1942

Citing the sport’s value as a morale-booster to Americans, President Roosevelt wrote, “I honestly feel it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.”1  But he also stressed that individual players eligible for the military should go into the service.  This so-called Green Light letter let America know that baseball was indispensable and that the game should give a business-as-usual appearance.  Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail responded, “We can’t adopt any ‘business as usual’ slogan for baseball.  There is no business in this country so dependent upon the good will of the public as baseball.”2  On February 19 the Dodgers front office announced that for the duration of the war, any serviceman in uniform would be admitted to Ebbets Field free.3

The Dodgers began their first wartime spring training with several games in Cuba, and then they traveled northward to Daytona Beach, Florida. With the war on two fronts, there was now a sense over the course of the season that 1942 might be the last normal season.  The Dodgers adopted an unofficial win-now philosophy, as among their key players only Hugh Casey, Kirby Higbe, Mickey Owen, Pee Wee Reese, and Pete Reiser were under 30. It seemed that most teams would play the wartime seasons with “4-Fs, has-beens, and never-would-bes.”4

With the war under way, players had begun to make their way to the service.  First to leave the Dodgers was third baseman Cookie Lavagetto.  He was replaced by Arky Vaughan, for whom the Dodgers traded four players.5  Cookie was followed into war by teammates Herman Franks, Joe Gallagher, Joe Hatten, Don Padgett, and Tommy Tatum.

In the 1942 home opener, Durocher and Giants manager Mel Ott were handed war bonds by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in a home-plate ceremony.  As part of the program, the two skippers announced that each had diverted 10 percent of his first paycheck to the war-bond drive.6

A few practices started across the country in 1942.  The “Star Spangled Banner” was played before every game, not just on special occasions.7  Further, for the duration of the war, fans were asked to return balls hit into the stands.  The balls were then donated by the clubs to various recreation departments of the armed forces.

The Dodgers won four more games than the pennant-winning club of 1941 but still ended two games short of a return trip to the fall classic, with a record of 104-50.  They had endured a fierce pennant race with the St. Louis Cardinals.  Some historians believe that Brooklyn actually lost the race on a July afternoon in St. Louis when Pete Reiser crashed into the center-field wall pursuing a drive off the bat of Enos Slaughter.8  Slaughter raced around the bases for an inside-the-park home run while Reiser lay unconscious with a concussion and fractured skull.  Pete’s batting average tumbled to .310 (still fourth best in the league), due to constant blurry vision.  Before the accident, over three consecutive games (May 31 through June 2), Reiser had collected 11 hits in 13 at-bats, including two home runs, a triple, and four doubles), and his offense had kept Brooklyn ahead of the pack.  Largely due to his absence, the Dodgers’ 10-game lead in early August disappeared. 

The 104 wins that season is the most ever by a Brooklyn club.  The New York Giants finished in third place in the NL, 18 games behind Brooklyn.  Dolph Camilli finished second in home runs and RBIs.  The Dodgers drew just over one million fans in 1942, which led all of baseball, and they once again sent seven players to the All-Star Game. 

On September 23, in the midst of the pennant race, Larry MacPhail lobbied for and accepted a commission in the Army.  A month later, on October 29, the Dodgers organization announced that MacPhail’s replacement as general manager and president would be his former classmate at the University of Michigan, Branch Rickey, who just happened to be general manager of the rival Cardinals.

1943

All major-league teams had conducted spring training in 1942 at their traditional Florida and California locations.  However, by late 1942, the general picture of World War II had changed.  In early 1943, Commissioner Landis decreed that clubs should conduct spring training in the North, in order to relieve rail congestion, causing major-league teams to search for suitable spring-training facilities north of the Mason-Dixon Line.  On January 15, 1943, Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey announced “that the Dodgers, still as much in character as ever, would do their 1943 ‘Southern’ spring training 45 miles north of New York City.  They will pitch their camp at Bear Mountain, noted ski-jumping resort, and have permission to assail (sic) themselves of Army’s magnificent field house at West Point should weather conditions prevent working outdoors.”9  Three decades before, the baseball diamond at Bear Mountain had been the site of a Sing Sing prison stockade.10

On the afternoon of April 2, 1943, the Brooklyn Dodgers had a practice game against West Point in which the batteries were switched.  Dodgers Roy Sanner and Bob Chipman “did the pitching for the cadets, while Paul Steinle, Randolph Heard, and Dave Zillmer of West Point performed on the mound for Brooklyn.”11  The Dodgers sluggers prevailed, 12-8, in an eight-inning game.  Billy Herman and Roberto Ortiz connected for home runs for the Dodgers.  Manager Durocher started the game at shortstop, had a hit in two plate appearances, and even stole a base.   

During the 1943 season, Brooklyn lost Hank Behrman, Hugh Casey, Cliff Dapper, Bruce Edwards, Larry French, Carl Furillo, Chet Kehn, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser, Lew Riggs, Johnny Rizzo, and Stan Rojek to a different uniform.  Reiser had tried to enlist in the Navy after the 1942 season but was rejected.  So, in January 1943, he tried for the Army and was waved through.  He was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas.  Larry French was a lieutenant junior grade at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The proximity to Ebbets Field inspired him to ask the chain of command for a favor.  At the time of his entry into military service, French had attained 197 career victories.  His last outing in a big-league uniform was on September 23, 1942, and Larry pitched a gem, allowing a single hit against the Phillies in a 6-0 victory.  He was 34 years old.  Therefore in 1943, he sought permission to pitch for his old club, the Brooklyn Dodgers, while on leave so he could get three more wins and number 200.  He even offered to donate his Brooklyn salary to the Navy Relief Society. But Admiral W.B. Young denied the request, fearing a flood of such requests from other ballplayers.12  French saw action at Normandy the next year on D-Day.  When the war ended, he remained in the service instead of returning to baseball, and he served during the Korean War.

On July 9 Bobo Newsom had an argument with catcher Bobby Bragan after a passed ball that cost the Dodgers a run.  Newsom continued the tirade against manager Durocher, who subsequently suspended Bobo.  The next day, the Dodgers team threatened to strike, upset over Newsom’s suspension.  Facing a forfeit, Durocher finally persuaded the team to take the field.  Only Arky Vaughan did not, sitting in street clothes in the stands next to Newsom.  Brooklyn exploded offensively against the Pittsburgh Pirates, winning 23-6.  Newsom was traded to the St. Louis Browns five days later.13

Brooklyn finished third in 1943; their 81-72 record placed them 23½ games behind the Cardinals, who ran away with the pennant.  Brooklyn drew 661,739 fans in 1943, almost 375,000 fewer than the season before, yet they still led the league in attendance.  In 1941 Dodgers sluggers belted out 101 home runs; in 1942 the total was 62. The 1943 squad hit only 39 round-trippers, tied for lowest in the league (Augie Galan led the team with nine home runs.) Second baseman Billy Herman and outfielder Galan led Brooklyn in most offensive categories.  Whit Wyatt won a team-high 14 games and led in most pitching categories. Five Dodgers were among the league’s oldest players (Johnny Cooney was 42) and three were among the league’s youngest.  Herman, Galan, Dixie Walker, and Mickey Owen made the All-Star team.

1944

In February 1944 the newspapers said that manager Durocher was going overseas with Danny Kaye to entertain the troops.  Unfortunately, the trip had been delayed, but Leo was confident he could “leap overseas, tour a sector, and leap back in time to take command of his team by March 15.”14 

On March 21, 1944, as the Germans pushed eastward in Europe, the Japanese pushed into India, and the Allied forces pushed northward in Italy, Durocher watched the snow at the Dodgers’ Bear Mountain resort, and worried about his infield. The day before, a 6-inch snowstorm had hit spring training.  As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, Durocher had become “half manager and half detective.”15  Branch Rickey had filled spring training with teenagers not old enough yet to be drafted, including Hodges, Duke Snider, and Ralph Branca, all of whom were years from fulfilling their potential.  Filling in for Vaughan was 18-year-old Gene Mauch, who would eventually become a big-league manager, but who in 1944 was only one year removed from serving as his high-school class president.  Durocher played second base and broke his thumb taking a throw from Mauch in an exhibition game against the Red Sox.

Before the 1943 season began, Rex Barney, Al Campanis, Dutch Dietz, Billy Herman, Kirby Higbe, Gil Hodges, and Bill Sayles had entered the military service. Additionally, once the season began, Jack Bolling, Ed Head, Roy Jarvis, Gene Mauch, and Lou Rochelli all either enlisted or were drafted.

The season did not start well. On April 27 Jim Tobin of the Braves no-hit the Dodgers and hit a home run in a 2-0 victory.  Three days later the Giants beat the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, 26-8.  The Giants set a major-league mark with 26 RBIs and tied another with 17 walks.  Phil Weintraub drove in 11 runs, one shy of the major-league record.  Weintraub recalled that “Babe Ruth was at the game and came in the clubhouse afterward, and in his big roaring voice said, ‘Where is the guy who knocked in enough runs for a month?’  This was the great Babe.”16

In the summer of 1944, so many Brooklyn Dodgers left for their World War II service that Branch Rickey had to call up or sign several players 18 or younger to fill the void. Among them were three pitchers, Branca, Charlie Osgood, and Cal McLish , a trio so young that Harold C. Burr of The Sporting News dubbed them “Brooklyn’s Nursery School.”17  McLish was wearing a Brooklyn uniform even before finishing high school in Oklahoma City.18 Other Dodger youngsters included Clyde King, Eddie Miksis, Tommy Brown, and Mauch, who played in just five games.

On June 6 all major-league games were postponed in observance of D-Day.  President Roosevelt strongly urged Americans to spend the day in prayer for the men in combat. That same day, Branch Rickey traded pitcher Bob Chipman to the Chicago Cubs for second baseman Eddie Stanky.  Stanky was well-known as someone with a small strike zone who pestered opposing pitchers, and he lived up to his nickname, “The Brat.”  Rickey described Stanky as a player who “can’t hit, he can’t run, he can’t field, he can’t throw.  All he can is beat you.”19

The Dodgers went from bad to simply dreadful.20  On June 28, playing after the Tri-Cornered War Bond Baseball Game involving all three New York area teams, they dropped a doubleheader to the Cubs at Wrigley Field and didn’t win again until the second game of a July 16 doubleheader against the Braves.  Their 16-game losing streak was the longest in the club’s history.

On September 1 the Dodgers beat the Giants 8-1 in a home game.  Giants Hall of Famer Joe Medwick had to leave the game temporarily after being hit on the elbow by a pitch. The Giants asked Brooklyn manager Durocher if Medwick could re-enter the game. Leo agreed, only if he could choose the pinch-runner for the Giants while Medwick was treated. Mel Ott agreed, and Durocher selected Gus Mancuso, a 38-year-old catcher with six career stolen bases at the time (he retired with eight).  As if on cue, the Dodgers then turned a double play.  That same day, Brooklyn released 41-year-old Paul Waner. 

The next day, on September 2, Dixie Walker hit for the cycle against the Giants.  Walker, whose nickname was “The People’s Cherce,”21 played in 147 games, belted a career-high 191 hits, and batted .357.  This mark was good enough to win the National League batting title. Walker, Augie Galan, and Mickey Owen played in the All-Star Game.  Attendance in Brooklyn dropped to just over 600,000 fans, third in the National League. However, Brooklyn finished a disappointing seventh, with a record of 63-91, 42 games behind the Cardinals.  No pitcher was ranked in the top five in any major pitching category; Curt Davis had a team-high 10 victories (against 11 losses).  The staff ERA of 4.68 was a full two runs higher than that of St. Louis.  Four of the oldest players in the league still wore Brooklyn uniforms.

1945

The 1945 season found the Dodgers training at Bear Mountain and West Point for the last time.  The first competitions of their spring season were against the cadets on March 24, 1945.  The Dodgers won the first, but Ralph Branca issued a walk with the bases filled in the 10th inning of a second game to give Army a 5-4 victory.  Manager Durocher played all 10 innings at second base, turning a double play but going hitless at the plate.22  The material with which Durocher started at Bear Mountain in the spring of 1945 was as sparse as it had been the year before.  In the offseason, Bobby Bragan, Rube Melton, Cal McLish, and Eddie Miksis had all left the team for military service.  Mickey Owen departed after the season began.  Branch Rickey asked Durocher to start the 1945 campaign at second base, and he is credited with saying, “I’ll add a thousand dollars to your salary if you will play the first fifteen games.”23  Rickey was seriously hoping that Leo’s hustle might have an inspirational effect on the team.

Some players returned from the war to the Dodgers, and the ballclub steadily climbed out of the cellar, up to third place.  On June 8 Durocher was charged, arrested, and indicted for assault on a Brooklyn fan.  So much for inspiration.

Pitcher Ben Chapman was on Brooklyn’s roster for the 1944 and 1945 seasons, winning eight games and losing six.  Rickey traded Chapman to the Phillies on June 15, 1945, where Ben became their manager for the next four seasons.24

Floyd “Babe” Herman came back to Brooklyn during the 1945 season.  He had played for the Dodgers from 1926 through 1931, and he retired from the game in 1937.  The fans loved Babe because they remembered him as one of the best hitters Brooklyn ever had.  The beat writers loved Babe because he was great copy, never denying even the most outlandish things written about him.25  Unlike many of the wartime old-timers, Babe Herman needed neither baseball nor money.  He owned a California poultry farm that made him wealthy. After being away from baseball for seven seasons, Babe returned in 1945 and batted .265 with one home run and nine RBIs. 

On September 15 the Dodgers and Pirates played a game in Pittsburgh, with Brooklyn winning, 5-3. Brooklyn had arrived in Pittsburgh after being involved in a train accident out of St. Louis. At 6:30 A.M., the train struck a gasoline truck, and the ensuing explosion engulfed the train in flames.  The heat was enough to shatter the train’s windows.  The train’s engineer was killed, but none of the Dodgers players suffered anything worse than a bruise. 

With the end of the war in 1945, attendance surged in Brooklyn, and the Dodgers drew 1,059,220 fans, enough to once again lead the National League.  Their 87-67 record left them 11 games behind the pennant-winning Cubs.  The .271 team batting average was above the league mean and the 3.70 ERA was below the league average. Augie Galan, Eddie Stanky, Dixie Walker, and Goody Rosen ranked fourth through seventh in Position Players WAR (Wins Above Replacement) for the National League.  Twenty-three-year-old Hal Gregg paced the club with 18 wins. There was no 1945 All-Star Game, but Gregg, Walker, and Rosen were selected to the NL squad. 

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, a bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  Less than three weeks after that, on August 28, an explosion would hit Major League Baseball, as Jackie Robinson met Branch Rickey.  By that fall, Rickey would announce that he had signed Robinson, an infielder who had played that year with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League, to a contract.  Rickey told the media, “I have never meant to be a crusader, and I hope I won’t be regarded as one.  My purpose is to be fair to all people, and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.”26 By 1947, Robinson’s first season with Brooklyn, the Dodgers were back in the World Series.

MIKE HUBER, a SABR member since 1996, is Dean of Academic Life at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he regularly sponsors undergraduate research in sabermetrics, focusing on modeling, simulation, and prediction. He has been publishing his sabermetrics research in books and journals for close to 20 years. He has been rooting for the Baltimore Orioles for more than 45 years.

Sources

Allen, Lee, The Giants and the Dodgers: The Fabulous Story of Baseball’s Fiercest Feud (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964).

Cohen, Stanley, Dodgers! The First 100 Years (New York: Birch Lane Press/Carol Publishing Group, 1990).

Goldstein, Richard, Superstars and Screwballs: 100 Years of Brooklyn Baseball (New York: Dutton Publishers, 1991).

Graham, Frank, The Brooklyn Dodgers: An Informal History (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1945).

Huber, Mike, West Point’s Field of Dreams: Major League Baseball at Doubleday Field (Quechee, Vermont: Vermont Heritage Press, 2004).

Marzano, Rudy, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s: How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser, and Rickey Changed Baseball  (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2005).

Snyder, John, Dodgers Journal: Year by Year & Day by Day With the Brooklyn & Los Angeles Dodgers Since 1884 (Cincinnati: Clerisy Press, 2009).

Stout, Glenn, The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004).

Newburgh (New York) News

New York Times

The Pointer of the United States Military Academy, Volume XX, Number 16, April 9, 1943.

Akers, W.M., “Spring on Bear Mountain,” found online at sportsonearth.com/article/69334480/brooklyn-dodgers-spring-training-world-war-ii-bear-mountain-state-park.  Accessed March 23, 2014.

examiner.com/article/charlie-osgood-teenage-pitcher-for-the-brooklyn-dodgers-dies-at-87.  Accessed March 23 2014.

Statistics taken from baseball-reference.com.

Notes

1 Richard Goldstein, Superstars and Screwballs: 100 Years of Brooklyn Baseball, 219.

2 Frank Graham, The Brooklyn Dodgers: An Informal History, 216. 

3 John Snyder, Dodgers Journal: Year by Year & Day by Day with the Brooklyn & Los Angeles Dodgers Since 1884, 306. 

4 Glenn Stout, The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 114.

5 Stanley Cohen, Dodgers! The First 100 Years, 64.

6 Goldstein, 222.

7 Snyder, 306.

8 Cohen, 66.

9 New York Times, January 16, 1943.

10 Goldstein, 229.

11 New York Times, April 3, 1943.

12 Goldstein, 228.

13 Snyder, 315.

14 Graham, 245.

15 W.M. Akers, “Spring on Bear Mountain.”

16 Goldstein, 237.

17 Examiner.com/article/charlie-osgood-teenage-pitcher-for-the-brooklyn-dodgers-dies-at-87.

18 Goldstein, 233.

19 Snyder, 320.

20 Goldstein, 238.

21 Graham, 246.

22 New York Times, March 29, 1945.

23 Graham, 248.

24 Rudy Marzano, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s: How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser, and Rickey Changed Baseball, 98.

25 Marzano, 101.

26 Snyder, 328.

But if the Dodgers played their money games against the Redbirds, they had their blood matches with the Cubs. Between 1940 and ’49, Brooklyn took Chicago on 119 occasions while the Cubs were victorious 101 times. Considering that the Dodgers nearly always had a far superior team, it was a fine showing for the Cubs.

In 1940, the Dodgers had become a force to be reckoned with after years of general dormancy, thanks mainly to the often controversial leadership of fiery manager Leo Durocher. The Cubs, on the other hand, were a franchise on the decline. After 14 straight years as contenders with four pennants—yes, that actually happened—the Chicago Nationals would drop to fifth place that season. While the Dodgers and Cardinals had built massive farm chains, the Cubs waited for apples to fall in their direction.

Such was the scene when the Lords of Flatbush locked horns with Chicago’s North Side gang on July 19, 1940, at Wrigley Field. In the bottom of the eighth inning, one-time Cub Hugh Casey on the mound for the visiting team. The Cubs had already scored two runs on Bill Nicholson’s 14th home run of the year, and Hank Leiber was on third base when Cub ace Claude Passeau came to bat. According to Chicago Tribune sportswriter Ed Burns, “Hughie wasn’t feeling especially chummy.”

Casey’s first offering to his mound rival was a wild pitch, Leiber scored easily. Now a bit incensed, Casey plunked Passeau between the shoulder blades. Not known as a pacifist, Claude hurled his bat at the offending Brooklynite as the dugouts emptied. After ducking the missile, Casey charged on Passeau with help from teammate Joe “Muscles” Gallagher, who attacked the Cub pitcher. As Cub manager Gabby Hartnett pulled him off Passeau’s back, Chicago third baseman Stan Hack put Gallagher out of commission with a haymaker.

Eventually, the umpires, ushers, and Chicago police brought the brawl to an end as the Cubs went on to an 11-4 victory. It was Passeau’s 11th win of the season and his fourth in a row.

The stage had been set. During the winter of 1940- 41, Cub owner Phillip K. Wrigley hired former sportswriter Jim Gallagher (no relation to Joe) as general manager and Jimmy Wilson as field boss. Together, the “James boys” embarked on a series of trades that made the Cubs look like a farm team for the Dodgers. Jealous of the popularity of Cub second baseman Billy Herman, Wilson and Gallagher swapped him to the Dodgers for $40,000, infielder Johnny Hudson, and a player to be named later. Not long thereafter, pitcher Larry French and outfielder Augie Galan were handed to Brooklyn on silver platters as well. Thought to be over the hill, all of these players soon found the fountain of youth in Brooklyn uniforms. The blood rivalry was heating up!

The Dodgers were back in Chicago on May 19, 1941. In the bottom of the second inning, the Cubs were already ahead 3-0 when Hugh Casey walked Bill Nicholson to start the inning. Usually a fireman, Casey appeared uneasy in a starting assignment. Nicholson easily stole second behind his back, after which “the Mad Russian,” Lou Novikoff, drew a free pass to first.

Up to the plate came the bulky rookie Cub catcher, Clyde McCullough. Although slower than a rock moving uphill, McCullough beat out a drag bunt to load the bases. Chicago second baseman Lou Stringer then coaxed Casey’s third walk of the inning to force Nicholson home. Seconds later, Dodger third baseman Cookie Lavagetto muffed Bobby Sturgeon’s grounder, allowing Novikoff to score. As if this were not humiliating enough, pitcher Claude Passeau smashed a grand-slam homer to make the score 9-0 with still nobody out.

At that point, Casey went to the showers and Mace Brown took the mound. It looked like a forerunner of instant replay as Stan Hack drew a walk and went to third on Phil Cavarretta’s double. Dom Dallessandro then flied to Pete Reiser for the first Cub out, with Hack scoring on the sacrifice. Up for the second time in the frame, Bill Nicholson swished a home run for the eighth and ninth Cub runs of the inning. Novikoff singled and went to second on McCullough’s sacrifice. Stringer walked, but Sturgeon flied to Joe Medwick to end the inning. The score was Cubs 12, Dodgers zip.

That was the way it stood in the top of the fifth inning when Leo Durocher announced to plate umpire Lee Ballafant that his team was playing the game under protest on grounds that the Cubs were allegedly over the player limit. Interestingly, the Cub of controversy was the “player to be named later” in the Billy Herman trade, Charlie Gilbert. In reality, Gilbert had indeed reported to Chicago on May 6 but was still on the disabled list due to an ankle injury.

Ballafant requested that Cub field announcer Pat Pieper relay Durocher’s message to the audience, but Pieper’s translation to the partisan crowd was that Leo was complaining “because the Cubs have too many runs.”

Chicago went on to a 14-1 victory as Leo the Lion’s grievances were dismissed by league officials.

As that fateful season neared its end, the rivalry was already entering its “believe it or not” stage. In the first game of a September 10 doubleheader in Chicago, Brooklyn held a 4-2 lead. With one out in the top of the ninth, Cub pitcher Johnny Schmitz—in his major league debut—replaced Bill Lee, who had earlier relieved Claude Passeau. On Schmitz’s first offering, Cookie Lavagetto grounded into a double play to end the inning. In the bottom of the frame, Chicago bailed it out to win, 5-4. In hurling but a single pitch, Schmitz had gained his first victory!

To add icing on the cake, the Cubs won the second game by the same score. Despite the victories Brooklyn would win its first flag in 21 years while the Cubs dropped in the standings to sixth place.

By 1942, the Cubs had acquired the services of a temperamental rookie pitcher named Hiram Bithorn. Brooklyn was in town on July 15 and Bithorn was on the mound. Durocher began needling the young hurler from the visitors’ dugout. Getting a bit fed up, Bithorn whirled and fired a fastball at Leo’s skull in the top of the fifth inning. Players emptied onto the field from both benches, but the umpires managed to restore order before a full-scale rumble erupted. Hardly intimidated, the Dodgers bumped off their hosts, 10-5. Ex-Cub Billy Herman knocked a home run as ex-Cub Kirby Higbe took the win with relief help from ex-Cub Hugh Casey. As the Cubs ended up sixth again, the only consolation they could take was that the Cardinals surpassed the Dodgers at the end of the season to win the pennant by two games.

Wartime shortages were soon hitting home in baseball. The Brooklynites were back in Chicago on July 30, 1943, for an apparently unique event in history. With Johnny Allen on the hill for the Dodgers in the third inning, Phil Cavarretta cracked a home run off the left-field foul pole. In pre-war times, the baseball would have been discarded. But this time the umps gave it back to the Brooklyn pitcher. On the next pitch, Bill Nicholson slapped the pellet onto Sheffield Avenue for his 15th round-tripper of the year. To this writer’s knowledge, it was the only time that two homers were hit off successive pitches and with the same baseball. The Cubs sailed away to an easy 12-3 victory, a sweet taste of revenge for pitcher Hiram Bithorn. But Brooklyn enjoyed the last laugh, finishing third to Chicago’s fifth.

As the Chicago-Brooklyn antagonism continued, strange happenings resumed along with it. On May 18, 1945, Dodger outfielder Luis Ohno made history by hitting a grand slam home run plus a bases-loaded triple ( along with a double for good measure), as the Dodgers outslugged the Cubs, 15-12, at Ebbets Field. It was Chicago’s sixth straight loss. Earlier, Bill Nicholson’s three-run homer with two out in the sixth had temporarily knotted the score at 9-9. But in ’45 the Chicagoans were not to be stopped.

They won their “most recent” pennant, leaving Brooklyn 11 games behind in third place. Included in the championship drive was a 20-6 mauling of the Dodgers at Brooklyn on August 15. Cub catcher Paul Gillespie, chiefly remembered (if at all) as their first player to wear a crew cut, drove in six runs with two homers and a single. Andy Pafko and Heinz Becker also homered for Chicago, while Hank Borowy went the distance for the victory.

But the Cubs had won the 1945 flag largely because they had more 4-F’s than any team in the league and because the Cardinals (who finished a close second) lost Stan Musial to the Navy. By 1946, that temporary advantage had gone up in smoke. While the Dodgers and Cardinals had superstars coming back from the service, the Cubs had a few good journeymen at best.

The defending league champs were once again in Flatbush on May 22, 1946. With the score tied at one apiece in the top of the 10th, Cub shortstop Lennie Merullo slid into Dodger second baseman Eddie Stanky spikes high to break up a double play. Merullo and Stanky, who had not gotten along when they were Cub teammates in 1943-44, were wrestling it out in the dust before umpire Lynn Boggess and Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese broke it up. The two fighters were ejected from the game, which Brooklyn finally won, 2-1, as Dixie Walker’s double off Johnny Schmitz drove in Dick Whitman with the winning run in the bottom of the 13th. 

The bad blood was far from over. During a pregame practice the following day, Merullo walked into the batting cage to show Reese his black eye, reportedly telling him that if he wanted to hit him again to do it while he was looking so that he could break Reese’s neck. Sneaking up from behind, Dixie Walker slugged Merullo on the back of the head, and then headed for the home dugout. Lennie grabbed Walker, tripped him to the ground, and knocked out one tooth while breaking another in half. By now every­body on either side of the fence had become involved in the melee. Phil Cavarretta was pushed back by the police, “who apparently thought the Dodgers needed protection,” according to writer Irving Vaughan of the Chicago Tribune. Cavarretta later denied taking part in the brawl but was conspicuously silent when asked if he had punched Leo Durocher in the nose.

From that point on, five policemen were stationed in each dugout. Again, the Dodgers pulled off a 2-1 victory, this time in only 11 innings. Walker, Reese, Merullo, Cavarretta, and Cub coach Red Smith were all slapped with fines. Jim Gallagher protested those of the Cub players, but his face-saving gesture went nowhere.

The Cubs were going nowhere either, finishing a distant third as the Cardinals and the Dodgers duked it out for the pennant. St. Louis eventually won it, along with the World Series. In their last gasp of winning ways for another two decades, the Cubs squared off with the Dodgers in Brooklyn on September 15, 1946, winning the first game of a twin bill, 4-3, in 10 innings. But in the sixth inning of the nightcap, a swarm of gnats descended upon Ebbets Field like an Old Testament plague. The obnoxious insects refused to depart, causing the contest to be called as a 2-0 Dodger win. Perhaps that was Brooklyn’s way of saying to Chicago, “Gnats to you!”

Cub fans gloated over the winter as commissioner Happy Chandler suspended Durocher for alleged associations with gamblers and other unsavory characters. But with Leo gone and Burt Shotton as their “temporary” manager, the Dodgers changed baseball forever by hiring Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in the majors since 1884 as well as the first to make racial integration permanent. On May 18, 1947, a crowd of 46,572 shoehorned its way into Wrigley Field to see Robinson’s Chicago debut. Although Jackie went hitless in his first Chicago appearance, the Dodgers won the game, 4-2, en route to another pennant while the Cubs sank to sixth.

By the end of the ’40s, Leo Durocher deserted Brooklyn permanently to become field boss of the New York Giants, while the Cubs had become the doormat of the National League. But the smoldering Chicago embers could occasionally still turn into a blazing fire when Brooklyn was around. On June 19, 1949, another overflow Wrigley Field assemblage (42,089) saw Cub manager Frankie Frisch, catcher Bob Scheffing, and bench warmer Al Walker get tossed from the game over umpiring calls which they thought were a bit too much in favor of the Dodgers. Momentarily inspired, the Cubs snapped a seven-game losing streak with an 8-2 triumph, helped by the long ball hitting of Andy Pafko and Hank Sauer. Far from demoralized, Brooklyn went on to win 17 games from Chicago that year. Ironically, the Cubs even helped the hated Dodgers win the pennant by thumping the Cardinals two out of three during the final weekend of the season.

As the ’40s evolved into the ’50s, the Cub-Dodger hatred still simmered, even if the open belligerency declined. In July 1950, Hank Sauer, Ralph Kiner of the Pirates, and Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals were voted as the starting outfielders for the National League All-Star team. But team manager Burt Shotton decided to replace Sauer with his own Duke Snider of Brooklyn. Up went a roar of protests from Chicago as Shotton was besieged with derisive mail. Frankie Frisch said (publicly, at least) that he would not swap Sauer for five Sniders. Yielding to pressure, league president Ford Frick ruled that Sauer would indeed start the game and play at least three innings. The Dodger manager obeyed but yanked Sauer after the third inning. Diplomatically, he replaced him with Cub teammate Andy Pafko.

For good measure, the Cubs acted as spoilers in the pennant race again. This time, they spanked the Dodgers 12 times out of 22 to help the Phillies win their first flag since 1915.

It would be the Cubs’ last major hurrah against their despised enemy for years to come. Throughout the 1950s, the Dodgers went on gathering pennants while the Cubs languished in or near the cellar. Not until 1964 would the Cubs again edge the Dodgers—by then relocated to the world’s largest suburb—in a season’s series. By 1966, the once loathed Leo Durocher had become the Cubs manager. That, however, is a story in itself.

ART AHRENS lives within walking distance of Wrigley Field. He attended his first game there on September 26, 1959, when Chicago beat Brooklyn, 12-2. He is the author of many articles on the Cubs.

There is evidence that the nickname “Babe” not only predated Ruth, but may have had a meaning independent of him, but for which he fit the mold. The Dictionary of American Slang contains the following definition:

Babe (Capital B) A large fat man; esp., a large fat baseball player; used as a nickname. As irony, and because many fat men have baby faces. Reinforced by Babe Ruth, the baseball star of the 1920s who was a heavy set man.

The accompanying table lists the height and weight of major league baseball players nicknamed “Babe.” With the exception of Ernest Phelps, a catcher who compiled a career average of .310 in 11 seasons and was also called “Blimp,” none of the other baseball “Babes” would seem to fit the “fat man” stereotype. In fact, one of the first players called “Babe,” Daniel Sherman, was only five feet, six inches tall and weighed just 145 pounds. His only appearance in the majors (half a cup of coffee) was a stint of one-third of an inning as a pitcher for the Chicago entry in the Federal League in 1914. He walked two batters and was charged with the loss. After Ruth’s prime, however, there is an indication that “Babe” is associated with big men. Clifford Bloodgood wrote in “Diamond Drafts” in Baseball Magazine in 1935:

Without apparent rhyme or reason a “Babe” has to swarm over the scales far better than two hundred pounds and stand well over six feet in his socks. Without these qualifications a baseball “Babe” is an illegitimate son according to the baseball writer’s union.

Again, as can be seen from the accompanying table, most but not all of the players nicknamed “Babe” after Ruth’s prime were in fact six feet tall or better, and at least approximated 200 pounds. Yet it was neither height nor weight which accounts for Ruth’s nickname “Babe,” although it does figure in the version of the origin of the monicker given to him by Boston Red Sox players.

There have been numerous explanations about Ruth’s nickname. In Baseball Nicknames 1870-1946, Tom Shea reported that Ruth received the nickname early in life when he was at St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore. The bigger boys refused to let him play in their sports events because he was “just a babe.” In a slightly different version, noted baseball historian Fred Lieb recounted that Ruth received the nickname at age seven shortly after coming to St. Mary’s. He was teased by the older boys and blubbered and so they called him “Babe.” Lieb pointed out that this incident was denied by a man who attended the school while Ruth was there.

Lieb also put forth still another story. When Jack Dunn signed Ruth to a contract in 1914, he was still a minor. Dunn was required to obtain a court order to get him out of St. Mary’s. This led to rumors that Dunn had legally adopted Ruth. It was at this time that Baltimore sports writers began calling him “Babe.”

None of these accounts is exactly the way Ruth supposedly remembered it. In the volume Babe Ruth’s Own Book Of Baseball published in 1928, it is stated:

It’s a funny thing, incidentally, how many times a year I get letters asking me how I got my nickname. Some of the newspaper boys made a pretty good yarn out of it one time. They said that when I was a little kid I always wanted to play ball with bigger boys, and when they wouldn’t let me play I’d cry and howl until I had the whole neighborhood disturbed. The big boys according to his story nicknamed me “Baby” because I cried so much, then shortened it to Babe, as kids will. It’s a shame to spoil a good yarn like that, but as a matter of fact the story is all wrong. A man named Steinam, who was coach of the Baltimore Orioles when I joined the club in 1914, gave me the nickname. The first day I reported at the clubhouse he said, ” Well, here’s Jack’s newest Babe now.”

However, the incident is recalled slightly differently in The Babe Ruth Story (as told to Bob Considine) published in 1948. It allegedly happened the first time Ruth took the field at spring training in Fayetteville, Ark., in 1914.

On that day, Dunn practically led me by the hand from the dressing room to the pitcher’s box. I was as proud of my Orioles uniform as I had been of my long pants. Maybe I showed that pride in my face and the way I walked.

“Look at Dunnie and his new babe,” one of the older players yelled.

That started it I guess. But the clincher came a few days later.

Ruth became fascinated with the elevator at the team’s hotel. After bribing the operator to let him run it, he nearly decapitated himself by closing the doors with his head sticking out.

Dunnie bawled me out until the stuffings ran out of me, and what he didn’t say to me the others said for him. But finally one of them took pity on me, shook his head and said: “You’re just a babe in the woods.” After that they called me babe.

Which of these accounts is the “true” version? Perhaps we will never know. Normally one would be more likely to accept the first-person account over secondary sources. But this is complicated in Ruth’s case. Ruth had two versions of how he got his nickname – or did he? According to Lieb, Bill Slocum of the New York Morning American was the ghost-writer for Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball and Bob Considine did the writing for The Babe Ruth Story. Were the accounts Ruth’s or theirs? Ruth had a notoriously poor memory, especially for names. Lieb commented: “Ruth probably had a low I.Q. Certainly he couldn’t remember names, so with everyone it was `Hello, Kid’ no matter what the person’s age.” It is quite possible that Ruth did not remember how he got the nickname “Babe” and simply agreed to versions suggested to him. Doubtless the origin of his nickname was of little consequence to Ruth. The reader will have to use his own judgment about the authenticity of the various accounts.

Be that as it may, “Babe” was not the only nickname used for Ruth by fellow ball players. According to Baseball for the Love of It by Anthony Conner, when Ruth first reported to the Red Sox in 1914 he was 19 years old, six feet two inches tall and weighed 198 pounds. He had a slim waist, huge biceps and absolutely no manners or social graces. His teammates called him “The Big Baboon.” A few years later when he was playing for the New York Yankees and the whole world knew him as “Babe,” this was the nickname used by his closest player associates. They used a takeoff on

George. Historian Lee Allen recalled: “Babe Ruth’s intimates on the Yankees usually referred to him as Jidge, a nickname which never caught on with the public.” Lieb also mentions the use of “Jidge” by Ruth’s close friends. However, in Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball the nickname is spelled “Jedge!”

To the members of the Yankee ball club I’m “Jedge.” That’s a name Benny Bengough (Yankee catcher) tacked on me two or three seasons ago, and it has stuck.

Few of the other players nicknamed “Babe” had distinguished careers. For example, Ellsworth “Babe” Dahlgren is probably better known as the person who replaced Lou Gehrig at the end of his 2,130-consecutive-game streak on May 2, 1939, than for any of his own heroics. Dahlgren was a hefty, hard-swinging righthander.

Many “Babes” spent only a short time in the major leagues. Such was the case of Jay Towne, one of the first two players to carry the “Babe” tag. He caught 12 games for the Chicago American League entry in 1906. Towne hailed from Coon Rapids, Ia. where as Shea put it, “Corn was tall and so was he.” Supposedly he was a “Babe in the woods.”

Another player made a brief appearance in the same year, and it was the start of an illustrious career. His name was Charles “Babe” Adams, and he deserves to be recognized as baseball’s original “Babe.” As a rookie pitcher with pennant-winning Pittsburgh in 1909, he won 12 games and lost three. He was the fourth starter on the club’s pitching staff. During the World Series the first three starters did not win a game, but “Babe” Adams wrote his name into the record book by winning three. He shut out Detroit in the deciding seventh game. Over his 19-year career he compiled a 194-140 won-lost record with an ERA of 2.76. Adams received his nickname while playing for Louisville in 1908. Women fans used to yell “Oh you Babe” when he was on the mound. It referred to his good looks and, according to Shea, was the 1908 equivalent of “Hubba Hubba.”

The only other player with a nickname of “Babe” to have an eminent career was Floyd Herman, a contemporary of Ruth. He broke in as a rookie with Brooklyn in 1926. From 1926 to 1931 the greater New York area baseball fans actually had two “Babes” to root for. In fact, in 1930 Herman hit for a .393 average compared to Ruth’s .359. He played through the 1937 season and then came back in 1945 to bat .265 as a pinch-hitter for the wartime Dodgers. In 13 seasons he averaged .324 with 181 home runs.

Herman received his nickname while playing first base for Edmonton in the Western Canada League in the early 1920s. A coach, Dan Howley, knew a heavyweight fighter in Canada named “Babe” Herman and insisted on calling Floyd “Babe” even though he had been previously called “Lefty.” According to Herman, the sportswriter picked it up immediately. Joseph McBride in High and Inside reported that when Herman was a rookie in 1926 Ty Cobb remarked to him that the 45-ounce bats he was using were even heavier than those that Ruth swung. Herman replied that if he used heavier bats he would hit the ball farther than Ruth. From then on the players also picked up the nickname of “Babe.”

Werner Birrer was the last major league player to carry the nickname of “Babe.” In a four-inning relief stint as a rookie pitcher for the Detroit Tigers on July 19, 1955, he hit a pair of three-run homers in two times at the plate. Thus the nickname “Babe.” Ironically, they were the only home runs and runs batted in for his major league career which ended with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1958. Thus it has been a quarter century since baseball has had a “Babe.” Like so many nicknames, “Babe” may be a relic of the past. We know there will never be another Ruth, but one wonders if there will ever be another “Babe.”

One final note is in order. Robert Peterson in his book Only the Ball Was White provides an “All Time Register” of players from the echelon of the Negro Leagues. Of the more than 2,500 players listed, only one, Spencer Davis, had the nickname of “Babe.” He played shortstop and was a manager for the New York Black Yankees and Winston-Salem Giants, 1941-1948.

(Click image to enlarge)

The practice of using jersey numbers, which was in use among dozens of prominent college football programs as early as 1914, had a slow evolution in baseball. In 1916, the Cleveland Indians temporarily added numbers to players’ left sleeves during the second half of the regular season. The following year, the Indians tried moving the numbers to the players’ right sleeves. A brief wire service blurb dated March 29, 1917, reported that the Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers played a spring training exhibition game in Memphis, Tennessee, where both teams sported numbers on their players’ sleeves. However, these experiments proved to be nothing more than a passing fad.

Sportswriter Tommy Rice, who covered the major leagues for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was an early advocate pushing the big league clubs to number their players. As early as the offseason of 1922–23, Rice’s almost constant lobbying succeeded in getting the eight National League club owners to take up the matter at their annual Winter meetings. Though ultimately little came of the discussion, Rice would continue to beat the drum, and other baseball writers — notably Stoney McLinn and later syndicated columnist Billy Evans of The Philadelphia Ledger1 — would consistently make the point in print that the fans deserved a better and more expedient way of identifying both the home and visiting players.

At least one other major league club thought the issue worth pursuing; the 1923 St. Louis Cardinals featured numbers on the players’ left sleeves. It would prove to be a one-year dalliance and nothing further was seen of uniform numbers at the major league level for another six seasons. The practice of numbering players in the major leagues would not be adopted permanently until the 1929 New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians. It would take until 1931 for all eight American League clubs to follow suit, and the National League wouldn’t catch up until the middle of the 1932 season.

This period of seeming indifference on the part of major league club owners prior to 1929 left the door wide open for others to step in. The result was that the minor league club owners pioneered uniform numbers, as they did many of the game’s most fan-friendly customs (including bat day and the “knothole gang”). Recent research has uncovered significant photographic proof of minor league clubs adding uniform numbers to player jerseys several years prior to 1929. For example, we know that the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association began numbering their players in 1926. A vintage wire photo of the Crackers’ Leo Durocher, his back turned towards the photographers’ camera, has been seen (but not yet acquired) by the author. What is unknown as of the writing of this article is whether the other seven Southern Association teams followed suit, or was this simply a case of Atlanta going it alone?

Sportswriters in The Sporting News — and other wire service reports of the day — generally credit the teams of the American Association (AA) with debuting player uniform numbers at the start of the 1925 season. In fact, the December 11, 1924, issue of the “Bible of Baseball” contained the following note: “At a special meeting of the American Association owners, held in Hartford, just before the magnates left, it was decided by unanimous vote that all players be numbered on the field during the coming season. The players will wear the numbers on the sleeves of their shirts, which will correspond to the numbers on the program. The numbers are to be six inches high so they will be easily discerned from the stands.” League president Thomas J. Hickey was quoted as saying, “The numbering system has become almost general with football teams and I see no reason why it should not help the baseball fan.”2

A photo of pitcher Curt Fullerton of the St. Paul Saints clearly shows the results of the league-wide edict in the American Association (see Figure 1). Fullerton originally began the 1925 season in Boston as a member of the Red Sox staff. His first four years in Boston had produced a combined 10–32 record and, when he gave up a total of 11 runs in his first 22-plus innings of work in 1925, the Red Sox shipped him to the Saints in early May, where he spent the remainder of the season. The wire photo of Fullerton shows him wearing the number two (2) on his left sleeve. The back of the photo is date-stamped May 25, 1925.

But were the eight teams of the 1925 American Association really the first minor league clubs (at any level) to begin numbering their players?

The author has uncovered proof of at least two other minor league ball clubs far to the south of St. Paul adding uniform numbers to their players’ jerseys. The first was the Fort Smith (Arkansas) Twins of the Class C Western Association. Slugging first baseman Jimmy Hudgens (who spent parts of the 1923–1925 seasons with Fort Smith) is shown in Figure 2 boldly wearing a rather large number 22 on his left sleeve.

Hudgens had a career season for Fort Smith in 1925, leading the league in several key offensive categories. He batted .389 with 63 doubles and produced 168 RBIs over a 150-game schedule. As a result, Fort Smith won 94 games and the league title. Hudgens’s reward was a promotion to the Cincinnati Reds, who brought him to the majors for the final two weeks of the regular season. There is no date (stamped or written) on the reverse of the Hudgens photo, leaving open the possibility that Fort Smith actually donned uniform numbers prior to the 1925 season.

We also have proof that the Bloomington (Illinois) Bloomers of the Class B Three I League numbered their players in 1925. Pitcher Herman John Schwartje spent the 1925 season with Bloomington, where he compiled an 18–10 record for a team that won only 56 games and finished nearly 30 games out of first place. He is shown in Figure 3 as a member of the Bloomers wearing number 15 on his left sleeve. A career minor leaguer, Schwartje spent parts of 15 seasons toiling in the low minors, where he twice won at least 22 games. (After he did it a second time in 1922 — winning 23 games for Class B Saginaw — he was promoted to Class AA Rochester of the International League the following season. It would prove the pinnacle of his pro career.)

The final photo accompanying this article is that of outfielder Ike Boone. In Figure 4, Boone is shown wearing the uniform of the San Antonio Bears (Class B Texas League) with a large number five (5) on the left sleeve. The most important thing about this photo is that Ike Boone’s only season with San Antonio was 1923. He played for Little Rock in 1922 and when he tore up the Texas League in 1923 (hitting .402 and leading the league in hits, doubles, triples and RBIs), his performance for the Bears would get him promoted to the majors to join the Boston Red Sox for the final 10 days of the regular season. Boone would spend the entire 1924 and 1925 seasons with the Red Sox.

Thus, we now have definitive proof establishing that at least one minor league team wore uniform numbers as early as the 1923 season, a full two years prior to the American Association’s league-wide adoption of the same custom. Could there possibly be other minor league teams that also jump-started the custom a year (or more) in advance of San Antonio in 1923? I invite any interested SABR members to contact me with any information which might shed light on this topic.

MARK STANG is the author of nine books on major league baseball, including Baseball By The Numbers (Scarecrow Press, 1996), the definitive guide to major league uniform numbers. He can be reached at: markmstang@comcast.net.

Notes

1. The Philadelphia Evening Ledger: Jan. 13, 1923; Feb. 15, 1923 and April 13, 1923; “Billy Evans Says” syndicated column; Oct. 9, 1925.

2. The Sporting News, December 11, 1924.

It has been noted that history is cyclical, and there is nothing new under the sun. Baseball’s relationship with the International Olympic Committee is one example of beatitude realizing its fruition. Baseball was to be a medal sport for the first time at the canceled 1940 Tokyo Olympics.1 And now some 80 years later at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics baseball was to return, only to be postponed. The tumultuous road that baseball has taken to medal sport status traces its roots to 1936 and involves Baltimore and her most famous baseball son, George Herman Ruth.

At the XIth Summer Olympiad in Berlin, on August 12, 1936, at 8:00 PM, 21 ballplayers were introduced to the largest crowd to see a baseball game in the twentieth century.2 One by one, each player jogged from the opposite end of the stands to the center of the huge stadium with a spotlight illuminating them in the increasing darkness. This would be the first night game for these players.3 Adding to the drama, each ballplayer was ushered in with music played by the stadium band, one of earliest examples of ‘“walk-up music.”4 While both teams wore the same elegant white flannels with “US” on the front and a red-white-and-blue Olympic logo shield on the left sleeve, they were distinguished by their caps and socks. This game would be between “Red Stockings” and the “Blues.” The team gathered at the center of the Olympic field and gave an Olympic salute.5

Baseball was one of two sports officially classified as “Special Demonstrations” outside the official Olympic medal winning competitions in 1936. The uncharted path baseball took to get on that field was led by Les Mann, the controversial former player and secretary-treasurer of the American Baseball Congress and the Olympic Baseball Committee. In December 1935, the question of whether the United States would attend the Winter and Summer games held in Germany in 1936 was addressed. In a very hotly contested and divided convention, the US decided not to boycott. But on December 5, the Japanese Olympic baseball authorities decided not to send an Olympic baseball team, claiming it was too expensive to send a team overseas.6 The Japanese did allow one official, “Frank” Matsumato from Meiji University, to travel to Berlin, where he served as an umpire.7 In response, MLB announced at the 1935 Winter Meetings that no financial support would be given and international baseball barnstorming to Japan and other countries was banned.8

The issue of Japan’s withdrawal was likely national pride and not money.9 In the winter of 1935, the Wheaties All Americans — under the leadership of Mann Herb Hunter and picked by Olympic Chairman Avery Brundage, and under partial sponsorship by and Louisville Slugger and chaperoned by Frank Bradsby 10. This college aged teamplayed 15 games against Japanese collegiate teams, beating them regularly.11 In front of 60,000 fans, they beat Waseda University, the Big Six Champion, 6-0. Yet the games were spirited and competitive. Fred Heringer, a Stanford pitcher and member of both the 1935 Wheaties and the 1936 Olympic team, noted in a 1937 interview that the Japanese players he faced were “tops in baseball, and will give anyone a run for his money.”12

While Japanese amateur baseball supposedly did not have the funds to send a team to Berlin, monies were available for a college ball team to barnstorm across the US. From May 15 to July 1, Waseda University played 22 games, going 15-7 against college-age competition. Their coast-to-coast journey started at Stanford University (two games) and included stops at the University of Chicago (two games), Ann Arbor (one inning before the rains came), Boston, a return to Chicago, and finally Seattle and Oakland.13 Coincidentally, the Japanese departure date was the same as the opening of the US Olympic trials.

The highlight of their barnstorming was two shutouts: Harvard (5-0) and Yale (6-0). The Yale game on June 8, 1936, made international headlines for the two-walk, 12-strikeout no-hitter by Waseda pitcher Shozo Wakahara.14

Meanwhile, the US Olympic Baseball leadership was selecting amateur players, attempting to find a capable opponent, and were forced to be independent and raise their own funds without support from MLB. This team needed a hero.

On February 9 and 10, 1936, newspapers around the country announced that the US Olympic Baseball team would be escorted to Berlin by baseball’s greatest hero of all: The Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, Babe Ruth. Ruth was given two new nicknames: Commander in Chief of the Olympic Baseball Committee and “commandant of the United States amateur baseball delegation.”15

After rejecting an offer from Larry McPhail to play for the Reds, Ruth was quoted as saying,“I’m taking a lot of interest in this Olympics baseball program.”16 The Sporting News of April 9, 1936, featured a photo of Ruth shaking Mann’s hand.

Baltimore was chosen as the site for the trials partly due to Charm City’s capable amateur baseball commissioner, Paul E. Burke, who was the also Maryland state representative to the American Baseball Congress. On March 14, 1936, Mayor Howard W. Jackson made public the letter of invitation to Mann and the American Baseball Congress stating that Baltimore wanted to host the trials. And two weeks later, on March 29, The Baltimore Sun ran the following headline: “Babe Ruth Promises To Attend.”

Tryouts were held at Gibbons Field on the campus of Mount St. Joseph. As an added benefit for the area, one or two of Baltimore’s best amateurs would be selected to the team. The plan included tickets to a Washington Nationals game against the Yankees on July 5 and then the use of Griffith Stadium for a fundraiser.17

Mount St. Joseph, run by the Xavierian Brothers of St. Mary’s Industrial School — Ruth’s alma mater, was no accidental choice. This high school had an established baseball development heritage, sending numerous students to professional baseball.18 Having empty summer dorms and a large gym and locker room, it was an ideal campus for the players.19 They were making history, becoming Olympic baseball’s first Team USA.20

An estimated 800 prospective ballplayers sent applications to Mann, from which about an reported to 150 wound up on Gibbons Field.21 While the trials were labeled free for all, it cost each participant a $60 admission fee. No doubt this substantial amount limited the number of attendees. Mann would later state that the fee would be refunded if a player did not make the team.22 By Sunday July 5, players from all corners of the country had arrived and were competing for spots on the team.23

Baltimore had not been the first or even the second choice for the tryouts. In the summer of 1935, the Olympic baseball committee had called for 12 regional tournaments of approved amateur teams competing to determine a national champion along with selecting a tournament all-star team.24 After the Japanese withdrawal, an “East vs West” set of teams was proposed: Well-respected Stanford Coach Harry Wolter was to lead a West team versus an East team from the Penn Athletic Club, led by George Lang and former A’s catcher Ira Thomas.25 These earlier plans did not pan out, but would shape the tryouts in Baltimore: some of the twenty slots on the team were reserved for Penn AC ballplayers.

Three games were scheduled, two in Charm City and one at Griffith Stadium, intended to showcase the talent and serve as fundraisers for the overseas trip.26 The two Baltimore games would feature the local sandlotters. The first, the Police Department game, was a fundraising disaster, generating a net profit of just of seven dollars — significantly short of the $500 required for each self-funded or community-funded player to attend the Olympics!27 In response, Burke called for an emergency meeting of the Maryland Amateur Athletic Association to address the financial shortfall. After much deliberation, they dropped the plan to send any of Baltimore’s best sandlotters to the Olympics. “Apathy of Fans Cited in Abandoning Plans” read the headline in the Evening Sun on the night of July 9.

A major reason for such apathy can be attributed to Baltimore’s favorite son. Ruth did not attend the tryouts, and after mid-April 1936, he went silent on going to Berlin and with his public support of US Olympic baseball. He was encouraged to resign his position of commandant of Olympic baseball, though by whom remains unknown.28

Yet the retired Ruth was still making headlines. During the two weeks of the Baltimore tryouts, the Bambino was in Canada, on a golf and fishing vacation with wife Claire, daughter Dorothy, and friends.29 News reports throughout Canada and the US documented his kindness, accessibility, and larger-than-life prowess.30 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that the Babe’s fishing was a Ruthian event, for on the St. Mary’s River he caught 21 salmon.31 By July 9, Ruth was tracked down in Digby, Nova Scotia, coming off a round of golf at the New Pines Hotel course where he denied the Cleveland Indians had offered him a job as manager.32 The Babe’s Nova Scotia legacy lives on to this day as the Digby Pines golf course challenges its patrons to play a round “ and try to drive the 11th hole like The Babe did in 1936.”33

Ruth did help the Olympic cause in one small way by attending the farewell banquet in New York on July 14, vigorously and confidently encouraging Jesse Owens to win the gold.34 The Babe also participated in homecoming activities, though, when the team returned to New York. The city hastily planned a ticker tape parade and on September 4 Ruth attended the welcome home banquet sponsored by Mayor LaGuardia on Randall’s Island, the site of Olympic Trials. Each Olympian, inncluding members of the baseball team, received a special bronze medal.35

But while the baseball team was taking the field in Berlin, Ruth was on the links again. August 12–14, the Bambino was playing in a tournament in Upstate New York at the Bluff Point Golf Resort, hosting the St Orleans International Invitational.36 His promises to help the 1936 Olympic team in Baltimore and Berlin went largely unfulfilled, perhaps not by his own wishes.

Dinty Dennis, the Miami News sportswriter who was also the assistant coach for the Olympic team, penned a scathing column on April 12, chastising MLB owners. He accused them of being hypocrites, for signing unproven minor leaguers for $25,000 but refusing to put up a few thousand for the national amateur team.37

Dennis was one of those who selected the team, along with college coaches Harry Wolter (Stanford), Judson Hyames (Western Michigan), Linn Wells (Bowdoin College), and Frank Anderson (Oglethorpe College), as well as Hall of Famer Max Carey and George Lang from the Penn Athletic Club. George A Lang, held an executive leadership position of Mann’s American Baseball Congress and was the USA delegate to the International Amateur Baseball Federaion.38

While the team was to be limited 20 players, 21 were finally chosen, and of those, 16 were associated with the Baltimore trials. The other five came from the Penn Athletic Club, holdovers from the early proposal to send the Penn AC team. Of the 16, only two had no direct connection to the coaches in Baltimore: Paul Amen from Nebraska and Grover Galvin Jr. from Rockford, Iowa. Seven of the players were known by Mann and Carey from either the 1935 Wheaties (Les McNeece, Fred Heringer, Ron Hibbard, and Tex Fore, with Rolf Carlsten an alternate who did not go to Japan) or one of their baseball school sessions (Herm Goldberg and Dow Wilson). Lin Wells picked his team captain and best rival respectively: Bill Shaw and Clarence Keegan, who both were their team’s best hitters. Wolter picked the west coast players: Gordon Mallatratt, Fred Heringer, Ike Livermore (all from his Stanford 1933 team), and Dick Hanna (from the 1936 Stanford team), and rivals Tom Downey from USC and Bill Sayles from Oregon. Hyames was also the coach to Ron Hibbard, who was the Western Michigan center fielder and team captain. Finally, Anderson picked a rival, University of Georgia football and baseball star Henry Wagnon.

Like the Baltimore sandlotters, the Penn AC had financial issues. They were initially allocated to send a whole team. Although the club’s membership came from top families of Philadelphia, including the Shibe family, and the team staged a benefit game against Connie Mack’s A’s, they were thousands of dollars short. While their goal was $5000, they raised a total of $2611, and sent only five players.39 Only four of those were found in the box scores from their games that summer: infielders Rolf “Swede”Carlsten, Earnest Eddowes, and pitchers Carson Thompson and Charles Simons.40 Two special player exemptions to the “strictly amateur” rules were given for Carlsten and the fifth player listed: Curtis Myers.

Carlsten had attended the University of Pennsylvania where he had starred in football and baseball, and had later bumped arround both the Orioles’ farm teams (York, Wilkes-Barre, Cumberland), and the Canadian Football League — from which league he was subsequently bannned when his professional baseball career was uncovered. He ended up the starting second baseman for Penn AC and would be “rechristened” an amateur for the Olympic team.41

The exception made for Myers is even more curious. He was the 21st player added to the supposed 20-man roster, and unlike the other four, he does not appear in any of the numerous Penn AC box scores in the years leading to the Olympics; moreover, a check with the Penn AC Archives did not find him there either. The only note was linked to a semi-pro team in Camden (NJ), the Morgan AC. Yet in the Olympic records, he is listed as being a member of the Penn AC. He was a rather successful college baseball pitcher with a career record of 8-4 and coached by former A’s legend and Hall of Fame Pitcher Charles, “Chief” Bender. .However, Myers was more than just a ballplayer,. Although the fact is not mentioned in any newspaper account of the team, he was also Lieutenant Curtis A. Myers of the US Navy, and had transferred landward to the Philadelphia Naval Yard in summer 1935. Adding to the espionage picture his home was listed as Hartford, Connecticut. His naval record included serving on various ships in the capacity of executive officer, being involved in naval aviation, and having received a Master’s Degree in Paris, France.42 He played baseball at the Naval Academy, graduating in 1927 making him the oldest member on the team and the one who had been out of the sport the longest time. Thus the question was, what was he really up to in Berlin?

Another player of note was the Baltimore tryout catcher, who played left field in the game. His name on the Berlin scoreboard was the very German-sounding “Harold Goldbergh.” In reality, he was Herm Goldberg, the only Jewish player on the team. His baseball legacy is vital to understanding how we today view the team and its moral mission some eighty years later.

Although the Olympic exhibition game had two official scorers — including the father of AP sports, Alan J. Gould — no box score seems to exist, just a line score. The game lasted seven innings and ended on a walk-off home run by McNeece. The final score was 6-5. The AP went on to report, “Only a handful in the vast crowd had any idea who was playing or cared who won.”43

The 1936 Berlin games were not about sports, but something more heinous and disturbing: the propagandization of sport for an immoral regime’s social, political, and cultural agenda symbolic of military conquest. The games were part of the great deception as noted by their stated purpose in the Official XIth Olympiad Report: “Sporting and chivalrous competition awakens the best human qualities. It does not sever, but on the contrary, unites the opponents in mutual understanding and reciprocal respect. It also helps to strengthen the bonds of peace between the nations. May the Olympic Flame therefore never be extinguished.”44

The other sport besides baseball that held a Special Demonstration in 1936 was gliding. Only countries within the specter of ambition of Nazi Germany’s influence were allowed to participate: Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Moreover, these gliding teams were housed not at the Olympic village but at the German Air Force Aviation Academy in Gatow. The official report confirmed the role of the Luftwaffe with the following: “all arrangements for the comfort and lodging of the group were under the supervision of Air Sport Leader Gerbrecht, who had been assigned to this task by the Reich Air Sport Leader.”45

Not surprisingly, the German Air Command ranked the performances and gave out awards.46

On July 28, 1936 — a mere three days before the opening Olympic ceremonies — Winston Churchill warned that the rising strength of the German Air Force was perilous, stating, “We are in danger as never before….”47 With military conscription in place, gliding introduced German youth into the basics of flight and thus the tactics of air combat. Gliding had become the militarization of sport in its rawest, most unrepentant form. Gliding was elevated to a cultural statement and iconographic descriptor of the nation of Germany in much the way baseball was for the United States, the only two nations to feature Special Demonstration sports.

Was the need to better witness the rise of the Luftwaffe and their pilots’ training skills and its material growth the reason why Lt. Curtis Myers was on the team?

In the heated debate on whether to send a team to Berlin, the issue of whether participation was equivalent to supporting an immoral state government was raised. The words of the German Olympic Organizing Committee verified such concerns: “a mighty all-enveloping educative ideal which rises above the limits of time and the confines of national frontiers, aiming at physical, mental and moral perfection.”48

The elimination of both those national borders and those humans deemed not physically, mentally, or morally perfect was the evil behind the propaganda façade. Years later, Goldberg recalled, “They were telling us … they were getting ready for war, although they didn’t call it that. They just called it the ‘preparation of Germany for expanding its borders.’”49 This deception of their true ambitions was hidden in plain sight, and sadly undiscerned by many of the ballplayers — and other Olympians as well. Les McNeece, the team’s second baseman and the one who hit the game-winning inside-the-park home run, years later noted to a reporter that, “When all the Olympic teams marched into the Stadium, there were thousands of Nazi SS Troops lining the road. We thought they were honoring us.”50

Standing against this immoral ambition on display at the Games would give rise to many heroes, none greater than Jesse Owens, who thwarted Hitler’s desire to prove Aryan superiority by winning four gold medal s and setting three world records. When conntrasted with the other demonstration sport of “Gliding,” staged by the Luftwaffe High Command and featuring future fighter and bomber pilots, baseball represents the pastime of peace This was a team of goodwill ambassadors. Goldberg, the left fielder from Brooklyn, gave the lessons of baseball a most eloquent voice: “I learned to live with the competition, to lose when I had to lose without crying about it. To win when I could win with joyousness and to share with my teammates.”51

And whether your teammate was Jim Creighton, Bill Mazeroski, Joe Carter, or Les McNeece, the shared experience the age-old stanza goes:

“And then Home with Joy.”52

KEITH SPALDING ROBBINS has been a SABR member since 2013. His family’s baseball story is an open book for all, especially if you read John Thorn, Peter Levine, or Mark Lampster. He was named after his father’s uncle, whose namesake building catches its fair share of home runs hit at Cal Tech. Keith has been published in the 2013-2014 Cooperstown Symposium and NINE and his research interests include old-timers games and international baseball tours.

Notes

1 Pete Cava, “Baseball in the Olympics,” Citius, Altius, Fortius (Journal of Olympic History 1997), Vol. 1, #1, Summer 1992, 9-16. M.E. Travaglini, “Olympic Baseball: Was es Das?” The National Pastime #5, Vol. 4 #2, Winter 1985, 46-55.

2 Report of the American Olympic Committee, Games of the XITH Olympiad Berlin, Germany; IVth Olympic Winter Games Garmisch-partenkirchen Germany, ed. Frederick W. Rubien, American Olympic Committee (New York, 1936). The actual attendance number is still in doubt to this day. The general agreement is in excess of 100,000 with the official US American Olympic Team Report stating it at 125,000. In totalitarian Germany of that day the costs of not filling the stadium would have been higher than the ticket price of 1DM.

3 Stanford’s famous Sunken Diamond did not get lights until 1996; in Philadelphia, Shibe Park did not get lights until 1939. To this day two college baseball diamonds have no lights: University of Pennsylvania and Bowdoin Colleges’ Pickard Field. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/stadium/st_shibe.shtml. https://gostanford.com/sports/baseball. https://www.facilities.upenn.edu/maps/locations/meiklejohn-stadium-murphy-field. https://athletics.bowdoin.edu/information/facilities/files/baseball.

4 Michael Clair, “The Complete History of the Walk-Up Song,” MLB.com, July 10, 2019, https://www.mlb.com/cut4/the-complete-history-of-the-walk-up-song

5 Paul Amen, diary journal entry of August 12, 1936, Baseball Hall of Fame File.

6 “Japan Cancels Baseball Trip,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, December 7, 1935, 4.

7 Travaglini, 53.

8 Chicago World-Telegram, December 12, 1935.

9 Sayuri Gutherie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War, University of North Carolina Press, 2012, 169.

10 Mann, Leslie, Baseball Around the World: International Amateur Baseball Federation, Self Published, Springfield MA, Springfield College Library, page 6.

11 “Scalzi Back from Tours,” The Huntsville Times, February 3, 1936, 3. Scalzi was the shortstop for the Alabama Crimson Tide and a 1935 Wheaties All American.

12 Interviewed by Corvallis Gazette Times, September 17, 1937.

13 “Waseda Has Fine Record for Invasion,” The Honolulu Advertiser, July 7, 1936, 11.

14 “Japanese Pitcher Allows Yale No Hits and No Runs,” The Boston Globe, June 9, 1936, 21. Some west coast newspapers erroneously reported this as a perfect game.

15 The Sporting News, April 9, 1936, 8. Advertisement of the American Baseball Olympic Committee.

16 “Babe Ruth rejects offer to play ball with Reds,” The Scranton Republican, March 10, 1936, 16.

17 “St. Joe Selected,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 26, 1936, 35.

18 “Cahill May Join Senators Today,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 9, 1915, 9. Other players mentioned include Bill Morrisette, Lewis Malone, Rube Meadows, and Dave Roth. Malone and Morrisette were on the 1915 A’s roster, the year after Connie Mack began his first great sell-off.

19 Now it’s the site of a turf multipurpose field enclosed by a track, called Pleyvak Field.

20 “Baseball Amateur Aces Are Gathering for Olympic Tryouts,” The Boston Globe, July 1, 1936, 24.

21 Stuart B. McIver, Touched by the Sun, The Florida Chronicles, Volume 3. Chapter 2,An Olympian Homer, page 14. Chapter on Les McNeece.

22 Bennington Evening Banner, May 23, 1936, p. 4.

23 “Here from Four Corners of Nation to Seek Olympic Places,” The Baltimore Sun, July 5, 1936, 18.

24 “District Baseball Stars Get Olympic Games Try,” The Pittsburgh Press, July 9, 1935, 26. The Sporting News of August 1, 1935, included a team application.

25 “West vs East,” The Reading (PA) Times, February 3, 1936, 14.

26 Jimmy Keenan, “July 8, 1936: Baltimore Police Tame the US Olympic Baseball Team,” SABR Games Project, https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/july-8-1936-baltimore-police-tame-olympic-baseball-team

27 Keenan, “Baltimore Police Tame US Olympic Baseball Team.”

28 “Dinty’s Dugout Chatter”, Column. Miami News, April 12, 1936, 11.

29 “Beware, Poor Fish.” New York Daily News, July 3, 1936, 195.

30 Saskatoon Star-Phoenix of July 6, 1936. The Babe visited Alfred Scadding at a Halifax hospital.

31 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 10, 1936, 17.

32 “Ruth Denies He was Offered Job as Indians’ Pilot,” Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1936, 25.

33 https://www.digbypines.ca/hotel-info/history/ Babe Ruth played a round of golf there.

34 http://jesseowensmemorialpark.com/wordpress1/1936-olympics-in-berlin

35 New York Daily News and Brooklyn Union Times, various stories, September 3-4, 1936.

36 “Ruth Gets 70 in Trial Round,” The South Bend Tribune, August 14, 1936, 28.

37 “Dinty’s Dugout Chatter”, Column. Miami News, April 12, 1936, 11.

38 See X. Page 8. Lang was noted as Vice President of the USABC and the USA delegate to the International Association Baseball Federation.

39 “Pennac Nine Needs $3000 – Or Else- They’ll Stay Home,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 1936.

40 “Athletics Upset Pennac Clubbers in Olympic Tilt,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 1936.

41 Given the issues with Jim Thorpe being stripped of his Olympic medals for playing semi-pro baseball its most curious that both Les Mann and the ever watchful and controlling Avery Brundage would allow a banned-in-Canada professional on the Olympic team, but they did.

42 Before World War II, newspapers published officers’ orders and ship movements. Lieutenant Myers was found approximately every 20 months with new orders. By 1935 he was in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

43 “100,000 See Baseball Tilt,” The Baltimore Sun, August 13, 1936.

44 The XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 1936. Official Report: Organisationskomitee Für Die Xi. Olympiade Berlin 1936 E. V. Wilhelm Limpert, (Berlin) 1937. Vol 6, 6. This stated is attributed to the dictator of the German state.

45 XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 1936, 1100.

46 Listed in the both Berlin Olympics and the US Olympic Committee reports.

47 XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 229.

48 XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 4.

49 Josh Chetwynd and Brian A. Belton, British Baseball and the West Ham Club, McFarland & Co., 2006, 127.

50 McIver, 15.

51 National Holocaust Museum Oral History files for Herman Goldberg http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504462.

52 Thomas Newberry, “Base-Ball,” The Little Pocket-Book, 1787 Worcester Edition, (Isaiah Thomas: Worcester, MA) 43.

In the past 25 years, however, something entirely new has come upon the major league scene: the player who hits 40 home runs while batting in fewer than 100 runs. Duke Snider (40/92) was the first to do so, in 1957. The following season, Mickey Mantle (42/97) followed suit, repeating in 1960 (40/94). Rico Petrocelli (40/97) became the only shortstop to do it, in 1969. That same season, Hank Aaron (44/97) turned the trick, and in 1973 (40/96) joined his second base teammate Dave Johnson (43/99) on the list. Harmon Killebrew’s 1963 season (45/96) deserves special mention, with the Twins’ outfielder blasting the most home runs while falling short of the 100 RBI mark.

This phenomenon, however, represents only part of a larger trend. With the advent of the “lively ball,” in 1922 both Babe Ruth (35/99) and Tilly Walker of the A’s (37/99) hit at least 35 home runs without driving home   100 runs. A quarter-century passed before another major leaguer matched this “shortfall” performance, as Hank Sauer compiled 35/97 marks in 1948. Since that time, however, this feat has been accomplished a total of 34 times, the last being by Dave Kingman (37/99) and Mike Schmidt (35/87) in 1982. Fourteen times a player with 35 home runs has failed to drive in 90 runs, with Wally Post and the rookie Frank Robinson batting in but 83 in 1956.

Whatever the exact figures, there are many fine seasons represented in the efforts described above. These players, however, stand in sharp contrast to another, seldom-recognized, group of major leaguers. This select company is composed of those who have driven in the most runs during a season while hitting the fewest home runs.

We are aware that Hugh Jennings is credited with knocking in 121 runs in that big batting year of 1896 without hitting a home run; and that Lave Cross’ 108 RBIs in 1902 were produced without a four-bagger. However, we are limiting our brief study to the modern period of 1920 to the present, not because the RBI became fully official in 1920, but because the home run component came into relatively equal prominence with the RBI at that point. The lively ball made for more Ruthian home run hitters, sweeping the bases ahead of all others.

After 1920 it became rather exceptional to see batters like Larry Gardner, Joe Sewell, and Pie Traynor knock in 100 runs with only 2-3 home runs. Sewell almost made the list in 1925 when he hit only one homer and knocked in 98 runs. In most cases the clubs these run producers played for had healthy team averages around .300, there were no full-blown home run hitters in the lineup, and the individual hit for a good average himself.

There were a few exceptions. In 1931, for example, Pie Traynor of the Pirates knocked in 103 runs while hitting only two round-trippers and batting only .298. The club was sixth in batting (.266) and fifth in scoring runs. Six other Pirates hit more home runs than Traynor, but no one else knocked in more than 70 runs, which was Paul Waner’s figure. There is no doubt that Traynor came through with men on base.

In 1934 Bill Rogell batted only .296 for the Tigers, and his 3 home runs could not compare with Hank Greenberg’s 26, but he still batted in 100 runs. However, the Tigers batted .300 that season and scored a very high number of runs – 958 to 842 for the runner-up Yankees. Rogell batted sixth behind Gehringer (third), Greenberg (fourth) and Goslin, all of whom knocked in 100 or more runs.

In 1943, Billy Herman hit two homers and knocked in 100 runs for the Dodgers. However, he batted a solid .330 and the Bums, in spite of little help from their fading home run hitter, Dolf Camilli, led the league in runs.

Gradually it became more and more difficult to collect 100 RBIs with fewer than 10 homers. Pinky Higgins and Frank McCormick both finished with 5/106 in 1938; and Cecil Travis and Bob Elliott were both 7/101 in 1941 and 1943 respectively. Herman’s exceptional record in 1943 stood out in comparison.

In 1950, Detroit third baseman George Kell (8/101) became the last player to post an RBI total in three figures with a single figure HR mark. The shift was already in motion. When Kell played his last season in 1957 Duke Snider became a “first” in the other direction with 40 homers and 92 RBI. In 1983 it looked like Ted Simmons might be a throw-back to earlier decades when he was knocking in runs without the long ball. However, by the end of the season his round-trippers had gone up to 13 and his RBIs stood at 108.

Here are the two extremes: Those players with 40 home runs and fewer than 100 RBIs, and those players who knocked in 100 runs with three or fewer four-baggers. Although the period is restricted to 1920 to the present, the two groups still fall into separate eras.

Note: All stats through 1983 season.

George H. Lawson (1864–1927), promoter of various baseball leagues, including the United States League, which drew attention for his announcement that he would sign African American players. After a modest launch in spring 1910, the league was disbanded in May, a few weeks into the season. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Few men appear to have been less qualified to take a stand against professional baseball’s greatest shame, the unwritten “color line” that segregated the sport for seventy years, than George H. Lawson (1864—1927). Lawson lived in the shadow of his more notorious brother, Alfred W. Lawson (1869— 1954), a longtime minor-league manager and promoter who, as a player, had a brief three-game stint in the weakened National League of 1890. Al Lawson was a restless, innovative, but mostly infamous figure in the baseball community between 1890 and 1916, thanks to his tendency to abandon players, teams, and leagues when his own interests were threatened. He eventually moved on to the fields of aviation, dietetics, philosophy, economic reform, and religion, building a following that some have labeled a cult. Alfred Lawson has often been cited as the foremost American eccentric—even his homespun system of physics (a component of the philosophy of “Lawsonomy”) included a key principle, “Zig-Zag-and-Swirl,” that posits that everything in the universe moves eccentrically.

George Lawson, Alfred’s brother, had less practical experience in baseball but tried to match his brother’s bluster as a promoter of new leagues. The evidence of those attempts made brief headlines between 1910 and 1926. However, recent research into George Lawson’s life has revealed a career full of aliases, criminal acts, debauchery, sociopathic tendencies, misogyny, quackery, and deception. In comparison, George Lawson makes his brother Alfred Lawson appear to be the soul of reason. Some small degree of recognition is due George Lawson for carrying the standard against racism in sport when so few others were willing to join him. However, his motives, as well as his actions after 1921, bring into question whether he can be credited with any real moral courage for his efforts to break the color line.

George Herman Lawson was born in the slums of London, England, in 1864, the son of Robert H. Lawson and Mary Ann Anderson Lawson. His mother’s maiden name, Anderson, was the source of the nickname he used for many of his baseball ventures: Andy Lawson. He also often used it to embellish his full name to George Herman Anderson Lawson. The family immigrated to Windsor, Canada, in 1869, and three years later moved to the Detroit area. When just sixteen, George H. Lawson left home and returned to his family’s old neighborhood in the East End of London. He soon enlisted in the British army and during the period 1881—86 served at postings in Ireland and India. He saw no fighting, but, like many of his fellow soldiers, he was hospitalized several times with gonorrhea and syphilis. He exhibited delusions of grandeur and was eventually diagnosed as “manic,” an archaic medical term that could signify a range of mental disorders. Interestingly, his medical record described his illness as inherited rather than due to venereal disease, suggesting a congenital personality disorder. He was sent to an asylum in India, then back to the major military hospital in England, and, finally, invalided out of the service in December 1886.1

AN EVENTFUL (BUT SKETCHY) BASEBALL CAREER IS LAUNCHED

Lawson returned to North America and married his first wife, Nana, in Ontario in March 1888. No evidence has yet surfaced that George Lawson participated in baseball before 1895, when he was 31 years old. In August of that year, George’s brother Alfred organized a team in Boston of “amateur” college players. Their intent was to tour England, playing against teams of the National Base Ball Association of Great Britain and the London Base Ball Association. Al Lawson recruited players allegedly from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but those schools have no records matching the names of Lawson’s players. The only non—Ivy League background of a player given to newspapers was that of an outfielder, George Anderson. However, one paper, the New York Times, reported the players’ names, replacing “Anderson” with his real name: George H. Lawson, “formerly of Ann Arbor University.”2 Not surprisingly, Ann Arbor University (as the University of Michigan was then informally known) has no record of George Lawson’s enrollment. Only one detailed box score out of the 19 games the Boston Amateurs played on this tour has come to light, and George is not in that lineup. Little, therefore, is known about his playing skills. The tour itself, which was originally to include 40 games and excursions into Scotland and France, scaled back its announced plans to 25 games. However, the tour collapsed within two weeks owing to low gate receipts. The Americans were surprised by the low ticket prices, as English baseball relied more heavily on club subscriptions rather than the gate. Poor publicity and hasty scheduling also contributed to the tour’s failure.3 Al Lawson, in typical fashion, had previously secured a ticket to Paris and used it, while his players were stranded without hotel money to tide them over until they could board their ship home.

George Lawson returned to his home in Boston, only to discover that his wife had left town in the company of another man. What then took place is a curiosity of nineteenth-century journalism. The Boston Globe ran a story that originated from Pittsburgh:

Geo. H. Lawson, manager of the amateur baseball team which went to England this summer, was in the city today with blood in his eye and a gun in his pocket He was about as angry a man as ever chased an absent wife, and as he boarded a train today for the windy city [he had tracked the fleeing couple first to Pittsburgh and then Chicago] he declared that he would continue the chase until some one got hurt.4

One has to wonder how a newspaper could report a crime that was merely threatened. Was a Globe reporter in Pittsburgh, and did he run into Lawson by happenstance? Or did Lawson himself wire the story to the Globe, thinking that his threats might eventually reach his errant spouse? At any rate, he appears not to have killed anyone, but Nana Lawson did ultimately divorce Lawson in 1897. Alfred Lawson, meanwhile, was mightily annoyed that his brother was misidentified in the Globe as the manager of the touring team, since that mention caused a misunderstanding between Al and a lady friend. It was the beginning of a public rift that divided the two brothers the rest of their lives.

At different points over the next two decades, both George and Alfred would deny that they were related to one another, although their reason could have been only to placate local citizens who had heard of the other Lawson’s baseball misdeeds. However, in some situations, George was quick to mention that he was the brother of a former major-league player. Sportswriters who learned of their relation assumed the two Lawsons colluded in their ventures, but the evidence suggests that George had none of Al Lawson’s baseball acumen and that George followed in his brother’s footsteps in order to see his own name in print and to capitalize on his brother’s occasional successes. For his part, Al Lawson seems to have viewed George as a pest who hounded his every baseball move.

The first example of this pattern occurred in 1897. That spring, Al Lawson organized an independent team in North Adams, Massachusetts, and tried to form a league in the Berkshires. Al Lawson’s “Lawsonites” played an impressive independent schedule, and he seemed to be a capable manager and owner. Meanwhile, across the state, George Lawson blew into Lawrence, Massachusetts, in mid-June and told reporters that he was organizing a team there and also would form a Merrimack Valley League. Local sporting men in Lawrence—and in the prospective league towns that George Lawson named—heard of these plans for the first time when they read them in the newspaper. George Lawson’s grand vision turned out to be just hot air.5

The next spring, both brothers were up to their usual shenanigans. Al Lawson secured a team for Manchester, New Hampshire, and made efforts to organize a New Hampshire League. Al Lawson’s Manchester team took the field for a few games in late April. Twenty-five miles to the south, George Lawson popped up in Nashua, New Hampshire. He secured a field there and also one in Concord, outflanking his brother’s moves to start a league. Frustrated, Al Lawson disappeared from Manchester with the gate receipts before the players’ May contracts started. George fielded a Concord team for a few weeks, and then he too threw in the towel. Later, in a Boston Globe article in 1923, sportsmen in Concord recalled:

When he [George] arrived he had with him an attractive young woman as his secretary, occupied a suite of rooms at the best hotel in town, leased the YMCA athletic grounds for a year, advertised for players, ordered handsome uniforms, announced that he would form a State League, and in various ways obtained a large amount of publicity. . . . Three or four games were played with teams from Laconia and Manchester [after Al Lawson had already left], but the gate receipts were not large either at home or abroad, and ‘Andy’ disappeared.6

Both Lawsons blamed their 1898 disasters on bad weather and a scarcity of players because of the Spanish—American War.

The Lawsons descended on Indiana in spring 1899. Al Lawson shaped a team for the town of Anderson and called together other unaffiliated town teams to form the Indiana-Illinois (Two-I) League. It started its schedule in early May. On May 27, Lawson took his team to play against Muncie and was distraught to find that Muncie was being managed by “George Anderson”—his brother George, using an alias. Their confrontation made headlines back east, where, the Boston Globe reported, with understatement, that “there had been ill-feeling between the brothers for some time.”7 The Two-I League dissolved in early June, and Al Lawson left Indiana to pursue a scheme to bring the first All Cubans team over to tour America. George, however, moved from Muncie and took control of the team in Kokomo, Indiana, which became a founding member of a more limited Indiana State League. George Lawson was unable to meet the team’s first payroll, and two of his players gave him a savage beating, forcing him to be hospitalized. When informed of George’s fate, brother Al was reported by the North Adams Transcript to be “evidently much disgusted with the lack of finesse shown by his brother in not getting out of town ahead of the game.”8 Perhaps he was just disgusted with his brother’s antics in general.

Chastened, George Lawson abandoned the field of sports for several years. He returned to Boston and in late 1899 married his second wife, Olivia. Lawson took up the occupation of selling sewing machines—a vocation that one of his other brothers, Donald Lawson, followed to become a regional sales manager for Singer. By early January 1902, Olivia Lawson had fled to the hinterlands of Boise, Idaho, and remarried within days of her arrival. In retrospect, it was probably the smart thing to do.

PROFESSOR LAWSON HERMANN, HYPNOTIST

George was impatient with the life of a salesman, and in 1901 he began self-study of another skill: hypnotism. In July, while still married to Olivia, he began an affair with a woman he met while selling sewing machines door-to-door. According to later court testimony, he made no sale but did convince Mrs. Della Carles (who herself was married) to take hypnosis lessons from him. They began a series of liaisons that occurred two or three times a week, sometimes overnight. Mrs. Carles tried to break it off over dinner at a restaurant. George flew into a rage and shoved her. The manager called the police. As Mrs. Carles fled, Lawson grabbed her purse. Lawson was arrested and charged—not for battery but larceny. He was sentenced to six months in jail.9

Imprisonment apparently only gave George Lawson time to hone his skills, for by the fall of 1902 he was touring the East Coast vaudeville circuit as a stage hypnotist. At every stop he publicized his engagement by sensationally announcing that he would bury a hypnotized assistant for a period of days—a stunt that necessarily involved trickery, since hypnotic “trances” last no longer than a normal sleep cycle. The papers of Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford, Wilmington, and Lowell abetted Lawson in his public-relations campaign as he appeared before city councils to get approval or defied police prohibitions against performing the burial stunt.10

In January 1903, “Professor Lawson Hermann” brought his act to the Passaic Opera House in New Jersey. He tried to recruit the wife of the theater manager to serve as his assistant. Though Mrs. Sohl appeared to be a willing accomplice, her husband objected. Mr. Sohl broke up a tryst between his wife and Lawson at Lawson’s apartment in New York City. Lawson then was booked to appear at another Passaic theater, the Empire. “Prof. Hermann” put his new male stooge, Samuel Powell, in a trance and inside a glass coffin on stage hours before the show. Meanwhile, word that Sohl was looking for Lawson “with ire in his eye and a revolver in his pocket” reached the “Professor,” and he failed to appear at his scheduled midnight performance. The New York Times reported:

The big audience became impatient, and manager Stein of the Empire became alarmed. The manager hustled around, and after some trouble secured Prof. Tony Frylinck. Prof. Frylinck worked all night before he could awaken the sleeper, and by that time the few weary spectators who had waited to see the upshot were so sleepy themselves that they had lost all interest in Powell, and some of those who had dozed off rather resented his return to consciousness of his surroundings, for Powell when he learned that Hermann had abandoned him was at first greatly alarmed and then waxed exceeding wroth, and expressed his opinion of the professor in language that was as loud as it was emphatic. He says he will never again permit himself to be buried alive.11

Lawson found a new female assistant, Helen Lenten, who became his third wife in 1903. In 1904, he brought his vaudeville act to Hartford, Connecticut. After a few performances, he and Helen settled in the city and he earned a modest living selling sewing machines from a storefront. During that time, Lawson hatched a much darker plan for using his hypnotic talents. He began to place in the Hartford papers ads claiming that “Prof. G. Hermann Lawson” could perform miracle cures for chronic medical conditions, and he scheduled appointments at his “sanitarium.” His practice, which probably consisted of dispensing placebos and hypnotic pain-control suggestions, proved to be lucrative. Soon he was waving around rolls of bills in local saloons. He paid for a new-fangled REO automobile in cash. He was arrested on two occasions for drunkenness, and one of those episodes resulted in bruises on Helen Lawson’s face and neck. The Hartford Medical Board finally caught up with Lawson in early 1906 and slapped him with an ineffectual $100 fine. Lawson kept on advertising, taking new patients, and appealed the fine. Creditors, not medical officials, finally forced the Lawsons out of Hartford.12 They moved south to Wilmington, Delaware, where they repeated the same scam. However, Delaware officials discovered his Hartford history and moved swiftly to charge him with medical malpractice. In February 1907, his first trial on those charges resulted in a hung jury.13 A month later, George Lawson assumed the name “James Anderson” and insinuated himself as the owner of the Greensburg club of the new Western Pennsylvania League. The president of this short-lived league was yet another Lawson brother, Alexander J. Lawson (who earned the nickname “Runaway Alex”—don’t ask).14 A few weeks into the season, on May 22, “James Anderson” disappeared from Greensburg, leaving the club broke.

To hedge his bets against being able to continue his career as a medical quack, George Lawson romanced one of his patients, Mary Gregg Chandler, the elderly, wealthy daughter of a former Wilmington sheriff. Lawson wasted little time in getting his marriage to Helen annulled on the basis that she had never legally divorced her first husband. He was then free to court the attentions of Mary Chandler. Simultaneously, he put out feelers for another baseball venture. In January 1908, George Lawson announced to Philadelphia papers that he was forming a new Pennsylvania—New Jersey League.15

George Lawson’s new league plans were preempted by a guilty verdict in his second retrial for medical malpractice, which resulted in a one-year prison sentence. Immediately after serving his sentence and being released from jail in March 1909, he married the heiress Mary Chandler. She was then 70 years old, he 45. She doubtless misjudged his true character, which didn’t take long to surface. In April 1909 he was arrested for beating her and putting a gun to her head to force her to write him a check.16 In September she filed for divorce.

UNITED STATES LEAGUE

Left to his own resources, George Lawson returned to Boston and a familiar enterprise. He announced the formation of the United States League in late December 1909 and made the astounding statement that he intended it to be an outlaw league (outside professional baseball’s National Agreement stipulations) that would ignore the color line and include black players on rosters of each team. In quick succession, Lawson announced that three members of the barnstorming Cuban (that is, African American) Giants would join the league’s Providence team and that Billy Thompson, an African American star of New Hampshire independent teams, would also be signed.17

Why did George Lawson take a stand against the color line? It was no secret in the sporting world that black players were talented and could play on a high level—such barnstorming independent teams as the Cuban Giants, Philadelphia Giants, and the New York Gorhams had proved that point. During the few weeks that he actually managed small-city clubs, George Lawson had signed at least one black player—Billy Thompson was a member of his Concord team of 1898. Lawson’s stint in the British army in India may have shown him that race was no measure of skill, strength, or courage. More likely, Lawson’s father, Robert Lawson, who had been a lay preacher from a section of London known for its reform politics, taught his sons the errors of prejudice. For whatever reason, Lawson did stake out a position, and many bigots heaped scorn on him, ridiculing the “Black and Tan League.”

There was no rush by African American players to join the United States League. Independent black teams (many of which were owned by whites) would have viewed Lawson as competition and discouraged their players from participating. Other early supporters of the United States League appeared to chafe at the increasing publicity given to the league’s integration. Efforts to place a franchise in Baltimore, or anyplace else south of the Mason-Dixon Line, were abandoned because of resistance by the local white establishment. Lawson’s shortcomings as an organizer were soon exposed. He had no head for business details, and for too long the league existed with no physical office. To the alarm of some of the prospective owners, Lawson agreed to the idea of letting players in the League unionize. On March 17, 1910, before any team had taken the field, the AFL recognized the players’ union.18 By late March, word of Lawson’s recent criminal history and his ex-con status likely forced his resignation as president of the United States League.19 The scandal proved too much for many of the backers to bear, and too much time had been lost. The league was scaled back to include only small New England cities, but it never captivated fan interest. The United States League of 1910 disappeared quietly in May, after a few weeks of play. Several of Alfred Lawson’s baseball cronies attempted to revive it in 1912. That effort failed too, after a slightly longer run. Veterans of that 1912 version went on to found the Federal League of 1913—15, which was a true attempt at a rival major league. In later years, George Lawson took credit for founding the Federal League, though he was at least two degrees separated from any connection to it.

WORLD WAR I AND THE ALLIED LEAGUE

Uncharacteristically, George Lawson kept his name out of public view during the period 1911—14. When World War I started, he was once again living in Boston and selling sewing machines from an outlet store. When war was declared, he was compelled to answer the call of his native country, Great Britain. He wrote to his old commander, the duke of Connaught, who was currently the governor-general of Canada, and volunteered his services. Despite his age (50) and ghastly service record in the British army (did they check, or were they that desperate?), George Lawson in 1914 was made the Boston recruiting officer of the Canadian Royal Engineers. He was soon transferred to Montreal, where he contributed to the war effort by helping to ferry men and cavalry horses over to England.

In later years he bestowed hero status on himself for his combat actions, but he mentioned only famous battles in which the Canadian Royal Engineers, notably, had no role. None of his World War I military records have survived, but a photo of Lawson in uniform displays the proper regimental insignia. His claim to have exited with the rank of sergeant major cannot be confirmed. George Lawson emerged from World War I in 1918 as a 54-year-old veteran. On arrival back in the United States, he picked up right where he had left off and announced that he was forming an Allied League, composed solely of war veterans. It was an idea with patriotic appeal, but Lawson was a poor organizer. He was only able to form one “Allied Veterans” team that played a few games against independent teams in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.20

In one of life’s ironies, a notable historical event that threatened to condemn Lawson to a fate he deserved miraculously released him. After returning home to Boston as a veteran, Lawson committed some unknown crime—probably while drunk and disorderly, possibly involving assault of a police officer— and was sent by the court to a state mental hospital, a sentence that courts of that time frequently imposed. Meanwhile, in September 1919, most of Boston’s police force walked off the job in a labor protest over abysmally low wages. Chaos resulted, and rioters wrought destruction on the Boston streets and citizenry. Order was restored by Governor Calvin Coolidge, whose staunch efforts to suppress both the rioters and strikers involved a directive to fire the striking policemen and to use National Guard troops to patrol the streets. Realizing that Boston needed to recruit a wholly new police force, Coolidge shrewdly reasoned that the best candidates were war veterans. He ordered vets confined for minor offenses to be paroled from prisons and asylums. The asylum doors opened to release George Lawson once more on an unsuspecting world. George Lawson was even motivated to run as an independent for the Massachusetts State Assembly against the incumbent local Democratic-machine candidate. His ballot-petition signatures were questioned in court, but his name remained on the slate on election day. He lost.21

CONTINENTAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION

In December 1920, Lawson burst forward onto the national sporting scene with a proposal for a Continental Baseball Association (more often referred to as the Continental League), an outlaw major league with franchises in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Lawson stated that the CBA would use some of the same policies he had set out for the United States League in1910: It would be integrated, it would have no reserve clause and no salary limits, and it would endorse players unionizing and joining the AFL. Lawson’s CBA balloon captured perhaps more attention than his 1910 effort, for several reasons. First, the public still had not forgiven the established major leagues for the Black Sox betting scandal of 1919, which many blamed on the greed of owners. Second, Lawson argued that the stalwart combat service of American blacks had disproved the bias against them. Third, the African American community now had a stronger media network, with major newspapers in large eastern cities.

The sports pages of newspapers across the country in January and February 1921 issued new details about the CBA, seemingly on a daily basis. Lawson dropped big names left and right. He would sign seven of the eight Black Sox outcasts; he would lure Honus Wagner out of retirement; he would meet with George M. Cohan about ownership of one of the franchises (when informed that his name had been mentioned, Cohan’s response was a classic: “Piffle!”); and Lawson was also in talks with Casey Stengel. Very little of this appeared to be true, but, still, interest in the CBA seemed to grow almost despite Lawson’s blather.

This was probably due to the enthusiastic backing of major black newspapers, notably the Chicago Defender. In the New York News, the progressive black writer and lyricist Andy Razaf (Ain’t Misbehavin,’ Honeysuckle Rose) composed an ode:

Hail to the Continental League,
The Champions of a nobler plan,
Whose motto is “Democracy”
Whose aims are true American.
For they would save the nation’s game
And free it from a selfish few;
Who have dishonored it for gain
And barred the men of darker hue.
The Baseball Park is soon to be
A place where players, white and tan,
Shall demonstrate pure sportsmanship
And man will love his fellow man.
Where grandstand, box, and bleacher crowds
Will feel a new and greater thrill;
When pale and dusky Ruths and Cobbs
Will match their fleetness, nerve and skill.
Proclaim the news from coast to coast,
Let every true, red-blooded fan;
Support the worthy enterprise Of Andy Lawson and his clan!22

By early March, Lawson was clearly cultivating black support for the CBA. He promised not to raid the National Negro League, only a year old at that point, for players or to place teams in cities where the National Negro League teams operated. Unlike the situation in 1910, the National Negro League had black ownership, so Lawson was careful not to antagonize their interests, and he stated that he was willing to sign a mutual protection agreement. Plans changed rapidly. First, two entire teams out of the eight in the CBA would be all-black. By March 25, the ratio changed to 50—50, four black teams, four white teams. Two of the league officers, Robert L. Murray and Altamont James Stewart, were African Americans.23

However, while these developments were intriguing, white newspapers had dismissed the CBA by mid-March. All mention of George Lawson in connection with the Continental League stopped in mid-April. Many baseball histories wrote the Continental League off as another Lawson Brothers pipe dream that never took the field, and no evidence from the archives of white-run newspapers indicated anything to the contrary. However, on April 23, 1921, the Chicago Defender reported that the Philadelphia Continental League team had defeated the Knoxville College nine at an exhibition game in Knoxville. On May 7, the Defender stated that the League’s schedule had been finalized and that play would begin on May 15. On May 14, the paper ran a complete box score of an exhibition between the Boston Continental League team and the Chelsea Knights of Columbus. On May 21, the box score of a league game between the Boston Pilgrims and the Bronx Giants ran, and on May 28 a short mention was made of the scores of games between Philadelphia and the Bronx.24 After that, no more scores appear.

REVEREND LAWSON TAKES ON THE KLAN

George Lawson disappeared from media attention for a year and a half, but he began to make headlines again in December 1922. He had gotten religion and set himself up as a storefront evangelist in East Orange, New Jersey. On December 2, the New York Times reported that he had taken to the pulpit and publicly prayed to God to deliver him a bride. The story was picked up by papers throughout the United States, and Lawson was labeled as the “Prayer Bride” preacher. His nationwide search for a divinely provided spouse became a running story for nearly a month, and he was flooded with hundreds of letters from women offering themselves in matrimony. Lawson’s prayers were finally answered, in mid-January, when a plainfaced, devout, and poor laundrywoman named Ella Wieber took vows uniting her with George Lawson. She was wife number six. Their honeymoon was launched as a two-year national revival-meeting tour.25 Rev. Lawson’s evangelistic campaign got as far west as Cleveland before the money ran out. Lawson and his bride remained there for a year, and another Lawson sibling, Robert Lawson Jr., gave him a job as a painter and wallpaper hanger. In September 1924, the couple returned to New Jersey, settling in Ella Wieber’s hometown of Keyport. Lawson quickly built up large audiences for his street-corner sermons, where a hat was passed for collections. Through Ella’s connections, Lawson after a couple of months was able to secure the use of a vacant church, the Centerville Baptist Chapel near Keyport. There was one big catch: Members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan controlled the chapel. Lawson willingly assented to the arrangement, and he gave several sermons in praise of the KKK. He was recognized as a Klan pastor and joined the organization.

In the mid-1920s, Klan membership throughout the United States reached its zenith, with many active chapters in the northeastern states. The revival of the Klan had been sparked by the 1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan as an opponent of the evils of Reconstruction. In Northern states, the Klan’s membership swelled during a nationwide economic dip in the early 1920s, capitalizing on antiunion sentiment and “Red Scare” fears. There were complex motives for its popularity: Some of its leadership may have seen membership fees as a convenient pyramid scam, while others of its members may have viewed it as just another benign fraternal society. However, no one who listened to Klan rhetoric could ignore that its principles were racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic.

It did not take long for Lawson and his new masters to clash. Lawson claimed the local leaders had earmarked all the church’s collection money for a new Klan building and a new car for the local Kleagle. At the end of December 1924, Lawson resigned from the Klan and complained that he was being threatened.26 By the following March, the war of nerves reached a new height: Lawson declared himself a candidate for governor of New Jersey on an anti-Klan platform. In April, he defied Klan death threats and divulged to reporters all the local Klan’s passwords, oaths, and fees.

In mid-June 1925, Lawson had to be rescued by a squadron of state police officers after giving a campaign speech in front of a hostile crowd of a thousand Klan supporters in Keansburg, New Jersey. Signs in the Keansburg auditorium displayed Lawson’s campaign slogans: “Kan the Klan, Vote for Lawson,” and “Lawson, the Visible Foe of the Invisible Empire.” After taking the podium, he wasted no time launching into a deflating portrait of the KKK: “The members of the KKK,” he thundered, “are a gang of freight car thieves, rum runners, and stool pigeons.” He had to be whisked out the back door.27

A measure of the nation’s racial attitudes could be found in requests made in July 1925 to the Park Commission of Washington, D.C., for permission to hold rallies at the base of the Washington Monument. The Ku Klux Klan’s rally application was approved. George Lawson’s anti-Klan rally application was rejected. The reason given was that Lawson was a candidate for public office.28

After the election that fall (his name may have not even been on the ballot), George Lawson made news again for reverting to his old, bad habits. In late November, police were called to the Lawson residence because of a loud domestic dispute. An enraged Lawson threw dishes at the police chief and leveled a pistol at the arresting officers. While being booked, Lawson had to be clubbed into submission. He was charged with drunkenness and assaulting an officer of the law. At his hearing in January 1926, the judge scolded Lawson for his uncontrolled ego. Lawson begged for parole and promised to leave New Jersey—and even the ministry, if the court so ordered. Instead, he was just told to leave town.29

*****

George Lawson’s last public act came in December 1926. He was 62 years old and in poor health, with failing eyesight. His sixth wife appears to have left him. However, his indefatigable need for self-promotion was still intact: He called a press conference in New York City and announced the formation of the United States Baseball Association, a new major league. Only a few newspapers ran the story, and then only once.30 Lawson returned to house painting to earn a living. In February 1927, he fell from a ladder and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage from which he never recovered. He died in a hospital in Newark, New Jersey, on May 18, 1927.

At the time of George Lawson’s death, his brother Alfred was working just a few dozen miles away in the town of Garwood, New Jersey, on his latest and greatest aviation scheme. He had built the cabin for a gargantuan hundred-passenger aircraft and was trying to get the rest of the project funded. The “Lawson Superairliner” was his last stab in the field of aeronautics; it may be that his brother’s death helped turn Alfred’s attention to the reform of human nature, which he pursued for nearly thirty more years.

The last offense that George Lawson perpetrated on the public was his burial place. He was given a free plot and interred in the American veterans’ section of a Newark cemetery. Later, when officials checked records in order to erect a headstone for Lawson, they discovered that he had not served in the armed forces of the United States. No one bothered to relocate his body, and so George H. Lawson’s final resting spot is marked by an empty gap in a long row of white gravestones, emblematic of his many shortcomings and unrealized schemes. 

JERRY KUNTZ is an electronic-resources librarian for the Ramapo Catskill Library System in Middletown, New York. He has recently completed a new biography of sharpshooter/aviator Samuel F. Cody, and is currently at work on a manuscript about Alfred and George Lawson.

Notes

1. The British Army Royal Artillery Corps records of George Herman Lawson, 1881—86, including his service and medical records, were obtained from the British National Archives.
2. New York Times, 11 August 1895.
3. However, the Boston Amateurs made one lasting impact: The detailed box score of their game of September 3, 1895, against the London Consolidated club was used to illustrate scoring notation in the first British textbook of the sport, Baseball, written by the leading advocate of the sport, music-hall comedian Richard George Knowles.
4. “One Town Behind: Lawson Is Following His Flying Spouse,”Boston Globe, 21 September 1895.
5. “Andy Lawson’s Scheme,” The Sporting News, 26 June 1897.
6. “Lawson Recalled by Concord Sporting Men,” Boston Globe, 5 January 1923.
7. Boston Globe, 27 May 1899.
8. “Al Lawson Here Again,” North Adams Transcript, 28 June 1899.
9. “Why Lawson Stole,” Boston Globe, 23 January 1902.
10. Lawson’s strategy to get publicity with the live burials worked to perfection in The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a series of articles detailing Lawson’s hypnotic claims and the reactions of police: Editions from October 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, and 31 and November 1 all ran stories.
11. “Abandoned Sleeper in Coffin,” New York Times, 8 February 1903.
12. Several years of reports of Lawson’s medical quackery culminated in “Lawson Decides to Quit Hartford,” an article in the Hartford Courant, 2 May 1906.
13. “‘Professor’ Lawson on Trial Again,” Hartford Courant, 11 February 1907.
14. Sporting Life, 9 March 1907.
15. “And Yet Another Mushroom League in Pennsylvania,” Washington Times, 7 January 1908.
16. “Wilmington News Notes,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 April 1909.
17. “Boston to Be in New League,” Boston Globe, 29 December 1909.
18. “Ball Player’s Union,” Boston Globe, 17 March 1910.
19. “Lawson Leaves U S League,” Boston Globe, 30 March 1910.
20. “Berkeley Trim’s Andy Lawson’s Veterans,” Pawtucket Evening Times, 9 June 1919.
21. Boston Globe, 16 October 1919.
22. New York News, 21 April 1921.
23. Chicago Defender, 16 April 1921.
24. Ibid., 28 May 1921.
25. “Baseball Preacher Weds Prayer Bride,” New York Times, 14 January 1923.
26. “Jersey Klansmen at Odds,” New York Times, 21 December 1924.
27. “Anti-Klan Speaker Rescued by Police,” New York Times, 18 June 1925.
28. “Permit is Refused Antiklan Gathering,” Washington Post, 8 July 1925.
29. “Preacher Lawson Freed,” New York Times, 26 January 1926.
30. “New Eight Club Ball League,” Chester Times, 20 December 1926.

The first home run was hit by Art Wilson of the Chicago Whales in a Federal League game on April 23, 1914. Wilson connected off Kansas City’s George (Chief) Wilson, sending the ball over the left-field wall with a man aboard in the second inning. The Whales went on to win 9-1 before 15,000 fans. It was the inaugural game at the Clark and Addison ballpark, which was constructed at a cost of $250,000 by Charles 0. Weeghman as a home for his Whales.

Two years later the Federal League folded and Weeghman headed a 10-man syndicate that purchased the Chicago Cubs. Gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. was a member of Weeghman’s group.

The Cubs moved from their West Side Grounds, located at Congress and Loomis, for their gala opener on April 20, 1916 at Weeghman Park. The team, managed by Joe Tinker, beat the Cincinnati Reds 7-6 on an 11th-inning single by Vic Saier. But the first National League homer at the North Side park was hit that day by the Reds’ John Woolf Beall with none on in the sixth inning off Claude Hendrix.

For the record, the first official Cub homer was hit by little Max Flack, who knocked the ball over the right-field wall off the Reds’ Gene Dale in the sixth inning with one on base on April 22, 1916.

Weeghman resigned after the 1918 season and Wrigley became the majority stockholder. Weegham Park then became known as Cubs Park. It wasn’t until 1926 that the stadium was renamed Wrigley Field.

Over the years, the most productive homer slugger at Wrigley Field was Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, with 290. Rounding out the top are Billy Williams, 241; Ron Santo, 212; Hank Sauer, 118; Gabby Hartnett, 115; Hack Wilson, 109; Bill Nicholson, 91; Rick Monday, 68; Andy Pafko, 67, and Jim Hickman, 65.

The longest homer at Wrigley Field? Roberto Clemente hit one to the left of the scoreboard, Bill Nicholson just off to the right, while Sauer and Randy Jackson both hit buildings across the street on Waveland Avenue. But our vote goes to Dave Kingman when he was a member of the New York Mets on April 14,1976.

It was the second game of the season and the Mets were leading the Cubs 3-2 with one on and two out in the top of the sixth inning. Cub manager Jim Marshall strolled to the mound to discuss strategy with reliever Tom Dettore. There was a 20-miles-per-hour jet stream blowing from the plate to left-center and first base was unoccupied with Kingman at bat.

Dettore insisted on pitching to Kingman. Marshall gave his OK, patted the hurler on the rump and departed for the dugout. Dettore worked the count to a ball and a strike. The next pitch was a fast ball. It exploded off Kingman’s bat and soared high into the wind. There was no question about it leaving the ballpark.

The usual gang of kids was waiting outside with gloves poised. But the ball sailed over their heads. They turned and started running north on Kenmore Avenue. The ball struck the porch of the third house from the Waveland Avenue corner and was caught on the rebound by Richard Keiber.

How far did the ball travel? Some say 600 feet. The Cubs went on to win 6-5, but Kingman’s king-sized blow took center stage. Many agreed it was the longest homer ever hit at Wrigley Field. Others say if Kingman could have straightened it out, the ball would’ve hit the scoreboard.

No. Nobody ever homered off the present-day scoreboard. But golfer Sam Snead once hit one over it. He teed off from home plate and sent a golf ball over the scoreboard moments before the Cubs’ 1951 season opener. While there is much debate over the longest homer, there is little doubt about the shortest. It was hit by Rocky Nelson of the St. Louis Cardinals on April 30, 1949. The ball traveled about 220 feet and was dubbed the “inside-the-glove-homer.”

The Cubs were leading the Cardinals 3-2 with two out and one on in the top of the ninth inning when pinch-hitter Nelson strode to the plate, facing Bob Rush. Rocky hit a sinking liner to short left center. Center fielder Andy Pafko ran in, dived for the ball and made a game-saving catch. The Cubs won.. . but wait.

Umpire Al Barlick, standing near second base, ruled that Pafko had trapped the ball. Andy came running in, holding the ball aloft in triumph, while the Cardinal runners raced around the bases.

Pafko then looked at Barlick in disbelief and started to argue. It wasn’t until Nelson was a few steps from home plate that Pafko threw the ball. Nelson was safe and the Cardinals won 4-3 on the shortest homer in Wrigley Field history.

Of the 19 World Series homers (six by the Cubs), none could equal Ruth’s “called shot” in the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 classic. Ruth had already hit a three-run homer for the New York Yankees in the first inning when he stepped to the plate to face Charlie Root. The Cub bench jockeys were riding the Babe and that made him fume. With one strike on him, Ruth yelled to the Cub dugout that he was going to belt a homer. Root then fired another strike and the Cub players increased their heckling.

Ruth then pointed his bat toward the center-field bleachers, letting them know what he had in mind. Root wound up and delivered and Ruth connected. He sent the ball sailing high and far to the spot he had designated for one of the most dramatic homers in World Series history.

The Cubs’ most dramatic homer was hit by Hartnett on September 28, 1938. It was the famous “homer in the gloamin” against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates led the Cubs by a game-and-a-half when they opened a crucial three-game series at Wrigley Field.

In the first game, manager Hartnett went with sore-armed Dizzy Dean and he escaped with a 2-1 victory, cutting Pittsburgh’s lead to a half-game. The following day, the skies were cloudy and gray. And the outlook was gloomy as the Pirates led 3-1 after six innings and 5-3 after 7½. But the Cubs put two runs across to tie the score 5-5 after eight innings. It was growing so dark that the umpires had agreed to call the game after the Cubs had batted in the ninth. Burly Pirate reliever Mace Brown retired the first two Cubs. Hartnett was the next batter.

Brown whipped home two quick strikes and was gloating. Brown, figuring Hartnett couldn’t hit what he couldn’t see, wound up and let loose with a fastball. The pitch wasn’t seen by many, but it was heard as Hartnett rocketed the ball into the left-field bleachers for a 6-5 Cub victory.

Gabby had to fight his way around the bases and was greeted by hundreds at home plate. The Pirates were done, and the Cubs went on to clinch the 1938 pennant.

The new generation of Cub fans, however, rate Banks’ 500th homer over Hartnett’s as the most dramatic. On Saturday, May 9, 1970, Banks hit his 499th homer. That set the countdown for No. 500. The following day, a crowd of 40,000 jammed Wrigley Field to see Mr. Cub experience his magic moment against the Reds.

In his first at bat, Banks received a standing ovation. He responded by lining the ball off the top of the ivy vines in left field. Banks started churning the bases. He rounded third, but that was as far as his 39-year old legs would take him. He puffed back to third base as the ball was relayed home. He had to settle for a triple.

On Monday, Banks remained a triple threat with another three-bagger. And Tuesday hardly seemed like a day for heroics. A fog rolled in and out and was replaced by a morning downpour. The skies were murky and it was damp, but the show went on against the Atlanta Braves. This time there was only a smattering of applause from the slim crowd of 5,264 as Banks faced the Braves’ Pat Jarvis in the second inning.

With the count one-and-one, Jarvis delivered a fastball, chest high and a bit inside-and Banks swung. The ball was hit deep, but had a low trajectory. Would it clear the 12-foot high fence? Left fielder Rico Carty went back, back-and then stopped. The ball landed in the first row of the bleachers. Banks ran as fast as he could to first base before he stole a glance, heard the crowd noise and then broke into his familiar home run trot. He doffed his cap as he crossed home plate, and repeated his act as he headed towards the Cub dugout. Play was halted as the ball was retrieved and presented to Banks.

And, finally, here’s one for trivia buffs. In which major league ballpark did Lou Gehrig hit his first homer? Yankee Stadium? Guess again.

On June 26, 1920, Lane Technical High School of Chicago was playing the High School of Commerce from New York for the inter-city baseball championship at Wrigley Field.

The score was 8-8 and Commerce had the bases loaded in the eighth inning, when Gehrig, a high school junior, stepped up and hit the first ball pitched over the right-field fence for a 12-8 victory.

Although it wasn’t one of the official 6,905 Wrigley Field homers, it was a memorable one.

PLAYERS WITH 20 OR MORE HOME RUNS AT WRIGLEY FIELD
(as Cub player or opponent; stats through 1978)

WRIGLEY FIELD HOME RUN FACTS (1914-1978)

• Total homers-6,905
• Total Homers by Cubs-3,427
• Total homers by Cubs opponents-3,396
• Total homers by Federal League teams-82
• World Series homers-19 (6 by Cubs, 13 by Cubs opponents)
• All-Star Game homers-5 (0 by Cubs, 2 by NL; 3 by AL opponents)
• Most homers in one season-201 in 1970 (Cubs 109, opponents 92)
• Most homers in one season by Cubs-109 in 1970.
• Most homers in one season by Cubs opponents-100 in 1966
• Most homers by a Cub lifetime-Ernie Banks 290
• Most homers by a Cub opponent lifetime-Willie Mays 54
• Most homers by a Cub in one season-Hack Wilson, 33 in 1930
• Most homers by a Cub opponent in one season-7
• Gene Oliver, St. Louis, 1965
• Johnny Callison, Philadelphia, 1965
• Mike Schmidt, Philadelphia, 1976 (4 in 1 game)

All-Time Cub Team

• Ernie Banks, 120   1B
• Rogers Hornsby, 29   2B
• Ernie Banks, 170   SS
• Ron Santo, 212 3B
• Billy Williams, 241   OF
• Hank Sauer, 114 OF
• Hack Wilson, 105   OF
• Gabby Hartnett, 115 C

All-Time Opponent Team

• Willie Stargell, 28
• Rogers Hornsby, 23
• Glenn Wright, 10, Johnny Logan, 10
• Eddie Mathews, 36
• Willie Mays, 54
• Hank Aaron, 50
• Mel Ott, 38
• Roy Campanella, 17

Note: Banks is listed at two positions; Hornsby made the Cub team and the opponent team; Stargell edged Gil Hodges and Orlando Cepeda by one homer at 1B; Johnny Bench has 16 homers and will likely replace Campy as the catcher.

*Assisted by John C. Tattersall

World War II had ended with the surrender of Japan on September 2, but few of the ballplayers in the service had yet been demobilized. There was a high caliber of players participating, and the games included Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Billy Herman, Bob Lemon, Johnny Pesky, and Bob Kennedy. The Honolulu Advertiser’s Gayle Hayes wrote that the Navy series would “present more individual stars than even the world series on the mainland… a titanic battle between some of the best known players in baseball” [September 23, 1945]. Herman, Musial, and Dick Wakefield had all been selected for the 1943 All-Star Game.

But the story is a complex one, going all the way back to the first night game in 1880, just a few months after Edison perfected the incandescent bulb. All through the nineteenth century tentative experiments occurred and St. Louis was a part of that grand tradition.

Chris Von der Ahe was a German-born St. Louis saloon keeper whose knowledge of baseball was practically non-existent. This, however, did not stop him from bank-rolling the St. Louis Browns franchise when the American Association formed in 1882. Ignorance, then as now,was no barrier to baseball success and the Browns were the Association’s powerhouse in the 1880s.

After 1891, the American Association disappeared, but the Browns were one of four of its franchises to survive, being absorbed into an expanded 12-team National League. While Chris’ Brown Stockings survived, they hardly prospered. Von der Ahe attempted to reverse the franchise’s rapidly-fading fortunes by sponsoring nighttime horse racing (“Electric Light Racing”) at his 10,000-seat Sportsman’s Park. The field was rented out for that purpose for $10,000 per annum to promoter Fred Foster. Each night at 8 (save Sundays) five races went off, with a “Concert Every Evening before the Racing commences.”

Now this was not the only popular attraction at Sportsman’s Park. There was an amusement park, a honky-tonk, a “wine room” — even Wild West shows featuring none other than Buffalo Bill Cody and Chief Sitting Bull — all this plus a ballgame for just fifty cents. The Sporting News was aghast, damning such goings-on as “the Prostitution of a Ball Park.” It was during this period that an unexpected incident occurred at Von der Abe’s emporium.

“Der Boss President” set records for going through managers that George Steinbrenner could only dream of, and in 1898 he outdid even himself by hiring an umpire, the famous Tim (“You can’t beat the hours”) Hurst, to pilot the Browns.

In March 1902, Hurst recalled the episode for the same Sporting News: “One of the funniest things I ever saw on a ball field took place when Chris Von der Ahe had the ponies over in St. Louis. It was getting dark one afternoon . . . and the fans were yelling at (umpire) Bob Emslie, burning matches and setting fire to newspapers to get his attention to the fact that it was getting dark. Bob kept `em at it when all of a sudden there was ablaze of light all around the track which surrounded the field. Chris had turned the switch and the game was finished by electric light.” But he never did it again.

Night baseball did not take off until 1930, but then it spread like wildfire throughout the minors. The majors were a different story, however, although the Cards showed a very early interest-and with a little cooperation from the Browns might have been the first big league team to lead the way.

Their interest was peaked in May 1930 when the Kansas City Monarchs stopped off for two arc-lit tilts. Half a dozen Cardinal players turned out to watch. The St. Louis Negro National League team, the Stars, installed permanent lights at the home park later that summer, playing their first night game on September 2, 1930. On that same night the Cardinals were getting their first experience playing under the lights in an exhibition game at Indianapolis. The first night game at Sportsman’s Park occurred on September 22, 1932, when the Redbirds played Grover Cleveland Alexander and the House of David under portable arcs. That afternoon the Cards had drawn a miniscule 450 crowd versus the Reds. Against the barnstormers they attracted 9,000 customers who paid a total of $9,273 at the gate.

“Singing Sam” Breadon was a Greenwich Village lad who moved West and made a fortune in St. Louis selling cars. He was immediately taken by the idea of night ball-and by the potential profits. At Houston, where he owned Buffalo Stadium, he immediately installed lights, something he could not accomplish at Sportsman’s Park, which was owned by the rival Browns. The following year, however, Breadon suggested to Browns’ owner Phil Ball that they jointly purchase a system, sharing costs equally. “It makes every day a Sunday,” contended Singing Sam.

The Browns should have been just as interested as Breadon. Their attendance was abysmal, having been the worst in the majors for four years in a row. Yet the American Leaguers turned the proposition down. Breadon then offered to foot the whole bill himself. Even that situation was somewhat complicated. The park was technically owned by the Dodier Realty and Investment Company, a Ball-controlled operation. Dodier would have to do the actual installation with Breadon footing the bill. Ball, an engineer, laid out certain conditions. First, he would not allow standards or towers on the playing field itself; lights would have to be mounted above the grandstand. Doing this would involve greater expense to the Cards. The suspicion existed that this plan was created merely to add additional cost to the scheme.

Beyond that the Cards and Browns tangled over who would own the lights. The Dodier Co.? The Cards? If the Redbirds moved out of Sportsman’s Park (there was a very serious proposal to this end during and just after the Second World War), would Breadon be free to take them along? The wrangling continued. Would the lamps be used for non-diamond events such as boxing or wrestling? Breadon was firmly opposed to that.

Breadon offered the Browns the use of his system, but the Brownies demurred. “We’re not interested in lights.” Browns Vice-President J. L. McEvoy tersely commented, “and I have no idea what the company owning the park will do even if approached . . . by the Cardinals.”

Ultimately, the deal just fell apart.

Throughout the 1930s, the Browns and the Cards battled back and forth on who would pay for Sportsman’s Park’s lights. On November 17, 1936 the two teams finally came to an agreement — no doubt helping matters was the fact that the new Brownies boss, Donald Barnes, had just come over from the Cards’ employ.

Harmony lasted until January. On January 14 Sam Breadon announced the Redbirds would play their first arc-lit tilt on May 24 or 25. Three days later Barnes summoned the Mound City press corps to blast him for allegedly violating a verbal agreement that neither club would have night baseball until June.

He now insisted that if the Cards wanted lights they could pay for them all themselves. “It’s up to Mr. Breadon now to install the equipment,” fumed Barnes. “It’s in our agreement as co-tenants of the park and in the lease, that either the Browns or the Cardinals can spend their money for the mazdas and the other side can rent them.”

Good-bye harmony. Hello darkness.

In 1938 after Cincinnati and Brooklyn had hit the jackpot with their systems, Breadon started agitating again. Barnes again hemmed and hawed, stuttering that the money would be wiser spent on better players for the woeful Brownies. The St Louis-based Sporting News found Barnes’ reasoning frustrating, noting that the $50-100,000 the system would cost would hardly propel the Browns into competition for talent with such free-spenders as Tom Yawkey or Phil Wrigley.

“When any minor-league club can install lights,” seethed the Bible of Baseball, it would seem two major league clubs could get together on the cost of a system, especially when the cost may be amortized over ten years. We wonder if the delay in installing the lights is due to the reports again circulating that one or the other St. Louis franchises will be moved?”

Ultimately, the two clubs got their act together and split the tab. Sportsman’s Park received its nocturnal baptism on May 24, 1940, the very same night as the Polo Grounds debut. Bob Feller and the Indians were the opponents. The young Iowan not only fanned nine Brownies, but also chipped in with his first Major League home run as the Tribe triumphed, 3-2. Only one error was recorded and that was on a hard-hit ball.

The paid crowd was a huge one for the St. Louis Americans: 24,827 (25,562 total) — their third largest ever. How bad was Browns attendance? For the entire 1939 season they had drawn a pathetic 109,159. In 1938 the Cleveland Indians had drawn just 8,998 for all eleven games they played in the Mound City. One game, with Bob Feller on the hill, drew 598 fans.

With their usual flair, the impoverished Browns ownership provided none of the usual trappings; no fireworks, no marching bands, or like hoopla. The most noticeable special event was the company caps worn by the several hundred employees of the Johnson-Shinkle-Stephens Shoe Company present.

Judge Landis attended, having flown in from Chicago for the occasion. He felt the crowd might have been more sizable save for threatening weather in the outlying areas.

“St. Louis is an ideal town for night ball,” analyzed A. L. President Will Harridge, “especially when the weather gets hot. Them are no beaches, lakes or other cooling diversions to detract from night baseball attractions. As for me I am a nighter.” Hardly a statement the Chamber of Commerce would want to reprint.

The Cardinals June 4, 1940 arc-lit debut was hardly as dramatic as Vander Meer’s double-no-hitter, but it did have its results — the firing of manager Ray Blades. Over 20,000 fans turned out to see the game. The club first announced the attendance as 23,500, then changed the figure to 25.300, but the press was openly skeptical of both figures. However many turned out to see the seventh-place Cards, what they saw they did not like. The Redbirds suffered a 10-1 pasting from Leo Durocher’s visiting Dodgers, and the crowd went crazy. Hundreds of empty bottles poured down onto left and center field. Patrons literally held their noses over quality of play.

It was a mess. The Brooklyns (helped by a normally light-hitting second baseman Pete Coscarart’s three-run homer) knocked out righthander Mort Cooper in the first as the Bums scored five times. In the second frame, right fielder Pepper Martin was tossed out of a game for the first time in his eleven-year major league career. (He was replaced by a young whippersnapper named Enos Slaughter.) Umpire Bill Stewart reversed partner George Magerkurth’s decisions not once but twice in the seventh, first on a pop bunt, second on a double by Brooklyn’s Babe Phelps. The crowd exploded with a shower of bottles, and the game was delayed for seven minutes.

Breadon was so distressed that he fired Blades after one more game, replacing him on an interim basis with veteran coach Mike Gonzales and then with Billy Southworth. The Redbirds turned their fortunes around, finishing third for the season and beginning a dynasty for the early 1940s.

Nineteen-fifty saw the first night season opener in Major League history. The site was Sportsman’s Park. Cardinal owner Fred Saigh successfully petitioned the National League for permission and got it despite the opposition of the visiting Pirates. On April 18, 1950 a crowd of 20,871 (the previous Card record for an opener was 20,754 back in 1928) turned out with one thing in mind — to boo the tar out of weak-hitting Redbirds catcher Joe Garagiola. (He evidently was as bad as he made himself out to be.) Garagiola shrugged off the criticism (“No, they don’t bother me anymore, even if I hit only .120 this year.”). But actions speak louder than words, and he responded with three sharply hit singles including a sixth-inning knock that drove in the winning tally. A couple of guys named Musial and Schoendienst helped too, chipping in with four-baggers.

Conditions were hardly perfect. Temperatures plunged before game-time, holding the crowd down. A harsh wind blew out to right, increasing the wind-chill factor, and in the seventh it began to drizzle. Topping it off were field conditions. A soccer league had demolished the turf of the Sportsman’s Park outfield. It was the first night opening game in big league history and probably the first major league game, sarcastically noted Post-Dispatch sports editor J. Roy Stockton,”played on a grass infield with a skinned outfield.”

So that’s the history of arc-lit ball in the Mound City. As Casey Stengel (a native Missourian) used to say: “You could look it up.”