the way many teams would in 1915, passing him four times. Collins eventually topped the AL with 119 walks, by far his career high.

Chicago lost six in a row after their first two victories, with a two-out, three-run homer by Hank Severeid transforming a seemingly sure Sox win into a 4–3 loss that dethroned Chicago from first. The Sox then lost four straight at Detroit.

When the team returned home, it got hot again. Starting with a five run rally when down 4–0 against St. Louis in the bottom of the ninth, Chicago won nine of its first ten home games. Shano Collins tied the game with a two-out triple in the ninth, scoring Eddie Collins, and Shano scored the winner on a passed ball. Faber won with six relief innings and would capture his next seven decisions.

Faber reportedly threw just 67 pitches in nine innings (50 strikes and 17 balls), retiring the side on one pitch per batter in both the third and fifth, in a 4–1 win over Washington May 12.35

The Sox moved into a virtual tie for first after beating Boston 3–2 in 17 innings on May 21 behind Faber’s ten winning frames in relief. “From the tenth to the seventeenth he allowed only two hits and walked nobody.”36 Backup catcher Tom Daly’s pinch-single secured the win.

Chicago swept the Boston series. Eddie Collins created an insurance run in the finale with his “nerve and footwork in going from first to third on [first baseman Jack] Fournier’s sacrifice bunt”37 in the seventh in a 4–2 win.

The Sox then swept three from New York to extend its winning streak to nine. Shano Collins saved the second Yankee contest, throwing out speedster Fritz Maisel trying to score from second on a single with two outs in the ninth to preserve a 7–6 lead.

On May 30, Cleveland ended Chicago’s streak, and on June 7 someone—Boston—finally beat Faber. “Faber showed speed, command and a neat moist ball”38 in yielding four hits, two walks, and one earned run but lost 3–0 as Chicago fell from first for the only time between May 21 and July 18.

Chicago took the finale in Boston and the first two in New York. Faber started against the Yanks and had led 8–1 lead in the bottom of the fourth. But Russell, in relief, lost the game, which ended with Daly flying into a double play with the tying run gunned down at home, reversing the ending of the game when Shano Collins had thrown out Fritz Maisel.

Washington took two of three from Chicago, but the streaky Sox took nine in a row and 14 of 15. After a three-game sweep in Philadelphia, Sporting Life predicted “a picnic for the White Sox if they do not become overconfident or get badly crippled.”39

Chicago kept rolling during a week in Cleveland with six straight wins, the last of which took 19 innings. Faber, in the midst of a strange batting streak of seven walks in eight plate appearances,40 survived five Chicago errors in the third of these games, a complete-game triumph over at Cleveland. “Buck Weaver was chief messer of the afternoon, being charged with three mistakes. He dropped a ridiculously easy pop fly, heaved one to the grand stand back of first base, and kicked one all over the infield, which was considerable messing.”41

Weaver redeemed himself in the 19th “when, with two men out, [he] lined a single to left field, his fifth blow of the game, and legged it home a moment later when Eddie Collins crashed a two bagger far down the left foul line.”42 On one day of rest, Faber won, hurling 11 scoreless innings, yielding three hits, and fanning nine.

After losing the Cleveland finale, Chicago took five from St. Louis and Detroit, giving the Sox a season-high six-game cushion in first place before losing five to the same two teams. Faber dropped a pair of games against the Tigers, the second of which occurred when he again appeared with just one day of rest. Down 7–1 after six on July 4, the Sox plated one in the seventh and five in the eighth, but Faber walked in the winning run in the bottom of the tenth for a disappointing 8–7 defeat.

In his 670-game career, Faber stole just seven bases, but swiped second, third, and home in one sequence against Philadelphia on July 14. Chicago led, and rain threatened to end the game before it had become official. Joe Bush “soaked him in the slats with a pitched ball. Red kept right on running after reaching first base, but the Athletics refused to put him out. When Faber was on the way to third Bush tossed the ball back to [catcher Wally] Schang and Schang tossed it back, although the runner was within easy reach of him.”43 The weather held, however, and Faber won a complete game.

Boston followed Philadelphia to Chicago, and after an opening doubleheader split on July 17, the White Sox had a 1½-game lead and seemed well-positioned to snare the 1915 pennant.

WHALES WINNING

The Chi-Feds had the best 1914 record among the local clubs at 87–67, finishing 1½ out of first. Unlike its older neighbors, the Federals kept their manager, Joe Tinker, for 1915. Tinker spent the offseason recruiting players.

Chicago’s powerful catcher, Art Wilson, had the FL’s sixth-highest OPS in 1914, but his two backups hit .188 with no homers, figures that William Fischer of Brooklyn, who jumped to the FL for 1915, would easily exceed.

Eddie Plank rejected Chicago, but days later, a headline blared, “Chicago Feds Sign Walter Johnson for Two Years.”44 The FL St. Louis Terriers had offered Johnson a three-year contract, but Chicago owner Charlie Weeghman suggested the same money for fewer years. Plank “was then awarded to the St. Louis Club for its part in signing Johnson.”45

Johnson, of course, never pitched for Chicago, instead returning to Washington, where he would torment the White Sox, but Plank stayed and went 21–11 with a 2.08 ERA. Instead of Johnson, the newly named Whales, a sublime joy for jokey sportswriters,46 inked Mordecai Brown. “Tinker doesn’t expect Brown to work as often as he did … but thinks he will turn out just as strong hurling … if not called upon more than … every five or six days.”47

Outfielder Les Mann, whose ninth-inning single beat Plank in Game 2 of the 1914 World Series, also joined Chicago. “Tinker wanted [Mann] particularly because he is a right handed hitter, and the Tinx of last year were overset with left handed batters,”48 including first baseman Fred Beck, and outfielders Max Flack, Al Wickland, and Dutch Zwilling. Shortstop Jimmy Smith switch-hit.

Through July 17, the catchers and outfielders led the attack in support of three workhorse pitchers, paced by George McConnell, who could not make the Cubs. Claude Hendrix, who went 29–10 with a 1.69 ERA over 362 innings in 1914, “has been slow in rounding to. He was late in reporting”49 and pitched inconsistently in 1915.

Hendrix bested Plank in the season opener 3–1 as Chicago rallied with three in the eighth. Mann reprised his heroics from Game Two of the 1914 World Series with another late-inning RBI single off Plank, and Wilson had the go-ahead hit.

After rain postponed the rest of the St. Louis series, McConnell, “mixing a good spitball with a terrific fast ball,”50 made his FL debut in relief against Pittsburgh. Down 3–0 in the home sixth, Chicago again rallied, giving McConnell his first win.

Although he yielded but three hits and one earned run in eight innings, Brown lost his debut on April 15, dropping a 3–1 decision to Pittsburgh. Teenage shortstop Jimmy Smith’s two errors gave him four in three games.

Smith also sparked the Whales to two wins, however. On April 16, he worked a ninth-inning walk and scored the winning run. The following day, with Chicago losing 1–0, Smith homered in the sixth and singled in the eighth as Hendrix improved to 2–0. Unfortunately, Kansas City’s Grover Gilmore “ran his spike into Smith’s hand,”51 slowing the rookie down in an April 24 game that rain kept from becoming official.

Brown’s first win sparked a five-game streak that left Chicago, on May 3, two games up in the race. This would be the team’s largest lead of 1915.

Six straight losses, five by one run and one by two, sank the Whales to fourth. Without Smith, Tinker played shortstop on occasion and sometimes played third with Rollie Zeider at short. On May 6, he went 3-for-4 with a double and triple, the last extra-base hits and multi-hit game of his career. Taking pregame infield the following day, Tinker “suffered a rupture in his right side”52 and thereafter mostly managed.

Smith returned May 10, just prior to a Pittsburgh trip where Hendrix, originally a Pirate, no-hit the Rebels. “James Savage was the last man up, and he drove the long foul to Leslie Mann, who made a great running catch … while many … rushed the field and congratulated the big Whale spitball pitcher for his accomplishment.”53

Chicago won another thriller back home, rallying twice against Baltimore’s Chief Bender. Down 5–2 with two outs in the eighth, the Whales got three. In the tenth, McConnell yielded a run, but Chicago once again scored multiple times with two down, getting a two-run pinch-single to win. Smith scored in both rallies, but made his eighth error in fifteen games.

Through the first six weeks of the season, Brown had pitched sparingly. He went nine innings May 22, but then the Whales split a doubleheader and trailed Buffalo 3–2. Buffalo hurler Gene Krapp, who lived down to his name by passing eleven, walked a man with the bases full to force home Flack with the tying tally in the ninth. Flack’s hit in the 14th won the game, making Brown, who yielded three hits in seven and a third relief innings, the winner on one day of rest.

First baseman Beck was hurt in Buffalo and missed six games. Bill Jackson replaced him and drew a bases-loaded walk to force in the winning run in Brown’s next appearance, a complete-game, eleven-inning 2-1 effort in the second half of a May 31 doubleheader against Kansas City. This win brought Chicago into a first-place tie, but the club then dropped six straight to fall to fifth. Led by McConnell (who won nine straight from June 6 through July 8), the Whales then captured 14 of 21 road contests, including the final six.

Brown nearly matched Hendrix on June 18, pitching “a near no hit no run game against the Buffalo Feds. One lone blow was all that separated Brownie from the much coveted record. Percy Dalton was the offender, getting the safe swat beyond question in the eighth inning, and that after Brown had put two strikes over him.”54

On June 19, Chicago seemingly beat Baltimore 8–1. With the bases loaded and one out in the first inning, Smith broke for home after a wild third strike, but the throw beat him, so he left the field thinking the Terrapins had retired him. The other runners advanced, however, and a dispute ensued. “While this was going on Smith ran out from the bench and touched the plate. Umpire Johnstone called him safe and the run counted. He contended that a play had to be made on Smith, as it was not a force out at the plate. [Baltimore] contended Smith was automatically out for running to the bench.”55

The FL upheld the protest, ordering a replay, although more than one month later the official standings still, erroneously, included the game.56 Hendrix lost credit for a complete-game win as well as two hits, including a homer, and the Whales lost a win.

Brown threw a second shutout 11 days after his one-hitter, giving up four Newark hits. Fischer drove in the only run following Flack’s walk and attempted steal of second, which resulted in a fielding error. “Only the great speed of Flack enabled him to score on a close play at the plate.”57

Unlike Brown, McConnell struggled at Newark, and Chicago trailed 6–1 late before breaking through in the ninth. “The sudden rally of the Whales was a thriller and all the serious damage was done after two men were out in the ninth round.”58 Chicago had good-hitting pitchers, which helped on this day. McConnell tripled, one of 25 extra-base hits from Brown, Hendrix, and McConnell in 1915. Fischer later tripled and scored the tying run. In the bottom of the eleventh, McConnell escaped a bases-loaded, no-out jam, and Beck won the game with an RBI single in the twelfth.

The Whales completed the sweep with another extra-inning win. Chicago busted a scoreless tie with three in the top of the twelfth. Flack legged out a double and scored following a sacrifice and Jackson’s bunt single. Although he had started two days earlier, “Brown had been warming up for several innings and was ready to be called upon.”59 Allowing two inherited runners to score by hitting consecutive batters, Brown saved the win and lowered his ERA to a season-best 1.41.

The Whales went back on the road after a home week. A Hendrix-Plank rematch in St. Louis resulted in 13 scoreless frames. Plank yielded one hit in that span, a Hendrix double. In the fourteenth, Jackson walked, took second on a single by Mann—still Plank’s nemesis—and scored when an outfielder played Hendrix’s fly into another double. Mann also tallied, and Hendrix fanned ten in his 2–0 shutout.

His winning streak over after losing in relief, McConnell won at St. Louis on July 14, edging the Whales back into a first-place tie for the first time since May 31. Chicago completed the St. Louis sweep, split a Brooklyn doubleheader, and held sole possession of first on July 17, the last time all three Chicago teams occupied first place. By the end of the 1915 season, fans of two of the clubs would find it hard to believe that such success had actually transpired.

CUBS COLLAPSING

After July 17, the Cubs fell apart. The offense scored nearly one fewer run per game, and Adams pitched horribly. Bolded OPS and ERA figures indicate performance declines compared to earlier data.

Beginning July 19, Chicago suffered its third and worst bad streak with three 1–0 losses, four other one-run losses, and a two-run loss. The July 20 game against Philadelphia encapsulates the Cubs’ sudden collapse.

Zimmerman did not run out a grounder, so Bresnahan fined him $25 after the sixth inning. Next, Saier scored on a double steal but “hooked his foot on the plate and sprained a tendon in his leg so badly that he had to be carried off … for repairs.”60 Finally, after Chicago had taken a 5–2 lead into the bottom of the eighth, Cheney relieved, retired two, but gave up two hits, erred, and threw consecutive wild pitches to help Philadelphia score six and eventually win 8–6. The performance likely expedited Cheney’s exit from Chicago and, worse, Saier never regained his fantastic form.

Bresnahan moved regular catcher Jimmy Archer to first and took over the catching duties until breaking his toe July 23. He would never again have an extra-base hit in the majors. His spirits broke, too: “Bresnahan has lost faith in a lot of his players … He made the statement … that he had only three or four men … who were really trying.”61 John McGraw agreed with his former backstop, blasting the Cubs for “not hustling as hard as they did.”62

On the marathon road trip, “Eighteen games were played, and the Cubs won only four of them. Bad luck, bad playing and injuries put the Cubs out of first place…”63

Saier returned for the first half of a July 30 doubleheader, the last game of the losing streak, but “hurt his lame knee in the second inning … and had to retire.”64 Missing three more games, he would—oddly—pinch-run to score the winning tally on a Murray hit on August 5, the middle match of a five-game winning streak that got Chicago within 1½ games of first.

The Cubs got no closer. Brooklyn beat Chicago four straight, with the nadir “the most one-sided and farcical baseball exhibition staged this season on the West Side grounds,”65 a 13–0 rout during which George Cutshaw went 6-for-6.

Five days later, the Cubs still had some fight in them. Against St. Louis, “an error by Zimmerman let in two runs. After the players returned to the bench, several got after Heinie for loafing after fumbling the ball. Had he hustled after fumbling he might have cut off one of the runs.”66 Zimmerman tried to punch Pierce, but hit a better pitcher, Vaughn, in the mouth instead, splitting the peacemaker’s lip.

Instead of fighting each other, Chicago killed itself with kindness after battling back from a 4–0 hole to tie Boston on August 26. Chicago should have surged ahead, but Archer fell rounding third. A teammate, coaching, “placed his hands kindly on [Archer] … The minute he held his hands on the crippled base runner the alert Evers ran crying to Umpire O’Day, calling his attention to the illegal act, and Hank promptly called Archer out,”67 and the game ended in a tie.

Languishing in fourth in late August, Chicago traded Cheney, who had “trouble with his arm and has been pounded harder than ever before,”68 to Brooklyn for infielder Joe Schultz Sr., who played just seven games for the Cubs. Lavender responded two days later by no-hitting New York. “His mastery of the situation was supreme. The Giants were as helpless as infants before his delivery. Just how helpless is shown by the fact that only twice … was the ball driven beyond the infield.”69

Lavender, however, faltered in relief two appearances after this no-hitter as the Cubs fell to fifth after an excruciating doubleheader loss to the Cardinals. In Game One, Lavender entered in the twelfth and hit a batter with the bases loaded, giving Chicago the loss; the bags had been filled by a hit, a fielder’s choice, and a walk. The Cardinals scored two runs batting out of order, but Bresnahan failed to protest in time, so the tallies counted.

Although not the losing pitcher against St. Louis, Lavender would drop six straight, the last of which dropped the Cubs to last place, albeit only for a day. By closing with seven wins in nine games, Chicago finished fourth, disappointing given the season’s early promise but devastating due to the hasty giveaway of Cheney, the crippled condition of Saier, and the malignant presence of Zimmerman.

SOX SINKING

After July 17, the White Sox scored nearly a run fewer per game. In addition, Faber slumped, perhaps due to his heavy workload. Bolded OPS and ERA figures show performance declines compared to earlier data.

After splitting a doubleheader with Boston on the 17th, the White Sox dropped three straight then won five of six to pull into a virtual tie for first. Although sued for breach of promise by a “very pretty” woman on July 20,70 Jim Scott won two (one by a 1–0 shutout in which he had an RBI single) and saved a third game from July 22 through July 30.

On August 4, the Sox, in the midst of scoring thirteen runs in six straight losses, fell to third for the first time since May 18, where they would remain.

Blackburne, subpar at third base, threw away the first loss. With two on and none out in the ninth, New York bunted, but “‘Lena’ scooped up the ball and heaved it high over Fournier’s head,”71 giving Benz the first in a series of tough losses over the season’s last months.

The August 2 game ended even more excruciatingly. Faber took a 2–0 lead over the Yankees into the bottom of the ninth. With one out and runners on the corners, Faber induced a double-play ball to Eddie Collins, who “handled the ball as if it was an anarchist’s bomb. He picked it up and dropped it and then repeated the operation.”72 The error cut the lead to 2–1; an out and a single tied the game, ending Faber’s day. Scott relieved, issued a walk, and threw a wild pitch to send the Sox to a 3–2 loss.

Chicago left New York, lost two at Washington, and seemed doomed to a fifth straight defeat, trailing Walter Johnson 2–0. But the Sox bats improbably awoke with a six-run eighth-inning rally sparked by Johnson’s throwing error on Shano Collins’ bunt.

With a four-run lead, Mellie Wolfgang relieved for Chicago then gave way to Faber. With two outs in the last of the eighth and the lead trimmed to 6–5, Faber had two strikes on Johnson with runners on second and third. The lead runner broke for home, “but Johnson poked a low fly to short left field. Weaver was running in … possibly with the idea of covering the plate on the steal home.”73 Johnson’s flare drove in two runs; Weaver’s vacating his position had transformed a heartening rally against the game’s greatest pitcher. Johnson would come around to score in the White Sox’s crushing 8–6 loss.

Weaver made the front page of the paper a few days later. In an article sub-headed “White Sox Ball Player Has More Trouble on His Hands; Now Must Explain Dice Gambling,” a brief revealed, “Buck’s poolroom … was going at a little too merry clip at 5 o’clock yesterday morning, so the police swooped down upon it like a bunch of Red Sox with war bludgeons.”74

Chicago got better news in late August with the Sox’ blockbuster acquisition of Joe Jackson, who had flirted with the Whales.75 The Sox needed reinforcements; beginning with Jackson’s arrival, Chicago played 89 innings in six days, with two doubleheaders (the first game of the first DH which Eddie Collins won with an eleventh-inning single) and four straight extra-inning games that Chicago would split. On his third day in Chicago colors, Jackson tripled home Eddie Collins to lift the Sox to an 11-inning win over the Yankees.

Washington was the opposition for the rest of the bonus baseball. On August 24, trailing 5–4 in the bottom of the eleventh with two outs and the bases loaded, the Sox won on Murphy’s walk and Shano Collins’ single before succumbing to Johnson’s arm and bat in the next two games. First, he scored the winning run and got the win in a 7–4 14-inning defeat of Chicago; he then drove in a run and saved a 2–1 13-inning win.

In 21 plate appearances in 1915, Johnson hit .421/.476/.579 against Chicago. On the hill, he posted a 4–1 record with two saves.

Hitting pitchers plagued the Sox into September. With a 1–0 lead at Fenway Park in the bottom of the seventh inning on September 14, Benz faced Boston pitcher Babe Ruth, who “smashed the ball against the left-field fence, sending home the winning run.”76

Chicago won its last eleven games but finished a distant third. This streak made Chicago’s season seem more impressive retrospectively, but the run differentials of the league’s top three teams show that the White Sox should have done far better.

“Comiskey has been prodigal in his expenditures for new talent, and has not obtained a great deal in return…. Eddie Collins was worth every cent … but the keystone monarch alone could not make a winning team out of the collection of ivory that surrounded him.”77 The 1915 additions—Rowland managing, Faber starting, and Collins, Felsch, and Jackson playing—paid off two years later with the 1917 champions. The gambling associations of Weaver hinted, however, that the game’s greatest scandal would soon stagger the Sox.

WHALES WIN!

The Whales declined at bat and on the mound after July 17, but the resilient club nevertheless eked out just enough clutch wins. Bolded OPS and ERA figures show performance declines compared to earlier data.

Starting with the second game of the July 17 doubleheader, Chicago dropped five of six. On July 22, “King Mordecai of the House of Brown brought the Whales up from the sea of despair … by pitching almost perfect baseball against the scrappy Terrapins of Baltimore. Brownie subdued the turbulent Terps with three small hits, and his 4 to 1 victory was clearly earned.”78 Following this game, Brown would not start for an entire month due to kidney inflammation.79

With Brown out, Chicago dropped four straight home games to Newark, including a 3–2 16-inning August 2 loss, the winning run scoring when “Smith cracked at the critical moment,”80 making his 40th error.

Smith kicked two more in the next game, but McConnell threw a critical complete game to beat Brooklyn 3–1. “McConnell varied the mud ball with an ordinary spitter he had, the Brookfeds missing ‘em by six inches, but he fanned only one batter. Properly delivered, the mud ball breaks like an illegal emery ball. It shoots around the plate like a bilious gent wending his way homeward at 3 a.m.”81

Chicago made the short trip from Brooklyn to Newark, and Mann scored the winning run in the ninth inning of the third game against the Peppers on August 12 following a triple82 and a pinch-squeeze bunt by backup outfielder Charlie Hanford, who had been “ejected” two innings earlier “because Umpire McCormick’s sensitive ear was offended … [in Federal League rules] A player ousted merely from the bench, who has not been in the game, may return any time his manager desires, so Tinker was able to recall … Hanford … from exile.”83

Hendrix homered and won the opener of an August 14 doubleheader split with Baltimore. One of these games represented the replay of the June 19 protest.

Chicago dropped the last Baltimore game and then four to Buffalo, dropping from first to fourth in three days. On August 22, Brown again righted the Whales’ ship, returning from illness on a day in his honor for “one of the greatest games of his long career. Against his magnificent labor the wrecking Buffeds were like children, and Tinker’s Whales sauntered to a 4 to 0 shutout victory.”84

Brown dropped three in a row after his comeback and “showed weakness as a result of his recent sickness. His fast ball was lacking in its usual speed.”85

Hendrix also struggled in August, losing the day before Brown’s beauty and twice more before the month’s end. Smith cost him a game in Pittsburgh. With the Whales up 2–0 and a man on first in the bottom of the eighth, Steve Yerkes “rolled an easy one to Smith, who had a perfect double play set before him, but fumbled, and both runners were safe.”86 Smith’s 47th and final error for Chicago set up the tying runs, and a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the ninth brought home the winner.

Tinker hurriedly swapped Smith for Baltimore’s Mickey Doolin, but at first, the Whales played worse following the trade. Given a 6–1 lead in a game Chicago would lose 10–9 against Kansas City, Hendrix “following his usual custom, was knocked off the hill in less than six innings.”87 The Whales slipped a season-high 5½ games behind with less than a month to play.

Another no-hitter turned around Chicago’s season, albeit a no-hit defeat in the first game of a September 7 doubleheader to Dave Davenport of St. Louis. Perhaps embarrassed, Chicago would go 17-4-1 over the season’s final 22 games. Three of the four losses came by one run.

Hendrix started the turnaround with the second-game win over St. Louis. “Previously he had taken part in six games without registering a victory. He worked … with severe pains in his back and limped off after each inning. However he pitched a masterly”88 3–2 Whales win.

Brown pitched a complete-game win over Baltimore in the first of a four-game series. On September 12, in Game One of a doubleheader, McConnell earned his 22nd victory in a wild, 5–4 15-inning affair. The win returned Chicago to second place. Trailing 3–2 in the tenth, Mann doubled and Doolin singled to re-tie the game. Then, down 4–3 in the 15th, Tinker pinch-hit Hendrix for his third-place hitter, Zwilling, the team leader in several offensive categories. Hendrix singled, advanced on a wild pitch, and scored on an error. The winning run scored on a single by Joe Weiss, who had joined the team after winning an amateur newspaper talent contest!89 In Game Two, Hendrix pitched a darkness-shortened shutout to complete his virtuoso day.

In the Baltimore finale after an off day, Brown, on two days of rest, yielded seven runs in seven innings. Hendrix rescued Chicago again, however, saving the 8–7 win with two shutout frames.

On September 19, the Whales met Buffalo in a twin bill. Brown fired a complete-game 3–1 win in the opener; Weiss started a triple play on a line drive to first.90 McConnell pitched a four-hit shutout for his 23rd win in Game Two, in which Weiss had another game-winning hit.

Weiss tallied three more hits September 22 as Chicago earned a critical 4–4 tie against Newark. Trailing 3–0 early, and 4–3 in the bottom of the eleventh, Fischer and Beck delivered pinch-singles that enabled the Whales to draw even in a game that would last 15 innings.

In third place, 1½ behind, Chicago closed the season with home-and-home doubleheaders against Pittsburgh. On October 2, Chicago swept the first twin bill and moved back into first for the first time since August 18.

Brown was the hit of the first game. He went 4-for-4 at the plate, staking the Whales to an 8–1 lead and cruised to a complete game 8–5 win despite yielding 16 hits. In the nightcap, Chicago blew a 3–0 lead in the ninth but escaped with a 6–3 win in 11, the decisive run scoring on Mann’s double and Doolin’s single.

The greatest—and last—day in the Whales’ brief history took place October 3, 1915. In the first of yet another doubleheader, McConnell could not hold a 4–1 lead in the ninth, and Pittsburgh delivered a disheartening 5–4 defeat in 11 innings.

Entering the bottom of the sixth of the last game, neither team had scored. The fans on hand were apoplectic. Doolin singled and advanced to third with two out. Flack “caught one on the nose and drove a terrific drive to left center. [Pittsburgh player-manager Rebel] Oakes … dashed madly after the ball and the Rebel did manage to get his hands on it, but the sphere hopped out into the crowd for two bases, driving in Doolin with the one run necessary.”91 Zwilling and Wilson followed with RBI hits, making the final 3–0 Chicago in a game called after six and a half because of darkness.

By percentage points, the Whales had won Chicago’s only 1915 pennant. By capturing the second and last banner in the brief history of the Federal League, the legacy of the Whales flickers a century later while the White Sox and the Cubs continue to play.

A SABR member since 1990, MARK S. STERNMAN has written for “The Inside Game,” the SABR BioProject, and “The Miracle Braves of 1914: Boston’s Original Worst-to-First World Series Champions.”

Notes

1 Chicago also had Negro League teams. “Dizzy Dismukes of the Indianapolis ABCs no-hit the Chicago Giants on May 9, while Dick Whitworth of the Chicago American Giants also no-hit the Chicago Giants on September 19.” www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/1915_in_the_Negro_Leagues (accessed January 3, 2015).

2 “The Chicago Cubs,” The Sporting Life, October 31, 1914: 7.

3 “National League Notes,” The Sporting Life, November 7, 1914: 8.

4 “Nativity against Him,” The Sporting Life, November 14, 1914: 7.

5 “National League Notes,” The Sporting Life, November 28, 1914: 4.

6 I.E. Sanborn, “Chatter about Cubs,” The Sporting Life, December 19, 1914: 3.

7 Sean Deveney, Before Wrigley Became Wrigley (New York: Sports Publishing, 2014), 208.

8 James Crusinberry, “Eleven Cubs Leave here for Tampa Training Camp,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27, 1915: 9.

9 I.E. Sanborn, “Cubs to Battle Cubans Again at Tampa Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, 1915: 13.

10 “Adams would have had the kind of APBA card that you’d have set fire to if he was on your team. He went 1-9 with a pretty decent team, had an ERA 70 percent over the league norm, and as a hitter went oh-for-thirty.” Bill James, The Baseball Book 1990 (New York: Villard Books, 1990), 183.

11 I.E. Sanborn, “Rain Disappoints 49 Bugs Who Go to Cub Park,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 22, 1915: 10.

12 I.E. Sanborn, “The Chicago Cubs,” The Sporting Life, April 10, 1915: 5.

13 I.E. Sanborn, “Rally in Ninth Nips Cubs, 7-4, in Real Farce,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 18, 1915: B1.

14 I.E. Sanborn, “Chicago Chat,” The Sporting Life, May 15, 1915: 6.

15 I.E. Sanborn, “The Chicago Cubs,” The Sporting Life, May 22, 1915: 6.

16 I.E. Sanborn, “Rogers Win, 1-0; Bert Humphries Holds New York,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 19, 1915: 13.

17 “Echoes of the Game,” Boston Daily Globe, June 17, 1915: 7.

18 “Rice,” “Ed Pfeffer Pitches Nineteen-Inning Game,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 18, 1915: 2.

19 Wm. A. Phelon, “The Season’s Game,” Baseball Magazine, August 1915: 19.

20 I.E. Sanborn, “Zim Steals Home in the Ninth, Winning Wild Battle, 14-13,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 25, 1915: 13.

21 I.E. Sanborn, “Zabel Hurls Three Hit Game, but Seven Errors Beat Cubs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 29, 1915: 11.

22 “H. Zimmerman Wants Divorce,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 30, 1915: 9.

23 I.E. Sanborn, “Lavender Loses Two Hit Game, but Cheney Blanks Redlegs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 1, 1915: 13.

24 I.E. Sanborn, “Saier’s Drive Gives Rogers 2 to 1 Victory,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 3, 1915: 11.

25 Grantland Rice, “Giving a Modest Star His Due,” The Sporting Life, July 31, 1915.

26 Ward Mason, “Vic Saier, the Slugger of the Cubs,” Baseball Magazine, September 1915: 78.

27 James Crusinberry, “Murray Joins Rogers’ Squad; Rain Balks Brooklyn Game,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 9, 1915: 11.

28 James Crusinberry, “Cubs Lose to Robins in 10th, After Leading by Six Runs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10, 1915: 15.

29 “Dodgers Win But Drop back in the Race,” The New York Times, July 13, 1915.

30 Warren Brown, The Chicago White Sox (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 63.

31 W. A. Carlson, “Eddie Collins,” Baseball Magazine, March 1915: 68.

32 Sam Weller, “Sox Start West Tuesday Night,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 14, 1915: B1.

33 Keene Gardiner, “Introducing Mr. Buck Weaver in New Role of Business Man,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 15, 1915: 14.

34 R.S. Ranson, “The White Sox,” Sporting Life, March 27, 1915: 4.

35 “Claims a Pitching Record,” Sporting Life, May 22, 1915: 8.

36 James Crusinberry, “White Sox Beat Boston in 17 Inning Battle, 3 to 2,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 22, 1915: 9.

37 “Daring Stealing by White Hose Leaders, with Some Great Fielding, Spells Defeat for Red Sox,” Boston Daily Globe, May 24, 1915: 7.

38 T.H. Murnane, “‘Smoky Joe’ Pulls White Sox out of Lead,” Boston Daily Globe, June 8, 1915: 6.

39 Chandler D. Richter, “New Sidelights on Baseball,” Sporting Life, June 26, 1915: 8.

40 Tom Ruane, “A Retro-Review of the 1910s (the 1914-1919 edition),” www.retrosheet.org/Research/RuaneT/rev1910_art.htm (accessed January 16, 2015).

41 James Crusinberry, “Sox Lam Ball; Crush Indians Despite Slips,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 23, 1915: 14.

42 James Crusinberry, “Sox Beat Cleveland in 19 Innings, 5 to 4,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 25, 1915: 13.

43 I.E. Sanborn, “Sox Trounce Mackmen, 6-4, in Crazy Game,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 15, 1915: 13.

44 I.E. Sanborn, “Chicago Feds Sign Walter Johnson for Two Years,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 4, 1914: 11.

45 Clarence F. Lloyd, “St. Louis’ Story,” Sporting Life, December 12, 1914: 9.

46 “Otto Knabe’s Terrapins kicked the sperm oil out of Joe Tinker’s Whales” represents an excellent example. Sam Weller, “Swat by Mr. Zinn ‘K.O.’ for Whales at Baltimore, 9-8,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 7, 1915: 11.

47 James Crusinberry, “Left Handers Beaten in Game at Whale Camp,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 26, 1915: 18.

48 Sam Weller, “Outfielder Mann of Braves Jumps to Local Feds,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1915: 16.

49 Philip Morgan, “The Chicago Whales,” The Sporting Life, April 10, 1915: 7.

50 “Notes of the Whales,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 14, 1915: 13.

51 “Chicago Chat,” The Sporting Life, May 1, 1915: 12. “In August he suffered one of the stranger injuries in baseball history. The Wilkes Barre Times Leader said that ‘Smith leaped for a hot one, lost his balance and doubled backwards wrenching the muscles of his neck and spiking himself in the back of the head. Smith was knocked out completely.’” Jim Sandoval, “Jimmy Smith,” sabr.org/bioproj/person/bcee87a4 (accessed January 15, 2015).

52 “Tinker Is out,” The Sporting Life, May 15, 1915: 13.

53 Sam Weller, “No Hits Made off Hendrix; Beats Rebels,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 16, 1915: B1.

54 Sam Weller, “Brown Blanks Buffeds, 8 to 0, with One Swat,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1915: 11.

55 Sam Weller, “Whales Defeat Terrapins, But Knabe Protests,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 20, 1915: B1.

56 J. J. Alcock, “Eastland Disaster Closes Whale Gate; Two Contests Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1915: 13.

57 Sam Weller, “Brown Defeats Newfeds, 1 to 0, in Mound Duel,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 30, 1915: 9.

58 Sam Weller, “Whales Score 5 Runs in Ninth; Win in Twelfth,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 1, 1915: 13.

59 Sam Weller, “Three Run Rally in Twelfth Gives Whales Victory, 3 to 2,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1915: 13.

60 James Crusinberry, “Rajah, Aroused, Levies Big Fines on Zim and Zabel,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 21, 1915: 11.

61 James Crusinberry, “Shakeup Coming Unless Cubs Get Hearts in Game,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1915: 13.

62 John J. McGraw, “In the National League,” Boston Daily Globe, July 26, 1915: 4.

63 James Crusinberry, “Cubs back Home with Only Coin to Offset Woe,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 28, 1915: 9.

64 James Crusinberry, “Losing Streak of Cubs Ended by Even Break,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 31, 1915: 9.

65 “Cutshaw Poles out Six Hits off Cubs,” The New York Times, August 10, 1915.

66 “Pierce and Zim Fight; Vaughn among Injured,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 15, 1915: B1.

67 James Crusinberry, “Cubs and Braves Play 4-4 Tie; Archer Falls and Loses Run,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1915: 9.

68 “Brooklyn Gets Cheney,” The New York Times, August 30, 1915.

69 “No-Hit Game Won by Jim Lavender,” The New York Times, September 1, 1915.

70 “American League Affairs,” The Sporting Life, August 7, 1914: 9.

71 “Chicago Baseman Tosses Game away,” The New York Times, August 1, 1915.

72 “Scott’s Wild Toss Lets in Winning Run,” The New York Times, August 3, 1915.

73 I.E. Sanborn, “White Sox Fall in Two Battles at Washington,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 7, 1915: 7.

74 “Buck Weaver’s Poolroom Raided and 12 Arrested,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 16, 1915: 1.

75 “Plot That Failed,” The Sporting Life, August 28, 1915: 9.

76 T.H. Murnane, “‘Speed Boys owe This One to Ruth,” Boston Daily Globe, September 15, 1915: 1.

77 I.E. Sanborn, “Chicago Gleanings,” The Sporting Life, October 2, 1915: 6.

78 J. J. Alcock, “Brown Allows Only Three Hits; Whales Win, 4-1,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 23, 1915: 9.

79 “Brown Sent to Hospital; Now on Way to Recovery,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 30, 1915: 9.

80 J. J. Alcock, “Whales Lose to Newfeds in Sixteen Inning Combat, 3-2,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 3, 1915: 11.

81 “Notes of the Whales,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 6, 1915: 9.

82 Mann had an FL-leading nineteen triples in 1915, including four in July, four in August, and seven in September.

83 Alcock called this quirk “a new wrinkle in Federal league rules.” J. J. Alcock, “Squeeze Play in Last Gives Whales 2-1 Victory Over Peps,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 13, 1915: 9.

84 J. J. Alcock, “Fed Fans Flock to Whales Park for ‘Brown Day,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 23, 1915: 9.

85 “Notes of the Whales,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 31, 1915: 11.

86 Sam Weller, “Smith’s Error Helps Pittfeds Defeat Whales,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 28, 1915: 11.

87 Sam Weller, “Whales Beaten in Binglefest at Kansas City,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September, 1915: B3.

88 Sam Weller, “No Hits, No Runs off Davenport; Whales Divide,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 8, 1915: 11.

89 J. J. Alcock, “Tribune Boy’s Swat Wins for Tinker in 15th,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 13, 1915: 11.

90 J. J. Alcock, “Tribune Boys Help Whales Win Twin Bill,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 20, 1915: 11.

91 J. J. Alcock, “Whales Win Pennant as 34,000 Fans Cheer,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 4, 1915: 13.

The date was July 16, 1909, and there was baseball in the air.1 The catcher showed up in a Panama hat. The left fielder was clad in white flannel trousers with a black silk watch fob dangling from his belt. The third baseman arrived in a suit described by one newspaper as having been stolen from a circus clown. The opposing center fielder—a future Speaker of the House of Representatives— wore a pair of checkered golf trousers tucked into long brown stockings and a silk shirt described in one news account as a “negligee.” The venue for this fashion festival? American League Park in the nation’s capital. The occasion for all of this sartorial sporting splendor? The very first Congressional Baseball Game.

The crowd of spectators was variously estimated to number between four hundred and one thousand, the difference likely being explained by the inclusion of the multitude who entered using free passes. Remember, this is the U.S. Congress about which we are talking. For those in attendance who were focused on the quality of play, the contest was destined to disappoint. The pitching was less than mediocre, but even that out-classed the fielding. Generous scorekeepers among the press on hand tallied only fourteen official errors; it was a charitable estimate. The batting star of the game was obvious—Representative Joseph Francis O’Connell of Massachusetts managed five hits in six trips to the plate, among them the first home run in congressional baseball history. Sort of. The home run ball did not come close to clearing a wall; it simply rolled around in the outfield and by the time it was retrieved and thrown in O’Connell was huffing and puffing toward the plate. He scored only because the catcher, James Francis Burke of Pennsylvania, muffed the throw.

For a time, the contest was nip and tuck. After two innings and a ten-run frame, the Democrats led 12-2. After five innings and a ten-run frame, the score stood at Democrats 14, Republicans 13. But by the end of the seventh, when the game was called because of fatigue and aching muscles, the final tally was 26-16 in favor of the Democrats. According to the box score,2 there were forty-five hits in all, four walks (Vice President Sherman, who did not attend, had decreed that a base on balls would require five balls rather than the customary four, though it is not clear whether this rule was implemented), and twelve strikeouts. The flavor of the game was perhaps best reflected in two particular plays. In one thrilling sequence captured by a newspaper photographer,3 Mr. Burke of the GOP is seen attempting to steal home while his counterpart, William Oldfield of Arkansas, awaits him at home plate, holding up the ball and yelling, “Come to my arms, Jimmy darling.” Unfortunately for Mr. Oldfield, he then simply dropped the ball, and the run scored. In the other play, during the Republicans’ mid-game rally, the watch-fobbed Democratic left fielder, the Honorable J. Thomas Heflin of Alabama, who by then had positioned himself beneath a large tree along the foul line where he was aided by a large dog that he dispatched to retrieve any balls hit in his direction, was presented with a line drive off the bat of Leonard Paul Howland of Ohio, the GOP first baseman, that was headed straight for him. Heflin ducked as the ball sailed by, and Howland should have had a home run. Alas, when he made it to second base he collapsed of exhaustion and called for someone else to come out and finish running for him.

Seated in the front row of the grandstand, with his feet for a time propped up on the railing and his purple stockings in full view, was Joseph “Uncle Joe” Cannon, the Speaker of the House and arguably the most powerful man ever to occupy that position. When it became clear that his Republican charges would fall to ignominious defeat, Cannon, by one account, threw down the large cigar he had been smoking and stomped out of the ballpark to a chorus of derisive catcalls from the Democrats.

But even as the GOP lost the baseball game, Cannon himself was the winner in a much larger contest. For this was a story less about a baseball game than about political gamesmanship. The “game” was played to serve the purposes of the chief gamesman. And at least in the short run, it performed that task quite well.

Congressman Edward Vreeland.

PLAYING BALL ON THE HILL

Joe Cannon had a problem, albeit one of his own makings, and a little inside baseball between the two parties— both on and off the field—would buy him the time to solve it. To understand why the game on the field was played, we first need to understand the game that was being played in the House. As in all things “Washington,” that means we need to follow the money.

Until 1909 the government had remained small. It was funded primarily by a highly protectionist tariff system. But an emerging movement, the progressives, saw the high tariffs mainly as protecting the trusts, fast growing and powerful industrial corporations which they were intent on reining in, and they demanded reform. To replace the revenue that they knew would be lost in the process, and to fund the growth in more aggressive government regulatory initiatives—a.k.a. trustbusting—that they craved, the progressives also backed new alternative forms of taxation, including the imposition of a personal income tax. A recent court decision had made clear that the latter could not be enacted without amending the Constitution.4

Standing against this was a conservative majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives led by Speaker Cannon, along with a similarly protectionist-minded majority in the Senate.

Cannon, who was a sharp operator—savvy, cagey, determined, and often vindictive—had seen the legislative battle over tariffs coming, and in the prior Congress he had pressed his colleague, Sereno Payne, who was both majority leader and Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, to take a deep dive into the tariff structure and prepare a bill that would not be introduced until 1909—after the 1908 election. In March 1909, a newly elected President Taft called for a special session of Congress to deal with tariffs. Cannon then promptly had Payne bring forward his legislation, which gave every appearance of responding to the progressives’ demands for tariff reform. But appearances were the point; Cannon and Payne had no intention of allowing for the passage of true reform. To the contrary, they adopted a highly cynical strategy of encouraging the reformers in public while assuring that in the end they would fail.

Payne’s bill was introduced in March, debated briefly, then passed in April and sent to the Senate, where it came under the control of fellow protectionist Nelson Aldrich, Chair of the Finance Committee. Aldrich stewarded the bill through nearly three months of open debate, in the course of which it was amended 847 times—always in the direction of greater protectionism. While this was happening, all the Democrats and Progressive Republicans in the House could do was to watch. That was because Speaker Cannon, who had wide-ranging powers, refused to name any legislative committees in the House until the tariff bill was passed in final form and signed by the president. Since the committee process was then as now the lifeblood of Congress, this meant that literally nothing substantive could happen in their absence.

The only exception to this came in June, when the proposed Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing the personal income tax, was rushed through the House with the complete support of the Speaker and his allies, who opposed the tax itself but backed the amendment for two reasons: they knew it would assuage the progressives, who were becoming increasingly restless, by continuing the fiction that the House would pursue a reformist agenda, and they were confident that the requisite number of states would never vote for ratification.

In the meantime, Washington’s typical summer weather— intense heat and humidity—began to build in earnest. And though mechanical air conditioning had been invented by Willis Carrier a few years earlier, the Capitol Building was three decades away from installing it. The weather, then, combined with the enforced inactivity of the body and the Speaker’s increasingly obvious circumvention of efforts at tariff reform, was generating another kind of heat in the halls of Congress. The mixture of frustration, anger, boredom, and impatience was boiling over. Something had to be done.

On Day 100 of the confrontation, the House leadership moved toward cooling off the situation, at least long enough to complete passage of the bill.

TAKE IT OUTSIDE! THE GENESIS OF THE CONGRESSIONAL BASEBALL GAME

On that day, June 23, three weeks before the competing nines would square off at American League Park, a caravan of sorts—a pair of touring cars—set out from the Willard Hotel in Washington for Oriole Park in Baltimore, some forty miles away.5 Members of the party could have taken the electric rail service that ran every half hour between downtown Washington and central Baltimore, a one-hour trip. But they opted instead to make the drive, a two-hour journey at best over a poorly delineated and at points lightly maintained network of county and state roads marked by multiple rough railroad grade crossings. Car trouble along the way delayed the group even further, but that was acceptable because most likely the real purpose of the drive was to provide an opportunity for some private, uninterrupted strategizing, and the longer trip allowed for more conversation.

In one auto rode Sereno Payne, two fellow Republican congressmen, one a member of Payne’s Ways and Means Committee, and a tariff lobbyist. In the other were newly elected congressman John Tener, two other Republicans, and a lone Democrat who had already cut a deal on a product-specific tariff. A ninth participant, the recently retired Republican House whip, met the group once they eventually reached their destination. While we cannot know what was said during the drive, it is amply clear that, once at the ballpark, all of the discussion within the group and with reporters at the game focused on the dominant issue of the day, the tariff bill.

John Tener was the first former major leaguer to be elected to Congress. Tener pitched two seasons for the Chicago White Stockings in the late 1880s, participated in the Spalding World Tour of 1888-89 (where he did double duty as treasurer of the venture and Spalding’s personal secretary and was the participant selected to explain the game of baseball to the future King Edward VII when the tour reached England), and many years later would serve as president of the National League. In the course of the tour, Tener became fast friends with Ned Hanlon, who recruited him to the Pittsburgh entry in the short-lived Players League in 1890. When the league folded, Hanlon returned to the baseball career that would lead him to the Hall of Fame, while Tener, who was from the Pittsburgh area, began a career in banking and other businesses. By 1909, Hanlon was owner of the Baltimore Eastern League team. We know that the congressional junket to Baltimore was arranged in the course of a telephone call between Tener and Hanlon on June 22. This fact has led historians to conclude that it was Tener who originated the idea for the initial congressional matchup. But that overlooks evidence to the contrary. There were other claimants to this title, perhaps most credibly Congressman Edward Vreeland of New York. Vreeland was a Republican insider and would be named to chair the Banking Committee once Cannon resumed the normal conduct of business in the House.6 Vreeland and Tener were both bankers from the western parts of their neighboring states and may have known each other professionally. But regardless, chances are that upon arriving in Congress banker Tener, who continued in the business during his term, would have sought out Vreeland in any event and Vreeland, a baseball fan, would have been open to such a gesture.

Vreeland was originally scheduled to make the trip to Baltimore but begged off at the last minute. However, it is quite possible that he had a conversation beforehand with Payne, another close follower of baseball, or even Cannon, where he shared the idea for the game. Whatever the case, it was immediately after the Baltimore visit that planning began for the congressional contest.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tener was the face of organizing the GOP roster, while Champ Clark, the minority leader, organized the Democrats. But there are reasons to believe that Tener’s role was limited. For one thing, almost none of the players he named in his first lineup actually played in the game. The entire group, save one, was changed at the last minute. In contrast, the initial Democratic lineup changed very little by game day. But more fundamentally, there was a great deal more involved in organizing the game than simply naming the players. A field had to be located and reserved, tickets and passes needed to be printed and distributed, vendors and stadium staff needed to be recruited, the charity that would benefit from the gate had to be selected, funds needed to be collected and, following the game, distributed to the chosen charity, and more. John Tener was, in reality, a one-term congressman with an abysmal voting record,7 limited staff support, and no particular institutional interest. He was useful to the leadership mainly as a minor celebrity who could serve as the face of the game and attract participants and spectators from the political class and the media. And that was precisely what the leadership needed if the baseball game were to serve its primary purpose—as a pleasant distraction that could buy a little time.

Another indicator of the probable limits of John Tener’s role is the makeup of the Baltimore travel party. If he had been the moving force behind that trip, one thing he almost surely would have done would have been to assure that he rode in the same auto as his most powerful companion, Mr. Payne. But Payne and Tener rode in separate vehicles. Moreover, given that Tener, during his congressional tenure, displayed no strong policy interests whatsoever, it would seem more likely that he would have selected friends and acquaintances to accompany him to Baltimore rather than a bunch of tariff experts. He almost surely knew one member of the party, lobbyist J.B. Fischer, because Fischer had served on the national board of the Elks organization around the time when Tener had been that group’s Grand Exalted Ruler, its top national leader. But as to the others there is no obvious personal link.

One final point in this regard. Given that the 1909 congressional game was, on its own merits, a political success that achieved media attention and public approbation, if Tener had been truly motivated by the idea he would most likely have organized a second contest the following year, 1910. He did not. The second game in the series was not played until 1911, when Tener was back in Pennsylvania serving as the state’s governor.

Whatever the details of the planning, the “athletes” representing their respective parties took the field at American League Park on July 16, just three weeks after that trip to Baltimore. Comments by the players themselves during the course of the afternoon were replete with references to the tariff bill, and news accounts both before and after commonly used the legislation and the state of the House as a frame for their game coverage. As the Boston Globe put it on the day of the game in an article headlined, “Greater Issue Than the Tariff: All Washington Excited Over the Congressional Ball Game.”

The conference on the tariff, the urgent deficiency bill [today we would call this a supplemental appropriation], and in fact all other legislation has been forgotten. Plastered all over the lobby, back of the speaker’s desk and in the cloak, rooms are big notices that the game will be pulled off today. It is a rare event indeed, when the sacred precincts of the house [sic] contain a notice of anything except to keep off the grass or to stay out of the private elevators, but in this case all rules have been swept to the winds.8

The Cincinnati Enquirer echoed the theme in its next-day recap:

The Democrats pounded the ball in much the same spirit they would hammer away at the tariff bill if “Uncle Joe” Cannon gave them half a chance, while the teamwork of the Republicans was as disjointed as their views are on the subject of raw materials and downward revision. There is only one way for the Republicans to get even, and that is through a series of special rules, which Speaker Cannon devises, containing every ingeniously cruel limitation upon the already curtailed privileges of the minority in the House….9

Or, as one unnamed Democratic participant put it: We had scores to settle, and this sort of partly evens things up, though I’m rather afraid that “Uncle Joe” will plant his foot more firmly on some of our necks to get back at us.10

1909 Congressional Game Box Score

HARDBALL ON THE HOUSE FLOOR

At the end of July, just a few days after the game, the Senate passed and returned to the House its amended, and far more protectionist, version of the tariff bill, now referenced jointly as the Payne-Aldrich Bill. The House promptly rejected the Senate version and sent it to conference for reconciliation. This was the critical point in the Speaker’s strategy, for Cannon, in concert with Senator Aldrich, controlled the conference committee, which promptly reported out a “final” version of the bill —one that incorporated all 847 Senate amendments. Through his control of the Rules Committee, which set the terms for floor consideration of all legislation, the bill was presented with virtually no opportunity for debate, and none at all for other than technical (proof-reading) amendments. It passed the House on August 5, 1909. President Taft, who had been waiting in a room just off the House chamber, signed Payne-Aldrich into law just minutes later.

Literally five minutes after the bill became law, recorded beginning on the very same page of the Congressional Record,11 Speaker Cannon proceeded to name members to all of the House committees of the 61st Congress, taking care to reward those who had helped him on the tariff, after which the House immediately adjourned the special session. Members would not return until December.

Uncle Joe had won the battle, but the victory was pyrrhic. In the next (1910) session of the House, in a clear repudiation, the Speaker’s powers were sharply reduced. No Speaker since Cannon has wielded such control of the body. In the 1910 election, Democrats reclaimed the House itself, making Champ Clark the Speaker. In the next Congress, the Payne-Aldrich tariffs were replaced by a much less protectionist regime. And not long afterward, the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by the states and incorporated into the Constitution. Not surprisingly, it did not take Congress long to begin taking advantage of this new power.

All of Cannon’s political machinations, then, in the long term were for naught. But in the moment—at a critical time in the political game—the very first congressional baseball game had played its part. It is perhaps worth noting that the 2025 Congressional Baseball Game, the ninetieth to be contested between the two parties, comes at a time when tariffs, progressivism, and internal factional disputes are once again at play in Congress.

J.B. MANHEIM was founding director of the School of Media & Public Affairs at The George Washington University and is a past chair of the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association. He is author of The Deadball Files, an award-winning series of present-day mysteries and legal thrillers grounded in events of the Deadball Era and, with Lawrence Knorr, co-author of What’s in Ted’s Wallet? The Newly Revealed T206 Baseball Card Collection of Thomas Edison’s Youngest Son. This article is based on his latest book, The House Divided: The Story of the First Congressional Baseball Game, which will be published in spring 2025 by Sunbury Press.

NOTES

1. The much abbreviated account that follows is based on an amalgam of the information, often overlapping, provided in the following sources: “Democrats Win Real Ball Game,” Washington Herald, July 17, 1909, 1, 9; “Carnage Is Something Awful When Those Big Swatting Democrats Cut Loose: Republican Ball Team Ground into Dust,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 17, 1909, 1, 2; “De-mocrats Win Baseball Game,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 17, 1909, 4; “Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee Stars, Who Figured in the Recent Congressional Baseball Game,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), July 23, 1909, 8; “Democrats Score Their Only Victory of the Extra Session,” Nashville Banner, July 17, 1909, 3; “Solons Play Ball,” Washington Post, July 17, 1909, 1, 4; “List of Cripples Numbers Twenty,” Washington Times, July 17, 1909, 4; Mary Craig, “A Comedy of Errors: The First Congressional Baseball Game,” The Hardball Times, April 10, 2017, accessed July 9, 2024, at tht.fangraphs.- com/a-comedy-of-errors-the-first-congressional-baseball-game; and Robert Pohl, “Lost Capitol Hill: The First Congressional Baseball Game,” February 27, 2012, accessed July 11, 2024, at thehillishome.com/2012/02/lost-capitolhill-the-first-congressional-baseball-game.

2. See, for example, “Democrats Win Real Ballgame,” op. cit., 9.

3. See “Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee Stars…,” op. cit.

4. The 1895 case, in which the Supreme Court reversed a previous decision, was Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company. See Cynthia G. Fox, “Income Tax Records of the Civil War Years,” Prologue Magazine, Winter 1986, 18:4, passim.

5. See, for example, “Ned Hanlon As Host: He Will Enter-tain a Congressional Party at Oriole Park,” Baltimore Sun, June 23, 1909, 10; “Noted Men to See Game: Represen-tatives From Several States to Be Guests of President Hanlon,” Washington Evening Star, June 23, 1909, 14; and “Congressmen on Tariff: Visitors to Baseball Game Talk Of ‘Revision Downward,’” Baltimore Sun, June 24, 1909, 12.

6. “Rep. Vreeland Is Doing Well,” Buffalo Evening News, July 16, 1909, 1.

7. Voting data are drawn from “Rep. John Tener,” accessed July 2, 2024, at www.govtrack.us/congress/members/ john_tener/410707.

8. “Greater Issue Than the Tariff,” Boston Globe, July 16, 1909, 8.

9. “Carnage Is Something Awful…,” op. cit.

10. “Solons Play Ball,” op. cit., 1.

11. Congressional Record–House, Vol. 44, Part 5 (Washington: United States Congress), August 5, 1909, 5088.

In the early years of the Tompkins regime, the Observer had no recognizable sports page. The major league baseball scores were liable to be found anywhere, but usually near the classified ads or between items of local interest. At first, simple line scores were all that appeared, when anything appeared. The reporting of major league games was, at best, haphazard. In 1896, short, pithy paragraphs, sometimes just one sentence long, accompanied the line tallies. A classic example is this piece on the April 28 contest between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. “Only four hits were made on each side and at least half a dozen of these were lucky.” This early writing usually concentrated on the performance of the pitchers and the effect their hurling had on the game’s final outcome. League standings were introduced in 1896 and final batting statistics for the season were first printed in 1898.

Charlotte has had for many years a minor league club of some affiliation playing within its borders. In the last decade of the 19th century, it was the Corkers of the Interstate League. Almost from its inception in 1892, Tompkins’ Observer ran feature-length articles and complete box scores on the home team. Major league coverage was not comparable for many years. The accounts of the Corker games were often given to hyperbole; to wit, “The most brilliant game ever played on the Columbia diamond was witnessed here this evening when the Charlotte boys crossed bats with the home team.” The final verdict read 1-0 in favor of Columbia. The area colleges, especially the state university at Chapel Hill, received special treatment, usually in the form of a paragraph on the game’s salient points and a box score.

A fact worthy of note is that during times of intense political activity or war, coverage of the national pastime diminished greatly. Interest, however, remained high as the Observer pointed out one day in 1898 as American warships under William Sampson were steaming victoriously from Santiago, Cuba:

“Is baseball doomed?”, asks the Atlanta Journal. It is not. If the Journal were a morning paper, it would know that when the war (Spanish-American War) was at its height and the bulletin boards were thronged with people reading of the destruction of Cervera’s fleet or the battle of Santiago, none of these things moved the baseball cranks, but these piped in with their usual inquiries as to “how today’s score stands”, and the morning paper which, by any bad chance, failed to print the score, was a failure in the eyes of the cranks, no matter how hot its war news was. No, baseball is not doomed.

The Observer learned its lesson, for in 1914, when all Europe was ablaze with the guns of August, the headline read, “War Will Wait – The Braves Must Win.” The day-to-day saga of George Stallings and his “Miracle Braves” led by Rabbit Maranvile seemed to absorb the thoughts of Americans much more than a mere balance-of-power-squabble some 3000 miles away. By 1917, things would be different, however.

A new major league and a new term, “World Series,” were introduced to the American public in the initial decade of the present century. At first, the Observer seemed satisfied simply to print the line scores of American League ballgames, but deigned not to supply the crank with the standings of the new circuit. By 1903 however, the American League was on equal footing with its older, established brother in the eyes of the Observer‘s editors. If Observer readers did not know that Boston and Pittsburgh were vying for the first world’s championship in 1903, they never would have realized it by scanning the pages of their morning paper that October as the Observer treated it like just another series. Front-page coverage for the World Series came in 1905 when Christy Mathewson shut out the A’s three times and, by 1910, the whole sports page was filled with news of the Series and its personalities, not to mention its statistics.

It was during this decade that rhyme and reason introduced themselves at the Observer sports desk; thus, some consistency was displayed in its baseball coverage. For example the right things (important hits, how the winning run or runs were scored, winning and losing pitchers) were being written about each game and winning and losing streaks were now being updated. Most significantly, articles on the big league ball games slowly started edging their way to the top of the sports page, thereby endangering the “most-favored” status of the area’s minor league clubs. Furthermore, the grand old game had become a sport of year-round interest as practitioners in the Hot Stove League were treated to all kinds of trade rumors and various other anecdotes and vignettes during the winter. Commencing in 1909, the spring training communiques of the noted baseball writer John B. Foster were run in the Observer. Finally, tabs were kept on the doings of local stars in the major leagues, including those of a slugger from Greenville, just across the South Carolina line, a man who would achieve immortality for his exploits with the bat and notoriety for his alleged involvement in the most sordid episode in baseball history. The reference is to Joseph Jefferson “Shoeless Joe” Jackson.

It was not that coverage of the minor leagues diminished during this period but that interest in the major circuits increased. Charlotte’s entry in the new Virginia-Carolina League, the Hornets, still received the usual long, detailed story and box score for each of its games and the standings of many minor loops, including the relatively far-away Eastern League, appeared every day. The college game did not suffer from want of coverage either, as scores were conscientiously reported and an All-Southern team was chosen annually at the close of each season.

Two wars, a scandal, and new trends in sportswriting and reporting dominated the Observer‘s baseball coverage in this century’s second decade. In 1912, the Charlotte paper experimented with the printing of daily box scores. Individual statistics and league leader numbers were first seen in the Observer during the 1910 season, just in time for the Cobb-Lajoie dogfight for the American League batting title and the snappy touring car the Chalmers company would award the winner. Though not particularly stylish by today’s standards, the sportswriting in the Observer was improving and, at the very least, colorful. Reported one of Smokey Joe Wood’s masterful victories in the 1912 World Series, an Observer scribe remarked that

Gray sodden clouds screened the sun and in the murky atmosphere Wood’s speedball worked havoc with the Giant batters.

Headlines from this period were long, tedious, frequently tongue-twisting affairs. For example, on July 1, 1913, the headline crowning the major league roundup read, “Watson Holds Mackmen Down –  The Smiling Slabbist Allowed Only One Willow to Graft Itself to His Curves.”

The rise of the sports feature writer, the syndicated sports columnist and the baseball-personality-turned-reporter was a salient development in sports coverage in this decade. The Observer hooked up with the NEA news service in 1914 and soon thereafter the imaginative prose of Billy Evans graced its sports page. Scouring about for the unusual and unique in baseball, Evans’ subjects included anything and everything from Cuban stars, such as Balmadero Acosta, Jacinto Calvo, and Adolfo Luque, playing in America, to “Yoricks of the National Game,” wild, clownish – but legendary – men like Rube Waddell and his roommate Ossee Schreckengost, Nick Altrock, and Germany Schaefer. Another NEA writer whose features were run frequently in the Observer was Paul Purman. Possessed of a style more analytical than that of Evans, Purman yet wrote beautifully and poignantly of the struggle of the little man and the partially crippled to succeed in baseball.

The two outstanding syndicated sports columnists of the era were Ringgold W. “Ring” Lardner and Grantland Rice. The Observer carried Rice’s words of wit and wisdom quite often; Lardner’s, less so. “Granny” even by today’s standards, was the quintessential sportswriter  –  clever, knowledgeable, and given to composing sports doggerel and quoting Shakespeare. One of his better efforts in verse, a tribute to Stuffy McInnis of the Philadelphia A’s, appeared in the Observer of August 18, 1915:

Piking alone with the trailers
Here as the Summer flits,
Sometimes isn’t it lonesome
Wasting your two-base hits?

Batting above Three-Hundred
While hanging on to a dream,
Swept from the years behind you,
Last of the Old Regime?

Lardner’s most memorable contribution to the pages of the Observer, his pre-Series assessment of the ill-fated 1919 World’s Championship related in his classic “busher” vocabulary, was set off by the headline “Ring Lardner Tells of World’s Series in `Ringing’ Terms – Picking the Winner Not an Easy Matter, According to the Chi Comedian – But You Know Me Al – If Reds Don’t Win, Sox Will, Says Expert.”

Though most, if not all, of their work was ghost-written (Christy Mathewson being the possible exception), many baseball personalities tried their hand at reporting and column-writing. The college-bred Mathewson, “Big Six” and the “idol of a nation,” supplied Charlotte’s Hot Stove Leaguers with fodder in the winter of 1913 when the Observer ran “Matty’s Big League Gossip.” Christy’s stall-mate in John McGraw’s powerhouse pitching stable, Rube Marquard, “covered” the 1913 World Series. Stories carrying his candid by-line, “By Richard Marquard – Star Southpaw of the Giants”, were found in the Observer that last autumn before the outbreak of World War I. McGraw himself got into the act the following spring training when he gave his impression of and predictions for the National League that year. No, “Muggsy” did not pick the Braves to take it all!

The decade’s two wars – the Federal League War of 1914-15 and World War I – affected our national game each in its own way. The Federal League, the first widespread organized resistance to the reserve clause, could have destroyed baseball down to its very foundations with its “raids” of National and American League ball clubs. The Observer saw this conflict through to its ultimate climax in 1915; however, during its short-lived existence, the Federal League received very much the same treatment spacewise as its two respectable brothers on the sports page of the Charlotte paper:

When American entered the First World War in 1917, the ball scores were understandably lost in the shuffle of news bearing datelines from such previously unknown places as Chateau-Theirry, Soissons, Sedan, and the Argonne Forest. Coverage in 1917 was cut short only to be revived for the World Series. But, as Germany made her final push during the spring and summer of 1918, the ardent fan was hard-pressed to find even the line scores for the previous day’s games.

Baseball’s final and most jarring shock of the decade came in 1919 when eight members of the American League champion Chicago White Sox allegedly conspired with gamblers to “throw” that year’s World Series to the Cincinnati Reds for $80,000. Even before the Series began, there was something peculiar about the way the Observer handled the story. It was as if the newswire writers and special correspondents knew something was going on, as the White Sox were painted as villains right from the start. The morning after the dismal opening game, one of the headlines on the sports page read “Betting on World’s Series Now At Even Money in Cincinnati.” Never before had there been anything written on the betting odds for any sports event, save horse racing, in the Observer. Yet, after the eighth and final game, there was no concrete talk of scandal. And there would be none in Charlotte until the following September 23 when evidence was introduced in Chicago proving the Series was fixed.

When Eddie Cicotte and local-boy “Shoeless Joe” Jackson confessed to their part in the conspiracy, it was front-page news in the Observer. There was much of the same the following two days as public opinion definitely went against the newly-christened “Black Sox.” A caption under the individual photographs of the “eight men out” read: “Here they are, the whole bunch. These are the men who betrayed Comiskey, the `Old Roman,’ and one of the grandest sports in baseball, for a few thousand dollars.” Little did the Charlotte ball fan know that Comiskey was actually a skinflint of an owner, a miser who treated his players like the dirt on the unclean uniforms they were forced to wear.

Finally, minor league coverage, like that of the major circuits, reached new heights, especially toward the end of the decade when the new South Atlantic or Sally League was born. There was some question as to whether Charlotte would receive a franchise in this new loop and the issue was bandied back and forth in the Observer. After the Hornets were accepted as members, articles on their games were longer than ever and the box scores more complete and comprehensive. Of course, any time two big league teams came to town on their way up north from spring training it was a truly festive occasion. Such a day was April 12, 1919 when the Phils and Senators, with the “Big Train,” Walter Johnson, hurling, played their final exhibition game at Hearn Field in Charlotte. However, the best was yet to come.

“You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” would be an adequate title for an essay discussing the Observer‘s baseball coverage in that “era of wonderful nonsense,” the l920s. The paper’s sports page finally acquired the cluttered, busy appearance so characteristic of the sports pages of the big city dailies. Baseball in the reign of Babe Ruth, and prizefighting in the era of Dempsey, Leonard, Loughran, and the phenom from the Georgia canebrakes, W.L. “Young” Stribling, were the undisputed kingpins in the eyes of K.B. Crandall, the Observer sports editor.

As the sports page expanded from one page to two, major league coverage finally gained parity with that of the local ball clubs. The brick which made the load complete was set in early 1923 when the Observer solidified its ties with the Associated Press and made arrangements to print daily all major league box scores. Accompanying this development was the fact that by 1925 every big league game had begun to receive individual treatment, each with its own headline and article. Once again, the writing and reporting of the syndicated special correspondents, John B. Foster and George Chadwick, added an air of refinement to the sports page. Their commentary, especially during spring training, was perceptive and incisive, yet devoid of the self-righteous frippery so evident today.

The regular day-to-day coverage also improved considerably with regard to style and content. To wit, an analysis of Joe Bush’s effort late in the fourth game of the 1923 World Series: “Bush seemed to grow stronger as the game progressed, or perhaps it was that the Giants lost heart, and in the eighth `Bullet Joe’ received an ovation when he struck out Jimmy O’Connell, the $75,000 beauty, and Dave Bancroft in succession.”

Statistics as well became more comprehensive as a complete roundup of all batting and pitching averages was supplied each week to the Observer by NEA statistician Al Munro Elias. As the pastime neared its golden anniversary, serialized accounts of the game’s history were disseminated to many papers throughout the country. Two such series, “The History of the National Game” by John B. Foster and “The Men Who Built Baseball and Kept America Young” by Bozeman Bulger, could be found daily in the Observer. After the Senators won their first pennant in 1924, a serial on the life of the champion’s young yet fiery player-manager, Stanley “Bucky” Harris, entitled “Mine Boy to Manager,” was run in the early wintry days of 1925.

During the 1920s, a pantheon of sports heroes walked the good earth of America. On the pages of the Observer, two ball players seemed to make more headlines than anyone else, one a swaggering giant of a man whose oversized body was set precariously on sprinter’s legs, the other equally impressive physically but of such a gentle demeanor that it seemed impossible that anyone could fear him. The exploits of Babe Ruth, the one and only, and Walter Johnson, the “Big Train” with the paralyzing fastball, were chronicled religiously by the Observer throughout their respective careers.

Charlotte was a city gone mad over baseball in the 1920s. Everybody dreamed of either poling them high and far like the Babe or blowing it by `em like the “Big Train.” As a result, the Observer covered local ball on all levels. The Hornets, of course, were as popular as ever, but by August 1922, even the Charlotte City League games, especially those of the Twilight League, were drawing crowds of up to 1500 people and even had their own reporter dispatched regularly by the Observer. High school contests also began to garner some headlines, but when a game between the Observer paper boys and the East Morehead Street gang merited not only an article but a full box score as well, one knew for sure that Charlotte had developed a serious case of baseball fever.