A native Louisvillian, Louis “Pete” Browning was born June 17, 1861, in the first summer of America’s Civil War. One of eight children (four sons and four daughters) born to Samuel and Mary Jane Sheppard Browning, Pete grew up in the city’s near West End. The family was geographically well-rooted, for when Pete died, a bachelor, in the late summer of 1905, it was at the old family homestead at 1427 West Jefferson, where he had made his residence at the end with his old mother and two sisters.

The tragic aspects of the Browning story begin early in “The Gladiator’s” life and course through his days like dark threads in a once bright tapestry. As a boy and a young man who loved not only baseball but skating, marbles, and fishing, Pete was afflicted with ear and hearing maladies that made learning difficult. (In those youthful years, he did not learn to read or write.) The diagnosis was mastoiditis, and in the still primitive days of surgery, Browning had two operations for his condition, neither of lasting help.

He was to spend 13 seasons in major league baseball (1882- 1894), with an average above .300 for seven consecutive years. He topped out in 1887 at .402. Two years later, he spent two months on suspension for the alcohol problem that plagued him throughout his adult years.

Browning first achieved notice as a pitcher, but spent his time in the majors as a fielder, staying permanently in the outfield after 1885. As a fielder, writes Philip Von Borries, Browning was “atrocious” and “wielded hands of stone.” His elegant hours, of course, were to be spent at the plate, armed with one of his formidable bats. There, in the glory days with Louisville, he regularly electrified his fans. An editorialist for the Louisville Herald wrote:

“. . . when “Old Pete” Browning walked with easy grace to the plate with his bat under his arm, and rubbed his hands with dirt, all of us youngsters in the bleachers raised our voices in wild acclaim . . . . With breathless interest we watched him as he took his position, crouching panther-like over the plate, his keen eye watching for the pitcher . . . . And when “Pete” found one to his liking and let go at it for a fair hit, how we rose with the other exultant fans and shouted for the pure joy of shouting.”

“Old Pete” stayed with the Louisville team through their disastrous 1889 season (27-111) and switched to the Players League and Cleveland in 1890, batting .373 that year. Before his career ended in 1894, he had done stints with Pittsburgh and four other National League clubs.

Browning maintained that he reformed and stopped drinking when he left Louisville. The New York Herald noted in 1891 that some reports had made a dupe of the real Browning, providing a “spin” that the Gladiator was ignorant and simple. “On the contrary,” the Herald reported, “he appeared to be decidedly sensible and well-read.” The columnist continued:

“Pete is one of the characters in professional baseball. He has figured in more scrapes and skirmishes with managers than practically any other ballplayer in the country. Two years ago he was a confirmed drunkard; now he is a reformer, sober, hard-working and respected.”

The transformed Mr. Browning visited Louisville during the “World Series” of 1890 between his native city and Brooklyn. He spoke of himself to the press inthe third person: “When Pete was here he wasn’t nobody. Now Pete comes back to town and everybody calls him Mr. Browning.. When he got with good people, he became good people himself.” Asked about the chances for a Louisville victory, the feisty old Gladiator replied: “All the Brooklyns might be killed in a wreck and then the Louisvilles would have to win.”

It was during the 1884 season playing with “the Louisvilles” that Browning cracked his bat, an event destined to become the Crack Heard ‘Round the World. For Pete turned to John Andrew “Bud” Hillerich, son of the owner of the J. F. Hillerich Co., purveyor of bed posts and butter churns, to create a round, barrel-shaped bat especially for him, and the Louisville Slugger tradition was born.

Browning was a man who was shot through with eccentricities—always stepping on third base with his left foot when he came off the field; pampering his “lamps” (eyes) and bushy eyebrows. But, foremost among his quirks was what might be called a “bat mysticism.” He named all his bats, often turning to the Bible as a source. He believed that each of his wood sluggers had just so many hits within them. When they were exhausted, they were given a respectful retirement in the basement of Pete’s mother’s home. Reportedly, over 200 ended up there in repose.

After his diamond career was completed, Browning returned to Louisville, where he kept a saloon (not the best of occupations for a man with his personal history) at the corner of 13th and Market streets. He also tried cigar sales for a time. But his health—both mental and physical—began to deteriorate significantly.

In the summer of 1905, he was committed by order of a local circuit court to the Central Kentucky Lunatic Asylum (Lakeland). After barely two weeks of residence there, he was removed by his sister. Within a month he was taken to City Hospital in Louisville and underwent surgeries on the ear and chest. He died at his mother’s home on September 10, 1905.

The Louisville papers next day could not resist puns in their obituary headlines: “Called Out For All Time On Life’s Field” read the morning Courier-Journal; and “Pete Browning ‘Out’ of Life’s Game” came from the evening Times. Old teammates—including John Reccius and Charles Pfeiffer—were among the pallbearers who brought “Old Pete” to his final resting place, Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery.

Pete Browning’s life, to all outward appearances, was a story of slow tragedy. His saga is one of great ability and performance that played itself out and finally wound down against a backdrop of ongoing incapacity, isolation, and misunderstanding.

Even in death, the tragedy has continued, for, despite outstanding achievement, Browning has never been inducted into the Hall of Fame. In his insightful study of Browning in Legends of Louisville, Philip Von Borries makes a studied and impassioned appeal that such an omission be remedied in the future. He writes of the failure of the Gladiator’s contemporaries and some later historians to recognize “the ravaging mastoidal condition that lay at the root of all his lifelong personal and professional problems.” Von Borries concludes:

“Today, nearly a century after he last played major league baseball, Browning is imprisoned by both that media-created legend and historical prejudice against American Association luminaries. When those shackles are finally broken, the way will be clear for Browning to enter Cooperstown.”

Hilda Chester and her famous cowbell (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

The New York Yankees have their Bleacher Creatures. The crosstown Mets had Karl “Sign Man of Shea” Ehrhardt, while “Megaphone Lolly” Hopkins was the super-fan of the Boston Red Sox and Braves. Cleveland Indians, Chicago Cubs, Detroit Tigers, and Baltimore Orioles rooters have respectively included John “The Drummer” Adams, Ronnie “Woo Woo” Wickers, Patsy “The Human Earache” O’Toole, and “Wild Bill” Hagy. Then there are the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose off-the-field attractions included their Sym-Phony, Eddie Bottan and his police whistle—and Hilda Chester and her cowbell.

Hilda, otherwise known as “Howlin’ Hilda,” was a product of the outer-borough “woiking” classes: a dees-dem-dose, toidy-toid-‘n’-toid Brooklynite. Granted, when interviewed, she was capable of using the King’s English. More often, however, her responses were pure Brooklynese. She criticized one-and-all by pronouncing, “Eatcha heart out, ya bum,” and identified herself by declaring, “You know me. Hilda wit da bell. Ain’t it t’rillin’?” And she is as much a part of Dodgers lore as Uncle Robbie and Jackie Robinson, Pistol Pete, Pee Wee, and “Wait ‘til next year.” “I absolutely positively remember Hilda Chester because I often sat near her in the Ebbets Field bleachers,” recalled Murray Polner, the author of Branch Rickey: A Biography. “Brooklyn Dodger fans all recognized her cowbell and booming voice.” (Polner added: “There was another uber-fan who would scream, ‘Cookeee’—for Lavagetto.”)1

Hilda’s reputation even transcends the Borough of Churches. Bums author Peter Golenbock labeled this “plump, pink-faced woman with a mop of stringy gray hair” the “most famous of the Dodger fans—perhaps the most famous fan in baseball history,”2 while Bill Gallo of the New York Daily News called her “the most loyal and greatest fan to pass through the turnstiles of the Flatbush ballpark.”3 The Los Angeles Times cited her as “perhaps the greatest heckler of all time” who would “scream like a fishmonger at players and managers, or lead fans in snake dances through the aisles.”4 Seventy years earlier, The Sporting News had christened her “the undisputed Queen of the Bleachers, the Spirit of Brooklyn, the Bell of Ebbets Field, and we do mean Bell.”5

Despite these accolades, little is known about Hilda Chester outside of baseball—and this was her preference. While piecing together the facts of her life, it becomes apparent that she was the product of a hardscrabble youth and young adulthood, one that she steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Writer Thomas Oliphant, whose parents got to know Hilda in the Brooklyn ball yard, described her background as “truly the stuff of legend, much of it unverifiable…. My father…told me that behind her raucous behavior was a tough, often sad life, but that she was warm and decent under a very gruff exterior.”6 What is certain, however, is that whatever joy Hilda took from life came from her obsessive love of sports—and especially her devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

So little is known about Hilda that the place of her birth cannot be confirmed. According to the United States Social Security Death Index, she was born on September 1, 1897.7 No location is listed; most sources cite her birthplace as Brooklyn, but this may be conjecture given her identity as a Dodgers fanatic. More than likely, Hilda was born and raised on the East Side of Manhattan, but no one knows the identities of her parents or the circumstances under which she settled in Brooklyn.8 In fact, in 1945 Hilda was queried as to what brought her to Brooklyn. “I liked da climate!” was her sarcastic response.9

What is certain is that Hilda was a product of urban poverty. “Home was never like this…,” she noted in a 1943 interview in The Sporting News. “I haven’t had a happy life. The Dodgers have been the one bright spot. I do not think I would want to go on without them.” The article observed, “Nothing Hilda does startles [the Brooklyn players] any more. She is one of the family.” Tellingly, the paper also reported, “Any further efforts to inquire into Hilda’s early history meet a polite ‘Skip it!’ And when Hilda says ‘Skip it,’ she means it.”10

Reportedly, Hilda played ball in her youth. “As a young girl she was willing to sock any boy who wouldn’t let her play on the baseball teams…,” noted journalist Margaret Case Harriman.11 For a while, she was an outfielder for the New York Bloomer Girls and she hoped to one day either make the majors or establish a women’s softball league. But this was not to be, and so she transformed herself into a rabid Brooklyn Dodgers booster. The story goes that, when Hilda was still in her teens, she would hang around the offices of the Brooklyn Chronicle in order to be the first to learn of the Dodgers’ on-field fate.

Various sources note that Hilda was married at one time but that her husband had passed away. A daughter, Beatrice, was a product of their union, and the child also had baseball in her blood. As “Bea Chester,” she played briefly in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In 1943 she was with the South Bend Blue Sox, where she was the backup third baseman, appearing in 18 games and hitting .190. The following season she joined the Rockford Peaches, where she made it into 11 games. Her batting average in 42 at bats was .214.12

While playing for the Blue Sox, recalled Lucella MacLean Ross, “I had two different roommates. One was Betty McFadden, and the other was Bea Chester. She’s a lady they have never traced as an All-American girl. Her mother was quite famous.… they used to call her ‘Hilda the Bell-Ringer.’ Her name was Hilda Chester.”13

After the 1945 campaign, Bea “retired” as a professional ballplayer. In 1948 columnist Dan Parker reported that Hilda “is a grandma now and has decided to bring up young Stephen as a jockey instead of a Dodger shortstop.”14

The AAGPBL website features a photo of Bea but also reports, “This player has not been located. We have no additional information.” However, the young woman in the picture bears a marked resemblance to the photo of a Beatrice Chester that appears in the June 1939 yearbook of Thomas Jefferson High School, located in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Are the two one and the same? It certainly seems so. For one thing, this Beatrice Chester is cited as her school’s “Class Athlete.” She is dubbed “the ‘he-man’ of girls’ sports” who “bowls, plays ping pong…She possesses letters in tennis, volley ball, basketball, baseball, hockey, shuffleboard, deck tennis, badminton…she has won a trophy at Manhattan Beach for the hundred yard dash, the running broad jump, and in baseball and basketball throw.”15 (In 1945, Hilda admitted to Margaret Case Harriman that Beatrice was a “very good soft-ball player.” Harriman asked her where her daughter played. Hilda did not cite the AAGPBL. Instead, she “hastily” responded, “Oh, up at that school she don’t go to no more.”16)

Most telling of all, the Jefferson yearbook notes, “To relieve the monotony of winning awards, Beatrice plays the mandolin and banjo.” On two occasions, a younger musically-inclined Beatrice Chester was cited in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reportage of events sponsored by the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. In February 1932, the paper covered “an afternoon entertainment staged by the boys and girls who live in the institution.” One was Beatrice Chester, who performed a mandolin solo.17 Then in December 1933, at an event sponsored by the asylum’s women’s auxiliary, Beatrice “played several selections on a mandolin…”18

What emerges here is that Hilda and Beatrice were Jewish, and Beatrice was a “half-orphan:” a child with one parent, but that parent was incapable of looking after her. Observed Montrose Morris, a historian of Brooklyn neighborhoods, “By 1933, during the Great Depression, the [asylum] estimated that 65% of their children had parents, but the parents were too poor to take care of them.”19

Given her lack of finances, one cannot begin to calculate how many Dodgers games Hilda saw during this period, nor can it be determined exactly when she became an Ebbets Field habitué. The Sporting News reported that she began regularly attending games “when a doctor told her to get out in the sunshine and exercise an arm affected by rheumatism.”20 It was not until the late 1930s, however, that Hilda was a conspicuous Ebbets Field presence. That was when Larry MacPhail, the Dodgers’ new president and general manager, inaugurated Ladies’ Day in the ballyard; one afternoon each week, for the price of a dime, women could file into the bleachers. “The price was right,” Hilda recalled years later. “I used to come to the park every Ladies’ Day. I was like any other ordinary fan. Then I started to get bored…,” and this resulted in her transformation from one of the anonymous masses into a uniquely colorful Dodgers devotee.21

Additionally, Hilda had long been unable to secure steady employment. But then the Harry M. Stevens concessionaire hired her to bag peanuts before sporting events; her job was to remove the peanuts from their 50-pound sacks and place them into the smaller bags that would be sold to fans. When she wasn’t redistributing peanuts, she could be found selling hot dogs for Stevens at New York-area racetracks, a job she kept for decades. And she relished her employment. “They’re all so good to Hilda,” she observed. “When you got no mother, no father, it’s nice to have a boss that treats you nice.”22

On game days in Brooklyn, Hilda would grab a spot at the Dodgers players’ entrance and greet them upon their arrival. She then would make her way to her seat in the center field bleachers where she loudly yelled at the players, her booming voice echoing throughout the stadium. After the game, she would situate herself along the runway beneath the stands that led to the team’s locker room and either applaud or console her boys, depending upon the final score.

Her employment with Stevens aside, sportswriters began providing Hilda with passes, which further enabled her to mark her Ebbets Field turf. Initially, she preferred the cheap seats to the grandstand. “What, go down there and sit with the shareholders?” she once quipped, “And leave these fine friends up here…. All my friends (are) here. They all know me! They save my seat for me while I am checking the boys in every day. Leave them? Never.”23 She added, “There are the real fans. Y’can bang the bell all y’darn please. The 55-centers don’t fuss so much about a little noise.”24

Hilda was not exclusively a baseball devotee. During the offseason, she made her way to Madison Square Garden to root for the New York Rangers, and she exhibited the same hardnosed devotion to the hockey team as she displayed in Brooklyn. On February 27, 1943, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle printed the following Hilda query: “Just a few lines to let you know I couldn’t wait for today’s Eagle to see what kind of writeup you gave the Rangers last night after that game with Detroit. I think it’s a rotten shame the way those referees treat our Rangers. I thought it was only in baseball they play dirty. Now I think it’s worse in hockey. How come?”25 Nonetheless, Ebbets Field and its environs were her preferred home-away-from-home. Hilda and her daughter were occasionally observed knocking down pins at Freddie Fitzsimmons’s bowling alley, located on Empire Boulevard across the street from the field.26

Various stories chart the manner in which Hilda expanded her repertoire from voice to cowbell. The most commonly reported is directly related to a heart attack she suffered in the 1930s. Her doctor eventually ordered her to cease bellowing at ballplayers, which led to her banging a frying pan with an iron ladle. They were replaced by a brass cowbell, which reportedly was a gift from the Dodgers’ players in the late 1930s. She also was noted for waving a homemade placard for one and all to see. On it was an inscription: “Hilda Is Here.”

After suffering a second heart attack in August 1941, Hilda found herself confined to Brooklyn’s Jewish Hospital. “The bleacher fans have taken on a subdued atmosphere since the absence of the bell-ringing Hilda,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “but she sends them all her best regards and urges them ‘to keep their thumbs up and chins out and we’ll clean up the league’.” While being prepared for a medical procedure, Hilda pinned a Dodgers emblem to her hospital gown and asked if she could hold onto a Brooklyn Daily Eagle clipping of Dixie Walker and Pete Reiser.27 Her health status was covered in the media, with the paper running a photo of a smiling Hilda, holding what presumably was the Walker-Reiser clipping, above the following caption: “Howlin’ Hilda Misses Dodgers: From a bed in Jewish Hospital Hilda Chester, popular bell-ringing bleacherite, roots for her faithful Dodgers to bring home the bacon.”28

After being bedridden for two weeks, Hilda announced that she was planning to leave the hospital and make her way to Ebbets Field for a game against the rival New York Giants. “I will be calm,” she told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Oh, yes. I have to be calm. But—sure, I’ll take my bell along, just for luck. And will I ring it when our boys show them Giants how to play ball? Sure, I will, just for luck. And, oh yes, I guess I’ll cheer a little, too, for Leo [Durocher] and Dixie [Walker] and the rest of the boys.”29 So against doctors’ orders, Hilda returned to Ebbets Field because, as she explained, her boys “needed me.”30

While hospitalized, Hilda had been visited by no less a personage than Durocher, who then was the Bums’ skipper. It was for good reason, then, that Durocher was a Hilda favorite. After the 1942 season, scuttlebutt had it that the Dodgers were about to fire Leo the Lip. “[W]hat’s all this noise going on about not re-signing Leo Durocher N.L. best Mgr., again in 1943,” Hilda wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “You know, I know that we all know whom we have but who knows what we will get. For the past two seasons Leo did a wonderful job and for that reason must the Dodgers get a new Mgr.” The missive was signed “HILDA CHESTER, 100% real loyal Dodger bleacher rooter.” Her mailing address was 20 DeKalb Avenue in downtown Brooklyn.31

During the 1945 campaign, The Lip faced a felonious assault charge for allegedly donning brass knuckles and helping to beat up John Christian, a medically-discharged veteran. Hilda immediately came to Leo’s defense. “The pernt is this: Christian had been pickin’ on nearly all the Dodger players for more’n a month—with a verce like a foghorn,” she declared. “He shouldn’t been usin’ langwidge that shocked the ladies.”32 In court, Hilda was called to the witness stand and promptly perjured herself, claiming that Christian had called her a “cocksucker”—and the manager merely was defending her honor.

By this time, Hilda occasionally accompanied the team on short road trips; “I’m travelin’ right along in da train wit da boys,” she declared in 1945. “Ain’t it t’rillin’?”33 During the war years, she also appeared at the team’s temporary spring training site at Bear Mountain in upstate New York. “Close to 500 watched the Dodgers in action on the Sabbath,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle during spring training in 1943. “A sizeable delegation of Brooklyn fans were headed by Milton Berle, the comic, and Hilda Chester, the cowbell girl.”34

Hilda was by then a semi-celebrity who was synonymous with the Dodgers brand, and who was cited in the same sentence as big-name entertainers. New York Post columnist Jerry Mitchell dubbed her “the Scarlett O’Hara of Ebbets Field,” and her name even occasionally appeared in game coverage.35 “Whether it was Durocher, Charley Dressen, Johnny Corriden or Hilda Chester, someone was responsible for a lot of wild masterminding in a wild and at times fantastic game,” wrote The New York Times Louis Effrat, reporting on the Dodgers’ tenth-inning victory over the Boston Braves in August 1944.36

And certainly, Hilda reveled in her fame. “I notice in [your] Sunday magazine section you gave me a little plug,” she wrote Times columnist Arthur Daley. After thanking him, she added, “For heaven’s sake, don’t call me a character.” She signed the missive “Hilda Chester, The Famous One.”37

It was around this time that Hilda went Hollywood. Whistling in Brooklyn (1943), an MGM comedy, stars Red Skelton as “The Fox,” a popular radio sleuth who is a prime suspect in a series of murders. He is chased into Brooklyn and winds up at Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers are playing an exhibition with the Battling Beavers, a House of David-style nine. “The Fox” dons a fake beard and impersonates “Gumbatz,” the Beavers’ starting pitcher, in a sequence that features such real-life Dodgers as Leo Durocher, Billy Herman, Arky Vaughan, Ducky Medwick, and Dolph Camilli.

As Herman comes up to bat, a female fan is shown on-camera and yells out what is best translated as: “Will ya get it wound up son of a seven, you Gumbatz.” Could it be? Yes, it’s none other than Hilda Chester. (“Beware, Hollywood!” observed columnist Alice Hughes in the Reading Daily Eagle. “Hilda Chester, most famous rooter of our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, has been playing a bit in [the] Red Skelton movie, ‘Whistling in Brooklyn,’ some of it filmed in the Dodgers’ ball park—so look out Hedy Lamarr and Greer Garson!”)38

Additionally, Brooklyn, I Love You (1946), a Paramount Pictures short highlighting the Dodgers’ 1946 season, features such Brooklyn stalwarts as Durocher, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser, Eddie Stanky, Red Barber—and Hilda. A Hilda-ish fan, played by character actress Phyllis Kennedy, appears in several scenes in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), the first “42” biopic; the Hilda-inspired Sadie Sutton, a gong-beating fan, is one of the minor characters in The Natural, Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel. Around this time, Hilda began popping up on radio and TV shows. For example, on April 19, 1950, she guested on a This Is Your Life radio tribute to umpire Beans Reardon. Among those appearing on the July 23, 1956, edition of Tonight!, with Morey Amsterdam substituting for host Steve Allen, were “Diahann Carroll, vocalist,” “Oscar Peterson, jazz pianist,” and “Hilda Chester, Dodger fan.” Then on March 7, 1957, Hilda guested on Mike Wallace’s Night Beat interview program. Her fellow interviewee was Gerald M. Loeb, a founding partner of E.F. Hutton & Co.

Across the years, Hilda formed warm personal relationships with players. In 1943, The Sporting News reported that “Brooklyn’s No. 1 rooter…always remembers the Dodgers’ birthday with cards, visits them in hospitals when they’re ill or injured and consoles them in their defeats.”39 Noted Dixie Walker: “She never forgets a birthday. She sends us the nicest cards you ever saw, on all important occasions. I think she’s wonderful.”40 Hilda the super-fan even had kind words for Dodgers’ management. Of Branch Rickey, she observed: “Anything the boss does, he knows what he’s doin’.” But clearly, Leo the Lip was her favorite. “They don’t come any better in my book,” she declared.41

On one occasion, in a well-reported anecdote, Hilda actually affected the outcome of a game. Whitlow Wyatt was the Dodgers’ starting pitcher. It was the top of the seventh inning; the year was either 1941 or 1942. The story goes that, as center fielder Pete Reiser took his place in the field, Hilda handed him a note and instructed him to deliver it to Leo Durocher. Upon returning to the bench, Reiser gave it to his manager—and Durocher assumed that the missive was from Larry MacPhail. It read: “Get [Dodgers reliever Hugh] Casey hot. Wyatt’s losing it.” Upon taking the hill, Wyatt surrendered a hit and Durocher promptly replaced him with Casey, who almost lost the game. An irate Durocher berated Reiser for handing him the note without explaining that it was from Hilda rather than MacPhail.

(As the years passed, different versions of the story were cited. For example, as early as 1943, The Sporting News reported that Hilda had written: “Better get somebody warmed up, Casey is losing his stuff out there.”42 In a 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle column, Tommy Holmes—after observing that “in 1941, [Hilda] was the unchallenged dream boat of the cheap seats”—recalled that she had written: “[Luke] Hamlin seems to be losing his stuff—better get Casey warmed up.”43 Then in 1956, Reiser claimed that the Dodgers’ starting pitcher that day was Curt Davis, rather than Wyatt.44 But the essence of the tale remains unchanged.)

During the 1943 campaign, after the Dodgers dropped their ninth game in a row, Tommy Holmes observed, “When nobody else loves the Dodgers, Hilda Chester will…”45 Perhaps Holmes was a bit optimistic. Just before the 1947 season, Hilda abruptly switched her allegiance to the New York Yankees. It was noted in The Sporting News that her “feelings have been hurt by certain persons in the [Dodgers] business office. It seems Hilda wrote in for her customary seat, but got a bill for $24.50, instead. She angrily denied the presence of Laraine Day [the Hollywood actress who was Durocher’s wife at the time] had anything to do with it. ‘Laraine?’ she said. ‘That’s Leo’s headache’.”46 Queried Brooklyn Daily Eagle columnist George Currie, “[W]hat is Ebbets Field ever going to be again, without her cowbell?”47

But Hilda never could become a true-blue American League devotee. Later that season, she and her “Hilda Is Here” banner began inhabiting the Polo Grounds; by the following year, the New York Giants had become her team of choice, in part because she claimed to have had difficulty obtaining 1947 World Series tickets, but also because, midway through the campaign, her favorite baseball personality left his Ebbets Field managerial post for the vacated one in Coogan’s Bluff. The Sporting News published a photo of Hilda and an unidentified female fan holding a large sign with “Leo Durocher” on it. In responding to a question about her health, Hilda explained, “I hardly ever get pains now, except for what they done to my Leo.”48

A statue of Hilda Chester now stands in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

All was soon forgiven, however, and Hilda returned to her outfield perch at Ebbets Field. In fact, she was presented with a lifetime pass to the Flatbush grandstand; eventually, in a departure from her loyalty to the center-field denizens, she was given a reserved seat near the visitors’ dugout. In 1950 she was asked if she ever received free Ebbets tickets. “Free tickets!” she bellowed. “I never accepted free tickets. They always give me complementaries.”49

The cowbell was not the only gift to Hilda from her Brooklyn “boys.” In August 1943 she was presented with a silver bracelet that featured her first name across the band and a small baseball dangling from the chain. “Was Hilda the happiest woman in Brooklyn last night?” queried The New York Times. “Silly question!”50 In August 1949, the Dodgers awarded her a charm bracelet for her “loyalty” as the team’s number one fan. On Mother’s Day 1953, after she dyed her hair “a flaming red,” team owner Walter O’Malley—in a pleasant mood because the Dodgers were completing a winning home stand and had just bested the Philadelphia Phillies—had a florist deliver to her a large bouquet with a note inscribed, “To Brooklyn’s newest redheaded mother.” The Sporting News reported: “Long after the game Hilda was still outside Ebbets Field, displaying her flowers to all and sundry.”51 In 1955, the Dodgers announced their all-time all-star team, as determined by fan vote. A ceremony was held at Ebbets Field on August 14. Various Dodgers who were present and in the stands or dugouts were acknowledged. They included Billy Herman, Leon Cadore, Otto Miller, Arthur Dede, Gus Getz, and one non-ballplayer: Hilda Chester.

By the 1950s, Hilda’s mere presence at Ebbets Field was enough to spur on the Dodgers. But she still sporadically employed her lungpower. On one occasion, she yelled to a young Dodgers broadcaster, “I love you Vin Scully!” Apparently, a mortified Scully did not respond, and her follow-up line to him was, “Look at me when I speak to you!”52 Meanwhile, her iconic status was acknowledged by Dodgers ballplayers. Recalled Ralph Branca: “She was better known than most of us, and if you stunk she’d let you know it.” Added Duke Snider, “She’d be in her box by the third-base dugout and keep hollering at you until you acknowledged her.” But the Duke of Flatbush admitted, “She had a great knowledge of the game and of game situations. It was her life.”53

Near the end of the 1955 season, The Sporting News reported that “Dodgers players, headed by Pee Wee Reese (who else?), gave Hilda a portable radio… Now Hilda can tune in on the Bums, wherever they may be.”54 However, “wherever they may be” would soon be a long way from Brooklyn, as it was announced that the team would be abandoning the Borough of Churches and heading west, to relocate in Los Angeles.

Hilda, like all Brooklyn diehards, was furious. At first, she was in denial about the situation. “The Dodgers ain’t gonna move to Los Angeles,” she declared in March 1957. “I saw some games in Los Angeles a few years back. Why, the place was like a morgue…no rootin’…no cheerin’…how are the Bums gonna feel at home there?”55 As the days turned to months, though, it became clear that the Dodgers’ new anthem would be “California, Here I Come.” Writing in the Los Angeles Times in July, Jeane Hoffman declared, “If you want one reporter’s opinion, our guess is that if L.A. comes up with what O’Malley wants, the city has got him—even if Brooklyn threw in the Gowanus River and Hilda Chester to try and keep him there.”56

Of course, the Dodgers did leave after the 1957 season. During their inaugural campaign in Los Angeles, the closest they got to Brooklyn was Philadelphia, when they played the Phillies—and Hilda pronounced that she “wouldn’t be caught dead” there.57 In June 1958, Dick Young quoted her from her perch selling hot dogs at one of the New York racetracks: “You oughta hear how the horseplayers talk. They hate O’Malley.”58

In 1960, upon the razing of Ebbets Field, Hilda and five members of the Dodger Sym-Phony appeared on Be Our Guest, a short-lived CBS-TV program. (The other guests included Ralph Branca, Carl Erskine, and Phil Silvers Show regulars Maurice “Doberman” Gosfield and Harvey Lembeck.) Hilda joined the Sym-Phony in performing a number, to the tune of “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which included a revised lyric: “Give our regards to all Dem Bums and tell O’Malley, ‘Nuts to you!’” Hilda asked host George DeWitt if the show was being broadcast in color. The answer was “black-and-white,” which displeased her because she had dyed her hair for the occasion. She and the musicians were described as being “still Dodger rooters, but only for the departed Brooklyn club.” All were given original Ebbets Field seats.59

A year later, it was announced that Hilda “will be honored as America’s No. 1 baseball fan” during ceremonies at the opening of the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita, Kansas.60 But then she quietly faded from view. Occasionally, her name would pop up in the media. In 1963, Dan Daniel noted that “the last I heard of Hilda was that she was employed by the Stevens brothers in their commissary department at the New York race tracks.”61 Still, she steadfastly maintained her Dodger ties. In 1969, Dixie Walker noted that he hadn’t been back to Brooklyn “for years” but was quick to add, “Ah, but last September I got a birthday card from Hilda Chester. She never misses a one.”62 Rumor had it that she no longer resided in the New York metropolitan area. “I understand she’s in retirement in Florida,” declared Dodgers super-fan Danny Perasa.63 However, Dick Young reported that “the cowbell-ringing zany of the old Dodger days” is “ill at age 71. Drop her a note at: 144–02 89th Avenue, Queens, N.Y. 14480.”64

In the early 1970s, Hilda’s address became the Park Nursing Home in Rockaway Park, Queens. Writer Neil Offen showed up at the home with the intention of interviewing her. “I’m sure she won’t want to talk, not about baseball, not about those days,” explained a nursing home employee. “She doesn’t like to talk about them anymore. She doesn’t even like to talk about them to us.” However, Offen got to speak with Hilda on the telephone. “The old days with the Brooklyn Dodgers, no, that’s out,” she insisted. She noted that there was “no particular reason” for her reluctance to reminisce, but she quickly added, “It’s all over, that’s it. That’s the only reason. I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry. But it’s all over. That’s it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”65

Hilda Chester was 81 years old when she passed away in December 1978. Matt Rothenberg, Manager of the Giamatti Research Center at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, reported that she died at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Queens and was buried in Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, which is operated by the Hebrew Free Burial Association.

What emerges here is that, for whatever reason, Hilda’s indigent state was not addressed by any surviving family member. According to the Association’s mission statement, “When a Jewish person dies and has no family or friends to arrange for the funeral, or if the family cannot afford a funeral, we assure that the deceased is treated with respect demanded by our traditions. The deceased is buried in Mount Richmond Cemetery in Staten Island where our rabbi recites memorial prayers over the grave. Whether they die in a hospital, nursing home, or a lonely apartment, the New York area’s poorest Jews are not forgotten.”66

Various sources list Hilda’s death date as December 1. However genealogical researcher Scott Wilson reported that her fate was altogether different—albeit no less tragic. According to Wilson, she “died alone at 81 at her home at Ocean Promenade, Far Rockaway, Queens. Found December 9, with no survivors or informant, she was taken first to Queens Mortuary, then to Harry Moskowitz at 1970 Broadway, through the public administrator. Buried December 15, 1978, and a stone placed by the Hebrew Free Burial Association in the 1990s, sec. 15, row 19, grave 7, Mt. Richmond Cemetery…”67 Andrew Parver, the Association’s Director of Operations, confirmed Wilson’s reportage and noted: “It doesn’t appear that she had any relatives when she died.” He added that Hilda’s “stone was sponsored by an anonymous donor” and that “our cemetery chaplain has a vague recollection of someone visiting the gravesite more than 15 years ago.”68

At her passing, Hilda was the definition of a has-been luminary—and her demise went unreported in the New York media. But in subsequent years, her memory has come alive in the hearts of savvy baseball aficionados. Events sponsored by The Baseball Reliquary, which was founded in 1996 and describes itself as “a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history,” begin with a ceremonial bell-ringing which pays homage to Hilda. All attendees are urged to bring their own bells and participate in the ceremony.

“It’s a great way to engage the audience and a perfect way to remember Hilda,” explained Terry Cannon, the organization’s Executive Director.

Additionally, The Reliquary hands out the Hilda Award, which recognizes distinguished service to the game by a baseball fan. According to Cannon, the prize itself is “a beat-up old cowbell…encased and mounted in a Plexiglas box with an engraved inscription.” But he was quick to note that, while Hilda is the Reliquary’s “unofficial symbol” and “perhaps baseball’s most famous fan,” she remains “somewhat of a mystery woman. I’m not aware of any existing family members…. Had she died today, of course, that news would have been on the front page of every paper in New York.”69

Hilda also has a presence at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, where an almost life-size fabric-machê statue of her and her cowbell, sculpted by Kay Ritter, is displayed with several other ballyard types. Hilda is all smiles as she rings her bell; affixed to her dress is a button that says: “I’LL TELL THE WORLD I’M FROM BROOKLYN N.Y.” Three years after her death, she was a character in The First, the Joel Siegel-Bob Brush-Martin Charnin Broadway musical about Jackie Robinson. And thirty-plus years after her passing, Howling Hilda (also known as Howling Hilda and the Brooklyn Dodgers), a one-person biographical musical set at the start of the Dodgers’ 1957 season, was penned by Anne Berlin and Andrew Bleckner and presented at various venues.

“I happened upon her and her story quite by accident and fell in love with her instantly,” explained Berlin. “She was one of the most colorful people I had ever read about…. She had a very musical sounding voice to me. With musicals you have to have a voice before you can tell a story. Hilda Chester was all voice—I could hear her voice clearly and thought she would make a wonderful subject for a musical.

“I think she was ahead of her time. Today her cowbells would be tweeted—pictures of her would be on Instagram. She would have a Facebook page called The Brooklyn Dodgers’ Greatest Fan. She knew how to market herself. She took an interest and love and made herself indispensable to it…. She’s coarse, abrupt, gruff, but at the same time she’s someone who can’t get enough of these guys. This was her family. She’s a product of her class, her environment, and Brooklyn. I feel the Dodgers were her family—her real family did not matter to her.”70

Hilda Chester may be long-gone, but she is not forgotten—and, if she could speak today, her response to all the hubbub surely would be: “Ain’t it t’rillin’!”

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history courses at the University at Albany. He is the author of “Great Baseball Films” and “Baseball on the Web,” and is co-author (with his wife, Audrey Kupferberg) of “Meet the Mertzes,” a double biography of I Love Lucy’s Vivian Vance and famed baseball fan William Frawley, and “Matthau: A Life.” He is a film commentator on WAMC (Northeast) Public Radio and a contributing editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. He is a frequent contributor to “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game” and has written for “Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond;” “Total Baseball;” “Baseball in the Classroom;” “Memories and Dreams;” and “NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.” His essay on early baseball films appears on the DVD Reel “Baseball: Baseball Films from the Silent Era, 1899–1926,” and he is an interviewee on the director’s cut DVD of “The Natural.“

Acknowledgments

Audrey Kupferberg; Lois Farber; Murray Polner; Jean Hastings Ardell; Anne Berlin; Jim Gates, Matt Rothenberg, Sue MacKay, and Cassidy Lent of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum; Terry Cannon of The Baseball Reliquary; Andrew Parver, Director of Operations, Hebrew Free Burial Association; Mark Langill, Team Historian and Publications Editor, Los Angeles Dodgers.

Additional Sources

Jean Hastings Ardell. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Notes

1.Interview with Murray Polner, March 21, 2015. 

2. Peter Golenbock. Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984, 60.

3. http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/duke-snider-brooklyn-dodgers-boys-summer-baseball-treasure-ebbets-field-article-1.117552.

4. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/01/sports/la-sp-erskine-20130502.

5. J.G.T. Spink. “Looping the Loops.” The Sporting News, April 22, 1943, 1.

6. Thomas Oliphant. Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005, 158.

7. https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1202535.

8. Rich Podolsky. “The Belle of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Saratoga Summer 2003, Summer, 2003.

9. Margaret Case Harriman. “The Belle of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Good Housekeeping, October 1945, 257.

10.Spink, 1.

11.Harriman, 256.

12.http://www.aagpbl.org/index.cfm/profiles/chester-bea/213.

13.Jim Sargent. We Were the All-American Girls: Interviews with Players of the AAGPBL, 1943–1954. Jefferson, North Carolina, MacFarland & Company, 2013, 105.

14.Dan Parker. “The Broadway Bugle.” Montreal Gazette, May 24, 1948, 15.

15.Mildred Danenhirsch. “The Miss of Tomorrow.” Thomas Jefferson High School Yearbook, June, 1939, 75–76.

16.Harriman, 19.

17.“Child Box Fund Brings $2,000 to Hebrew Orphans.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 23, 1932, 6.

18.“Asylum Given Substantial Aid By Auxiliary. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 14, 1933, 22.

19.http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2012/09/walkabout-saving-abrahams-children.

20.“Hilda Clings to Lip, Clangs for Giants.” The Sporting News, August 18, 1948, 14.

21.Louis Effrat. “Whatever Hilda Wants, Hilda Gets in Brooklyn.” The New York Times, September 3, 1955, 10.

22.Carl E. Prince. Brooklyn’s Dodgers: The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball: 1947–1957. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 89.

23.Spink, 11.

24.Sam Davis. “No Fair Weather Fans in Flatbush, and When You Hear the Gong, It’s Hilda Chester Time at Ebbets Field.” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 28, 1943, 6.

25.“Sincerely Yours: Ralph Trost Answers the Mail.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 27, 1943, 9.

26.Hugh Fullerton, Jr. “Sports Roundup.” The Gettysburg Times, February 3, 1944, 3.

27.“Brooks’ No. 1 Fem Fan ‘Benched’ By Illness.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 21, 1941, 1.

28. http://www.brooklynvisualheritage.org/howlin-hilda-misses-dodgers.

29. “It’s All Over, Terry, Our Ace Feminine Fan Is On the Mend.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 3, 1941, 3.

30. “Defies Doctors’ Orders to See Dodger Games.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 8, 1941, 1.

31. “Sincerely Yours: Ralph Trost Answers the Mail.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 21, 1942, 9.

32. Jack Cuddy. “Leo’s Alleged Lawsuit Divides Brooklyn Fans.” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1945, 10.

33. Harriman, 258.

34. “Flock Is Getting Into Shape Fast.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 22, 1943, 9.

35. Jerry Mitchell. Sports on Parade. New York Post, January 29, 1943, 41.

36. Louis Effrat. “Dodgers Set Back Braves in 10th, 8–7.” The New York Times, August 6, 1944, S1.

37. Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times: Short Shots in Sundry Directions.” The New York Times, June 12, 1947, 34.

38. Alice Hughes. “A Woman’s New York.” Reading Daily Eagle, April 29, 1943, 14.

39. Oscar Ruhl, “Purely Personal.” The Sporting News, August 12, 1943, 9.

40. Spink, 11.

41. Davis, 6.

42. Spink, 11.

43. Tommy Holmes. “Daze and Knights.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 22, 1953, 9.

44. “‘McPhail’s Order’ for Leo Proved to Be Work of Hilda.” The Sporting News, April 4, 1956, 16.

45. Tommy Holmes. “Dodgers Drop 9th Straight, 7 to 4.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1943, 24.

46. Paul Gould. “Even Hilda Quits Dodgers, shifts to Yankee Stadium.” The Sporting News, April 9, 1947, 20.

47. “George Currie’s Brooklyn. Brooklyn Daily Eagle. April 9, 1947, 3.

48. “Hilda Clings to Lip, Clangs for Giants,” 14.

49. Oscar Ruhl. “From the Ruhl Book.” The Sporting News, May 3, 1950, 21.

50. Roscoe McGowen. “Dodgers Overcome By Braves, 7 to 4; Defeat 9th in Row.” The New York Times, August 8, 1943, S1.

51. (Roscoe) McGowen, “Hilda, Now Redhead, Gets Big Bouquet From O’Malley.” The Sporting News, May 20, 1953, 11.

52. http://lasordaslair.com/2012/01/21/dodgers-in-timehowlin-hilda-chester.

53. Podolsky.

54. Roscoe McGowen. “It Was 25-Man Job,’ says Smokey, Dodging Orchids.” The Sporting News, September 14, 1955, 5.

55. “Hilda Claims Bums to Stay.” Toledo Blade, March 8, 1957, 31.

56. Jeane Hoffman. “Soul of Irish Charm: O’Malley Adopts ‘Wait and See’ Policy in Face of N.Y. Headlines.” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1957, C-6.

57. Gay Talese. “Brooklyn Is Trying Hard to Forget Dodgers and Baseball.” The New York Times, May 18, 1958, S3.

58. Dick Young. “Clubhouse Confidential.” The Sporting News, June 18, 1958, 19.

59. “Hilda and Sym-Phoney [sic] Band Bid Adieu to Ebbets Field.” The Sporting News, February 17, 1960, 27.

60. “Hilda Chester to Be Cited as Top Fan at NBC Tournament.” The Sporting News, February 15, 1961, 21.

61. Dan Daniel. Mary, Lollie, Hilda—Loudest Fans in Stands.” The Sporting News, February 2, 1963, 34.

62. John Wiebusch. “Dixie…Hilda…Leo…Shades of Daffy Dodgers.” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1969, F1.

63. Michael T. Kaufman. “For the Faithful, There Will Never Be a Coda to the Sym-Phony of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” The New York Times, April 11, 1971, 77.

64. Dick Young. “Young Ideas.” The Sporting News, February 15, 1969, 14.

65. Neil Offen. God Save the Players. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1974, 96–97.

66. http://www.hebrewfreeburial.org/what-we-do.

67. Scott Wilson. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of Over 10,000 Famous Persons. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2007, 134.

68. Interview with Andrew Parver, April 22, 2015.

69. Interview with Terry Cannon, March 24, 2015.

70. Interview with Anne Berlin, March 12, 2015.

Assist average. Assists divided by games played. Stat created by Philadelphia baseball writer Al Wright in 1875.

Average bases allowed. A pitcher’s total bases allowed, divided by his innings pitched—what might be termed opponents’ slugging average. Created by Alfred P. Berry in 1951.

Linear weights. A system created by Pete Palmer to measure all the events on a ball field in terms of runs.

On-base percentage. Created by Allan Roth and Branch Rickey in its current form [hits plus walks plus hit by pitch, divided by at-bats plus walks plus hit by pitch] in the early 1950s.When OBP was adopted as an official stat in 1984, the denominator was expanded to include sacrifice flies.

Runs created. Bill James’s formulation for run contribution from a variety of batting and base- running events. In its basic expression, the formula is [(hits + walks) x (total bases)] divided by (at- bats + walks).

Total average. Tom Boswell’s formulation for offensive contribution from a variety of batting and baserunning events. The concept of the numerator is bases gained; that of the denominator is outs made: [total bases + steals + walks + hit by pitches] divided by [at-bats − hits + caught steal- ing + grounded into double plays].

Runs produced. Runs batted in plus runs scored minus home runs.

Curiously, the inventor of the runs-produced (RP) statistic is not mentioned. Similarly, other sources of such information have provided only the definition or formula for runs produced—nothing at all about its creator. For example, the third edition (2009) of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary gives the following for runs produced: “An informal statistical measurement that equals runs scored plus runs batted in, minus home runs. Of unknown origin, the measure was evaluated by Bill James (Baseball Abstract, 1987).”2

Because of my interest in determining who has the major-league record for the longest consecutive- games run-produced (CGRP) streak,3, 4 I deemed it appropriate to find out who created the runs-produced statistic.5

So, who did invent runs produced?6

Here’s the fascinating chronology of my discovery. In a phone conversation with fellow SABR member Seymour Siwoff (Elias Sports Bureau), I mentioned my CGRP-streak research (and the need for accurate data for runs and RBIs alike on a game-by-game basis). Seymour told me that he recalled runs-produced stats first being presented in Sports Illustrated—a couple of years after its first year of publication, which was 1954. Similarly, in an email exchange with Pete Palmer, Pete thought that runs produced “was introduced by Sports Illustrated, maybe in the ’50s or ’60s.”

With that lead, I went through every “baseball season” issue of Sports Illustrated from 1955 through 1964, looking for anything on runs produced. Here’s what I came up with:

1955. Nothing at all on runs produced. In each weekly issue, SI included an information box (titled “Major League Baseball”) that gave the scores of the previous week’s games and the indi- vidual leaders in BA, RBI, HR, and pitching W–L.

1956. Each weekly issue of SI included “The X-Ray Box,” which (in addition to the usual stats) presented a chart for the top five “runs produced” leaders for each league.

In the first baseball-season issue (May 14, page 52), the column headings in the runs-produced chart were

• Player’s name (team and batting average)
• Runs Scored
• RBI
• Total Runs Produced

In the next issue (May 21, page 46), the column headings in the RP chart were

• Player’s name (team and batting average)
• Runs Scored
• Teammates Batted In
• Total Runs Produced

Note the difference for the third column heading in the first two issues—“RBI” (i.e., Runs Batted In) in the May 14 issue and “Teammates Batted In” in the May 21 issue.

It is pointed out that SI provided no explanation whatsoever of the change from “RBI” to “Teammates Batted In.”

For the remainder of the 1956 baseball season, the column heading “Teammates Batted In” was used.

In the end-of-the-season “X-Ray” (October 7, page 55), the distinction between “RBI” and “Teammates Batted In” is crystal clear (though not expressed by SI). For example, Mantle (the AL RBI leader) is listed in a chart of “month-by-month leaders” with a total of 130 RBI; in the Runs Produced chart, he is listed with 78 teammates batted in. Thus, “Teammates Batted In” is equal to RBI minus HR (Mantle having hit 52 home runs in his 1956 triple-crown season).

It is emphasized that in none of the baseball articles accompanying “The X-Ray Box” was any mention made or discussion given of runs produced (or of “teammates batted in”).

1957. Each weekly issue of SI was organized essentially just like those in 1956—“The X-Ray Box” included a runs-produced chart with the same column headings:

• Player’s name (team and batting average)
• Runs Scored
• Teammates Batted In
• Total Runs Produced

1958. Exactly the same as in 1957 (and 1956).

1959. The “X-Ray Box” was replaced by “Baseball’s Week,” which included text by Les Woodcock as well as some performance charts, including “Runs Produced,” which was exactly the same as those employed in 1958 (and 1957 and 1956)—with one significant midseason addition. Beginning with the July 13 issue (page 10), and continuing for the rest of the baseball season, the column heading “Team- mates Batted In” was asterisked, the asterisk directing the reader to the explanation “Derived by subtracting HRs from RBIs.”

1960. Same as in 1959—“Baseball’s Week,” which included text by different authors as well as some performance charts, including “Runs Produced, which for the column heading “Teammates Batted In” had an asterisk indicating the explanation “De- rived by subtracting HRs from RBIs.”

1961. Same as in 1960.

1962. Identical to 1961.

1963. Similar to 1962. However, the performance charts provided only runs-produced information— no columns for “Runs Scored” and “Teammates Batted In.”

1964. No performance charts; text only—no mention of runs produced.

In none of the baseball articles published in Sports Illustrated from 1955 through 1964 was any mention made of the creator of runs produced; likewise for the period 1965–2008.7, 8

So, I wrote the following summary and emailed it to Seymour Siwoff, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn:

The batting performance statistic, “Runs Produced” (which is defined as Runs Scored plus Runs Batted In minus Home Runs) first appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1956 (May 14 issue, page 52). A “Runs Produced” chart was included in nearly every issue of SI during the baseball season from 1956 through 1963. The specific person(s) deserving credit for creating the “Runs Produced” statistic has/have not yet been identified.

Thorn wrote back the following: “This sticks in my memory—that the inventor of the SI Runs Produced formula was none other than Bob Creamer.”

That Bob Creamer could have been the creator of the runs-produced statistic seemed unlikely to me for the following reason. In the Sports Illustrated issue with the very first presentation of the runs-produced statistic (May 14, 1956), “The X-Ray Box” accompanied the article “End of Round One” with the by-line “Baseball by Robert Creamer.” (“Round One” referred to the fact that each club was supposed to have played every other team in its league at least once.)

While Creamer provided his assessments on the round-one performance of each team in each league, he gave only brief mention to individual performances (through May 6), and then only of a few players— Mickey Mantle (who was ahead of Ruth’s 1927-season homer pace), Whitey Ford (who won his first four decisions), Bill Wight (who lost his first four starts), and Cardinals pitchers Tom Poholsky, Jackie Collum, and Ellis Kinder (who combined to pitch a “rare three-man shutout”). Creamer made absolutely no mention of runs produced.

So, I asked Thorn for contact information for Bob Creamer. Thorn responded that, while he didn’t have contact info for Creamer, another SABR member might—Marty Appel. (Appel had been public-relations director for the New York Yankees during the middle 1970s and is the author of the book, Now Pitching for the Yankees: Spinning the News for Mickey, Reggie, and George [Kingston, N.Y.: Total / Sports Illustrated, 2001].)

I sent an email summarizing the situation to Appel, asking for Creamer’s contact information. Appel replied: “Happy to provide it; very interesting story. I’ll be surprised if Bob was the creator, in that I don’t see him as a ‘stat guy,’ but you never know!”

Next, I sent an email to Creamer, including some of the salient points from above. I concluded my missive with the following:

So, I wanted to contact you to find out if you are the creator of the Runs Produced stat. I would greatly appreciate it if you would please let me know if you did indeed originate Runs Produced and your recollections of SI including RP in their weekly coverage of baseball during the 1956– 1963 period.

I was hoping that, even if Creamer was not the inventor of runs produced, he would recall who was.

*****

Pay dirt! Two days later, Bob Creamer sent the following email to me:

My computer has been down—it’s still not working right—or I’d have answered your email before this.

I’ll be honest and admit that I was delighted to get your message.

Yes, in 1956 in working up a weekly stat report for Sports Illustrated I suggested the Runs Produced idea. Les Woodcock, another original member of the SI staff, worked closely with me and helped refine it. At first I thought adding runs scored and runs batted in was enough, but that gave an over-preponderance to home-run hitters, who got two RPs for a home run, the one they batted in and the one they scored. To level the playing field, so to speak, and to give more weight to less powerful hitters who nonetheless seemed to get around the bases and score a lot, we arbitrarily decided to deduct home run totals.

The Runs Produced stat was sometimes dismissed by mathematical purists and I confess I was surprised and pleased when Total Baseball included it among its many measures of batting performance. I’d always felt that despite its mathematical flaw it was a good honest way of evaluating an offensive player’s worth. I had that belief reinforced in the 1950s by my great friend Seymour Siwoff of Elias, who said something to the effect that while it may not be mathematically valid, “It works!” (Seymour, who was a tremendous help to us at Sports Illustrated in those early days of the magazine, often spoke with exclamation marks in his voice.)

The Runs Produced stat had its origins a decade earlier, in 1946, just after World War II, when a bunch of us returning from military service to southern Westchester County formed a softball team and joined a Sunday league (Sunday because lots of people still had to work Saturdays in those days and evening games were difficult for guys who commuted to jobs in New York City). I was the manager for some reason and because I was smart enough to keep myself on the bench most of the time (I wasn’t much of a player) I was able to keep a meticulous scorebook of all our games. Because of my fondness for stats (I love Marty Appel but he pegged me wrong on that one) I kept working up lists of team leaders in various categories.

I had an On Base Percentage that included not just hits and bases on balls but getting on base because of errors. We had a little right-fielder who batted about .220 but could bunt beautifully and was fast as a rabbit going down the line to first, with the result that pitchers, catchers and infielders hurrying to throw him out made error after error. Jay had a very high OBP and a remarkably high number of runs scored. We also had a rotund third-baseman who could hit and drive in runs but who didn’t get around the bases to home plate that often. Jay would be high on the list of runs scored, and Fred would be among the leaders in RBIs. I got the idea of adding runs scored and runs batted in to see who overall were the best run producers on the team.

That Runs Produced figure worked well in softball because we didn’t play on a fenced field and home runs were hard to come by. But when Les Woodcock and I applied the Runs Produced idea to major league baseball it became distorted by the great number of homers, which led us to the idea of deducting them from the overall total. And there we were.

How I do run on. Sorry for the length, but it was a pleasure.

So: Mission accomplished!

Bob Creamer (with refinement input from Les Woodcock) is the inventor of runs produced.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank all the persons who contributed to this chronology—Seymour Siwoff, Pete Palmer, Gary Stone (who helped me search some of the issues of Sports Illustrated), John Thorn, Marty Appel, and, especially, Bob Creamer.

Notes

1. John Thorn and Pete Palmer, , Total Baseball, 1st ed. (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 2286–93.
2. Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary,” 3d (New York: Norton, 2009), 729.
3. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Lance Berkman Joined Select Group of Run Producers in 2008,” Baseball Digest, May 2009, 40–43.
4. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Who Has the Major-League Record for the Longest Consecutive-Games Run-Produced (CGRP) Streak?” The Baseball Research Journal 38, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 125–134.
5. The runs-produced (RP) statistic should not be confused with the statis- tic estimated runs produced (ERP) devised by Paul As reported on pages in The Bill James Baseball Abstract (1985), Johnson’s ERP “is a method for estimating run production which is more accurate than even Bill James’ runs created formula” (276–81). The ERP formula is: ERP = 0.16 x {2 x [TB + BB + HB] + H + SB – [0.605 x (AB + CS + GIDP – H)]}.

6. The Baseball Almanac (www.baseball-almanac.com) states the following in its section “Career Leaders for Runs Produced”: “Runs produced is a SABERmetric statistic that describes a hitter’s overall effectiveness by measuring his ability to produce runs for (his) team either by scoring them himself or driving them in at the plate. Runs produced was created by baseball great Bill James during the 1970’s and the way it is calculated is adding runs to runs batted in [and] then subtracting home runs.” Likewise, in The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), John Thorn and Pete Palmer (with David Reuther) wrote the following: “Bill James, at about the same time [i.e., that Steve Mann introduced his run-productivity average in an unpublished 1977 manuscript] came up with a similar formula, since shunned, with values based on runs plus RBIs minus home runs” (64). However, in The Bill James Baseball Abstract (1984), James wrote that “there is another road toward the same truth [ascertaining a player’s contributions to offense, i.e., his runs created] that I would like to say something about. That is the statistic ‘Runs Produced’” (17–19). James concluded his discussion with the following statement: “Ah, well, I didn’t build the road” (i.e., invent runs produced). Then, three years later, James in The Bill James Baseball Abstract (1987) wrote: “Runs produced were invented by Spiro Agnew, an attempt to measure the same thing [as total average—i.e., to sum up the total effectiveness of an offensive player]. The ‘formula,’ of course, is runs + RBI – home runs (Spiro never was too complex)” (25).

7. In a subsequent (13 November 2008) search of the SI Vault on the Sports Illustrated website (www.Vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com) for the term “runs produced” for the period 1954–present, I found that runs-produced charts were included in some post-1964 issues: 1965, once each month [(April 19 [the 1964 season RP rankings], May 3, June 7, July 12, August 16, September 13, and October 11); 1966, once every other month (April 25, June 20, and August 15); 1968 (August 19); 1976 (June 21, October 25, and November 29); 1982 (July 5); and 1999 (June 21). In none of the articles in which runs-produced statistics were presented (with or with- out RP charts) was any mention made of the creator of the RP statistic. In the “Scoreboard” (a collection of snippets on a variety of current top- ics, edited by Robert W. Creamer [e.g., Philadelphia Flyers Bobby Clarke’s thoughts on the NHL’s decision to crack down on fighting and related violence by introducing more stringent penalties]) in Sports Illustrated (21 June 1976) was the following statement about runs produced: “A baseball statistic called Runs Produced, which first appeared in Sports Illustrated 20 years ago, is based on the premise that runs are what count most in baseball. The figure is arrived at by adding the runs a player scores to the runs he bats in and then subtracting from that amount the number of home runs he hits. Players at or near the top in Runs Produced invariably are the ones who win ball games, those who get on base and score, those who drive other base runners in. For example, last year’s Runs Produced leaders were Joe Morgan of Cincinnati in the National League and Fred Lynn of Boston in the American. Not by coincidence, each was voted Most Valuable Player in his league, even though neither finished first in any of the so-called Triple Crown categories— batting average, home runs, runs batted in. If you’re wondering why the Reds are moving away from the pack, or why Texas and Kansas City are running one–two, here are this season’s top Run Producers in each league through games of last Friday.” The accompanying chart provided the following information (Player, Team, Runs Produced): National League—Griffey (CIN, 85), Morgan (CIN, 79), Perez (CIN, 75), Rose (CIN, 72), Schmidt (PHI, 72); American League—Mayberry (KC, 65), Otis (KC, 65), Burroughs (TEX, 63), Chambliss (NY, 62), Hargrove (TEX, 62), Hisle (MIN, 62). Later in the “Scoreboard” in SI (25 October 1976), Creamer reiterated the position that “while hitters who win batting titles and home-run championships get the publicity, the most valuable players tend to be the ones who are at or near the top in runs produced.” An accompanying chart provided the top ten in each league in runs produced—in the American League, Thurman Munson of the Yankees finished second in runs produced with 167 (Rod Carew of the Twins finished first with 178); in the National League, Joe Morgan of the Reds was first with 197 (with teammate Pete Rose second with 183). Creamer’s prognostication turned out to be on the money, as Munson and Morgan each later claimed the Most Valuable Player Award in his league. These two commentaries are apparently the only editorial texts on runs produced provided in Sports Illustrated. However, in a later issue of SI (29 November 1976), in the “19th Hole” (where readers expressed their thoughts about SI ’s treatment of a given topic), two people wrote to criticize runs produced. Archie Motley (Chicago) claimed that, in order to have a meaningful statistic, home runs should not be subtracted. And, Phil Tortora (Milford, Connecticut) opined that the “runs-produced theory does not take into consideration the player’s team”—i.e., a player on a good-hitting club will likely produce more runs than if he were on a poor- hitting team.

8. Similarly, an analogous online search of The Sporting News at paperofrecord.com for the period 1954–2003 showed that, while runs-produced statistics have appeared numerous times over the years since 1962 (particularly in the columns of Edgar Munzel, Peter Gammons, and Moss Klein), no indication of the inventor of runs produced was ever provided.

L to R top row: Ken Medlock, Bobby Darwin, Mike Sgobba, Phil Pote. Middle row: George Genovese, Dick Wiencek, Joe Stephenson, Roger Jongewaard. Bottom row: Dick Cole, Angel Figueroa, Edward James Olmos, Jesse Flores. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library).

The heroes of baseball movies usually are brawny power hitters who bash ninth inning homers or fireballing hurlers who toss shutouts to win the Big Game. Or, they are raw but promising younger players, some in fictional scenarios and others in biopics, who overcome obstacles and fashion Hall of Fame careers.

If Bob Sheppard, longtime public address announcer for the New York Yankees, was class personified, Tex Rickards, who held a similar slot with Dem Bums, reflected the spirit of the “woiking” class Brooklynite.1 And while Robert Merrill, the classy Metropolitan Opera baritone, often sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at Yankee Stadium, at Ebbets Field the fans themselves were the artistes. They included Hilda Chester and her cowbell, Eddie Bettan and his police whistle, and the Dodgers Symphony (or, Sym-phony and Sym-phoney): a five, six, or seven-man unit of comically wacky amateur instrumentalists.

Away from Ebbets Field, the Sym-phony members, who changed across the years, toiled as truck drivers, clerks, and city workers of various stripes, and they hailed from such blue-collar communities as Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Their instruments included everything from snare drums, bass drums, and metal containers posing as drums to cymbals, bugles, trumpets, trombones, and washboards employed as noisemakers. “Sometimes the band sounds like a herd of elephants with whooping cough,” wrote the New York Times’ Murray Schumach in 1947, when the Sym-phony was at its zenith.2 Dodger devotee Aaron Elkins, Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School Class of 1952, added seven decades later: “For me, they were a given, so natural I never really thought about them… [I] just laughed and enjoyed them… I remember them all with much affection and nostalgia now…”3

The Sym-phony was founded in 1937 by Carmine “Shorty” Laurice, also known as “Jack” Laurice: a diminutive long-time Dodgers fan who toiled as a welder in the New York subway system. Laurice’s verbiage was of the toidy-toid-and-toid variety. “Shorty is softspoken and even-tempered,” observed Schumach, “and his speech is true Brooklynese. He favors the present tense and has a tendency to ignore grammatical links between verbs and nouns.” Laurice explained his version of how the Sym-phony came into being: “Back in ’37 I’m sittin’ in my seat at Ebbets Field — the same seat I got for twenty-eight years, Section 8, Row 12, on the aisle — and I’m whistling, through my megaphone like always, when I run into this guy, a drummer. And that’s the beginning of the band. It don’t take much to start things in that Section 8 at the ball park, you know. Pretty soon I get myself a band. No, we don’t get paid, just free ducats to the ball games.”4 Originally, the Sym-phony called itself the Dodgers’ Bums band. Legend has it that, in 1939, broadcaster Red Barber re-named it the Sym-phony to emphasize that their members were non-professionals.

Laurice was the star attraction in Section 8. “He is extremely visible, in the area behind the Brooklyn dugout, because he usually wears a silk hat, frock coat and orange pantaloons, and is perpetually in prancing motion,” Schumach observed. His baton was a cane, until an uncle fashioned a real one from the branch of a tree in upstate New York. “Shorty thinks it elegant,” Schumach added, “but he would have preferred a baton from a Brooklyn tree.” Early on, Laurice’s primary companion was forever-jitterbugging Jo Jo Delio, a little person who weighed only forty pounds. “Shorty would toss Jojo (sic) over his head, under his legs, make him cakewalk the guard rail. All this was done with consummate ease as his musicians wrestled with rhythm.” However, by 1947, Jo Jo’s weight had ballooned to 120 pounds: just five pounds less than Shorty. So their acrobatic act was history.5 Laurice and company also regularly left the environs of Section 8 to parade through the stands during games and could be found atop the dugouts responding to on-field happenings.

The Sym-phony is best-recalled for serenading baseball’s men in blue with a rendition of “Three Blind Mice.” Predictably, the umps were not amused. “The Brooklyn Sym-Phony used to be the worst for us — they would always play ‘The Three Blind Mice’ when we’d walk out on the field,” explained umpire Beans Reardon in 1949. “And that would eat up a feller like (umpire) Babe Pinelli. I said to the Babe, just ignore ’em, and he did and they stopped after a while. Fans like you to growl back at ’em.”6

Opposing players also were subjected to the Sym-phony’s taunts; “After all,” Shorty claimed, “it’s my job to rattle the other team.”7 If a Giant or Cub or Cardinal grounded out, the band comically imitated his gait as he returned to the dugout. If one sipped water from a drinking fountain, the Sym-phony lampooned him with “How Dry I Am.” If one too-slowly returned to his dugout seat, he was loudly accompanied by the drums and cymbals. If one struck out, or if a pitcher entered or was taken out of a game, he was saluted with “The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out,” also known as “The Hearse Song,” a ditty that exists in various incantations. A typical verse:

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
A big black bug with two red eyes,
crawls up through your stomach and out through your eyes.
Your liver turns to a slimy green,
And looks and tastes like whipped cream. 8

Shorty and his Sym-phony were nationally-known. In 1947, The New York Times dubbed him “the Toscanini of Ebbets Field.”9 By all accounts, he was beloved and respected off the field. “Shorty would bring Jackie Robinson and Ralph Branca over to St. Lucy’s Church,” recalled his brother, Joe Laurice, “and he also managed a ball club at the Navy Yard. He’d do anything for anybody. He’d play basketball after the game was over on Friday nights, buy the kids sodas…”10

Shorty also was endlessly, unashamedly vocal in his support of the Dodgers. Six days before the start of the 1947 campaign, Commissioner Happy Chandler handed out a one-year suspension to Leo Durocher, the Dodger skipper, and Shorty brandished a sign in which he informed one and all: “Open the door, Chandler, and let our Leo in.”

Occasionally, Shorty and the Sym-phony trekked outside the boundaries of Ebbets Field. In 1941 and 1947, they were front-and-center in parades starting at Prospect Park, heading along Flatbush Avenue, and ending downtown, at Borough Hall, in celebration of the Bums copping National League pennants. In September 1946, they appeared at Sanford’s, a Sheepshead Bay restaurant, to fête Pee Wee Reese and Eddie Stanky, and performed at an impromptu 36th birthday party for Dixie Walker. 11 Its members were invited to stroll the aisles of the 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Thomas Dewey, New York governor and presidential nominee, promised to have them perform at the White House. (But Dewey lost to Democrat Harry Truman.)12

On August 21, 1948, Laurice was honored with a special “Shorty Laurice Day” at Ebbets Field. Tragically, however, the Sym-phony superstar died suddenly that November after undergoing ulcer surgery. Laurice was just 43 years old, and some of the money given him on his “Day” helped pay for his funeral. “Just as Shorty would have wished it, every member of the Dodger outfit who possibly could come was at the mass [at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church], together with hundreds of Dodger fans, including several members of his impromptu band,” reported the Brooklyn Eagle. Branch Rickey, Walter O’Malley, Jackie Robinson, and Roy Campanella were among those in attendance.13

Most poignantly, Shorty’s cortege circled his beloved ballyard. It is not without irony that he had been felled by ulcers between the 1946 and 1947 seasons. “That ulcers, it’s all in the head,” Laurice told Murray Schumach. “Give me plenty of baseball and I don’t never get ulcers.”14

Laurice was not quickly forgotten. The following summer, he was honored at Ebbets Field on Opening Day. A plaque dedicated to his memory was erected on his favorite Section 8 seat and a memorial fund was instituted in his honor to help support underprivileged children. Five years later, the Brooklyn Eagle described Laurice as the “Brooklyn fan who ‘cared’ more deeply than anyone else” and a “wonderful little fellow,” adding that a “gentle touch to the story of Shorty Laurice is that his memory is perpetuated by the association he formed and that his friends hold dances and parties to raise money to take orphans to Brooklyn games.”15

Upon Laurice’s death, snare drummer Lou Soriano became the Sym-phony’s leader and director. Occasionally, “Brother Lou” (as he was called) accepted credit for founding the band; he just may have been the unnamed drummer that Laurice mixed with at Ebbets Field in 1937. As Soriano explained in a 1981 interview: “We were coming home from a picnic with our families… and it was so nice a day when we passed the park we went in. Instruments and all. People said: ‘Give us a tune!’ So we gave ’em a tune.”16

Members of the Brooklyn Dodgers Sym-phony gave a stirring performance (if you can call it that) at the 1991 SABR convention in New York City.

In 1949, six musicians comprised the Sym-phony: Soriano (who worked as a civilian driver for the US military on Governors Island); trumpeter Phil Mason (a truck driver); clarinetist Bob Sharkey (a subway maintenance man); bass drummer Patsy Palma (a beer distributor); trombonist Pete Norman (a paper cutter); and, of course, Jo Jo Delio (a grocer) who manned the cymbals. Their day jobs allowed them to play at Ebbets for approximately 35 games each season, on Sundays and holidays and during night games. Plus, they earned a write-up in the venerable New Yorker magazine. Here, Soriano (rather than Laurice) was cited as the band’s founder. The Sym-phony “was started by Soriano,” claimed the magazine. “He brought a trombone player [with him] one day [and] when the Dodgers had a man on base, he blew a few notes. Soriano kept adding instruments till they got what they have now. The band has a thematic music for nearly every Dodger player. It also plays ‘Hearts and Flowers’ when a visiting team is hollering about something to the ump.”17

A minor flap occurred in July 1951, when Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians demanded that the Sym-phony members be paid for their work and imposed a ban on their performances. It was lifted with one proviso: No union member could play with the band. Then on August 13, the Dodgers staged a “Music Depreciation Night.” Of the 24,560 fans in attendance, 2,426 showed up with banjos, bongo drums, trombones, flutes, saxophones… All were admitted for free, and joined the Sym-phony in their music-making. Additionally, the band was honored that same month in a pre-game Ebbets Field ceremony. Fans were encouraged to donate $1 each for the purchase of new musical instruments and costumes.

On the rare occasion that the Sym-phony did cross the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, it was usually to represent Brooklyn in some manner. They might show up at Penn Station to welcome Dem Bums after a successful road trip. In September 1951, they entertained the crowd at Times Square’s Globe Theater during a screening of Rhubarb, a newly-released Brooklyn-set baseball film.

In 1956, the band included seven musicians: Soriano and Palma plus trumpeter Ziggy Rullo (a lithographer); clarinetist Frank Ambro (a Parks Department worker); cymbalist Louis Dallojacono (a bank clerk); trombonist Pete Dellaiacono (a tree pruner); and tenor saxophonist William “Cally” Califano (a high school student). The Sym-phony’s act also had changed. When asked if they still serenaded umpires, Soriano responded: “Na. When they had three umpires we used to play ‘Three Blind Mice.’ But now they got four. And, what! — we can’t come up with the fourth mouse! We leave ’em alone. If we don’t, they holler at us.”18

Even after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, the Sym-phony remained intact; they marched in parades and appeared at everything from store openings to old-timers’ games. In 1958, they accompanied a busload of Brooklyn diehards to Philadelphia, where the then-Los Angeles Dodgers were to battle the Phillies. On their way out of town, the Sym-phony performed “St. Louis Blues” and “Who’s Sorry Now.” Upon their arrival in the City of Brotherly Love, it was announced that the game had been rained out.19

As the years passed, Sym-phony members aged and died — and in 1989, Lou Soriano’s passing merited a brief obituary in The New York Times. Unlike many of his brethren who by then had abandoned the city for the suburbs, at age 84 Soriano still resided in Greenpoint. “Mr. Soriano’s most cherished possession,” noted the Times, “was a plaque presented to him by the Brooklyn Dodgers organization… He was offered as much as $7,000 for the keepsake, but turned it down. Asked if he held on to it for sentimental reasons, he explained, `Nah, I’m holding out for $10,000.’” 20

In October 1995 — the fortieth anniversary of the team’s lone World Series triumph — the Sym-phony appeared at the Brooklyn Historical Society in an event accompanying a special Ebbets Field exhibit. The following year, they were found at a 92nd Street Y shindig honoring living Brooklyn Dodgers from Cal Abrams to Pee Wee Reese. In June 2001, they showed up at the KeySpan (now MCU) Park debut of the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Class A New York Mets farm team: the first professional baseball game in the borough since the departure of the Dodgers 44 years earlier. At one point, according to The New York Times, the Sym-phony members “huddled by a concession stand. The musicians were supposed to get prime seats, said Dan Wilson, a 79-year-old trumpeter, `but somebody goofed; at our age, this we don’t need.’”21

The Sym-phony performed several numbers — including “Three Blind Mice” — at the 2005 unveiling of a Jackie Robinson-Pee Wee Reese statue outside KeySpan Park. At a KeySpan gathering two years later, Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, saw and acknowledged Dan Wilson, whom The New York Times described as “the longest-tenured active member of the Dodgers Sym-phony — as in phony symphony…” On that occasion, the Sym-phony included Arnie Mig, also 85, playing cymbals; Lou Mento, 82, on bass drum; saxophonist Rex Sita, 77; and trombonist Nick Fiore, also 77.

Wilson admitted that he was not an official Sym-phony original. He was just 17 years old in 1939, and was enlisted as a fill-in musician. “… (the) Dodgers management did not want us at the ballpark,” he recalled. “They felt we were a nuisance, but the players and the fans loved us, so we had to sneak into the ballpark. One guy paid the admission fee and lowered a rope over the side of the stadium, and we tied our instruments to the rope and had them hoisted up. Then we ran into the stands and started playing.”

Wilson noted that, in 2007, he and Jo Jo Delio were the sole remaining living links to the original Sym-phony. Delio, then 87, resided in a Massapequa, Long Island nursing home. 22 He was 94 — or, over twice the age of Shorty Laurice — when he passed away in January 2011. One year later, a Newsday tribute cited him as the “last member of the Brooklyn Dodgers Sym-Phony Band. Your legend will never be forgotten! From your loving family and friends from the Northside Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Parkview Nursing Home.”23 Then in 2015, Newsday reported that the Sym-phony “has lost (one more) last surviving member” upon the passing of 87-year-old Armand Soriano, Lou Soriano’s son. A cymbal-player, Armand had been recruited by Lou right after World War II, when he was 18. Armand’s life was typical of most Sym-phony musicians. Brooklyn-born, he dropped out of school after completing eighth grade to support his family. He eventually worked in the stockroom at the Steuben Glass company, where he remained for three decades.24

“Over the years, as the original guys disappeared, we took their places,” explained Nick Fiore in 2007. He reported that he had joined the Sym-Phony in 1977, adding: “Danny and the rest of us are all trained musicians who performed with big bands, but we’re still proud to keep this great tradition alive.” And Rachel Robinson observed, “The Sym-Phony was one of the things people loved about Ebbets Field. They provided a kind a special character and loving warmth that few other ballparks had, so I’d recognize them anywhere.”25

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history courses at the University at Albany. He is the author of “Great Baseball Films” and “Baseball on the Web,” and is co-author (with his wife, Audrey Kupferberg) of “Meet the Mertzes,” a double biography of I Love Lucy’s Vivian Vance and famed baseball fan William Frawley, and “Matthau: A Life.” He is a frequent contributor to “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game” and has written for “Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond,” “Total Baseball,” “Baseball in the Classroom,” “Memories and Dreams,” and “NINE.”

Photo credit

Brooklyn Dodgers Sym-phony photo is courtesy of RMY Auctions.

Notes

1 Most famously, after a cluster of fans had placed their coats over the grandstand railing at Ebbets Field, Rickards requested that “the fans in the first row along the railing please remove their clothes.” (One of a number of variations: “Will the ladies sitting along the first-base line please take off their clothes….”) So as not to confuse anyone in the stands, Rickards — not to be mistaken for the legendary boxing promoter and founder of the New York Rangers, who passed away in 1929 — appeared on the field garbed in a white wool sweater with the words “Dodgers Announcer” stitched on its front. It may have been 100 degrees in the shade, but Rickards always wore the wool. He inexplicably conjured up incorrect names in his announcements, referring to pitchers Ernie Johnson and Eddie Erautt as, respectively, “Cy” and “Herman,” and infielder Gene Freese as “Augie” — which became Freese’s nickname.

2 Murray Schumach, “Dodgers’ Maestro,” The New York Times, September 28, 1947; SM28.

3 Email from Aaron Elkins, March 10, 2017.

4 Schumach; SM28.

5 Schumach; SM28.

6 Adam K. Raymond, “How To Get Ejected From a Baseball Game,” Slate, September 18, 2012.

7 Schumach; SM28.

8 “The Hearse Song,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hearse_Song

9 Schumach; SM28.

10 Bob McGee, The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rivergate Books. 2005); 211.

11 “Dodgers’ Party Followed by Fete For Dixie Walker,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 25, 1946; 4.

12 McGee; 211.

13 “Dodger Leaders Attend Rites For Carmine (Shorty) Laurice,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 29, 1948; 11.

14 Schumach; SM28.

15 Tommy Holmes, “Dazes and Knights,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 8, 1953; 17.

16 Ken Denlinger, “Only Memories At Ebbets Field,” Washington Post, October 28, 1981.

17 Frank Grisaitis and Rex Lardner, “Incidental Music,” The New Yorker, September 3, 1949; 17.

18 William R. Conklin, “Dodgers’ Music Score? Off-Pitch Sym-phoney Band Is Base,” The New York Times, August 12, 1956; 161.

19 Gay Talese, “Like Old Times in Brooklyn: Safari All Awry,” The New York Times, May 26, 1958; 34.

20 “Louis Soriano, 84, Dies; Led Dodger Band,” The New York Times, April 12, 1989; B5.

21 Andy Newman, “It’s Summer: The Boys Are Back in Town,” The New York Times, June 26, 2001; D3.

22 Vincent M. Mallozzi, “Sour Notes Are Sweet for Sym-Phony of Brooklyn,” The New York Times, August 14, 2007; B2.

23 “In Memoriam,” Newsday, January 23, 2012.

24 Joan Gralla, “Armand Soriano dies; last of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ razzing Sym-Phony was 87,” Newsday, June 13, 2015.

25 Mallozzi; B2.

A third of a century has passed since the Dodgers commemorated their centennial – 100 years since joining the National League in 1890, the year they consider their founding. The anniversary was highlighted by a midsummer Old-Timers Weekend held at Dodger Stadium, which included a private luncheon for former players and coaches on Saturday, June 30, and an exhibition on Sunday, July 1, 1990, before the regularly scheduled game against the St. Louis Cardinals. The largest number of former Dodgers to appear at an Old-Timers Game, before or since, assembled that weekend. The specific theme was a salute to the Dodgers’ 21 National League pennant-winning teams. Players from 16 teams who went to the World Series between 1941 and 1988, including six that won the Series, attended.1

The first group of retired players began to show up at the ballpark on Friday evening, June 29, a night that would go down in Dodger annals. Carl Erskine and Rex Barney were among those looking on as Fernando Valenzuela, the 1981 National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Award winner, on this summer evening twirled a no-hitter, something both Erskine and Barney had accomplished with Brooklyn. Then in his 10th season with the ballclub, Valenzuela beat St. Louis Cardinals pitcher José DeLeón, 6-0. The Dodgers offense was sparked by a three-hit night from Lenny Harris and home runs by Hubie Brooks and Juan Samuel.2

Valenzuela’s was the 20th no-hitter in Dodgers history, and the first thrown by a Dodgers pitcher since Jerry Reuss held the Giants hitless in 1980. It also was the first at Dodger Stadium since Bill Singer denied the Phillies a hit on July 20, 1970.3 Valenzuela’s gem nearly evaporated in the top of the ninth inning. With a runner on first and one out, former Dodger Pedro Guerrero hit a grounder that Valenzuela deflected with his glove and second baseman Samuel converted into a game-ending double play. With the last out recorded, Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully advised listeners, “If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!”4

Remarkably, earlier in the day, Valenzuela’s former teammate and friend, Dave Stewart, of the Oakland Athletics, hurled a no-hitter against the Toronto Blue Jays. As of 2023, this was the only time in big-league history that two no-hitters were thrown on the same day. And on Sunday, Andy Hawkins of the New York Yankees pitched an eight-inning no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox but in a losing cause, 4-0; in 1991 he also “lost” the no-hitter, when a major-league rule change asserted that a game must go at least a full nine innings to be classified as a no-hitter.5

On Saturday afternoon, June 30, the Dodgers hosted a private luncheon for former players and coaches in the posh Stadium Club, perched high above right field, where old acquaintances were renewed and days of glory recalled. Erskine kidded with Dodgers President Peter O’Malley’s sister Terry Seidler: “Peter paid for a hotel room, meals, plane tickets, game tickets, and chauffeur service to get me here. That’s more than your dad (Walter O’Malley) paid me to play for him.”6 Don Drysdale, who was by this time a member of the Dodgers broadcasting crew, served as the luncheon’s emcee, and after viewing a four-minute video encapsulating a century of the team’s history, told those gathered, “I wish I could put everything in a time capsule and keep it just the way it was.”7

Sunday afternoon was set aside for the Old-Timers Game. There was nothing particularly new about Old-Timers Games. In fact, MLB historian John Thorn traced the earliest one to have been played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1875.8 The Yankees have famously held an annual Old-Timers Day continuously since 1947 and as of 2023 were the only big-league team that carried on the tradition. It appears the Dodgers held their first Old-Timers Game at Ebbets Field in August 1932, and held another in September 1936, the latter ostensibly to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National League.9 Four years later, in September 1940, the Dodgers brought back nearly 40 of their former players for a three-inning old-timers exhibition. It was the last one held in Brooklyn.10

Thirty-one seasons passed before the Dodgers hosted their next Old-Timers Day. In their 14th season on the West Coast, in 1971, the Dodgers brought 34 of their former players back to Chavez Ravine.11 It became an annual promotion for the next 25 seasons, often centered on a specific theme or commemoration of an anniversary, such as their first year in Los Angeles, a World Series championship team, their first year in Dodger Stadium, the retirement of a uniform number, and so forth. The 1990 event, in fact, was the 20th consecutive season the Dodgers staged an Old-Timers Game. There would be five more through 1995.

By 1990, Equitable Insurance had not only become a sponsor of the Dodgers Old-Timers Game but held one in each big-league ballpark.12 On July 1, 1990, fans cheered on their favorite players of seasons past at Dodger Stadium. Before a crowd of just under 40,000 fans, 86 Dodgers alumni from both the Brooklyn and Los Angeles eras emerged from the dugout and stood along the baselines and were introduced to the crowd, and assembled afterward for a team photo. Veteran backstop Rick Dempsey, age 40, was summoned from the dugout to join the group photograph to represent the 1988 champions.13

Tom Pagnozzi and Bob Tewksbury were among the Cardinals collecting autographs from some of the famed Dodgers, and Tewksbury, an amateur artist, recorded the day in his sketch pad. Cardinals coach and Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst was asked about his impressions in seeing many of his old rivals on the field again. “Those old goats used to slide into my legs and knock me down. My legs started hurting when I got here, so I knew there was going to be an Old-Timers game,” he joked.14

Then it was time to play ball. The Dodgers divided into two teams and, amid all the on-field antics expected of them, somehow played three innings. For those interested, the highlights included Derrell Griffith’s (1963-66) clutch double to drive in Al Ferrara (1963; 1965-68), and Tommy Davis’s (1959-1966) RBI single. It was fitting that both Ferrara and Davis had been born in Brooklyn. Seventy-four-year-old Mickey Owen (1941-45), the catcher who dropped the third strike with two outs in the ninth inning of Game Four in the 1941 World Series against the Yankees, made solid contact for a hit and drove in a run. Sandy Koufax (1955-1966) received the loudest ovation, and retired the two batters who faced him: Maury Wills (1959-1966; 1969-72) grounded out to third baseman Ron Cey (1971-82) and Ted Sizemore (1969-70; 1976) flied out to left fielder Lou Johnson (1965-1967). Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda took to the mound and received the crowd’s cheers while running over to cover first base on a dribbler hit by Dick Nen (1963). Lasorda was so excited about nipping the runner that in attempting to whip the ball around the infield, threw the ball wildly into the outfield.15

In the regular-season game that followed, the Dodgers took an early 5-0 lead against St. Louis. Dempsey arguably had his best performance all season – smashing two doubles and going 3-for-4 – in seeming defiance of time. But the Dodgers’ fortunes quickly changed, and the players began to resemble their “Daffiness Boys” antecedents rather than any of those league championship teams they had just finished honoring. In this game, the 1990 Dodgers exhibited mental lapses and committed physical errors, with a wild pitch, an errant pickoff throw, and strange baserunning thrown into the mix. Lenny Harris was picked off base for the first time in his major-league career – by, of course, a former Dodger, now Cardinal, Ricky Horton. Rubbing salt into the wound was another former Dodgers pitcher, Tom Niedenfuer, who, like Horton, shut the door on his old chums. The Cardinals came back to win, 6-5.16

The Dodgers shelved the annual Old-Timers Games after 1995. When asked why, the organization offered no official comment. After an 18-year absence, the Dodgers resumed Old-Timers Day for five seasons, between 2013 and 2017, but as of 2023 have not scheduled one since. Though every Old-Timers Game is special, those fortunate enough to attend the special event in the summer of 1990 were witness to the greatest assemblage of former Dodger players in their history before or since.17

GREG KING is a California-based public historian who attended his first game at Dodger Stadium in 1962, a 13-inning affair that produced a 2-1 LA win over the Reds and featured both managers being tossed. He and the late Woody Wilson co-founded SABR’s Dusty Baker – Sacramento Chapter in 1994.

Roster of Players and Coaches Introduced at Dodger Stadium on July 1, 1990

• Red Adams
• Don Drysdale
• Tommy Lasorda
• Dick Schofield
• Joey Amalfitano
• Carl Erskine
• Don LeJohn
• George Shuba
• Sandy Amoros
• Chuck Essegian
• Bill Loes
• Ted Sizemore
• Bob Aspromonte
• Joe Ferguson
• Ken McMullen
• Reggie Smith
• Monty Basgall
• Al Ferrara
• Mike G. Marshall
• Duke Snider
• Rex Barney
• Herman Franks
• Carmen Mauro
• Dick Teed
• Jim Baxes
• Augie Galan
• Joe Moeller
• Darrel Thomas
• Joe Beckwith
• Al Gionfriddo
• Manny Mota
• Arky Vaughan
• Carroll Beringer
• Dick Gray
• Dick Nen
• Ben Wade
• Joe Black
• Derrell Griffith
• Don Newcombe
• John Werhas
• Ralph Branca
• John Hale
• Nate Oliver
• Maury Wills
• Bobby Bragan
• Gene Hermanski
• Claude Osteen
• Steve Yeager
• Al Campanis
• Ben Hines
• Mickey Owen
• Geoff Zahn
• Jim Campanis
• Burt Hooton
• Danny Ozark
• Ron Cey
• Tommy John
• Ron Perranoski
• Eddie Chandler
• Lou Johnson
• Joe Pignatano
• Chuck Churn
• Tom “Spider” Jorgensen
• Johnny Podres
• Dolph Camilli
• Von Joshua
• Doug Rau
• Pete Coscarart
• Clyde King
• Phil Regan
• Willie Crawford
• John Kennedy
• Pete Richert
• Mark Cresse
• Clyde King
• Ed Roebuck
• Tommy Davis
• Sandy Koufax
• John Roseboro
• Willie Davis
• Clem Labine
• Jerry Royster
• Al Downing
• Lee Lacy
• Bill Russell
• Norm Larker