BACKGROUND: The 2010 SABR convention publication, The National Pastime: Baseball in the Peach State, included an article entitled “That Was Quick” describing a professional baseball game that lasted a mere 32 minutes. Based on information in “The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball”1 and a Google-based search for any quicker game (as unlikely as that seemed), the article indicated that this 1910 game remained what a local sportswriter called it at the time—“the fastest nine innings ever played in the organized baseball world.”22 Shortly after The National Pastime was published, SABR member Jim Baker informed the author that a faster game had been played in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. He provided supporting documentation, and the following article ensued. The Atlanta Crackers and Mobile Sea Gulls were plenty quick in 1910, but the Asheville Tourists and the Winston-Salem Twins were even quicker six years later.

Baseball history was made at Oates Park in Asheville, North Carolina, on August 30, 1916, but nobody noticed. In fact, nobody noticed until some 50 years later—and even then the discovery was accidental and did not receive the lasting attention it deserved. On that day, two baseball teams in the Class D North Carolina State League played a nine-inning game in only 31 minutes—one minute faster than the 1910 Southern League game that has long been touted as the fastest game in professional baseball history.3

The game in Asheville pitted the local Tourists against the Twins from nearby Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The local newspaper account the following day understated the game’s historical significance calling it merely “the fastest bit of pastime ever played on [the] local diamond”4 [emphasis added]. The headline labeled the game “farcical,” and the article itself provided little information on the game itself, but enough to substantiate that description. No box score accompanied the story, only a line score by innings documenting a 2–1 victory by the visiting team and identifying the teams’ batterymates. The two Winston-Salem papers added no game details, and one said that “no official score was kept.”5

Only some 200 fans witnessed this historic event—perhaps because it ended before it was scheduled to start. The season was almost over, and both teams were out of the second-half pennant race. Both teams also had trains to catch; Asheville was headed to Raleigh to face the Capitals, and the Twins were going home. Therefore, when Winston-Salem manager Charley Clancy asked his Asheville counterpart to begin the game early, Jack Corbett readily agreed. The game started at 1:28 instead of 2:00, the final out was recorded at 1:59, and the Tourists were on a 2:30 train to Raleigh.6 The first three innings were played without an umpire because Red Rowe, who had that role, arrived only 20 minutes before the announced starting time.7

The limited description of game action makes it clear that this was no ordinary game. The Asheville paper noted that “it is usually the custom after the pennant has been clinched…for [some] other team… to make merry at the last game. The same stunt was pulled here at the end of last season.”8 The Atlanta Crackers had taken a similar approach six years earlier, and the result of their effort received more publicity.

The Crackers, the Tourists, and their opponents showed that the way to play a game at maximum speed involved racing on and off the field to minimize the time taken to change sides between innings. The North Carolina teams seem to have added several fillips that allowed them to set the new speed record. Players sometimes ventured on and off the diamond before the final out was recorded. Pitchers did not always wait for all their teammates to be in position before delivering their first pitch, and both moundsmen “lobbed” their tosses. All batters swung at the first pitch they saw, and after hitting the ball simply kept running until they were tagged out.9 Hence, all three runs resulted from home runs that cleared the outfield walls,10 and no baserunners were stranded.

Although both teams obviously collaborated to minimize playing time, the game’s result must not have been prearranged. The visiting team won, 2–1—as did its counterpart in the earlier fastest game. Had the teams’ sole purpose been to play the games as quickly as possible, they could have arranged for the home team to win, thus avoiding the need to play the bottom of the ninth. Apparently, there are limits to collusion.11

One play personifies the farcical approach to the game: when a Winston-Salem hitter led off an inning with a single to center field and continued running, he drew an errant throw that was heading toward the visitors’ dugout until Frank Nesser, the Twins’ on-deck batter, scooped up the ball and threw his teammate out at second base.12

The description of this play in the local newspaper also illustrates the limited coverage the game received. The attending sportswriter described the action as
having occurred “along about one of the innings,” identified the hitter only as “some Twins player,” and called the on-deck batter “Nerwer.”13 This writer was much more interested in describing certain fans than identifying game participants, reporting that the ladies in attendance were especially disappointed that the game was so short. His eloquent description: “Buxom blondes and brunette belles, fraulines and fraus, all pouted in the same breath that it was ‘perfectly horrid.’”14

Another spectator who was displeased with the record-setting game was L.L. Jenkins, owner of the Tourists. Like the umpire, Jenkins thought he had arrived ahead of game time, only to find that the game was well under way. Unlike most owners, Jenkins chose to pay for his own ticket. He definitely wanted to get good value for his money and thought other fans deserved the same. He didn’t consider a 31-minute game to be an adequate return on investment, so he quickly “assured the fans, in his best oratorical style,”15 that the club would refund their money. Thus, fans who requested and received that rebate saw a once-in-a-lifetime event for free!

What these fans apparently did not see was future major league stars. The absence of a box score and the local sportswriters’ limited attention to detail make it impossible to identify with certainty all the participants in this game. Besides the batterymates and Frank Nesser (aka Nerwer), only two players—Osteen and Adams—are named. Partial (and understandably sketchy) rosters16 for both teams available through Baseball-Reference.com give insight into who might have been on the field that day.

While these rosters included a number of players who had been or would become major leaguers, neither team was blessed with players who would earn lasting fame on the diamond. Two Asheville pitchers—George “Doc” Lowe, the loser of the record-setting game, and Eddie Bacon—eventually had “cups of coffee” in the majors, as did Asheville second baseman Dallas Bradshaw and Winston-Salem infielder Harvey “Hob” Hiller. The Twins’ Ray Rolling, who was playing the last of his 11 seasons in the minor leagues, had played five games for the St. Louis Cardinals four years earlier. Another former major leaguer was behind the plate for Asheville in this historic game; Earle Mack, son of the legendary owner/manager Connie Mack, had played in five games over three seasons for his father’s Philadelphia Athletics. He would not play another major league game, but continued to play in the minors until 1923—a total of 11 seasons.

Two players from these teams made more indelible (albeit brief) marks in the majors. Asheville’s star outfielder in 1916 was Jimmy Hickman, whose .350 batting average led the league and convinced the Brooklyn Robins to bring him up at the end of the season. He already had some major league experience, having played 20 games for the Federal League’s Baltimore Terrapins in 1915, but initially did little to distinguish himself in nine games with the NL Champion Robins. The following year, however, his six home runs tied him with teammate Casey Stengel for the team lead and ranked forth in the National League. His batting average that year was only .219, and he ranked forth in the league in strikeouts (66) and outfield errors (15). His productivity quickly diminished (he hit only one more home run in the majors), and his major league career ended in 1919 after three full seasons.

Charles “Whitey” Glazner was the ace of Winston-Salem’s 1916 pitching staff; his victory in the 31-minute game gave him a 21–7 record, but it took a 24–10 record for Birmingham in the Class A Southern Association in 1920 to earn a trip to the major leagues.

He joined the Pittsburgh Pirates late that season and appeared in only two games. His first full major league season (1921) was his best by far. He compiled a 14–5 record for a league-leading .737 winning percentage; his 2.77 ERA was 3rd best in the National League; and his 1.162 WHIP ranked second behind teammate Babe Adams. Glazner never had another winning season, and by 1925 he was back in the minors, where he spent seven more seasons before finally hanging up his glove.

Two individuals involved with this historic game gained more lasting fame. Jack Corbett, who managed the Tourists and who agreed to speed up the game, was a career minor leaguer (mainly at the Class D level) as a player and manager, but he made it to the majors as an inventor. Corbett managed for only one year after the 1916 season, and he eventually moved to California, where he designed and patented a new style of base with a tapered lip on the bottom to grip the infield dirt and a six-inch anchoring stanchion.17 In 1939, these bases, which bear his name (“Jack Corbett Hollywood Base Sets”), became Major League Baseball’s “official bases,” and Jack Corbett had his place in every Big League stadium. He also earned a place in literature (although under a different name) thanks to the later efforts of the 15-year-old youngster who served as Asheville’s batboy during the 1916 season. That young man became a writer, and two of his novels included a fictional baseball player named Nebraska Crane. The batboy and future author was Thomas Wolfe, and his model for Crane probably was Jack Corbett, who had lived for a time in the boarding house operated by Julia Wolfe, Thomas’s mother.18

Despite the record-setting pace and the related historical tidbits, this game went unnoticed for “more than half a century”19—until Dick Kaplan, a writer for the Asheville Citizen, stumbled across the story while searching the newspaper’s microfilm on a different and unrelated topic. Bob Terrell, longtime sports editor and columnist for that same newspaper, told the long-lost story in The Sporting News (April 5, 1969), but some accepted reference works still list the 1910 Atlanta game as the fastest ever played. It is time to give the Asheville and Winston-Salem teams the credit they deserve even though we cannot honor all the players by name. The anonymous writer who chronicled that game was correct when his opening paragraph warned that he could not enlighten us much. We will just have to take him at his word that “it was a good game, what there was of it.”20

WYNN MONTGOMERY, a recent transplant from Georgia to Colorado, is a retired bureaucrat and educator and a recovering workaholic. He has been a SABR member since 1983 and was co-editor of (and contributor to) the 2010 SABR Atlanta convention publication, “Baseball in the Peach State“. His article “Georgia’s 1948 Phenoms and the Bonus Rule” appears in the Summer 2010 issue of the Baseball Research Journal. His baseball interests include the art and the history of the game (especially the 1950s and the Negro Leagues). He has attended games in 55 minor league parks in 22 states and in every major league city except Arlington, Texas.

Notes

On October 15, 1988, with a runner on first, Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers jerked a slider from the Oakland A’s Dennis Eckersley into the stands for a 5-4 victory.

Newspaper reports noted that it was the first time a World Series game had been turned to victory from defeat by a final-at-bat home run.

Actually, it wasn’t. It had happened tens, dozens, maybe a hundred times before. It had happened in books, books which were implanted in the imagination of every American youngster.

Standing in the back yard, or down at the neighborhood park, it was always the bottom of the ninth. His team was always behind. It was his home run that would save it all.

A boy might never have seen that situation in real life but he had read about it. Frank Merriwell or Fred Fearnot or Joe Matson or Roy Tucker or Chip Hilton or one of the Blue Sox had banged out that desperation hit and he could do it, too.

He knew he could because he could recognize in those same stories many things which had happened before. Jackie Robinson had rattled many pitchers into balks before Roy Tucker did it. Sal Maglie had been released on Old Timers day before Speedy Mason. Don Drysdale had come along as a hot-tempered but talented rookie before Schoolboy Johnson. And those characters are from just one book. There are other fictional characters who echo Mike “King” Kelly or Frank Chance, Ralph Branca or Joe DiMaggio.

Baseball’s history has been so diverse, and has been recorded so well, that few heroics needed to be imagined. They were there, waiting to be polished.

What was polished changed as the game evolved. Early fictional characters played on town teams, told the pitcher where to throw the ball and thought the hit and run was the height of skill. With time, they played in domed stadiums, were taught to hit by computers and waited for the three-run homer.

The first novel which was almost completely about baseball was published in 1884. Noah Brooks Our Baseball Team and How It Won The Championship was a reflection of professional baseball in its formative decades.

Our Baseball Team was an Illinois town team formed from the swells and the mechanics by the city bigshots, formed to reflect well on the town and perhaps increase real estate values. Its best players were paid decent salaries by the standards of the time and its lesser players were paid nothing or next to it. The team traveled, played other teams around the state and reflected in many ways the career of the Midwestern boy to whom the book was dedicated, Albert Spalding.

By the first decade of the new century boys’ baseball books were filled with the “inside baseball” of John McGraw and the Giants. Team captains such as Frank Merriwell ran their charges like puppets, with elaborate signs. Professional managers tended to have Irish names mirroring McGraw, Connie Mack (Cornelius McGillicuddy), Jimmy Collins and the other famous managers of the era.

In the early 1920s one of baseball fiction’s most popular characters, Baseball Joe Matson, suddenly switched positions. In the teens, Joe had been a pitcher, the dominant position in the dead ball era. Suddenly, in 1922, just after Babe Ruth had shattered earlier records with consecutive 54-homer and 59-homer seasons, he became Baseball Joe, Home Run King.

In the ’50s, black players began to pop up in books, both about neighborhood games (Florence Hayes’ Skid) and the big leagues (Murrell Edmunds’ Behold, Thy Brother.) Little League and its equivalents also became the setting for many a book.

In recent decades, the reliever emerged. No longer merely a way to give a fading starter one last chance for glory, relief pitching produced prominent characters. Television gave authors another possibility, putting the hero in the booth to prolong his connection with the game.

Just as they drew their baseball from the game they watched, writers drew their characters from the players they watched. Sometimes, the debt was acknowledged, as it was to Frank Chance in Hugh Fullerton’s Jimmy Kirkland series. Sometimes, as in Johnny Madigan (Eddie Stanky) of Duane Decker’s Good Field, No Hit, it wasn’t. Spalding was merely the first of the characters borrowed from life.

George Brett, Charlie Finley, Reggie Jackson, Don Larsen, Connie Mack, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Eddie Waitkus have all shown up in some form.

If a writer didn’t want to borrow a player wholesale he could give him a bit part using his real name. Babe Ruth has a walk-on in Spitballs and Holy Water. Gene Autry has a ride-on in Johnny Got His Gun. Shoeless Joe Jackson got a book and a movie from the same bit of imagination.

Some authors took the idea of blending fiction and baseball history to a greater degree of exactness. Season’s Past by the pseudonymous Damon Rice uses several generations of a family to trace the history of New York City (mostly Brooklyn Dodger) baseball from Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson to Jackie Robinson and Walter O’Malley. Two others, Donald Honig and Frank O’Rourke, built books around transparently disguised versions of the 1941-42 Dodgers and the 1949 Phillies. W.P. Kinsella imported the 1908 Chicago Cubs for The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

It wasn’t only in the writing that baseball fiction reflected the game’s history. The illustrators which accompanied the stories are an alternative to photographs. Brooks’ book contains drawings of players without gloves and with benches that were exactly that, no roof to shade players from sun or fans.

Since Gilbert Patten’s Frank and Dick Merriwell books were reprinted several times from the 1890s to the 1930s, their cover art is a vital history of the period. The pitcher’s stage changes from a field-level slab with a path shaved directly to home plate to a raised mound with only a circle of dirt around it. Uniforms, caps, gloves, bats and stadiums evolved.

From the beginnings to 1910

But everything didn’t come together at once.

Although forms of baseball were played dating back to Colonial times, and some fragments tantalize us, there was nothing recognizable as baseball fiction until after the Civil War made baseball the national game.

In many ways, this was a reflection of the economics of book publishing in the United States. Fewer than 1,000 books were published in the country annually before 1890. Many of these were reprints of popular British authors, whose work American publishers could “borrow” freely because of the lack of a copyright treaty.

Most books were sold for about $2, a substantial sum when $1 a day was a laborer’s wage. They were the province of the wealthier classes, a group heavily influenced by English tastes.

In fact, the first substantial appearance of baseball came in a book that was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Tom Brown’s Schrool Days. Thomas Hughes’ schoolboy classic had been published in London in 1857. The book had been printed in America as well, and Boston’s Lee and Shepard Co. was looking for a way to tap the same market. They snapped up Charles’ Everetts’ Changing Base, a book of schoolboy adventures with a little more than two chapters devoted to the description of a baseball game. It appeared in 1868.

Between then and the turn of the century fewer than 10 original novels were published which contained any significant amount of baseball.

Yet, publishers were interested in baseball. In 1887, for example, teams from five publishers had formed a league which played regularly around New York City. The league included teams from Scribner’s (which had published Brooks’ Fairport Nine) and The Century Co. (which would publish its first full baseball novel, Leslie Quirk’s Freshman Dorn, Pitcher, in 1911.) Publisher’s Weekly, the bible of the industry since the 1870s, printed box scores of games between publishing house teams.

They also knew there was a market for baseball fiction. For outside the book market, a sizable number of baseball stories were being published.

They were appearing in what today we call story papers and dime novels. Story papers were generally the size of a newspaper and contained several serialized tales. Dime novels were about the size of a comic book and usually contained one or two stories, the main one about the length of a substantial short story. The dime novel story was generally complete in that issue (no heroes were left hanging with the bases loaded) but the characters and general plot lines continued from issue to weekly issue.

The series dime novel had been invented by the brothers Beadle, originally of Cooperstown, New York, in 1860. After the Civil War, the Beadles and their imitators began to publish large amounts of such fiction.

In contrast to the Anglocentric fiction of the rich, dime novels were overtly patriotic. The staples were the American West and heroic moments from American history.In the 1880s however, faced with a flagging market, dime novel publishers began to cast around for other topics. The major new genre was detective stories. The Beadles tried their share of these, but they also had other ideas.

Since its inception in 1860, the Beadles had published the annual Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player by Henry Chadwick, the inventor of the box score and one of the early codifiers and popularizers of baseball. For example, John McGraw recounted how he established his early baseball reputation in Truxton, New York by purchasing the new edition every year and being the first around to absorb the rule changes and think about their implications.

With this background it seemed natural for the Beadle to introduce some baseball tales into their dime novels, often in conjunction with detective stories. Their first baseball dime novel, in 1885, was Edward Wheeler’s High Hat Harry, the Baseball Detective. A couple of years later, they introduced the aptly named Dan Manly as Double Curve Dan, the Pitcher Detective, who made it clear baseball was merely a way to solve crimes and not a career for anyone serious, was the first baseball character to return in multiple dime novels.

At the same time, dime novel publishers were eyeing a younger audience. Dime novels (which usually cost a nickel) were one of the few forms of packaged entertainment a child could afford in the days before movies.

Baseball stories were a natural for this market. They were such a natural that publishers were inclined to fudge a bit in their advertising. Baseball covers became a favorite, even when there was little or no baseball action inside. Book publishers imported the Jack Harkaway boys adventure series from England and put a picture of Jack on the spine with a baseball bat, even though the Britisher played nothing of the kind. A.L. Burt, one of the large publishers of the day, put out a book called The Bordentown Story Teller in 1899. On the cover is a young man sliding into the plate while the catcher reaches for the throw. A crowd watches from a grandstand and the trees behind the outfield fence. Inside is a series of stories about Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, after he settled in the United States in the 1820s. Not a word of baseball.

Dime novel publishers also learned to jump on current events quickly. In 1890, John Montgomery Ward tried to break the owners’ economic stranglehold by creating the Players’ League, also known as the Brotherhood League. By late April, Street & Smith,which was replacing the Beadles at the top of the dime novel heap, was producing The Brotherhood Detective, or, Short-Stop Sam. In May, they had Brotherhood Buck, or, The Players League in the South.

The publishing world’s knowledge of baseball’s popularity received its greatest confirmation beginning April 18, 1896. On that date appeared Frank Merriwell’s School Days, the first issue of a new dime novel series, Tip Top Weekly, from Street & Smith. Frank’s creator was Gilbert Patten, a successful dime novel writer from Maine who’d played a lot of baseball as a boy and run a town team as a young man.

From the beginning Frank played baseball. Oh, he’d stray to football in the fall and a host of lesser sports during the dull winter months (which were often broken by a game of indoor baseball or a trip to some southern clime for a few winter innings.) But Frank’s acknowledged favorite was baseball. Baseball tales began with late winter practice, slid into the school team’s year and then stretched into some kind of summer league or barnstorming team. Frank’s foreign trips almost always took place during the winter. In all, some 712 of the eventual 245 Merriwell books (Frank spawned a brother, Dick, and later a son, Frank Jr.) contained baseball, far more than all other sports combined.

Frank was a publishing phenomenon, such a phenom that within a year, Street & Smith began to turn the Tip Top Weekly episodes into books. They would take three or four of the dime novels, do a little editing for continuity and put them out with paper covers. A couple of years later, they began putting out hardbound versions.

While no other venture was as successful as Patten’s Merriwell, there was no lack of imitators. Fred Fearnot was created by a Street & Smith rival in 1898. He survived into the 1920s and spent many of his summer months playing baseball. Others — Jack Lightfoot, Frank Manley, the Three Chums, Dick Daresome — popped up for a year or so and played baseball.

From 1910 to 1940

But the dime novel was actually on its last legs.

The first blow had hit in the 1890s with increased postal rates, for most dime novel sale were to subscribers. The publishers were also thrashing around for new genres, new plots and new characters.

The plots had long ago reached the point where even a 12-year-old boy could recognize a tinge of unreality. 13-year-olds regularly out-thought, out-played and out-fought adults. This came despite these adults trying every known poison, trap, deceit or disguise imaginable.

And then came the movies. Movies in the early 1910s were much like dime novels. They ran for fifteen action-packed minutes. Any they just happened to cost a nickel, too. They were such a natural that Gilbert Patten dug up his old dime novels and sold some to movie makers. (Eventually, in the 1930s, some Merriwell stories would be made into a movie serial).

Even the perennials like the Merriwell stories began to fade. The last original Merriwell dime novel appeared in 1915, and Patten had bailed out several years before that.

While the dime novel was fading, things were looking up for books. The first impetus was production methods. Cheaper paper and bindings, as well as new, highly-automated binding methods, had the potential to cut publishers’ costs.

Edward Stratemeyer was one of the first to perceive the potential of lower prices. Stratemeyer was a successful dime novel author and a friend and admirer of Horatio Alger, whose unfinished works he’d completed after Alger’s death.

Stratemeyer came up with two successful ideas.

The first, not entirely his own, was to price books at a dollar, or even at 25 cents. The increased volume would more than make up for the lower profit margin, he reasoned. He turned his pen to producing more of the historical adventure novels he was known for under a variety of pseudonyms. They sold well.

They sold so well they inspired Stratemeyer’s second idea, to turn writing into a highly organized, highly profitable enterprise — what a later writer was to call a fiction factory. Stratemeyer would think of a character and a basic plot outline. This would be turned over to a writer who would produce the book to Stratemeyer’s specifications. Stratemeyer would then find a company to publish the book.

In effect, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, as it was known, was a publisher. And thus he put great emphasis on two of a publisher’s standard practices of the time — series books and pseudonyms.

The series book was an extension of the most popular publishing ventures in the United States, the mass circulation magazine and the dime novel. Like both of these, the series book sought to interest a broad range of readers rather than a small, upper-class audience. And like the successful dime novels, it centered on a character with whom the public could identify. The identity and continuity bred sales.

However, it wasn’t a good business practice to attach these potential profits too closely to an author. What if he died, or won the lottery or decided to write the new The Scarlet Letter? Where would the series go? As if they needed another example, American publishers of the 1910s had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes’ creator had decided he was a spiritualist and wanted to spend his fortune propagating those ideas. Harper & Bros. lost the flow of stories from one of the most profitable publishing ventures.

From publishers’ nightmares like these arose their penchant for pseudonyms. While they are widely thought of as protecting an author from the immediate consequences of publishing something controversial, in popular fiction they are more often a publisher’s device. The character belonged to the publisher and if it was successful, there was always another hack available.

Stratemeyer made great use of pseudonyms, either the Capt. Ralph Bonehill or Arthur M. Winfield he favored for himself, or the dozens he created for other series. In fact, Stratemeyer made great use of all the tricks of popular fiction. The Syndicate, run by his daughter and others, lasted long after his death in 1930, and still exists as part of Simon & Schuster.

His syndicate created the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, Tom Swift Jr. and a host of less successful series. The books were written over generations by multiple writers and the syndicate was so well organized and so secretive that even today the authorship of many of the books has not been established.

Most of the Stratemeyer syndicate books were not about baseball. Many of the early works were historical. But the next big category Stratemeyer moved into was a series featuring a hero or a group of chums having adventures at school, camp, etc., much like the contemporary Merriwell material. And, as with Merriwell, many of these books featured baseball plots or games.

In 1910, having watched the success of the Merriwell series, Stratemeyer created a new pseudonym, Lester Chadwick, specifically to handle baseball books. Stratemeyer was a baseball fan (a crank in the parlance of the time) and chose the name to echo that of Henry Chadwick. The Chadwick pseudonym first appeared on a couple of books about Tom Parsons, a hayseed who goes to college and makes good through baseball.

In 1912, Baseball Joe appeared under the Chadwick name. Joe Matson was an important new type for boys’ baseball fiction. He was the first series hero who was primarily a baseball player. Others had been all-around athletes, such as Jack Lightfoot, or all-around paragons, such as Frank Merriwell. Joe, of course, became a detective, boxer, financial whiz, etc. as the plots demanded, but he sustained none of these.

He was also the first professional baseball player in a series. Merriwell, the other dime novel heroes and the characters springing up in the series books of Ralph Henry Barbour, Albertus True Dudley and Zane Grey were amateurs, generally high school or college players. Professionals were faintly disreputable, and frequently beaten by Our Heroes’ amateur clubs. Many of the early Baseball Joe books seem to be reacting against this. Joe explains to his mother that he can help more people as a ballplayer than as a minister, that he can make lots of money, that he can win the respect of the right people.

Baseball Joe actually began as an amateur, playing as a 15-year-old for the Silver Stars of Riverside, his vaguely New England home town. In the next books, he moves to prep school and Yale. But by the fourth book, in 1914, he becomes a professional. By the next year, and the next book he’s in the majors. The series eventually ran to 15 books and continued until 1926.

Stratemeyer wasn’t the only writer making the transition from dime novels and amateur baseball players.

After Patten begged out of the Merriwell series, Street & Smith made him editor of a new weekly called Top Notch. The magazine featured stories of sports and adventure, many written by Patten using the Burt L. Standish pseudonym. He began writing serials for the magazine with baseball themes and characters.

The most popular of these characters was Lefty Locke, and in 1914 the same year Baseball Joe became a pro, the first five books of Patten’s Big League Series were published. Most of these featured Lefty, but not all, for Patten was breaking even more new ground with this series. They were all set in the same Big League (that’s how the books referred to it) and many characters repeat from book to book. But the characters also come and go. Lefty was the central character of the first four books, but in the fifth, Brick King, Backstop, he has a cameo at the end, congratulating rival Brick on his play.

Patten, a more skillful and interesting writer than most of his contemporaries, was creating a larger world, one which would give him more freedom to choose characters and plots. The Big League Series ran 16 books and ended in 1928, a run very parallel to Stratemeyer’s Baseball Joe. Yet, Patten was never driven to the length of plotting and draracterization of the later Baseball Joe books, which reached absurd lengths.

Joe would pledge to lead the league in all the major batting and pitching categories and then do so. He would extend the cliche of the “well thrown ball nailing the bad guy” to beaning a shark. In Baseball Joe, Pitching Wizard, he uncovers a plot by two Giant teammates to throw the pennant race. He chases them out of the league, but two rookies take their place, and being rookies, are making errors in the clutch. For the crucial game with the Cubs, Joe comes to the only possible conclusion. He must strike out every enemy batter. Needless to say, he does so. Presumably unable to top this, the Baseball Joe series died.

Baseball Joe and Lefty Locke were merely the two most prominent of the series characters that popped up over these decades.

The writers varied greatly in skill and audience. Some, such as Barbour, Dudley and William Heyliger, wrote mostly of prep schools. The books were published in nicely bound editions with color illustrations. They chronicled schoolboy hijinks and other sports as well as baseball. They were more expansive and aimed at a “nice” audience. Barbour worked his way through a large number of series, none of which ran more than 11 books, and none of which were completely baseball. In all Barbour published an astounding 135 boys’ series books between 1899 and 1943, while writing other works as well. Many consider him, especially in his early works, the most skillful writer of the period. Robert Cantwell maintains Barbour’s game descriptions were a major positive influence on sportswriters of the period.

Others, such as Harold Sherman and various pseudonyms from the Stratemeyer stable, were published in cheap editions, with few black and white sketches, paper the first cousin of newsprint and cardboard covers. Sherman’s Home Run Series was a series mostly because of its title. Characters didn’t carry over from book to book.

Sherman also wrote some of the purpler prose in a mauve era, the kind of prose that has made the era a snicker for modern readers. This is a speech from a chapter called “The Flame of Feeling Grows” in Fight ‘Em Big Three. Speaking with “simple directness,” the old coach tells the team, “if any of you think that the satisfying of personal grievance means more than victory for Milford, go ahead and betray your fellow team-mates who are grving their all for the finest old high school in the world.”

The other notable series of the period was attributed to professional baseball players Christy Mathewson and Everett “Deacon” Scott but actually written by John Wheeler. The books were linked by their alliterative titles — Pitcher Pollock and Catcher Craig — but by little else.

These series went a long way to establishing the characteristics of the baseball series and some of the themes that would stay with it. The characters were positive role models. The books aimed at a moral lesson (teamwork is important, gambling will hurt you). With writers like Barbour, and the greater freedom granted Patten outside the Frank Merriwell stories, the plots and characters improved and became more believable.

From 1940 to 1955 – Juveniles

World War II slowed the production of both babies and baseball fiction. From mid-1942 until 1946, only two baseball novels were published, both by John R. Tunis.

But, with the end of the war, the production of baseball fiction shot up in part to meet the reading habits of the baby explosion which celebrated the end of the war. There were an average of 17.5 baseball novels produced annually during the 1950s, in contrast to the 2.8 of the depression-wracked 1930s or the 4.8 of the booming 1920s.

The traditional series books returned with expanded vigor.

Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton and Wilfred McCormick’s Bronc Burnett and Rocky McCune recreated the series hero of old. Chip, Bronc and Rocky carried real-man nicknames and did real-man deeds even though Chip and Bronc were teenagers. They won state and national championships in the big three sports. They defeated bad guys, outwitted gamblers, endured bad umpires and generally ignored girls. (There was always one on the edge of the story just to let you know our hero’s, uh, heart was in the right place.) They mostly played baseball. Even Bee, who before he created Chip was nationally famous as a basketball coach, wrote more baseball stories for Chip than either basketball or football.

Drane Decker’s Blue Sox stories were a distinct echo of Gilbert Patten’s Big League Series which featured the Blue Stockings. Decker’s books each follow a player who establishes himself in the Blue Sox lineup, with characters in the later books in the 13-volume series replacing those who had been the heroes of the first books.

But new themes were appearing too.

The most obvious was Little League, which was expanding across the nation in the 1950s. Curtis Bishop and Cary Jackson built series or groups of similar books in Little League settings. Many of the books, especially those from Jackson, included instructional sections to help young players.

Race also was popping up as a topic in the years after Jackie Robinson. The first was Skid by Florence Hayes in 1948. Others soon followed, and some of the series book writers took up the theme — Bishop in Little League Heroes and Archibald in Outfield Orphan.

The pivotal figure in this period was Tunis. He had begun publishing sports books in the 1930s with stories of Harvard snobbery and track. He wrote them for all ages, but his publisher marketed them as juveniles. Just before World War II, he turned to baseball.

Before Tunis, the values taught in baseball novels were socially very conservative. The themes constantly taught the young readers that the individual had to conform to the group. Individuals could be criminals or cheats, mean or jealous, but society as a whole was fine. The books showed these aberrant, individual evils overcome and society rendered whole again.

Tunis’s books rendered a much more liberal view of society. Some evils were broad. Keystone Kids, published during World War II, was a story of two brothers who’d fought their way to the big leagues from poverty. It was also a book about anti-Semitism, a social evil which had never served as a theme before. In fact, many turn-of-the-century books were filled with anti-Semitic remarks and slurs against other ethnic and racial groups, too.

Tunis’s theme gained power from his characters, who had many more dimensions than other writers. Most characters in boys’ novels reeked of a nobility unfound in the readers’ daily lives. The sneaks and the baddies were easily identifiable. Their “shifty” eyes or some such things would reveal them to the alert reader long before their cowardice or manipulations caused trouble for the hero. Tunis’s characters were grayer, and thus their struggles over their own selfishness (Highpockets) or insensitivity (Young Razzle) carried more weight.

Tunis even had the temerity to challenge that most sacred icon of juvenile baseball heroes — the former player who is now the main character’s coach. In Buddy and the Old Pro, Buddy’s admiration for his hero turns to disgust when the Stankyish old pro begins to teach him how to cheat.

From 1965 to 1990 – Updated Juveniles

Tunis’s work was just one signal of a broader societal change, a greater concern with the rights of the individual than of the society as a whole.

Books about baseball, a team sport, reacted slowly. Even in race, an issue where baseball had been something of a pioneer, the fictional reaction was slow. Black characters began to appear in books — Matt Christopher’s No Arm in Left Field, George Shea’s Big Bad Ernie — but so did a host of groups previously far from the mainstream.

Linnea Due’s High and Outside looked at alcoholism. Marilyn Levinson’s And Don’t Bring Jeremy was about learning disabilities. Barbara Aiello’s It’s Your Turn at Bat featured a kid with cerebral palsy. In addition to the other themes in these books, each one found society (the baseball team) must come to an understanding of the main character’s problem, rather than the character adapting to the group.

To be sure, authors such as Christopher and Bill Knott continued to turn out more traditional books. But even these authors broke non-traditional ground with Knott’s story of a boy who must cope with sitting on the bench while his sister plays or Christopher’s story of a boy struggling while his parents’ divorce.

The new trend of the post-baby boom years clearly was the role of women, or girls. They were not the non-competitive softball players of earlier books, but rivals. One, R.R. Knudson’s Zan Hagen, was even a superwoman of the Frank Merriwell/Chip Hilton ilk, beating all comers at all sports. They also appeared as Little League coaches.

Most of these books came down on the side that girls could and should play with boys. But one, David Klass’ A Different Season, while accepting the validity of all the feminist arguments, has the main character adamant that there are some things — the high school baseball team, a funky local driving range — that really should be just for boys.

In some ways, these arguments are echoed in a new genre of baseball fiction, one specifically aimed at girls, the juvenile romance. Here, girls are most often cheerleaders or ball girls or some other decorative role. Even when they do become players, as in Elaine Harper’s Short Stop for Romance they do so to attract the attention of a boy and quit when they get it. He’s supposed to be the sweaty sports hero. She’s really more into ballet.

Another development of the period was the growth in the number of books designed to be read to children of pre-school age. Before 1970, for example, there were only 14 juvenile books of 50 pages or less published. Since then, there have been 71.

While these books were proliferating, the traditional series had all but disappeared with Bee, McCormick and Decker in the 1950s. The most prolific writers of the period, notably Christopher, didn’t do any series. Throughout the 1970s, no series carried longer than the four books of Clem Philbrook’s Ollie’s Team.

Very recently, however, the baseball series book appears to be making at least a modest comeback. In 1989 and 1990, Random House’s Ballantine Books began publishing paperbound series which echoed many of the traits of the dime novels. They used a recognizable set of characters, were programmed to come out over the course of the baseball season and focused heavily on the game. The 1989 series, The Rookies by Mark Freeman, followed three boys from high school to the World Series in three years. I have not seen the 1990 series, The Angel Park All-Stars by Dean Hughes, but the publisher’s catalogue indicates it will be about Little League boys.

Adult Baseball Novels

While baseball books aimed at teenagers and smaller fry have had a long history, the adult baseball novel didn’t really flower until the 1950s.

There had been earlier attempts. Some early pot-boilers were aimed at adults. Heywood Broun wrote a rather interesting novel in the 1920s. And several murder mysteries were published.

The only pre-World War II baseball fiction which was judged to have any literary merit were the Jack Keefe and Danny Warner stories of Ring Lardner. Lardner thought they were simply dialect stories best treated as amusement, but luminaries such as Virginia Woolf found them interesting. Lardner never pursued the characters and the literary establishment made it clear they felt baseball and serious literature were incompatible.

This began to change with the publication of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural in 1952 and Mark Harris’s The Southpaw in 1953. Both were recognized as literary novels despite their baseball content. But Harris has recalled that at the time he had to do a lot of talking to convince critics that his was a serious book. Harris said he argued this so long that it took him years to acknowledge publicly his debt to the baseball novels he had read as a boy.

That’s interesting, because in The Southpaw, Harris has Henry Wiggen admit to having read Heyliger, Sherman, Tunis and Lardner, “although Lardner did not seem to me to amount to much, half his stories containing women in them and the other half less about baseball then what was going on in the hotels and trains. He never seems to care how the game came out. He wouldn’t tell you much about the stars but only about bums and punks and second-raters that never had the stuff to begin with. Heyliger and Sherman and some of the others give you a good baseball story that you couldn’t lay it down.” Henry describes his great delight at a series with strong echoes of Baseball Joe.

While Malamud and Harris were storming the literary gates, the publishing firms of A.S. Barnes was making an effort to create a body of adult baseball fiction in more popular form. In a decade from 1948 to 1957, they published a series of novels by Frank O’Rourke, Jack Weeks, Arnold Hano and Ed Fitzgerald which took a more adult view of baseball. It wasn’t sugar-coated. People lost more than a game at times. Players had trouble (but rarely actual sex) with women.

It was Malamud and Harris, however, who opened the baseball novel to serious litterateurs. Novelists began to use baseball to explore established themes and questions in a new way.

From alienation (Robert Coovey’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.) to fantastic realism (W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe), the themes and styles which dominated American literary writing in the last few decades have appeared in baseball novels.

As the publishing market changed and expanded in the decades following World War tr, all the styles and genres threw off baseball novels.

There were the 1950s screwball comedies begging to be movies — H. Allen Smith’s Rhubarb, Bud Nye’s Stay Loose, Paul Molloy’s A Pennant for The Kremlin. Later, the genre followed the imitators of Dan Jenkins’s football book, Semi-Tough, adding much more explicit sex.

There were the new types. Romances blossomed, from Lucy Kennedy’s The Sunlit Field in the 1950s to a host of paperback romances, such as Sheila Paulos’s Wild Roses, in the 1980s. Curiously, only the more explicit lines in the romance field used baseball themes. Science fiction produced a couple of baseball books, as did horror novels.

Older genres produced baseball books, too. The detective novel blossomed. one of Robert Parker’s early Spenser novels had a baseball setting. Richard Rosen turned out stylish mysteries with a former player as detective. Spy novels, from the grim Cold War seriousness of Robert Wade’s Knave of Eagles to the spoofs of Ross H. Spencer used baseball.

The first woman in baseball became a popular theme, ranging from the trashy A Grand Slam by Ray Puechner to Barbara Gregorich’s She’s on First. Some in this genre were in sharp contrast to the romances, which for all the statements about independence had some finding their fulfillment in their relationships with men. Books such as Michael Bowen’s Can’t Miss and Gregorich’s attempted to take a serious look at the issue and to have the main character be primarily a baseball player rather than a seeker of love.

Graham Greene once noted that literary figures are perfectly happy to acknowledge their debt to writers such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Henry James. But they are, he said, less likely to recognize H. Rider Haggard, the turn-of-the-century writer of fantastic adventures who inspired Greene’s own imagination as a boy. Yet, it is writers like Haggard, he said, who bring us to a love of reading when we are young.

The baseball juvenile nurtured many of us in two ways. It created a sense of enjoyment in reading, a joy which we could take to reading of all kinds. It also created a sense of the game, its strategies, its characters, its traditions, the way baseball situations were always the same yet always just a bit different.

The novel may have always brought the winning run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth. But the man at the plate was never quite the same. Maybe he was weak from having escaped gamblers, like Frank Merriwell. Maybe he was tormented by past failures, like Pete Gibbs of the Blue Sox. Maybe he was a man so crippled he had to hit a homer because he couldn’t run, like Kirk Gibson.

The 2007 Old-Timers Day included Whitey Ford (16), Yogi Berra (8), Reggie Jackson (44), Don Mattingly (23), Ron Guidry (49), Moose Skowron (14), Don Larsen (18), Graig Nettles (9), Bobby Murcer (1), Goose Gossage (54), Paul O’Neill (21), Scott Brosius (18), Joe Pepitone (25), and Chris Chambliss (10). (Jerry Coli/Dreamstime)

The original Yankee Stadium, with its majestic triple-deck structure, was impressive. Jerry Coleman, ex-Yankee, World Series MVP winner, and broadcaster, recalled the ballpark with awe: “That stadium … that huge triple deck with the façade up there … my God, it was like going to a cathedral, really.”1 Memorable moments thrilled fans over the years: a seventh-game World Series win, Ruth’s 60th, Maris’ 61st, Mantle’s 500th.

Yankee Stadium, rebuilt in 2009, was a special place for memorable events. One such event was the long-running Old-Timers Day.2

Although the Yankees have maintained the tradition of the old-timers games the longest, John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s historian, noted that the recognition of former players playing exhibition games dated back to 1875. The “Old Duffer” Knickerbockers of the 1840s and 1850s played the “Youngsters” of the 1860s.3

Yankee Stadium Old-Timers Day roots can arguably be traced to two moments that honored dying ballplayers. The first was on July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. On hand were Gehrig’s 1920s teammates, including Mark Koenig, Wally Schang, Herb Pennock, Wally Pipp, Bob Shawkey, Benny Bengough, George Pipgras, Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, Joe Dugan, Waite Hoyt, Bob Meusel, Everett Scott, and Babe Ruth. The unforgettable part of that day was Gehrig’s iconic goodbye, his “Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth” speech.4

The second was on April 27, 1947. Babe Ruth Day was proclaimed across professional baseball by Commissioner Happy Chandler to honor The Babe.5 On that day Larry MacPhail, the Yankees general manager, announced that the Yankees would host their first Old-Timers Day on September 28.6 This event would include an exhibition game between former players. Red Patterson, the Yankees’ publicity director, continued the tradition in homage to Ruth.7

Regardless of the day one selects as the origin, the Yankee Old-Timers Day tradition has continued with its pomp, revelry, and circumstance for either 75 or 83 years, with a two-year interruption (2020-21) because of the COVID pandemic. Following are some Old-Timers Day events with significant themes.

RECOGNITION OF THE BABE AND THE FIRST OFFICIAL OLD-TIMERS DAY (1947)

The Yankees had clinched the American League pennant two weeks earlier, but still a crowd of 25,085 attended the Yankees’ final game of the regular season on September 28, 1947. The one-time very familiar Bambino batting stance was not seen this day. A frail, visibly ill Ruth appeared, his camel-hair coat collar turned up and buttoned to his chin.8 Barely able to speak, Ruth waved to the roaring crowd.9 Ruth could not suit up for the game. He posed for pictures with other immortals like Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. Yankee greats there included Frank Baker, Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, Earle Combs, Waite Hoyt, Lefty Gomez, and Red Ruffing. Philadelphia Athletics owner-manager Connie Mack managed a squad of non-Yankee former stars including Speaker, Al Simmons, George Sisler, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, Chief Bender, Cy Young, Ed Walsh, and Ty Cobb. Twenty current or future Hall of Famers played or attended. Combs sealed the win with an inside-the-park home run over Tris Speaker’s head. The quip of the day may have been uttered by Hoyt who, after throwing out Ty Cobb said, “They had been trying to do that for 40 years.”10

All gate receipts were donated to the Babe Ruth Foundation, which had recently been founded to aid underprivileged youth.11 The event reportedly raised about $45,000.12

SILVER ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE STADIUM (1948)

Silver Anniversary Day, June 13, 1948, was festive, cast in emotional celebrations: the 25th anniversary of Yankee Stadium, the retirement of Ruth’s number 3, and recognition of some of the most storied players.13 On a bittersweet note, it was Ruth’s last appearance at the Stadium.14

Yankees President Dan Topping presented Ruth with a pocket watch with the inscription “Silver Anniversary 1923-1948, the House That Ruth Built.” Former general manager/club President Ed Barrow, who greeted Ruth at the plate, also received an inscribed pocket watch. Ruth thrilled fans when he assumed his familiar once-feared stance and took a mighty cut.15

American League President Will Harridge accepted the Ruth uniform and proclaimed that “it would never again be worn here or on the road.”16 That Ruth uniform remains on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Before the player introductions, memorial wreaths were placed on the Lou Gehrig, Jacob Ruppert, and Miller Huggins monuments. Bob Shawkey, Huggins’ successor as Yankees manager, placed the wreath on his monument; Barrow, on Ruppert’s; and Bill Dickey, on Gehrig’s.17

Players from the 1923 team squared off against a collection of former Yankees. New York Mayor William O’Dwyer threw out the first pitch; Governor Al Smith had used the same ball for the Stadium’s inaugural toss in 1923.18 Yankees players in the Old-Timers game included Joe Sewell, Tiny Bonham, Hank Borowy,19 Red Rolfe, George Selkirk, Lefty Gomez, Tom Zachary, Bill Dickey, and Mark Koenig. The ’23 team, anchored by Pipp, Meusel, Bullet Joe Bush, Carl Mays, Shawkey, Hoyt, and Dugan, prevailed, 2-0. The Yankees All Stars were managed by Ruth with help from Chuck Dressen. Meusel drove in Dugan and Pipp on a blooper misplayed by Rolfe.20

Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio (center top) and Claire Ruth, the Babe’s widow (center bottom) were frequent Old-Timers Day guests. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

DIMAGGIO’S FIRST OLD-TIMERS DAY (1952)

On August 30, 1952, Joe DiMaggio returned for the first time in what would be a very long Old-Timers Day run for him.21 He returned every year until his death before the 1999 season, except for 1988, when he was recovering from abdominal surgery.22 That span of 46 years was the second-longest number of appearances by any Yankees old-timer. Hector Lopez holds the record with 53 appearances (1967-2019).

The Yankees commemorated their 50th year by honoring living members among the greatest Yankees of all time as voted by the baseball writers.23 Joe DiMaggio managed the cast of “All-Timers.” Honorees included Bill Dickey, Phil Rizzuto, Earle Combs, Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Wally Pipp, Frank Crosetti, and Home Run Baker, who managed the “Yankee All Stars.” The All-Timers prevailed, 3-0.

Special recognition was given to Clark Griffith, pitcher and manager of the 1903 team, then known as the Highlanders, by American League President Will Harridge, with a little help from Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, Connie Mack, and Ed Barrow. Others from Highlanders days included Dave Fultz and Elmer Bliss.

The Yankees held a reunion dinner at the Ruppert Brewery.24

SECOND DECADE OF OLD-TIMERS DAYS BEGINS (1957)

On July 27, 1957, 30 former Yankees stars and 25 Detroit Tigers notables compiled this installment of Old-Timers Day. In perhaps an ironic moment, Home Run Baker and Joe DiMaggio were captured giving home run tips to Mickey Mantle. Mantle was the Triple Crown winner in 1956, with 52 homers that year – a mark neither DiMaggio nor Baker ever reached.

Other notable attendees: recent Hall of Fame inductee Wahoo Sam Crawford, Mickey Cochrane, Ty Cobb, and Earle Combs.

DIMAGGIO’S TAINTED AT-BAT (1965)

On July 31, 1965, before a crowd of 42,170, Al Schacht, known as baseball’s Clown Prince and noted for his comedic antics on the diamond, played a big part in the DiMaggio at-bat. Schacht served as a guest umpire, and his generous rules interpretations victimized former Cincinnati Reds star pitcher Bucky Walters. Schacht allowed a DiMaggio at-bat to continue, twice.25 Disappointed fans groaned when Jim Hegan caught the Yankee Clipper’s foul pop. Sighs turned into cheers when Hegan “dropped” the ball. Walters looked in and smiled. DiMaggio hit another popup, near third. Monte Irvin made a backhanded grab. As DiMaggio started to walk away, Schacht ruled the backhanded catch “illegal.” DiMaggio did not disappoint; on the next pitch, he smacked a line drive into the left-field stands.26

NEW AND OLD OLD-TIMERS (1969)

Old-Timers Day on August 9, 1969, was themed the Yankee All-Timers and the opponent All-Timers. For the first time since October 5, 1951 (Game Two of the World Series), Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio played together.27 A fan vote selected the all-timers. The outcome was odd: Two active Yankees were selected as Yankee All-Timers, Mel Stottlemyre and Joe Pepitone. The under- or near 40-year-old contingent included the newly retired Mantle, Whitey Ford, Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, and Bill Skowron. The Yankees roster included Bill Dickey, Joe Dugan, Waite Hoyt, Lefty Gomez, Charlie Keller, and Gil McDougald. Yankees opponents included Carl Furillo, the Bronx-born Rocky Colavito, and Hall of Famers Monte Irvin and Dizzy Dean. The largest ovations went to the newly elected Hall of Fame members Roy Campanella and Stan Musial.28 The game ended in a 0-0 stalemate.

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PENNANT (1971)

On July 10, 1971, the Yankees celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first pennant, in 1921, when the Yankees were tenants in the Polo Grounds. At least one member of all 29 pennant-winning teams was on hand. From the 1921 team were Whitey Witt, the first Yankee to take a turn at the plate in 1923 at Yankee Stadium, and Roger Peckinpaugh, who managed the Yankees for 20 games as a 23-year-old in 1914 and anchored shortstop for the Yankees for nine seasons.29

The two-inning affair was capped off with an unlikely inside-the-park home run by Elston Howard off Ralph Terry. It was the only run of the game.30 Throughout the game there was remarkable fielding, including a leaping grab by Gil McDougald off a hot smash by Tommy Byrne, and a running catch by Charlie Keller on a ball hit to deep left field by Hank Bauer. Pitchers were relieved after nearly every hitter, which enabled nearly all the attendees to participate. Of the 56 players on hand, the lone non-Yankee was a recent Hall of Fame inductee, Satchel Paige. Casey Stengel was the brunt of a press-box joke attacking his wisdom: “He has DiMaggio batting third and [Tommy] Henrich fourth.”31 Tom Tresh was the youngest Old-Timer, at 32.

MICKEY’S FINAL HOMER AT THE OLD YANKEE STADIUM (1973)

Longtime Yankees broadcast Mel Allen, the author of the widely recognized home-run call “It’s going, going, gone!” announced the Yankee Old-Timers Day on August 11, 1973.32 Whitey Ford took the mound. No strange sight for Yankee fans. Into the batter’s box came Mickey Mantle. Ford and Mantle were not only former teammates and close friends, but roommates for a time.

The stadium buzz turned loud. Over 46,000 fans watched this moment unfold, future Hall of Famers and Yankees immortals squaring off.

Ford readied and wasted no time. With the count 1-and-1, Mantle took an awkward cut, topping the pitch foul. With a better swing, he hit the next offering hard, a liner foul. Ford grooved the next pitch. Mantle hit it a long way into the upper deck, but foul. George Selkirk, coaching at third base, encouraged Mantle. Mel Allen gleefully implored, “Straighten it out, Mick.” With those words still hanging in the air, Allen continued, “[The pitch is] down the alley. There it goes; going, going, gone!”33 Mantle had launched a majestic fly that landed about 25 rows back in the lower left-field stands. In his prime, that ball most likely would have reached the upper deck. Fans cheered wildly as Mantle began the familiar head-down trot around the bases. He moved more slowly now with a more pronounced limp. This was Mantle’s final homer at the original Yankee Stadium. Renovation plans had been announced, and for the next two years, the Yankees played in Shea Stadium.

The Old-Timers team was divided between the Stengels and the Houks. The Stengels included Ford, Witt, Rizzuto, Johnny Mize, DiMaggio, Hector Lopez, and Andy Carey. The Houks included Mantle, Nick Etten, Irv Noren, Howard, Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, and Ryne Duren.34

“BILLY MARTIN WILL RETURN” (1978)35

Just five days after “quitting,” Billy Martin was rehired to take the reins again with the start of the 1980 season at Old-Timers Day on July 29, 1978.

The theme of this game was the silver anniversary of the amazing run of five straight World Series championships (1949-1953). According to John Sterling, announcing from the radio booth, this may have been the greatest assemblage of former players. The game marked Roger Maris’s first Yankee Old-Timers event. Joe Pepitone caught fans’ attention with two batting-practice blasts into right field. After the second, he pranced around the bases in his home-run trot. Harmon Killebrew and Elston Howard smashed several batting-practice drives into the left-field seats.

After the announcements like “the crafty chairman of the board” (Ford), “the greatest switch-hitter of the game” (Mantle), and “the greatest living player” (DiMaggio), Yankees’ PA announcer Bob Sheppard, announced that manager Bob Lemon had signed a new five-year contract with the club.36 He would manage through 1979 and then work as general manager through 1983. Fans booed. Sheppard quieted the crowd with his gentle but firm voice as only he could do. “Please, please … managing the Yankees in 1980 and for many more beyond then, number 1 …” 37 Applause erupted, rocked the stadium and continued for seven minutes.38 Billy was coming back.39

ONE RETURNS, TWO REUNITED, SNUBBED EX-PLAYER SATISFIED (1982)

On August 7, 1982, introductions for the great Yankees teams ranged from some lesser-known players like Marius Russo and Ed Wells to legends occupying their customary last and next-to-last spots in the introduction order, DiMaggio and Mantle, respectively.40

There were two notable reunions at the event this year. Joe DiMaggio took the field with his brother Dom, a Boston Red Sox star who had not put on a uniform for an old-timer event since 1971. Dom declined playing in the game due to a medical problem with his eyes. The other, Ray Fisher, the oldest Yankee at the time at 94, was rolled onto the Yankee Stadium field in a wheelchair for the first time. During his career with New York, he played at Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds, but he was banned from baseball over a contract dispute before the 1921 season. Fisher’s lifetime banishment from baseball was lifted by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1980.41

Reports of the Old-Timers Game in the next day’s newspaper were brief: The American League All-Stars defeated the Yankee Stars, 2-1; Billy Pierce bested Whitey Ford; singles by Bob Allison, Vic Wertz, Steve Whitaker, and Roy Sievers produced the runs for the All-Stars, and the Yankees scored on singles by Irv Noren, Hector Lopez, and Jake Gibbs.42

Jim Bouton, a pitcher with the Yankees from 1962 to 1968, received more press with his reminiscent New York Times piece about his omission from Yankees invitees. The missed invitation stemmed from his controversial 1970 book, Ball Four, which revealed some of the players’ on- and off-the-field antics that previous writers would not dare print.43 In retrospect, Bouton felt he’d laughed last; defying baseball norms about speaking out, he was ahead of his time.

LITTLE RAY AND THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL YANKEE (1998)

For the 52nd Old-Timers Day, on July 25, 1998, Frank Messer, a former Yankees broadcaster who began serving as emcee for Old-Timers Day in 1988, manned the microphone. The game would feature players from the Yankees and Dodgers teams from the 1970s.44 His first two introductions were important. First, he welcomed Little Ray Kelly, who sat in the dugout on April 18, 1923, Yankee Stadium’s Opening Day, and served as Babe Ruth’s mascot until the early 1930s.45 Messer also recognized Jim Ogle, the 25-year director of the Yankees Alumni Association.46

Then, the announcement of the return of the “prodigal Yankee”; Messer welcomed back Jim Bouton, the hat-flying phenom with 21 victories in 1963. He referred to Bouton as an accomplished author. Fans roared. Bouton slyly smiled as he walked out, all the controversy from his book forgotten, thanks to a letter written by Bouton’s son Michael to the New York Times asking that the Yankees forgive his father.47

Dodgers in attendance included Ralph Branca, the pitcher who in 1951 yielded “The Shot Heard Round the World” to Bobby Thomson that gave the rival Giants the pennant. Other Dodgers there were Tommy Lasorda, Willie Davis, Steve Howe, and Tom Niedenfuer.

Mel Allen was posthumously honored as the “forever and legendary voice of the Yankees,” with a plaque in center field.48

Willie Randolph hit a walk-off homer as the Yankee Old-Timers bested the Dodgers again.

CELEBRATING A RUBY JUBILEE (2001)

On July 21, 2001, while Billy Crystal collected autographs in the dugout, the familiar voice of Bob Sheppard set the stage for the 55th Old-Timers Day celebration. He introduced the co-emcees, radio broadcasters John Sterling and Michael Kay. Sterling referred to Yankee accomplishments as magical and somewhat mythological, saying, [S]everal of the greatest moments in baseball history have been right here on this sacred field.” Michael Kay reminded the crowd that the Yankees had won four out of the last five World Series and were currently atop the AL East, meaning the fans should expect great Old-Timers Days in the future.49

Specific historical mention went to Ron Blomberg (baseball’s first designated hitter) and Rick Cerone, who was in the unenviable situation of following Thurman Munson behind the plate in the 1980 season.

After a pause to recognize the passing of former Yankees since the previous Old-Timers Day, accolades were given to Don Larsen for his 1956 World Series perfect game and to Hank Bauer, record holder for the World Series consecutive-game hitting streak (17). Then members of the 1961 Yankees were introduced. Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford received the loudest ovations. Posthumous honors were paid to Elston Howard, the first African American to play for the Yankees; and Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, by their sons Kevin Maris and David Mantle. Mantle and Maris combined for 115 homers in 1961 in the pursuit of Ruth’s record of 60. Acgor Billy Crystal, creator of the movie 61*, described Mantle and Maris as humble but the heart and soul of the ’61 team. He imagined what Mantle would respond: “Aw shucks, Whitey won 25 games, our catchers hit 64 home runs and we had the best defensive infield in baseball. We had a pretty good year.”50

The last introductions were Reggie Jackson51 and player/broadcaster Phil Rizzuto.

POMP, COMMEMORATION, AND IMAGE (2004)

For the 58th Old-Timers Day event, on July 10, 2004, former players once again gathered from an array of eras. Player ages ranged from the not very old to the aged.

Old-Timers Day by this time had become the Yankees’ most elaborate promotional event. And with it came the need for extensive and careful planning.52 The emphasis on an Old-Timers game had lessened.

Debbie Tymon, who in 2022 was the Yankees’ senior vice president of marketing and had been with the organization for nearly four decades, has headed this effort for much of that time. She and the team spend several months on a list of tasks, including deciding the invitees and that year’s commemorations, as well as travel and accommodations, the pre-event dinner, and the post-event wrap party.

There were two honorees in 2004. Honoring Red Ruffing, a plaque was added in center field’s Monument Park. Ruffing holds the Yankee record for complete games (261).53 Ruffing had allowed the most hits as a Yankee pitcher, 2,995. Catcher Thurman Munson was also honored; August 2 marked 25 years since his death.

The Yankees provide every Old-Timer in attendance with a new uniform. “I don’t want to hear at 12:30 that day that someone has forgotten their uniforms,” explained Tymon as to why players did not bring their own.54 As of 2004, each player also received a commemorative Louisville Slugger for his participation.

Every aspect of Old-Timers Day is well-orchestrated right down to the introduction order of invitees. By 2004, Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto, the senior statesmen, were fully entrenched in DiMaggio’s former closing spot in the roll call. Rizzuto even mimicked DiMaggio’s over the head two-handed salute to the crowd.

On this day other Yankee greats on hand included Reggie Jackson, Don Mattingly, Bill Skowron, and Hank Bauer. Luis Sojo hammered a walk-off home run off Ron Guidry. Sojo performed his best Reggie Jackson imitation – Jackson was recovering from knee surgery and didn’t play – as he rounded the bases.55

OLD-TIMERS BID FAREWELL TO THE ORIGINAL CATHEDRAL (2008)

On Saturday, August 2, 2008, the largest contingent, more than 70 Old-Timers, including 18 for the very first time, were at the original Yankee Stadium for its final Old-Timers Day celebration. The doors to the new Yankees home opened on April 3, 2009, on the north side of 161st Street and River Avenue.56

Each of the last 16 Yankees World Series championship teams since 1947 was represented at the 2008 event by at least one player. Yankees alumni in uniform included Hall of Fame members Yogi Berra, Wade Boggs, Whitey Ford, Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, and 2008 inductee Rich “Goose” Gossage.57 Baseball’s all-time stolen-base leader Rickey Henderson made his first Yankee Stadium Old-Timers Day appearance. The loudest and longest welcome of the afternoon went to Willie Randolph, unceremoniously dumped as Mets manager in June.58 The standing ovation lasted several minutes.59 Lesser-known players were also on hand. One such player who had experienced a magical season in pinstripes was Aaron Small. He compiled a remarkable 10-0 record for the 2005 AL East champions. Prior to that, he had won 15 games in seven seasons. Perhaps the least-recognized player there was Mickey Klutts, a Yankees veteran of eight games from 1976-78.

The 1996 World Series winners were well represented. Tino Martinez (then a special assistant to the general manager), Pat Kelly, Jimmy Key, Graeme Lloyd, Ramiro Mendoza, Jeff Nelson, and Tim Raines were all on hand, as were other Yankees including Mike Stanley, David Wells, current pitching coach Dave Eiland, former manager Buck Showalter, and former coach Jeff Torborg. First-time attendees included Don Baylor, Tony Fernandez, Wayne Tolleson, and YES Network broadcaster Al Leiter.

The widows of five legendary Yankees were also present – Arlene Howard, widow of Elston Howard; Helen Hunter, widow of Jim “Catfish” Hunter; Jill Martin, widow of Billy Martin; Diana Munson, widow of Thurman Munson; and Cora Rizzuto, widow of Phil Rizzuto.

The greats and the ordinary gathered in uniform, each with their memories and sentiments, and said goodbye to the great stadium in the Bronx.

RALPH PELUSO was born in New York City and remains a loyal Yankees fan. Since becoming a member of SABR in 2009, he has been a contributing member of the Overlooked Legends committee. Ralph holds an MBA in finance from Bernard Baruch College and is now retired after 45 years in corporate finance and management consulting. His book 512, a fictional re-imagination based on Babe Ruth, was published in 2014. His latest work, a psychological thriller titled Back Stories, was released in November 2022. Several of Ralph’s short stories are published. He began contributing to SABR projects in 2018. Ralph trekked to Mount Everest base camp in April 2019. He serves as the literary editor for the Zebra Press, a monthly newspaper serving Northern Virginia and the DC Metro area, and writes the “Book of the Month” series. Ralph and his spouse, Janet, enjoy retirement in an active 55+ community near the Delaware beaches.

NOTES

1 Associated Press, “Yankee Stadium: Remembering a Baseball Cathedral,” ESPN.​com, July 3, 2008. h​ttp:/​/www.​espn.​com/e​spn/w​ire/_​/sect​ion/m​lb/id​/3472​343. Accessed December 14, 2022.

2 A great deal of information regarding Old-Timers Days at Yankee Stadium may be found at this site: h​ttp:/​/www.​ultim​ateya​nkees​.com/​oldti​mersd​ay.​htm. Date accessed October 31, 2022.

3 John Thorn, ht​tps:/​/twit​ter.c​om/th​orn_j​ohn/s​tatus​/1567​88631​74841​303​05. Accessed October 31, 2022.

4 John Drebinger, “61,808 Fans Roar Tribute to Gehrig,” New York Times, July 5, 1939: 1.

5 Robert W. Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 418-419.

6 Jane Leavy, The Big Fella (New York: Harper, 2018), 444.

7 Leonard Koppett, “Yankee Old Timer Fans Get a Run for the Money,” New York Times, July 11, 1971: S 1. Red Patterson was the first publicity director for a major-league baseball team, joining the Yankees in 1946. Patterson is credited with many innovations promoting fan interest during his 45-year career in professional baseball. See Ross Newhan, “Red Paterson Dies of Cancer,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1992: C2.

8 Sports Century: Babe Ruth Sports Century: ESPN Classic, available at h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=5GkZ​Rw2​1kho. Accessed October 31, 2022.

9 Hy Turkin, “Ruth Whispers His Gratitude to Cheering Fans,” New York Daily News, April 28, 1947: 3.

10 Jim McCulley, “Ancients Turn Back Clock – 2 Inns,” New York Daily News, September 29, 1947: 43.

11 “Babe Ruth Foundation Set Up to Aid Underprivileged Youth; Famous Player Makes Initial Gift to the Organization,” New York Times, May 9, 1947: 27.

12 McCulley.

13 “25 Years of Glorious Deeds in Stadium Revived by Babe Ruth and Host of Other Yankee Stars,” New York Times, June 14, 1948: 26.

14 Joe Trimble, “Number 3 Brings Down House That Ruth Built,” New York Daily News, June 14, 1948: C17.

15 Babe Ruth’s Last Appearance at Yankee Stadium, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=nmcj​CQNGz​DY. Accessed November 4, 2022.

16 Trimble.

17 Trimble.

18 “25 Years of Glorious Deeds in Stadium Revived by Babe Ruth and Host of Other Yankee Stars.”

19 Bonham and Borowy were still active players at the time.

20 “25 Years of Glorious Deeds in Stadium Revived by Babe Ruth and Host of Other Yankee Stars.”

21 “Old Timers Day Today at Stadium,” New York Times, August 30, 1952: S 7.

22 Dave Anderson, “Reggie a No-Show; Billy Draws Cheers,” New York Times, July 17, 1988: S3.

23 “Old Timers Day Today at Stadium.”

24 “Old Timers Day Today at Stadium.” See also “Yankee Stars Through 50 Years Thrill 41,558 at Stadium,” New York Times, August 31, 1952: S 1, 2.

25 Mark Leepson, “Of Al Schacht and a Cracker Jack Afternoon,” New York Times, October 21, 1984: S2.

26 “DiMaggio Hits One for Auld Lang Syne at Yankee Stadium,” New York Times, August 1, 1965: S1.

27 John Drebinger, “Yanks Win, 3 to 1, Tie Series; Lopat Holds Giants to 5 Hits.” New York Times, October 6, 1951: 1.

28 “New Old Timers Steal the Show,” New York Times, August 10, 1969: Sports S1.

29 “74,200 See Yankees Open New Stadium: Ruth Hits Home Run,” New York Times, April 19, 1923: 1, 15.

30 Leonard Koppett, “Yankee Old Timer Fans Get a Run for the Money,” New York Times, July 11, 1971: S 1.

31 “Yankee Old Timer Fans Get a Run for the Money.”

32 Mickey Mantle 1973 – His Last Home Run in Yankee Stadium, OTD, 8/11/1973, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=I9fN​cMLaW​_A. Accessed October 15, 2022.

33 Mickey Mantle 1973 – His Last Home Run in Yankee Stadium, OTD, 8/11/1973.

34 Gerald Eskenazi, “Old Yankees Visit Their Past,” New York Times, August 12, 1973: Sports 1.

35 New York Daily News front-page headline, July 30, 1978.

36 On DiMaggio, see “Baseball’s Centennial ‘Greatest Players Ever’ Poll,” n​ation​alpas​timem​useum​.com, September 12, 2019, h​ttps:​//www​.then​ation​alpas​timem​useum​.com/​artic​le/ba​sebal​ls-ce​ntenn​ial-g​reate​st-pl​ayers​-ever​-poll. Accessed December 14, 2022.

37 Bob Sheppard 1978 – Billy Martin to Return as Manager Speech, 7/29/1978, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=KQf2​BYjnk​Rw. Accessed December 6, 2022.

38 Murray Chass, “Martin Will Rejoin Yanks as Club’s Manager in 1980,” New York Times, July 30, 1978: S5 1, 3.

39 Martin never managed the Yankees in 1980. On June 18, 1979, the Yankees fired Bob Lemon after the club got off to a slow start. Martin rejoined the Yankees then. On October 29, 1979, Martin was once again fired for a fight in Minneapolis. The Martin saga continued, with Martin ultimately hired and fired five times as Yankees manager before his death in 1989.

40 1982 New York Yankees Old Timers Game (revised), YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=LPkW​AUEhV​yc. Accessed December 4, 2022.

41 Jacob Pomrenke, “A Rose by Another Name; Ray Fisher’s Ban from Baseball,” the n​ation​alast​imemu​suem.​org. January 4, 2020. h​ttps:​//www​.then​ation​alpas​timem​useum​.com/​artic​le/ro​se-an​other​-name​-ray-​fishe​rs-ba​n-bas​eball​-0. Accessed December 14, 2022.

42 Murray Chass, “Trading Dent for Mazzilli,” New York Times, August 8, 1982: S5 1, 5.

43 Jim Bouton, “Outside Looking In: An Uninvited Guest Gets Last Laugh,” New York Times, August 8, 1982: Sports 2.

44 1998-07-25: New York Yankees Old Timers Day, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=lvGy​JT_​D5​nI. Accessed December 4, 2022.

45 Richard Goldstein, “Ray Kelly, 83, Babe Ruth’s Little Pal, Dies,” New York Times, November 14, 2001: A25.

46 1998-07-25: New York Yankees Old Timers Day.

47 Dave Anderson, “Return of the Prodigal Yankee Old-Timer,” New York Times, July 26, 1998: Sports 1.

48 1998-07-25: New York Yankees Old Timers Day.

49 2001-07-21: Old Timer’s Day – Tribute to the 1961 New York Yankees, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=BGfu​g-​RkN​xE. Accessed December 1, 2022.

50 2001-07-21: Old Timer’s Day – Tribute to the 1961 New York Yankees.

51 Reggie Jackson becomes Mr. October during the 1977 World Series | Yankees-Dodgers: An Uncivil War, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=DzEa​vV_Q2​9U. Accessed December 1, 2022.

52 Richard Sandomir, “Sports Business: Yankees Plan to Make Old-Timers Look New,” New York Times, July 9, 2004: D 6.

53 Andrew Marchand, “Yanks Honor Ruffing,” New York Post, July 11, 2004.

54 Sandomir.

55 Sojo Wins 2004 Old Timers’ Day with a Walk-Off Homer, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=DH8j​4iWM​SOE. Accessed December 1, 2022.

56 Tyler Kepner, “Amenities and Expectations at Yankee Stadium Opening,” New York Times, April 4, 2009: S 1.

57 Reggie Jackson, recovering from knee surgery, did not play in the Old-Timers Day game.

58 Billy Altman, “Yankee Greats, and Not-So-Greats, Celebrate the End of Many Eras,” New York Times, August 3, 2008. Digital Access December 1, 2022.

59 Yankees Old Timers Day 2008 Willie Randolph, YouTube, h​ttps:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=7Qft​ffraz​T8. Accessed December 1, 2022.

Richard Anthony Allen. Just the mention of his name evokes surprisingly emotional responses from the baseball fans who saw him play. Some recall Allen’s awesome natural talent, his intimidating presence on the field. Others regret his off-field difficulties, his seemingly wasted opportunity for greatness. When Allen burst onto the major league scene in 1964 as the National League’s Rookie of the Year, he had it all: He could run, hit for average and power, field, throw, and he had that unusual gift of awareness on the field, the “sixth sense” that enables great players to make the great play when it counts.

If natural ability were the criterion for Hall of Fame election, Allen would be a sure thing; instead, he is on the outside looking in and figures to stay there. Still, despite devastating injuries to his right shoulder, wrist, and hand, a succession of disputes with management, media, and fans, and a growing battle with alcohol, Allen still produced a .292 career average and blasted 351 homers. In 1976, Dick himself wondered, “The Lord gave me a talent, but only He knows how much. Imagine if! didn’t have this [pointing to his shoulder] and this [pointing to his hand]. Imagine what might have been.”

Nothing was left to the imagination in 1972. Dick Allen was not only the dominant player in baseball, but his impact on the game and the city of Chicago went beyond the confines of the diamond. The period 1972 to 1974 was known as the “Allen Era” on the South Side. The attendance figures bear that out:

• 1971: 833,891
• 1972: 1,177,318
• 1973: 1,302,527
• 1974: 1,149,596
• 1975: 750,802

Roland Hemond, general manager of the White Sox, still believes that Allen saved the American League franchise for Chicago. If it had not been for those three years, we might now have the Pale Hose of New Orleans, Denver, or Toronto. Beyond the raw attendance numbers, Allen’s popularity and his leadership of a mediocre team into contention brought the South Siders much needed publicity and media exposure. In 1972, the Sox games were broadcast on radio station WEAW-FM, a station that could barely be heard in the Loop. The following year, they contracted with WMAQ, a 50,000 watt AM station that could be heard clearly (at night) in Philadelphia!

In April of 1972 fans endured baseball’s first full-scale labor strike, forcing the cancellation of 85 games and creating an uneven schedule (one that in the end would frustrate Red Sox fans particularly, as Boston finished one-half game behind Detroit in the American League East). The ailing national pastime was in desperate need of a surprise team, an epic phenom, or the coming of age of a superstar. While Carlton Fisk did his best to fill the role of phenom (Rookie of the Year in the AL), and Steve Carlton rolled to a 27-10 Cy Young Award year with a last place team, it was Dick Allen and the Sox who captured hearts and headlines around the country.

In retrospect, it is amazing that the Sox were in the pennant race. Their main competition was an Oakland A’s team that was to win the first of their three straight World Championships. The Sox finished seventh in team batting (.238), eighth in ERA (3.12), and ninth in defense (.977). They outscored their opponents by only 28 runs (566-538), yet were twenty games over .500! Oakland outscored their opponents by 147 runs, but finished 29 games over .500. Using Bill James’ Pythagorean Method of determining a team’s won-lost record — (Runs² / (Runs² + Opponent’s Runs²)) = Won-Lost percentage — the Sox should have finished eighteen games behind the A’s, but were only five and a half behind when the season clock ran out. Chuck Tanner did a phenomenal job of managing, maximizing his team’s mediocre talents and winning the close games (evidenced by their 38-20 record in one-run decisions). The pitching staff was led by the big three of Wilbur Wood (24-17, 2.51 ERA), Stan Bahnsen (21-16, 3.60), and Tom Bradley (15-14, 2.98), who collectively started 130 of the 154 games. The ace of the bullpen was twenty-year-old southpaw Terry Forster (6-5, 2.25, with 29 saves); Goose Gossage, only six months older, was 8-1 but saved only 2 games.

The Sox leadoff men—Pat Kelly and Walt “No-Neck” Williams were platooned—hit a combined .257 and scored only 79 runs. Mike Andrews batted second and “ripped” AL pitching at a .220 clip and scored 58 runs. Bill Melton, the league’s home run champ in 1971 whose big bat was supposed to keep opponents from pitching around Allen, was shelved by a back injury in June and provided a meager 7 homers. His cleanup slot was taken by Carlos May, who hit .308 but certainly could not generate the power to protect Allen. May, in fact, went from July 23 to September 20 without a homer. The rest of the lineup was a collection of has-beens, never-will-be’s, and maybe-someday’s.

Despite being pitched around (Dick tied for tops in the AL with 99 walks), Allen still piled up some very impressive stats. As late as September 9, he led all categories for the Triple Crown. Rod Carew’s solid September edged Dick by .011 for the batting title, but Allen’s domination of all other offensive stats was awesome. His 37 home runs led the league; only one other player hit more than 26 (Bobby Murcer, 33). His 113 RBIs also set the pace by a wide margin; only one other had more than 96 (John Mayberry, 100). Allen’s margin in slugging percentage over Carlton Fisk (.603-.538) was the biggest since Frank Robinson’s Triple Crown in 1966. As further proof of Allen’s dominance, I offer Bill James’ Runs Created formula, computed for 1972. Taking into account steals, caught stealing, and bases on balls as well as hits and total bases, it is a superior measure of offensive contribution to either the batting average or the slugging percentage.

Top Five, Runs Created

• Allen, CHI: 128
• Murcer, NYY: 110
• Mayberry, KCR: 99
• Rudi, OAK: 98
• Fisk, BOS: 90

In the premiere issue of The National Pastime, Bob Carroll wrote a piece (“Nate Colbert’s Unknown RBI Record,” TNP 1982) detailing the group of players that drove in 20 percent of their team’s runs in a season. At 19.96 percent, Allen just missed that plateau in ’72. However, none of the eight “20 percenters” (Frank Howard did it twice) accomplished it in the pressure of a pennant race. Jim Gentile’s Orioles finished third in ’61, but fourteen games behind the M&M Yankees. Ernie Banks was the National League’s MVP in ’59, but the Cubs finished tied for fifth, thirteen games back. All of the others finished at least twenty and a half games out of first, with Wally Berger’s 1935 Braves finishing an astonishing sixty-one and a half out. Certainly the Braves would have finished last with or without Berger, but the 1972 Chicago White Sox were a different story.

The definition of Most Valuable Player was epitomized by Allen’s one-man gang. In addition to his prolific hitting, he stole 19 bases and finished second, only .0004 behind Mayberry, in fielding percentage. Coming down the stretch, in August and September, he hit .305 with an on-base average of .431. Despite their obvious intent to pitch around Dick, the World Champion A’s were ripped by Allen for an on-base average of .514 and a slugging percentage of .647!

The way to beat the Sox was to pitch around Allen in clutch situations. This was evident from his 53 walks in the 65 losses he played in, compared to 46 walks in the 83 wins. When granted the opportunity to swing the bat, Allen hit .343 in winning games, .265 in losses. And he loved to entertain the home folks. In old White Sox Park (as it was called in ’72), Allen hit 27 of his 37 HRs and had 83 of his 113 RBIs!

Some memorable moments of that memorable year:

• June 4: In the second game of a doubleheader against the Yankees, with two on and one out in the bottom of the ninth, Allen (pinch-hitting for Rick Morales) blasted a Sparky Lyle pitch into the upper deck in left for a dramatic 5-4 victory. I’ll never forget listening to Phil Rizzuto’s call on radio (on my way to a batting cage in Seaside Heights, NJ). All the Scooter could shout over the roar of the crowd was, “I don’t believe it!!! I don’t believe it!!!,” over and over, never telling what actually happened. It was at least two or three minutes before Frank Messer grabbed the microphone and told us of Allen’s blast! On the All Star game telecast that year, the network showed a replay of the homer. Roy White took one step back, then headed straight for the dugout. It was one of the few times that I ever saw Allen display emotion on the field. As he rounded first and realized the ball had disappeared in the upper deck, he pumped his right fist in the air in triumph. Of course, he was mobbed by his teammates at home plate. It was a great moment for Dick, the Sox, and all of his fans (but not for the three Yankee fans who were in the car with me!)
• July 31: Allen became the seventh player in history, and the only one since 1950, to hit two inside-the-park home runs in one game. The pitcher victimized by both homers was Bert Blyleven, and the center fielder who fell victim to Allen’s torrid line drives was Bobby Darwin. Dick connected in the first inning with two on, and in the fifth with one on to lead the Sox to an 8-1 victory.
• August 23: Allen became only the fourth player in history to reach the center field bleachers at Comiskey Park. Only Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, and Alex Johnson before, and Richie Zisk since, have been able to reach the seats. Again, Allen’s was extra special. The blast came off Lindy McDaniel of the Yankees in the seventh inning with one on and cemented a 5-2 win to vault the Sox into first place. During the 1972 season, the Sox played all of their Wednesday home games in the daytime, and Harry Caray would broadcast from the center field bleachers, soaking up the sun and suds with his compatriots. Allen’s shot missed Caray by just a few rows. Unfortunately, I have never had the opportunity to hear Caray’s call of the homer, which must have been great. To reach the bleachers, the ball must travel 440 feet to the back wall and clear the sixteen-and-a-half-foot-high wall. Allen’s blast cleared the wall easily.
• September 7-12: In a seven-game stretch against West rivals Oakland, California, and Kansas City, Allen had 16 RBIs, including four game-winners!

In November Allen was named, to no one’s surprise, the AL Most Valuable Player. During the winter a new contract was negotiated, calling for $225,000 per year for three years, making Allen the highest paid player in the game at the time.

Dick was well on his way to another MVP caliber year in 1973 when he broke his leg in a collision with Mike Epstein in June. In retrospect, this event seemed to burst the bubble as the pressures of the media, management, and fans became too much for Allen to bear. Despite a triumphant return to action in 1974, in which he led the league in homers and slugging, Allen announced his retirement on September 14. Over the winter the Sox traded his rights to Atlanta, who subsequently dealt him to the Phillies in May of 1975. Although welcomed home warmly by fans in the city of brotherly boos, Allen’s continued erratic behavior and eroding skills led to his release after the ’76 season. Charley Finley gambled by signing Allen for ’77, but a quick exit from the ballpark during a game in June prompted his suspension and final release.

Dick Allen was a complex man with some deep-seated psychological scars that affected his behavior. But the sight of No. 15 digging in at the plate, tugging his uniform at the shoulders and left leg, pushing his batting helmet down on his afro, outlining the outside corner of the plate with his bat, and waving that forty-ounce war pole, brought a tremendous surge of excitement to the game. Wherever he played, the anticipation of a titanic home run had the crowd alive with each at-bat. In Philadelphia fans would not leave the ballpark until after Dick’s final at-bat of the game, no matter what the score. Dick Allen may not make it to the Hall of Fame, but he was a player with style, a uniquely fearsome batter who will be remembered not only for what he might have been, but also for what he was.

While WAR represents a huge step forward in baseball analysis, it is not really up to the task of assessing career value, since it gives too much weight to quantity and too little weight to peak performance. When we think of a Hall of Famer, we think of a player who was ideally among the best in the game over a significant stretch of time, rather than someone who was merely above average for a very long period of time. However, career WAR makes no distinction between a 70-WAR superstar, who averaged 7.0 WAR per year (near MVP level) for 10 years and made multiple AllStar appearances with an occasional MVP or Cy Young award, and a 70-WAR “compiler,” who averaged a good but unspectacular 3.5 WAR per year for 20 years and was rarely an All-Star. For example, WAR tells us that Don Sutton (66.7 WAR with 4 ASG, no MVP, no CYA in 23 years) had a better career than Sandy Koufax (48.9 WAR with 7 ASG, 3 CYA, 1 MVP in 12 years). HOF voters clearly believed Koufax to be superior: electing Koufax on the first ballot, while passing on Sutton until his fifth year on the ballot.

WAR is also highly dependent on the length of the schedule and on historical patterns of player usage, which have differed radically across the generations, especially for pitchers. For example, was Old Hoss Radbourn’s 19.2 pitching WAR in 678.2 IP (!) really better than Clayton Kershaw’s 7.7 pitching WAR in 198.1 IP in 2014, when he swept the NL Cy Young and MVP awards? Where does Mariano Rivera’s 53-save 2004 season (4.2 WAR in 78.2 IP) fit in? This “opportunity inequity” also suppresses WAR for hitters and pitchers in leagues playing shorter schedules. For example, Cap Anson never made more than 550 PA or accrued more than 6 WAR until 1886, when he was 34 years old.

In my 2021 book, Baseball Generations, I introduced Career Value Index (CVI) as a tool to evaluate the Hall of Fame (HOF) candidacy of players from the National and American Leagues and other leagues that were recognized as “major” before 2020, which a) placed premium value on players who were at or near the top of their league for multiple years—the longer the better—rather than on players who were merely good enough to hold a job for twenty years, and b) considered historical opportunity inequities—particularly among pitchers of different eras.3 The tool accomplished this by defining an “all-star threshold” (AST) of WAR corresponding to all-star quality performance, which differed for pitchers and non-pitchers and from season to season, and giving players triple credit for the amount by which their WAR in any particular season exceeded the AST for that season. The default value of the AST was 5.0 in 1924–67, but it ranged from as high as 11.0 for pitchers in Radbourn’s heyday (1883–84) to 4.0 for modern pitchers, and dipped as low as 2.0 for 1871–78 position players and for all players in the 60-game 2020 pandemic season.4 The original version of CVI also contained numerous customized secondary adjustments, including adjustments for catchers, designated hitters, and relief pitchers, discounts for PED use, and credits for time lost to wartime military service or years lost to enforcement of the color barrier.

The Jaffe WAR Score (JAWS), first introduced in 2002, takes a different approach to valuing players who were dominant in their prime by awarding double weight to a player’s seven best seasons of WAR.5 However, Sutton’s 50.3 JAWS still beats out Koufax’s 47.4. As we shall see, CVI (like the HOF electorate) assigns the higher career value to Koufax. Furthermore, until the recent introduction of S-JAWS, which attempts to control for the large WAR scores accrued by the work-horse pitchers of the nineteenth and early twentieth, JAWS did nothing to address opportunity inequity.6

Unfortunately, neither JAWS nor the original version of CVI is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the Negro Leagues, seven of which have now been recognized as major leagues by both SABR and MLB.7 Negro League schedules varied between 50 and 100 games, and tended to get shorter after the demise of the first Negro National League in 1931. Many prominent Negro League players (Oscar Charleston, John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams, etc.) began their careers well before 1920. Even after 1920, other players (Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Martin Dihigo), looking for bigger paychecks, played significant portions of their careers in Cuban, Mexican, and other independent leagues, which have not yet been recognized as “major” by MLB. Furthermore, before 1930, Negro Leaguers often played in a summer league, a winter league, and on barnstorming all-star teams within a single 12-month period. One would have to customize the original CVI formula (CVI 1.0) one player at a time to accommodate this complexity. In this article, I will present a generalized streamlined version of CVI (henceforth referred to as CVI 2.0), which yields similar results to CVI 1.0 for most players in the other major leagues but also accommodates the Negro Leagues.

METHODS

While CVI 1.0 evaluates WAR against a threshold (the AST) that is defined season by season, CVI 2.0 evaluates WAR against a threshold that is calibrated to plate appearances (PA) for position players and batters faced (BF) for pitchers. This calibration of AST to PA and BF makes it possible to automate the CVI calculation rather than customize it one season at a time. CVI 2.0 uses a “standard” season of 650 PA for hitters and 1000 BF for pitchers to define the AST as 5_*PA/650 for position players and 5_*BF/1000 for pitchers. The general formula for CVI for any season is the sum of CVI_H and CVI_P, where

The subscripts H and P in these equations refer respectively to the hitting and pitching components of CVI, WAR and AST. As in CVI 1.0, all negative WAR values are rounded up to zero. In CVI 2.0, AST=5.0 (the default threshold for 1924–67 in CVI 1.0) for all hitters with 650 PA and all pitchers with 1000 BF, no matter which league or which season. The 650 PA standard for position players corresponds to the workload of a typical, everyday, middle-of-the-order hitter and has been stable for more than a century (excepting work stoppages and pandemics). In 2022, for example, Paul Goldschmidt, Josh Bell, Anthony Santander, Randy Arozarena, and Nathaniel Lowe all had 645–655 PA; 27 players, mostly durable top-of-the-order types, led by Marcus Semien’s 724 PA, had ≥655 PA. The 1000 BF standard corresponds to a typical workload for AL and NL starting pitchers between (roughly) 1909 and 1988. Some examples of pitchers with 996–1004 BF are Red Faber (1917), Burleigh Grimes (1929), Whitlow Wyatt (1940), Allie Reynolds (1952), Whitey Ford (1965), Ed Figueroa (1977), and Rick Reuschel (1988). In 1871 through 1908, BF totals above 1500 were common and approached 3000 in 1879–92. Since 1989, BF totals ≥1000 have become increasingly rare; the last pitcher to attain this milestone was David Price (1009) in 2014. In 2022, Sandy Alcantara led MLB with 886 BF.

I will illustrate the calculation of CVI using Shohei Ohtani’s 2022 stats as an example. In 2022, Ohtani accrued 3.4 WAR in 666 PA as a hitter and 6.1 WAR in 660 BF as a pitcher. To calculate Ohtani’s CVI as a hitter, we first calculate that his AST_H=5_*666/650=5.12. Since his WAR_H was only 3.4 (i.e., less than his AST_H), he gets no bonus, and his CVI_H=0.8_*3.4=2.72. To calculate Ohtani’s CVI as a pitcher, we first calculate that his AST_P=5_*660/1000=3.3. Since his WAR_P exceeded his AST_P by 2.8 he gets a bonus of 5.6. His CVI_P is therefore 0.8_*(6.1+5.6)=0.8_*11.7=9.36. Adding his CVI_H and his CVI_P gives Ohtani a total CVI of 12.08 for the 2022 season.

All non-Negro League data in this article come from Baseball-Reference.com.8 For the Negro Leagues, I have used PA, BF, and WAR data from the Seamheads.com database, which includes data from leagues that have not been officially recognized by MLB and may include some games against lesser competition.9 For those Negro League seasons where BF data are unavailable, I have approximated BF as 0.98_*(3_*IP+H+BB+HBP). The empirically derived 0.98 factor adjusts for the fact that the expression in parentheses does not include players who reach base on error, catchers interference, etc. and double counts double plays, triple plays, and baserunning outs. Also, the WAR calculation formulas in Seamheads may not match those used in Baseball-Reference. Nevertheless, I have erred on the side of inclusiveness, since restricting my consideration to officially recognized leagues would grossly undervalue the careers of many Negro Leaguers, especially those who played before 1920.

Note that Negro League statistics are a work in progress and that new data are periodically being added to both databases as research uncovers previously untallied box scores and game articles. Even the statistics of the AL and NL are not written in stone since Baseball-Reference tweaks its WAR formula at least once a year. Thus, the WAR and CVI calculations in this article, which are complete and accurate through October 24, 2022, will undoubtedly change— perhaps even before this article is published.

I have retained two secondary adjustments from CVI 1.0: 1) the PED adjustment, which applies a 20% WAR penalty for hitters and a 10% penalty for pitchers for seasons with sufficient evidence of PED use, and 2) a modified positional adjustment for catchers, in which their WAR for each season is multiplied by a factor of 1+.001_*games caught.10 So, for example, the WAR of a player who appeared in 100 games as a catcher that season is multiplied by 1.1. This correction puts catchers (who suffer greater wear and tear and whose game calling and other intangibles are not captured by WAR) on a more level playing field with other positions. The other secondary adjustments in CVI 1.0 have been dropped, since they rely on projection and cannot be automated.

EXAMPLES OF CVI CALCULATION

I have selected three examples of position players with similar WAR_H (Table 1) and three examples of pitchers with similar WAR_P (Table 2) to illustrate how CVI elevates superstars with abbreviated careers (DiMaggio and Koufax) over compilers (Rose and Sutton) with lesser peak value and how it compensates for opportunity inequity. Table 1 features Pete Rose, Joe DiMaggio, and Oscar Charleston, while Table 2 features Satchel Paige, Sandy Koufax, and Don Sutton.

Note that Charleston’s age 19, 20, 24, and 27 seasons include his winter (as well as summer) league stats for those years. Tables 1 and 2 do not include the small pitching contribution of Charleston (-0.8 WAR, 1.1 CVI) or the small hitting contributions of Sutton (-1.6 WAR, 1.2 CVI), Koufax (-4.2 WAR, 0.4 CVI), or Paige (-1.8 WAR, 1.0 CVI).

Rose played for nine years longer than DiMaggio (who was injured frequently and missed three years in World War II) and amassed more than twice as many PA. But DiMaggio’s WAR exceeded his AST in 13 of his 15 seasons, while Rose exceeded this threshold only five times in 24 seasons. Rose won an MVP and two World Series championships, but DiMaggio far surpassed Rose with three MVP awards and nine World Series championships. Thus, while Rose had a slightly higher WAR, CVI recognizes the superiority of DiMaggio. Similarly, CVI recognizes Koufax, whose WAR exceeded his AST threshold in each of his last six seasons as a greater star than Sutton, who had 15 more WAR_P than Koufax but faced more than twice as many batters (Table 2). CVI also recognizes the superiority of Charleston (who attained 79.5 WAR in only 6802 PA) over Rose and DiMaggio and the superiority of Paige (who attained 61.3 WAR in only 8512 BF) over Sutton and Koufax.

While CVI 2.0 is designed to reward quality of performance, it reflects volume as well. This is in contrast to metrics like OPS+, ERA+, and WAR per 162 games, which focus solely on quality. CVI 2.0 compensates for opportunity inequity not by projecting the WAR a player actually accrued to 650 PA or 1000 BF, but by adjusting the standard to which that player’s actual WAR is compared (i.e., the AST); no projections or extrapolations are made. For example, in Table 1, Oscar Charleston at age 23 (1920) and Joe DiMaggio at age 33 (1948) each had seasons of identical “volume”—i.e., 6.9 WAR—but Charleston had the higher quality, accruing his 6.9 WAR in 416 PA versus 669 PA for DiMaggio. So, Charleston scores higher in CVI, 11.4 to 8.3.

In another example, Sandy Koufax at age 27 (1963) and Satchel Paige at age 23 (1930) had seasons of near identical quality as measured by WAR/AST (1.77 for Koufax versus 1.74 for Paige), but Koufax had three times the volume (10.7 WAR in 1210 BF versus 3.5 WAR in 403 BF). Although their seasons were of similar quality, Koufax’s quantitative superiority translates to a 16.0 to 5.2 advantage in CVI for those seasons.

Moving from the particular to the general, Figure 1 illustrates how CVI increases with both volume of performance (as measured by WAR) and quality of performance (as measured by WAR/AST). At each quality level, CVI increases linearly with WAR. When WAR/AST≤1, there is no bonus and CVI=0.8_*WAR (or zero if WAR<0). When WAR/AST=1.33 (e.g., DiMaggio’s 1948 season), the slope increases to 1.2. When WAR/AST=2.0, which often translates to MVP or Cy Young level performance over a full season (e.g., DiMaggio’s 9.4-WAR 1941 season), the slope increases to 1.6.

Only 34 seasons with unadjusted WAR/AST≥2.2 over at least 750 BF or 500 PA have been recorded. Aaron Judge’s 10.6 WAR in 696 PA in 2022 translates to WAR/AST 1.98—outstanding, but not one of the 34. The 34 are:

WAR/AST ≥ 2.4: Babe Ruth (2.64 in 1923, 2.51 in 1920, 2.42 in 1921), Pedro Martinez (2.86 in 2000), Rogers Hornsby (2.49 in 1924), Barry Bonds (2.49 in 2002), Greg 0Maddux (2.47 in 1995), Oscar Charleston (2.43 in 1924).

2.3 ≤ WAR/AST < 2.4: Babe Ruth (1926, 1927), Barry Bonds (2001), George Brett (1980), Walter Johnson (1913), Mickey Mantle (1957), Pedro Martinez (1999), Honus Wagner (1908), Ted Williams (1957), Carl Yastrzemski (1967).

2.2 ≤ WAR/AST < 2.3: Roger Clemens (1990, 1997), Mookie Betts (2018), Barry Bonds (2004), Ty Cobb (1910), Dwight Gooden (1985), Zack Greinke (2009), Jacob deGrom (2018), Rogers Hornsby (1925), Hubert “Dutch” Leonard (1914), Mickey Mantle (1956), Willie Mays (1965), Joe Morgan (1975), Babe Ruth (1924), Ted Williams (1941).

PLAYER RANKINGS

We will now see how CVI plays out over the full range of potential HOF candidates over 152 years of baseball history and where the Negro Leaguers fit in. We will begin with the CVI results for infielders (Table 3). All infielders with CVI≥57.0 are listed in the upper (unshaded) portion of the table. Hall of Famers with CVI<57.0 are listed in the lower (shaded portion). Designated hitters are listed at the field position they played most often. In this and subsequent tables, Hall of Famers are shown in boldface type. Negro League players are shown in Italics. Players with CVI<30 who were elected to the HOF as “pioneers” or for their contributions as managers, executives, etc.—including Negro Leaguers Rube Foster, Buck O’Neil, Frank Grant, and Bud Fowler—are not listed. Four confirmed PED users with unadjusted CVI>57.0—Robinson Cano (76.3 to 49.4), Mark McGwire (70.0 to 47.8), Rafael Palmeiro (63.9 to 50.4), and Jason Giambi (57.3 to 40.1)—fall out of Table 3 after the PED adjustment. The PED adjustment also drops Rodriguez from second (152.1) to third at SS. Three Negro League infield Hall of Famers—Wells, Lloyd, and Wilson—achieved CVI≥57, despite the shorter seasons they played and the gaps in their statistical records.

As a rule of thumb, a CVI in the neighborhood of 60 or more makes a player a credible HOF candidate; CVI between 57 and 63 is a “borderline” region. A CVI>75 practically guarantees election—absent steroids or “character” issues; Bobby Grich is the only exception in this table. Altogether, eleven eligible infielders with CVI ≥ 63 are not yet in the HOF—Grich, Rolen, Dahlen, Glasscock, Whitaker, Allen, Boyer, Bell, Helton, Nettles, and Bando. Rolen and Helton are still on the BBWAA ballot, and Allen fell just one vote short of election on the Era Committee ballot for the class of 2022. But Grich, Dahlen, Glasscock, Whitaker, Boyer, Bell, Nettles, and Bando have been off the radar and deserve a fresh look.

On the other side of the coin, 32 non-Negro League infielders have been elected to the HOF despite CVI <57, including 22 with CVI<50. All but Perez, Ortiz, Aparicio, Maranville, Killebrew, and Traynor were elected by the Veterans and Era Committees. One can cut them some slack for the five Negro Leaguers in this group (Leonard, Taylor, Suttles, Johnson, Dandridge), whose statistical records are incomplete, and for Gil Hodges, whose managerial success factored into his election. But many of their selections, especially of players from the 1920s and 1930s, were heavy influenced by the inflated batting averages of that era and by the cronyism, which reached its apex during Frankie Frisch’s tenure on the committee in 1967–73.11 Infielders Bancroft and Kelly (Table 3), outfielders Hafey, L. Waner, and Youngs (Table 4, page 120), and pitcher Jesse Haines (Table 5, page 120), all of whom played with or for Frisch and were elected in 1967–73, are prime examples.

(Click images to enlarge)

In Table 4, the CVI results for outfielders and catchers are presented in the same format used in Table 3.

Two confirmed PED users with unadjusted CVI>57.0—Manny Ramirez (67.8 to 56.4) and Sammy Sosa (61.9 to 43.4)—fell below 57.0 after the PED adjustment. The PED adjustment also drops Bonds from second (236.6) to third and Sheffield (58.3) from 56 to 57 among OF. The positional adjustment for catchers raises Campanella (54.2), Hartnett (54.3), Cochrane (52.2), Torre (53.2), Ewing (55.4), Simmons (47.0), Schang (50.2), Munson (46.6), and Tenace (49.4) above 57.0 CVI. The CVI for Bench (86.0), Carter (83.0), Gibson (88.3), Fisk (72.9), Rodriguez (69.5), Piazza (66.9), Dickey (58.8), Berra (57.0), and Mauer (58.0) were already above 57.0 before the adjustment.

Again, this time without exception, every retired outfielder and every catcher with CVI≥75 and no steroid or “character” issues is in the HOF. Lofton, Jones, Edmonds, Evans and Reggie Smith are the only such OF with CVI≥63 who have not yet been elected; Jones is still on the BBWAA ballot, while Lofton, Edmonds, and Smith have not yet made the list of Era Committee finalists. Dwight Evans (63.1 CVI) came close to election by the 2019 Modern Era Committee. For the record, recently retired Buster Posey’s adjusted CVI is 55.6, and Yadier Molina’s is 49.2.

Negro Leaguers—and players of color in general— feature very prominently in Table 4. Indeed, more than half (31/58) of the OF with CVI>57 would have been excluded from MLB before 1947. Josh Gibson ranks third among catchers, and Oscar Charleston and Cristobal Torriente rank among the top 20 OF. In particular, Charleston and Gibson clearly belong on the short list of the best players of all time. Negro Leaguers Turkey Stearnes and Pete Hill and Larry Doby and Roy Campanella (who each began their careers in the Negro Leagues) also fared very well in Table 4. Minnie Miñoso, Monte Irvin, Cool Papa Bell, Willard Brown, Biz Mackey, and Luis Santop had CVI<57, but would undoubtedly have fared better if the major leagues had not been segregated. Note that CVI also undervalues the career of Ichiro Suzuki, whose many productive years in Japan are not counted.

As with infielders, too many non-Negro Leaguers—22 OF and 3 C—have been elected despite CVI<50 (even after the catcher adjustment). All but Puckett, Jim Rice, and Brock were elected to the HOF by the Veterans and Era Committees and again often reflect the inflated batting averages of the 1920s and 1930s and rampant cronyism.

The CVI results for pitchers are presented in the same format in Table 5. Rube Foster, who had CVI=17.7 as a pitcher but was elected primarily as the architect of the first Negro National League and longtime manager of the iconic Chicago American Giants, is not listed. The PED adjustment affects only three pitchers with unadjusted CVI>57—Roger Clemens (179.2 to 171.8), Kevin Brown (74.0 to 66.2), and Andy Pettitte (61.6 to 61.1). No pitcher fell below the 57.0 threshold for inclusion in Table 5 because of this adjustment.

Once again, a CVI≥75 is nearly a guaranteed ticket to the HOF, unless there are PED or “character” issues. Luis Tiant (75.7) is the lone exception among eligible pitchers. However, eight eligible pitchers with CVI between 63 and 75 and no steroid or character issues—Bond, Cone, Saberhagen, Reuschel, Buffinton, McCormick, Appier, Santana, and Adams—have not yet been elected. Most of them were noted for a small number of brilliant seasons rather than extended excellence. While it is debatable whether all these pitchers belong in the HOF, they deserve a second look.

Most relief pitchers fare poorly in CVI due to their limited workloads. The indomitable Mariano Rivera (96.9 CVI) is a glaring exception, ranking 19th among all pitchers despite facing only 5103 batters in his 19-year career. And that doesn’t count his even more impressive postseason stats! Only five other pitchers with significant relief experience—Eckersley, Smoltz, Gossage, Wood, and Wilhelm—had CVI≥57, and Eckersley, Smoltz, and Wood accrued much of their CVI as starters. No other reliever has CVI≥45. On the 2022 BBWAA ballot, Billy Wagner’s and Joe Nathan’s CVI are both 40.2, and Jonathan Papelbon’s is 35.5.

Five Negro League pitchers—Satchel Paige, Martin Dihigo, Bullet Rogan, Smokey Joe Williams, and Jose Mendez—have CVI>60 and clearly deserve their place among baseball’s all-time greats. Dihigo and Rogan were two-way players, whose offense contributed 38.7 and 36.2, respectively, to their CVI totals. Ray Brown also has a very respectable 54.2 CVI. The credentials of Willie Foster, Hilton Smith, Leon Day, and Andy Cooper are less impressive, but we don’t know how much of their statistical record is missing.

Sixteen non-Negro League pitchers with CVI<50 have been elected to the HOF. Four of these 16 pitchers were relievers, and one (Candy Cummings) was elected as a baseball “pioneer” and executive, rather than for his playing career per se. Three of the remaining 11 pitchers (Dean, Lemon, and Hunter) were elected by the BBWAA; the remaining eight were elected by the Veterans and Era Committees.

Table 6 compares Negro League CVI results based on the Baseball-Reference (BR) and Seamheads (SH) databases. I have included only Hall of Famers in this table; the highest CVI I could find for Negro League players not in the HOF is 55.0 for SS Dobie Moore, who played for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1920–26. For most players in this table— especially those who played much of their careers before 1920 (Torriente, Lloyd, Williams, Mendez, Hill, Taylor, Santop, Rube Foster) and players who played much of their careers in Cuban and Mexican leagues (Dihigo, Torriente, Mendez)—the SH database (which includes data from non-MLB-certified leagues) yields substantially higher CVI values than the BR database. For those who played in the newly integrated major leagues in the 1940s and 1950s (Robinson, Doby, Miñoso, Campanella, Irvin, Willard Brown) and others whose careers began after 1920, the difference is relatively small. Oddly, Willie Foster (Rube’s less renowned younger brother), who pitched 1923–37, fared far better in BR than SH. Note that Rube Foster and Buck O’Neil, whose HOF elections were largely predicated on what they accomplished after their playing careers, and nineteenth century “pioneers” Frank Grant and Bud Fowler, for whom statistical records are virtually non-existent, do not fare well in either BR- or SH- derived CVI.

DISCUSSION

While standards for the Hall of Fame will (and should) always have a subjective element, CVI provides an objective framework for more nuanced judgments. Every player with CVI near or above 60 is worthy of serious HOF consideration, although not every such player should necessarily be elected. Any player with CVI>70 should be a presumptive Hall of Famer, unless there is a compelling reason for exclusion (cheating, gambling, criminal behavior, etc.). Conversely, players with CVI<50 should rarely be considered for the HOF, unless there is a compelling reason for inclusion (an extraordinary postseason record, a distinguished career as a manager or executive, historical significance, etc.). For example, I consider David Ortiz (48.7 CVI) a legitimate Hall of Famer because of his leadership qualities and surreal .455/.576/.795 slash line in three Red Sox World Series victories. (Also, I believe that WAR over-penalizes designated hitters for their lack of defensive value.) However, the HOF debate should mostly focus on players with CVI between 50 and 70; most players with CVI in the upper 60s should get in, while most in the lower 50s should not.

While critiques of the HOF credentials of specific players are beyond the scope of this short article, it is unfortunate that HOF voters apparently continue to give undue weight to pitcher wins, despite the fact that modern trends in pitcher usage (particularly the extensive use of relief pitchers and the near extinction of the complete game) have greatly diminished the relevance of this statistic, which typically signifies nothing more than the pitcher who happened to be in the game when his team took the lead. Thus, pitchers like Luis Tiant (229 W, 114 ERA+), Dave Stieb (176 W, 122 ERA+), David Cone (194 W, 121 ERA+), Kevin Appier (169 W, 121 ERA+), Bret Saberhagen (167 W, 126 ERA+), and Johan Santana (139 W, 136 ERA+) are dismissed without a second thought, while lesser pitchers of the post-integration era like Don Sutton (324 W, 108 ERA+), Early Wynn (300 W, 107 ERA+), Jim Kaat (283 W, 108 ERA+), Jack Morris (254 W, 105 ERA+), and Catfish Hunter (224 W, 104 ERA+) are all in the HOF. All of the first group had an ERA 14% or better than the league average; none of the latter group had an ERA as much as 10% better than the league average. I am not saying that all the pitchers in the latter group are undeserving; I would have voted for Sutton and perhaps Wynn. However, the pitchers in the former group were clearly superior to those in the latter group; Tiant at least should have been a shoo-in for the HOF. Wins are the ultimate yardstick of team success, and teams—NOT individual pitchers— win games.

It is useful to frame the Hall of Fame debate in the context of percentiles. A total of 17,821 NABBP and major league players debuted before the debut of MLB’s most senior active player in 2022, Albert Pujols, on April 2, 2001.12 The 268 men who have been elected to the HOF primarily as players, all of whom debuted before Pujols, represent 1.5% of the pre-Pujols cohort. (The 5040 players who have debuted since Pujols, 1495 of whom appeared in an MLB game in 2022, are irrelevant; none are in the HOF, and few have even been on the ballot.13,14) The threshold for the top 1.5% of the pre-Pujols cohort ranked by CVI is 51.0. By contrast, the 60.0±3.0 CVI threshold I proposed represents the top 1.02 to 1.23% of the pre-Pujols cohort. While there is no objectively “correct” percentage of players who belong in the HOF, I prefer the more exclusive 60.0±3.0 CVI to the 51.0 cutoff, although there will of course be exceptions in both directions.

In the period 1971–2006, during which the HOF enshrined 35 Negro League players and executives, the Negro Leagues were rich in legend but thin in documented statistical records. Josh Gibson’s HOF plaque tells us that he hit almost 800 HR, but only 165 HR are currently documented in Baseball-Reference.com.15 Satchel Paige claimed Cool Papa Bell was so fast he could turn off the light switch and be in bed before it got dark (true, but the light switch in question had a short), but Baseball-Reference.com credits him with only 285 SB.16 Paige’s HOF plaque says he won “hundreds of games,” but only 121 wins (including 28 AL wins) are documented in Baseball-Reference.com.17 Even if we turn to the Seamheads database to capture stats from uncertified leagues and non-league play.18

Now, in 2022, some of the gaps in the historical records have been filled, and we can better separate fact from myth. By standardizing for PA and BF to adjust for opportunity inequity, CVI now allows the statistical records of the Negro Leagues to be viewed alongside the American and National Leagues. Negro League players are still at a disadvantage because they played shorter official seasons and their records remain incomplete. But now we have more hard numbers, not just stories, to support the lofty status of Negro League stars like Charleston, Gibson, Paige, Torriente, Wells, Dihigo, Rogan, Lloyd, et al in the baseball pantheon. The hard numbers are less favorable for some other Negro League Hall of Famers, like Bell, Leonard, Mackey, Dandridge, et al, but this may change as additional records are unearthed, although we will probably never have more than sketchy records for the earliest stars of Negro baseball. Given the limitations of the Negro League records, no statistical construct can do full justice to all the great players whose careers were irreparably damaged by segregation. However, CVI effectively uses the data we do have to allow the Negro Leagues to be considered as an integral part of baseball history, not just as a colorful historical sidebar.

DAVID J. GORDON MD, PhD is a retired medical scientist and longtime Cubs fan, who joined SABR in 2016. Since 2016, he has authored five BRJ papers and a book called Baseball Generations (published by Summer Game Books). He has a keen interest in baseball history and in metrics to assess career value across historic eras.

Notes

1. Baseball-Reference.com, WAR Explained, https://www.baseballreference.com/about/war_explained.shtml.

2. Piper Slowinski, What is WAR? FanGraphs 2010, https://library.fangraphs.com/misc/war.

3. David Gordon, Baseball Generations (South Orange, NJ: Summer Game Books, 2021), 3–16.

4. Baseball Generations, Table 2.2, 11.

5. Jay Jaffe, Cooperstown Casebook, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 22–27.

6. Baseball-Reference.com, Starting Pitchers JAWS Leaders, https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/jaws_P.shtml.

7. Society for American Baseball Research and Sports Reference LLC, Sean Forman and Cecilia Tan, editors, The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues: Essays and Research for Overdue Recognition (Phoenix, AZ: SABR, Inc.,) 2021.

8. Baseball-Reference.com, https://www.baseball-reference.com.

9. Seamheads.com. https://www.seamheads.com/NegroLgs/index.php.

10. Full details on the PED adjustment can be found in the book Baseball Generations. In brief, we accepted any evidence from failed drug tests, the Mitchell report, investigations, credible testimony, but not from unconfirmed leaks of supposedly “anonymous” testing. See David Gordon, Baseball Generations, Summer Game Books, South Orange, NJ 2021. Table, A2.3, 339.

11 .Jaffe, Cooperstown Casebook, 48–61.

12. Baseball-Reference.com page for Albert Pujols, https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/pujolal01.shtml.

13. Baseball-Reference.com page for Simeon Woods Richardson, https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/w/woodssi01.shtml.

14. Baseball-Reference.com, 2022 Major League Baseball Appearances, https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2022-appearances-fielding.shtml.

15. A note on the seeming discrepancy between Josh Gibson’s home run total on Baseball-Reference.com being 165, and his Hall of Fame plaque stating he hit “almost 800.” The total home run number at Baseball Reference reflects only the home runs hit during “league” games, but Gibson’s teams may have played 2–3 times as many games in exhibitions and “non-league” play that are not included. See the Introduction reference.com/negro-leagues-are-major-leagues.shtml; Hall of Fame Website: Josh Gibson, https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/gibson-josh.

16. Hall of Fame Website: Cool Papa Bell, https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/bell-cool-papa.

17. Hall of Fame Website: Satchel Paige, https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/paige-satchel.

18. Seamheads.com. https://www.seamheads.com/NegroLgs/index.php.

Even so, manager Gene Mauch is often blamed for starting his two best pitchers, right-handed ace Jim Bunning and left-handed ace Chris Short, twice each on two days’ rest, instead of the normal three, during the losing streak. In accounts of the Phillies’ implosion—by David Halberstam in October 1964 and William C. Kashatus in September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration and in the Baseball Prospectus compilation on great pennant races, It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over — Mauch is portrayed as increasingly panicked, lashing out at his players and perhaps over-managing in a desperate attempt to salvage the pennant.1

These narratives provide an excellent account of what happened, including key plays along the way— such as with the ever dangerous Frank Robinson at bat, Reds utility infielder Chico Ruiz daringly steals home with two out in the sixth inning, scoring the only run in the game that began the Phillies’ 10-game losing streak—and players’ perspectives on the unfolding disaster. The authors of these accounts note that Mauch’s decision to start Bunning and Short on short rest was ill conceived and probably cost the Phillies some games they might have won had those two been pitching on normal rest. But they do not consider some other decisions made by Mauch that might have cost the Phillies some games during those critical weeks. 

After a comprehensive play-by-play analysis from the game logs posted at Baseball-Reference and made available through the painstaking efforts of Retrosheet researchers, I believe there were at least six critical decisions Mauch made, other than those affecting how he used Bunning and Short in the final two weeks, that backfired to upend Philadelphia’s pennant dream. Four of them came in the five days before the Phillies began their 10-game losing streak. To make sure that I fully understood the circumstances of the games, I personally scored each play of each game so I could plainly see how each game developed. 

I started with the Phillies’ game at Houston on September 16. They went into this game with a comfortable lead of 6 games, with 17 left on the schedule. This was the first of three September starts that Bunning made on only two days’ rest. The other two are more understandable, because they’re in the midst of the Phillies’ 10-game losing streak. But why would manager Mauch start Bunning on short rest on September 16, when at this point the prospect for a tight pennant race down the stretch looked so unlikely? To understand the context, let’s begin with a quick look at how the Phillies got to where they were. 

HOW THE PHILLIES GOT TO THE THRESHOLD OF A PENNANT 

In the article on the 1964 pennant race in It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, the argument is made that what is often overlooked in discussions of the Phillies’ collapse is that the team should not have been in contention in the first place, notwithstanding that they exceeded expectations by finishing surprisingly high, fourth place, in 1963.2 Mauch’s daily lineup was much less settled than that of the National League’s other putative contenders for 1964—the defending champion Dodgers; the Cardinals, who had finished second the previous year; the Reds; and the Giants—and with many more weaknesses. Mauch had only three players whose names he wrote into the lineup every day—Johnny Callison in right field, Tony Taylor at second base, and rookie sensation Richie Allen, as Dick Allen was then called (against his wishes) at third base. Callison and Allen both had sensational years; Taylor was a steady hand at best. 

The only other position player to start as many as 100 games for the Phillies was catcher Clay Dalrymple, a left-handed batter who platooned with the right-handed Gus Triandos. Mauch started the season platooning the rookie left-handed-hitting John Herrnstein at first base with the veteran right-handed-hitting Roy Sievers. Neither hit well, and by mid-season Sievers was gone and replaced by veteran right-handed-hitting Frank Thomas (acquired from the Mets in early August), who took over the position full-time until suffering a hand injury in early September that kept him out of the lineup most of the final month of the season. Mauch used a platoon in left field, with the left-handed-hitting Wes Covington paired off first with rookie Danny Cater and later with rookie Alex Johnson, and in center field for most of the second half of the season, with the left-handed-hitting Tony Gonzalez trading off with Cookie Rojas. Mauch started the year with Bobby Wine as his regular shortstop and ended using mostly Ruben Amaro, neither of whom hit well. 

Going into the season, the Phillies’ pitching was not considered on par with that of the other NL-contending teams. Only Jim Bunning, acquired in a winter trade from Detroit, had an established pedigree. Mauch’s starting rotation was right-handers Bunning and Ray Culp and southpaws Chris Short and Dennis Bennett as his core four, with righty Art Mahaffey as a fifth starter. Jack Baldschun was the best of an otherwise suspect bullpen. By September, however, Mauch’s starting rotation was in deep trouble. Culp was sidelined with an elbow problem and made his last start on August 15, and Bennett was battling a persistently sore shoulder. Bennett continued to pitch through the pain. Mauch replaced Culp in his fourman rotation with Mahaffey, and 18-year old rookie Rick Wise replaced Mahaffey as the fifth starter, whenever one was needed. Fortunately, Bunning and Short were healthy and pitching well. 

The Phillies got off to a fast start, winning 9 of their first 11 games, and never trailed by more than 2 games as they positioned themselves for a pennant chase. On July 16, they moved into a tie for first and gradually built a lead that reached 7½ games on August 20 after a string of 12 wins in 16 games against the three worst teams in the league—the Cubs, the Colts, and the Mets. The Dodgers had imploded, getting off to a 2–9 start, and never recovered. The Giants had spent much of May and June in first place but then went 28–31 in July and August, reaching a nadir of 8½ games behind the Phillies on August 21, amid racial-diversity issues in the San Francisco clubhouse. The Reds had split their first 44 games (actually their first 45, as one was a tie) and then began a steady climb up the standings from sixth to second, which they reached on August 20, although settling in at a distant 7½ games behind the Phillies. And the Cardinals were languishing in eighth place with a 28–31 record on June 15 when they made the trade with the Cubs that brought them Lou Brock. The Cards still trailed by as many as 11 games on August 23, presumably not harboring pennant dreams, but won 13 of their next 16 games—the last in Philadelphia—to close within 5 games of the Phillies, in second place, on September 9. 

By mid-September, the question of whether the Phillies were good enough to compete for the pennant was moot. Paced by Allen and Callison on the offensive side, and by Bunning and Short on the mound, Gene Mauch had his Phillies in command of the pennant race. To say that the Phillies had overachieved to get to this point—a 6-game lead with 17 games remaining after Bennett and Baldschun combined for a four-hit, 1–0 shutout in Houston on September 15—and that their subsequent collapse should somehow not diminish the great success they had in 1964 would be disingenuous. Some of the most compelling pennant races in baseball history have involved teams that were not expected to compete but did, and won—the 1914 “Miracle” Braves, the 1969 “Miracle” Mets, anyone? 

Of course, some might argue that the 1964 Phillies peaked too early—that eventually their weaknesses caught up with them—while the 1914 Braves and 1969 Mets peaked at just the right time, both coming from far behind to finish first by a decisive margin, their late-season momentum carrying them on to win the World Series before their weaknesses could reassert themselves. 

MAUCH’S MAJOR STRATEGIC BLUNDER—LOOKING AHEAD TO THE WORLD SERIES? 

And so it was with great expectations that the good citizens of the City of Brotherly Love awoke on the morning of September 16, 1964, for their Phillies had beaten the Colts out in Houston the night before and held a commanding 6-game lead over second-place St. Louis, with time for the other contenders running out fast. San Francisco was 7½ games back, and Cincinnati, 8½. The Phillies, in fact, had been in first place every day since July 17. It seemed inconceivable that the Phillies would not soon be appearing in the World Series for the third time in franchise history. 

It was then that Gene Mauch made perhaps his biggest mistake of the season. He decided to start Bunning, his ace, in Houston on September 16, on only two days’ rest. The ninth-place Colts were certainly not contenders. Moreover, in his last start, a 4–1 ten-inning complete game victory in San Francisco, he struck out nine and gave up seven hits. Pitch counts were not much (if at all) in managers’ minds back then and were not recorded for posterity, but clearly Bunning threw well over 100 pitches in his 10-inning effort. 

In the chapter on the 1964 pennant race in It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, Mauch’s decision to start Bunning on this date is called “inexplicable.”3 Kashatus says that Mauch was anxious to extend the Phillies’ lead in the standings and that the ninth-place Colts would seem to be perfect patsies for a pitcher of Bunning’s caliber even if he was not fully rested.4 Halberstam says Mauch wanted Bunning to pitch in every series the Phillies played down the stretch.5 Both Kashatus and Halberstam say Mauch wanted Bunning to pitch in Los Angeles, but he would have anyway, if he had not started in Houston.6 He would have opened the series in L.A. for the Phillies the very next day—and would have been in to start the opening game in the next series against the Reds, who still had some hope for the pennant, while the Dodgers had none. By starting in Houston, however, Bunning was indeed available to pitch the final game of the LA series, but that meant he would miss the Cincinnati series entirely, unless Mauch intended to use him again on short rest. 

Those explanations might be true, but they don’t make sense, at least not to me. Why start Bunning on short rest? When we consider the calendar and that the Phillies were beginning to print World Series tickets, what emerges as the most plausible reason for this decision is that Mauch was trying to set up his best pitcher, Jim Bunning, to start the first game of the World Series—scheduled to begin on Wednesday, October 7—on suitable rest. (See table 1.) Ironically, had there been a game scheduled between the Phillies and Reds on Saturday, October 3, Bunning would have been perfectly lined up to start the World Series by making his last five regular-season starts on normal rest. But a quirk in the scheduling had the Phillies and Reds concluding the season with games on Friday, October 2, and Sunday, October 4, but with a day off on Saturday between the two games.

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If this analysis is correct, Mauch faced a dilemma. If Bunning continued to pitch on his normal schedule, his last start before the World Series—assuming he was to start the first game, which of course was a given—would have been on September 29, giving him a full week off before the World Series began. (See table 1.) Starting pitchers especially establish a rhythm for pitching during the season, and Mauch probably assumed that seven days between starts was too long for a workhorse like Bunning, who might lose his edge with so much downtime. 

Mauch could have decided to give his ace four days’ rest between his remaining starts, which would have had Bunning making his final start of the regular season on Friday, October 2, giving him another four days’ rest before the start of the World Series. But this would not have been a viable solution for Mauch even if he were willing to buck the then conventional practice of the top starting pitcher taking the mound every four days and to start Bunning every fifth day. With Culp out, Bennett hurting, and no depth in his rotation, Mauch really had no option to go to a five-man rotation until the World Series. Instead, he appears to have decided that keeping to the rhythm of three days’ rest between starts was preferable and took the gamble of starting Bunning—presumably just this once— on short rest against the woeful Houston Colts, in order to set him up to have proper rest before his final regular-season start on October 2. That would have given Bunning an extra fourth day before pitching in Game 1 of the World Series. (See table 2.) 

In his Houston start on short rest, Bunning gave up six runs in 4 1?3 innings, leaving the game after giving up three hits and two walks to the six batters he faced in the fifth. At the time, it was a loss that had no bearing on the standings, and in fact the Phillies won the next day in the first of four games in Los Angeles, beating Don Drysdale, against whom Bunning would have pitched on normal rest, to increase their lead to 6½ games with 15 remaining. All seemed right with the world in Philadelphia, but Gene Mauch had made what in hindsight proved to be a disastrous decision: starting Jim Bunning on two days’ rest. 

QUICK HOOK OF YOUNG STARTER HAS CONSEQUENCES 

Although the Phillies did win 4–3 that next day, September 17, in Los Angeles, Mauch made another decision that would have unanticipated consequences down the road. He started right-hander Rick Wise, a rookie teen, instead of Art Mahaffey, whose previous two starts apparently had caused Mauch to lose confidence in him, according to several accounts, including Kashatus’s.7 Mahaffey had given up three runs in only two-thirds of an inning on September 8 in a 3–2 loss to the Dodgers in Philadelphia, and then two runs in two innings on September 12 in a 9–1 loss in San Francisco. 

Wise was making only the eighth start of his career, however. Back in August, he did have back-to-back victories in which he pitched effectively into the eighth inning, but in his two starts immediately before this one on September 17 he did not pitch well. He gave up five runs in four innings to the Braves on August 25 and was removed by Mauch in the first inning of his next start on September 7 against the Dodgers after facing only three batters—giving up two walks and a single—all of whom scored. He got no one out. 

Here was Wise starting against the Dodgers again, ten days later, and he already had a 3–0 lead from the top of the first, but this game began much the same way as his last start had. Wise had given up two singles, a walk, and a groundout resulting in two runs when Mauch decided that—even with a 6-game lead and a depleted starting rotation—he had seen enough for the day of young rookie Wise, who had turned 19 only days before. With left-handed batters Johnny Roseboro and Ron Fairly next up for Dodgers, Mauch called on veteran southpaw Bobby Shantz rather than let Wise try to work his way out of trouble and see if he might settle down. 

At the time, it seemed like a brilliant move. Shantz pitched into the eighth inning and gave up only one run of his own to earn the 4–3 win that put the Phillies up by 6½ games. However, with Bunning and Short his only two healthy starting pitchers, Mauch had no pitchers to spare. Instead of showing commitment to his decision to start a young rookie in a late-season game during a pennant drive, Mauch replaced him in the first inning. In effect, he used two pitchers in one “starting role” that day. An unintended consequence was that Bobby Shantz, who faced 25 batters in relief of Wise, was unavailable to pitch in dire circumstances two days later. 

The Phillies’ unraveling began the next two days with consecutive 4–3 losses in Los Angeles. Chris Short, starting on normal rest, took a 3–0 lead into the last of the seventh on September 18, having given up only two hits. Three batters later, the score was tied on a three-run home run by Frank Howard. The Dodgers won on a two-out single off Phillies’ relief ace Jack Baldschun with two outs in the ninth. The next day, September 19, the two teams battled into the sixteenth inning, tied 3-3, when Baldschun—having already worked two innings in this game and six innings in the previous four days—gave up a single to Willie Davis, intentionally walked Tommy Davis after Willie stole second, and then surrendered a wild pitch that advanced Willie to third with left-handed batter Ron Fairly at the plate. 

Gene Mauch chose this moment to replace his relief ace with rookie southpaw Morrie Steevens, who was appearing in his first major-league game of the season and had only 12 appearances in the major leagues before this. Mauch had only one other left-handed option available, the crafty veteran Bobby Shantz, but Shantz had pitched 7 1?3 innings just two days before in relief of Wise and was not sufficiently rested—apparently not even to face one batter, although getting the out would have meant going into the seventeenth inning. Instead of staying with Baldschun to get one more out to escape the inning, Mauch went with Steevens. There were two out, and the possible winning run on third. As a left-hander, whether pitching from the stretch or from a full windup, Steevens on his delivery would have had his back to the runner at third. Steevens apparently was so focused on Fairly, as well he should have been, that he was inattentive to Willie Davis, which he should not have been; Willie Davis took advantage and stole home, scoring the winning run. 

BUNTING DICK ALLEN 

Mauch had an opportunity to win this game in the fourteenth inning, when Johnny Callison led off with a single. Dick Allen, the cleanup hitter, strolled to the plate. After Allen was the pitcher’s spot (the result of an earlier double switch) but, this being a long game in which he had already used seven position players off the bench, Mauch had limited options for a pinch-hitter. Specifically, he had the light-hitting Bobby Wine, who was batting .209, with only 4 home runs and 33 RBI, and hadn’t played in five days—except as a defensive substitute who did not get a chance to bat. 

Allen, coming to bat with nobody out and Callison on first in the fourteenth inning of a tie game, was the Phillies’ most dangerous hitter. He already had 26 home runs for the year and was third in the league in slugging percentage. In his three previous plate appearances, he had two singles and been intentionally walked by the Dodgers. Even though he knew that Wine was to bat next, Mauch opted to play for one run rather than letting his cleanup batter hit with the possibility of driving in the run. He had Allen—his best and most feared hitter—lay down a sacrifice bunt. Allen did so successfully, but that left Mauch with only two outs to work with and two weak hitters—Wine, followed by .238-hitting catcher Clay Dalrymple—to try to drive in Callison from second. Callison was picked off, Wine flied out, and the Phillies failed to score, ultimately setting up Willie Davis’s game-winning steal of home. The loss still seemed relatively inconsequential, however, as Bunning came back on September 20, on his normal rest, to win his eighteenth game of the season, 3–2, both runs unearned in the ninth. 

WITH 12 GAMES LEFT, THE PHILLIES FACE THE PERFECT STORM 

We are now at where most accounts of the Phillies’ 1964 collapse begin. When the Phillies returned to Philadelphia on September 21 for their final homestand of seven games, they once again had a 6½-game lead over both the Reds and the Cardinals and were 7 games ahead of the Giants. Even if the Reds or Cardinals won all of their remaining games, the Phillies needed to win only 7 of their remaining 12 games to win the pennant outright. If the Cardinals or Reds won 10 of their last 13 games—which, in fact, St. Louis did— the Phillies could have finished the season 4–8 and still gone to the World Series. It would take nearly a perfect storm for Philadelphia to not win the pennant.

And, as fate would have it, the remaining schedule conspired to make that perfect storm plausible. (See table 3.)

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The Reds had five of their 13 games remaining against the Phillies, and the Cardinals had three games left with the Phillies, giving both teams the opportunity to make up significant ground against the first-place team they had to overtake. But the Reds also had five games against the awful Mets and three against the struggling Pirates, who were in sixth place at the close of play on September 20. And the Cardinals had five against those awful Mets and five against those struggling Pirates. The Giants, who really shouldn’t have been in the discussion at this point, as any combination of six Phillies’ wins or six losses of their own would eliminate them from contention, had the advantage of playing their final 12 games against the eighth-place Cubs and ninth-place Colts. 

The Phillies, however, did not have any of the National League’s worst teams on their remaining schedule. In eight of their final 12 games, they had to contend against their two closest competitors, the Reds and Cardinals—meaning they would lose ground in any game they lost. And the Phillies’ other four games were with the fifth-place Milwaukee Braves, whose potent lineup was well able to do serious damage to Mauch’s worn-out pitching staff, especially with his regular third starter, Culp, disabled with an elbow problem; his fourth regular starter, Bennett, enduring a sore shoulder; and both Mahaffey and Wise deemed less than reliable by their manager. The Phillies were scheduled to close the season with three games in St. Louis and two in Cincinnati. At this point, at the start of play on September 21, both the Cardinals and the Reds still had a dim chance, but Mauch had reason to hope they would no longer be a pennant threat by then. 

To put their remaining schedules in a different perspective: The Reds and the Cardinals were playing teams (including the Phillies) with a combined winning percentage of .483 on the morning of September 21, while the Phillies were going against teams (the Reds, Braves, and Cardinals) with a combined winning percentage of .544—a significant difference. Philadelphia had a tougher schedule, but still, a 6½-game lead with only 12 remaining should have been safe, almost impossible to lose. 

The Phillies seemed to have an advantage in that seven of their final 12 games were at home. With a 46–28 record at Connie Mack Stadium, the Phillies at this point had the best home record in the National League. Their first three games were against the Reds, who really needed to sweep the series to have a realistic chance of catching the Phillies. While there was nothing at the moment the Phillies could do about the Cardinals and the Giants, just one win in the three games would leave the Reds 5½ games back, a gap that would be virtually impossible to close with only 10 games left. How important would just one win have been? Even if the Cardinals swept their upcoming two game series with the Mets in New York, one Phillies win against the Reds would have left St. Louis five games behind with 11 remaining, and with not very much hope. 

BUNTING DICK ALLEN AGAIN AS THE LOSING STREAK BEGINS 

The Phillies lost the first game of their series with the Reds in dramatic fashion, 1–0, when Chico Ruiz stole home with two outs in the sixth inning. On his delivery, Mahaffey, back in the starting rotation, would have been facing the third-base line. Of course, with Frank Robinson, one of baseball’s most accomplished and feared batters, at the plate, the Phillies (including their manager) could be excused for assuming that an attempt to steal home in this situation was highly improbable. But steal home Ruiz did. Reds pitcher John Tsitouris was in command the whole game, pitching a six-hit shutout, and Philadelphia’s lead was down to 5½ games. 

All accounts of this game mention that both Mauch and Reds manager Dick Sisler were shocked that Ruiz had the gall to try to steal home with Frank Robinson at bat. What they don’t mention is that the Phillies’ best chance for a run came when Tony Gonzalez led off the home first with a single, bringing up Dick Allen—whom Mauch had batting second in the lineup, rather than in a power slot, and whom he once again asked to sacrifice the runner to second rather than hit away with the possibility of setting up a big first inning. The Phillies had all 27 outs remaining, so why give up Philadelphia’s best, most effective hitter at this point in the game? If Allen got out and the runner was still on first, Mauch would have still had two outs in the inning and eight more innings to go. The sacrifice turned out to be good, but the runner ended up stranded on third. 

This was the second time in three days that Mauch called for Allen to lay down a sacrifice bunt. The first time, as we have already seen, in the September 19 game in Los Angeles, Mauch had Allen bunt with a runner on first and nobody out in the 14th inning in an effort to break a 3–3 tie, despite knowing that none of the batters following Allen in the order were notable run-producing hitters. This time, in the first inning with nobody out, Mauch was hoping to set up an early run. With Dick Allen on his way to 201 hits, 29 of them home runs, an OPS of .939 (fifth in the league), and more total bases, 352, than anyone else in the league (Willie Mays had 351), Mauch’s decision to have Allen sacrifice-bunt is open to legitimate question, especially as most other managers did not use their most powerful hitters to lay one down for lesser lights to try to drive the runner home. 

Allen batted .542 with runners on base during the 17 days that forever shocked Philadelphia. Had he been allowed to swing away in either of those plate appearances against the Dodgers and Reds, the outcome of either game, or of both games, might have been different. One more win at that point in the season, with so few games remaining, might have been all it would have taken to permanently deflate the hopes of the Reds and Cardinals before they began their surge upward. 

Gene Mauch’s reputation as manager was that he tended to call for plays—the sacrifice, the hit-and run—to work for one run at a time, even from the very beginning of the game, in order to score first if at all possible. The problem is that sacrificing an out to help set up a run is precisely that—giving up an out, and there are only three outs an inning and 27 a game. While this strategy made sense for managers of teams (Walter Alston, for example, with his mid-1960s Dodgers) that had difficulty scoring runs, Mauch had a lineup with much more ability to score runs. Even so, he often chose to sacrifice for one run—even with his best hitters at the plate—instead of trusting in his firepower.

The two best hitters in the Phillies’ lineup, Allen and Callison, who hit a combined total of 60 home runs in 1964, both, in the course of the season, laid down six sacrifice bunts to move a base runner up with nobody out. In calling for them to do so, Mauch, in the interest of playing for one run, gave up as outs the two batters most likely to drive in runs. Of the league’s other premier hitters who also hit for power, Willie Mays had one sacrifice bunt for the Giants in 1964, Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey none; Frank Robinson did not have a sacrifice all year for the Reds; neither did Ken Boyer for the Cardinals; nor did Hank Aaron or Eddie Mathews for the Braves. Milwaukee, in fact, had five players who hit 20 or more home runs, only one of whom had any sacrifice hits—Denis Menke, not otherwise known as a power guy, with four.  

WHERE SHOULD DICK ALLEN HAVE HIT?

It seems Gene Mauch never decided where the appropriate place in the batting order was for his rookie phenom, Dick Allen, in 1964; he changed his mind about that at least three times. In the first part of the season—64 games from opening day through June 12, during which the Phillies went 29–21 (.580)—the powerful Allen most often batted second, a lineup spot usually used to help set up runs for the third, fourth, and fifth hitters. Allen batted cleanup only three times in the first two months of the season—understandable, given that he was still an unproven rookie. By this point in the season, June 12, he was batting .294 and had 12 home runs and 32 RBIs, leading the Phillies in all three triple-crown categories. Allen also had an .895 OPS. Aside from his power numbers suggesting that the third or fourth slots in the batting order would have been a more logical fit for him, he also had a propensity to strike out a lot—not a good thing for a number-two batter. Allen led the league in strikeouts in 1964 with 138, averaging one strikeout every five at-bats when he batted second in the order. 

Seeing what his emerging young slugger could do, Mauch put Allen into the cleanup spot on June 13, where he stayed for 53 of the Phillies’ next 55 games, during which they went 33–22 (.600). By August 6, Allen was batting .311 and had a .913 OPS, with 19 home runs and 56 RBIs. On August 7, however, right-handed power-hitting Frank Thomas joined the Phillies to fill their glaring weakness at first base. From then until September 17, Mauch alternated Thomas with the left-handed Wes Covington in the cleanup spot. Of the 42 games played in that time, Allen batted fourth only twice and once again was used most frequently (23 times) in the number-two spot of the lineup, although Mauch also often had him batting third (17 times), with the usual number-three hitter, Johnny Callison, second in the order in those games. From looking at who the opposing starting pitcher was, it is not apparent that Mauch’s shifting of Allen and Callison between second and third in the order had anything to do with whether the pitcher threw left-handed or right-handed. The Phillies were 27–15 (.643) in their best stretch of the season, at the end of which Allen was batting a team-high .307 and had a teambest .913 OPS, with 26 home runs and 79 RBI. 

Mauch, however, still had not settled on a permanent spot in the batting order for his most dangerous hitter. In the final 15 games, Allen batted fourth eight times, second five times, and third twice. He finished the season batting .318 (fifth in the league), with 29 home runs and 91 RBIs. 

Would it have made a difference had Mauch stayed with Allen in the second or third slot in the final weeks, particularly when the games became desperate as Philadelphia’s lead evaporated? There is much to be said for lineup stability. There is also much to be said for a hitter batting cleanup who was as much of a power threat as Dick Allen was. In the final 15 games of the season, Allen continued to hit well even as the rest of the Phillies did not. While the Phillies as a team were terrible in the clutch with runners on base, especially in scoring position, Allen was . . . well, clutch. He went 13-for-26 with runners on base in those 15 games—a .500 batting average—and walked or was intentionally walked several times. He also had those two sacrifice bunts.

LOSING BUILDS MOMENTUM 

After the Phillies’ dispiriting 1–0 loss on September 21, Chris Short was roughed up the following day in a 9–2 loss to Cincinnati, victimized by yet another steal of home (by Pete Rose, as part of a double-steal in the third) and by a two-run homer by Frank Robinson. And on September 23, in the final game of the series, Vada Pinson’s second home run of the day broke a 3–3 tie in the seventh as Cincinnati went on to a 6–4 win to sweep the series. Bunning, whose regular turn in the rotation would have had him starting the first game of this series if not for his short-rest start in Houston, did not pitch against Cincinnati. 

The failure to take even one game from the Reds cost the Phillies three games in the standings in three days, but with a 3½-game lead and now only nine games remaining, it still seemed time was on their side. Moreover, the Cardinals and Giants were both five games back, presumably no longer in the picture. But for Philadelphia, the losing had become contagious. Bunning, pitching for the second time on his normal rest after his September 16 start in Houston, threw six strong innings on September 24 in the first of four games against the Braves, but the Phillies were held scoreless until the eighth in a 5–3 loss. But the Phillies had a three-game lead at the end of the day. 

No need yet to be desperate, but Gene Mauch, feeling that the sure-thing pennant was slipping away, acted in desperation On September 25 he started Short, on only two days’ rest, instead of Mahaffey, whose turn it was in the rotation and who had pitched so well in his previous start (the one where he neglected to check Chico Ruiz at third). Kashatus suggests that Mauch did not start Mahaffey in this game because he felt that the pitcher had cracked under pressure when he allowed Ruiz to steal home.8 Short pitched effectively into the eighth inning, giving up only three runs on seven hits, but left trailing in the game. Callison tied the score in the eighth with a two-run home run, and the game went into extra innings. In the tenth, Joe Torre’s two-run home run for the Braves was matched in the bottom of the inning by Dick Allen’s two-run inside-the-park home run, which tied the game at 5–5. Milwaukee won in the twelfth, however, 7–5. As had been the case too often in recent games, Mauch’s Phillies were abysmal with runners in scoring position. In eight such at-bats in this game, they were hitless. 

STAYING WITH SHANTZ TOO LONG

But things looked brighter the next day, September 26, when the Phillies took an early 4–0 lead behind Mahaffey against the Braves, only to once again go cold at the plate when there were opportunities to score runs. The game went into the ninth inning, the Phillies’ lead in the game whittled down to 4–3. Due up for the Braves in the ninth were two of baseball’s best hitters, the right-handed Hank Aaron followed by the left-handed cleanup hitter Eddie Mathews. The Braves’ pitcher, batting fifth in the order as a result of earlier maneuvers by Milwaukee manager Bobby Bragan, was scheduled to bat third in the inning. Fourth up in the inning, however, would be another dangerous right-handed batter, Rico Carty. 

Despite this formidable array of mostly righthanded batters, beginning with perennial home-run threat Aaron, Mauch allowed southpaw Bobby Shantz to take the mound in the ninth. Shantz had gotten the final two outs of the eighth, coming into the game in a bases-loaded situation with one out. The Braves’ third run of the game was scored on a passed ball. The Phillies’ right-handed relief ace, Baldschun, was no longer available, having relieved starter Mahaffey in the eighth, and was followed by Shantz. With Aaron leading off the ninth, capable of tying the game on one swing, Mauch could have turned to right-hander Ed Roebuck, warming up in the bullpen. Instead, he stayed with Shantz. 

He stayed with Shantz after Aaron started the ninth with a single. This made sense, since Mathews was a left-handed power hitter. He stayed with Shantz after Mathews singled even after the right-handed Frank Bolling was announced as a pinch-hitter. This maybe also made sense, since Bolling, the Braves’ mostly regular second baseman, was hardly a dangerous hitter, his average hovering slightly above .200. Bolling reached on an error, loading the bases. The Phillies had a one-run lead but had yet to secure an out in the ninth. Coming up to bat was the right-handed Carty. He had come into the game batting .325, with 20 home runs and 80 RBIs. Still, Mauch stayed with southpaw Bobby Shantz, when he had right-hander Ed Roebuck waiting in the bullpen. 

Why not turn to Roebuck? In a month when Mauch’s bullpen was stressed—relief ace Baldschun had lost four games already in September and allowed 37 of the 106 batters he had faced so far in the month to reach base, including one of two in this game before Shantz replaced him in the eighth—Roebuck had been pitching well. (See table 4.) In fact, Roebuck had allowed only four earned runs in his previous 14 appearances dating back to August 18. Two of those came on the three-run home run he surrendered to Vada Pinson that made him the losing pitcher in the final game of the series with Cincinnati. (See table 4.) That was three days ago. Presumably, Mauch no longer had much trust in Roebuck because he stayed with Shantz in a situation where he desperately needed an out. Carty tripled, the Phillies’ lead was gone, Shantz was removed from the game, and Mauch finally brought in Roebuck. The Phillies went down quietly in their half of the ninth. 

Gene Mauch had now watched his team lose six straight games, eight of their last nine dating to September 18, and nine of eleven dating to when he decided to start Bunning on short rest against Houston. With the Reds having extended their winning streak to seven straight games, the Phillies’ lead was down to half a game. Meanwhile, the Cardinals, having won five of their last six, had closed to within a game and a half. 

BUNNING AND SHORT IN DESPERATION STARTS 

Now was truly desperation time for Mauch and the Phillies. Bunning told Halberstam he volunteered to pitch the final game of the Milwaukee series with only two days’ rest. With Bennett suffering through a sore shoulder, Mauch probably felt he had no other choice—certainly not 19-year old Rick Wise, who pitched to only four batters, giving up two runs, in his last start on September 17 and to only three batters in his start before that. Following a script similar to that of his short stint against Houston, Bunning gave up five consecutive hits before departing in the fourth without getting an out. All five hits led to runs in a 14–8 Milwaukee blowout in Philadelphia’s final home game of the season. Ironically, given that they lost, this was the Phillies’ first real offensive outburst since they beat the Giants, 9–3, way back on September 5 in Philadelphia. The Reds beat the Mets in a doubleheader, and for the first time since July 16 the Phillies were no longer in first place. Philadelphia was now down a game to Cincinnati and just barely ahead—by half-a-game—of the surging third-place Cardinals of St. Louis, the Phillies’ next destination.

(Click image to enlarge.)

The unintended consequence of his having started Short and Bunning out of turn against Milwaukee was that Mauch was now forced to use his two best pitchers on only two days’ rest between starts against the Cardinals—which were now a team they (the Phillies) had to beat to keep from falling behind yet another suddenly emergent pennant contender, let alone to keep pace with the Reds, against whom they would play their final two games of the season. Had they pitched in turn in the rotation, Short and Bunning would have been available to pitch on normal rest in the season series that now mattered the most—against the Cardinals, with the pennant at stake. Both did start in St. Louis, but on short rest, and both lost. 

In the first of the three-game series, Mauch had Short making his third start in seven days. It was his second consecutive start on two days’ rest. Short pitched into the sixth inning, leaving the game trailing 3–0. His mound opponent was Bob Gibson, who was making 1964 the year that established him as almost impossible to beat when the Cardinals needed a win—as they did on this day—and Gibson delivered a 5–1 victory. As had become all too commonplace in their now-eight game losing streak, the Phillies had great difficulty with runners in scoring position, going 0-for-7 in this game. (See table 5.) Philadelphia was now in third place, 1½ games behind idle Cincinnati. 

The next day, September 29, the Phillies got only one hit in nine at-bats with runners in scoring position—a two-run single with the bases loaded by pinch-hitter Gus Triandos—as they lost for the ninth straight time, 4–2. Bennett, starting with five days’ rest for his sore pitching shoulder, was much less effective than in his previous start. He got out of the first inning giving up only one run before being saved by a linedrive double play, but he gave up three consecutive hits and a sacrifice in the second before he could go no further. The Phillies lost no ground in the standings as the Reds lost to the Pirates; the Cardinals were now tied for first. 

(Click image to enlarge.)

With only three games left and a game and a half back, the final game in St. Louis was critical for the Phillies. Once again, Gene Mauch asked Bunning, his ace, to pitch on two days’ rest. His only other option was Art Mahaffey, who had pitched into the eighth inning four days before, giving up only three runs against the power-hitting Braves. And the game before that, Mahaffey had given up only one run in 6.2 innings against Cincinnati, the game he lost, 1–0, because he failed to pay attention to the remote possibility (which became reality) that Chico Ruiz might try to steal home with two outs and Frank Robinson (Frank Robinson!) batting. Mahaffey was rested and he was pitching well, but for whatever reason Mauch did not trust him and chose to go with the worn-out Bunning, now making his fifth start in 15 days. 

As was becoming predictable when he pitched on short rest, Bunning was battered around, giving up a two-run home run in the second, allowing five consecutive batters to reach base (one on an error) to start the third though only surrendering two runs, and leaving with one out in the fourth after consecutive singles. Both baserunners scored. After four innings, the Cardinals had an 8–0 lead on their way to an 8–5 win. They took a one-game lead over the Reds, who lost for the second straight time to the Pirates.

Then, blessedly for the Philadelphia Phillies, came their first day of rest since August 31. They had played 31 games in the first 30 days of September. 

TOO LATE FOR A HAPPY ENDING 

The day off on October 1 and another offday scheduled for October 3 meant that, in the final two games of the season, in Cincinnati, Mauch could start his two best pitchers, Short and Bunning, on their normal three days’ rest. Now in third place, trailing St. Louis by 2½ games and Cincinnati by two, Philadelphia could still finish the 162-game schedule tied for first if they won both their games against the Reds, and the Cardinals lost all three of theirs against the lowly Mets, which would create a three-way tie. Their only possibility of making the World Series, which ten consecutive losses ago seemed such a sure thing, would be to win a never-before three-way playoff series with the Reds and Cardinals to determine the pennant winner. It could have even been a four-way tie for first at the end of the scheduled 162-game regular season, but only if the Giants, who were now three games back, won all three of their remaining games against the Cubs in San Francisco and if the Cardinals were swept by the Mets and if the Phillies won both of their games against the Reds. 

None of those things happened, except for the Phillies ending their 10-game losing streak by winning their final two games of the regular season against the Reds. In the first game, Short left in the seventh, trailing 3–0, but Dick Allen tied the socre with an eighth-inning triple and then scored what proved to be the winning run. The Cardinals, meanwhile, lost two games to the Mets, setting up a final-day scenario for a three-way tie (the Giants having already been eliminated by losing on Saturday to the Cubs). Pitching on normal rest, Jim Bunning hurled a six-hit masterpiece to shut out the Reds, 10-0, never allowing a runner past second base. Allen hit two home runs. 

The Phillies were now tied with the Reds, both teams awaiting the outcome of the Cardinals game with the Mets in St. Louis. The Mets had a 3–2 lead in the fifth, but the score proved deceiving, as the Cardinals brought in Gibson in relief to shut down the Mets and scored three times in the fifth, the sixth, and the eighth on their way to an 11–5 victory and the 1964 National League pennant. For good measure, St. Louis went on to win the World Series that Philadelphia had seemed sure was theirs to play. 

WAS GENE MAUCH GUILTY OF OVER-MANAGING? 

Certainly Mauch’s strategic miscalculation in starting Bunning and Short on short rest against Milwaukee— before, arguably, he needed to resort to that, even if his starting rotation was in disarray because of the injuries to Culp and Bennett—and his hitters’ inability to take advantage of scoring opportunities contributed to the Phillies’ colossal collapse, which haunts Philadelphia to this day. But the question remains whether the manager may have cost his team the pennant by his penchant for overmanaging in game situations. Baseball can be unforgiving, quick to smack down those who think they can master the flow of the game. Mauch was an intense baseball man who prided himself on his intimate knowledge of the game. As a manager, he tended to be very hands-on. 

Managerial brilliance can be a tricky thing. Managers are both strategists and tacticians in the dugout. They must navigate a delicate line between managing too much and managing too little. At the game level, managing too little could mean not anticipating how the game might play out given the current situation. Or it could mean not trying to force the action when the game situation might suggest that it should be forced. Managing too much, on the other hand, could mean trying so hard to force the action that the natural flow and rhythm of the game for the players is interrupted. The one managerial style could convey a lack of urgency, with the result that players lose focus and fail to execute or to exercise subtle skills. The other style, over-managing, could convey too much urgency, even panic, with the result that players play tight and do not follow, or in some cases even develop, their instincts for the game. This was a criticism that Dick Allen in particular made, according to Halberstam, Kashatus, and, in his autobiography, Allen himself. Over-managing is not necessarily indicative of managerial brilliance in game situations. It can, rather, indicate a manager’s overwhelming desire to maintain tight control over each game, perhaps for fear of the second-guessing that comes with losing. Or it can indicate that he does not fully trust his players’ instincts and ability or even (dare we say?) that he has some wish to prove his relevance to the outcome of games when it’s the players’ performance that is the obvious determinant. 

Managers must understand what is most appropriate for their team and make adjustments to their styles and strategies when necessary. The 1964 Phillies probably would not have been in a position to win the pennant without Mauch as their manager, but his intensity (often manifested as sarcasm and the belittling of his players when things didn’t work out) and constant maneuvers to try to wrest the advantage in games may have caught up with him in the final weeks of the season. When it was all over, Mauch blamed himself for the debacle. This was telling not so much because he attempted to remove the stigma of the collapse from his players but because, in the final weeks, he may have put on himself too much of the burden to win games instead of allowing the games to play out with less urgency. 

(Click image to enlarge.)

First he was in a rush to clinch the pennant, and he quite likely began preparing for the World Series prematurely when, with a 6-game lead, he started Bunning in Houston on short rest, probably so he would be aligned for Game 1 of the World Series. Then he overreacted to a string of defeats, especially to the Reds, that still left the Phillies in control of the pennant race with fewer than ten games remaining—if no longer in commanding control. Then, as the defeats piled on, he panicked as he tried desperately to pick up wins by starting his two best pitchers twice consecutively on short rest, wearing them down, when they, and especially Bunning, would have been more effective with normal rest. 

The Phillies lost the pennant by one game. Even if Mauch had lost all of those games where he had no obvious starting pitcher (with Culp unable to pitch because of his elbow and Bennett badly hampered with a bum shoulder), Bunning and Short would have been more likely to pitch effectively and gain a victory on normal rest, as Bunning proved in both of his stretch-drive victories. Just one additional win by both, or two by either, could have changed the outcome of the pennant race. In effect, it may be that Mauch turned possible wins into losses by panicking rather than simply accepting losses for the sake of maximizing the odds of winning when his two best pitchers started. 

If Mauch made his decision to start his ace on September 16 in Houston on only two days’ rest in order to line Bunning’s remaining starts up with Game 1 of the World Series—this appears to be the only plausible explanation, if you study the calendar—it suggests that at that point he took the pennant for granted. Joe McCarthy, by contrast, when he was managing the Yankees in the 1930s and 1940s, led pennant-winning teams that typically finished strong and with a huge lead at the end of September. 

Mauch apparently was willing to risk a loss by Bunning on short rest, for the purpose of setting him up for the World Series. But the National League pennant had not yet been clinched. Perhaps Mauch should have waited for his Phillies to officially clinch the pennant before trying to arrange the rotation so that Jim Bunning would be able to start Game 1 of the World Series with the appropriate rest between his final regular-season starts. There likely would have been time enough for that. 

While one could argue that the impact of his starting Bunning in Houston on September 16 could have been mitigated had Mauch thereafter kept Bunning on a normal schedule, this decision of his had a devastating cascading effect as the Phillies went into their 10-game losing streak, because Bunning turned out not to be available to pitch against one of the remaining contending clubs, the Reds. In trying to prepare for the World Series, Mauch forgot the importance of starting his best pitchers in their appropriate turn. Baseball has a way of punishing hubris. 

BRYAN SODERHOLM-DIFATTE, who lives and works in the Washington, D.C., area, is devoted to the study of Major League Baseball history.

Notes

1 David Halberstam, October 1964 (New York: Villard Books, 1994); William C. Kashatus, September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Steven Goldman, ed., It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

2 Clifford Corcoran, “There Is No Expedient to Which a Man Should Not Avoid to Avoid the Real Labor of Thinking,” in It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, ed. Goldman, 134.

3 Corcoran, 141.

4 Kashatus, 118.

5 Halberstam, 303.

6 Kashatus, 119; Halberstam, 303.

7 Kashatus, 119.

8 Kashatus, 124.

The Houston Astros were a natural for the Rio Grande Valley, as they were the closest (about 350 miles) major league team to the area. But would anybody else be interested? As it turned out, nobody was, so the idea died a quick death. The Rangers (along with the Kansas City Royals) went to Surprise, Arizona; the Astros chose to renovate their existing complex in Kissimmee, Florida, and nobody came to the Rio Grande Valley for spring training. But in the early years of the 20th century, spring training in Texas was hardly an unusual proposition.

Spring training was not meticulously chronicled in early years of professional baseball, but preseason trips to warmer climes have a history almost as long as organized baseball itself. The first trip to Florida was made by the Washington Capitals, who set up shop in Jacksonville in 1888. In 1886, Cap Anson, a staunch believer in preseason preparation, took his Chicago White Stockings to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a popu­lar locale for a number of teams well into the 20th century. The White Stockings and the Cincinnati Red Stockings took trips to New Orleans in 1870, the first time two teams were in the Crescent City. The power­ful Reds defeated the local Pelicans, 51-1, on April 25 of that year.

The teams that headed south played themselves into shape not just against each other but also against local talent, including minor league teams1 and col­lege teams, thus presenting a great opportunity for young players to make an impression on major league managers. To a certain extent, the level of competition was determined by the other major league teams training nearby. In 1917, however, when the White Sox were training in Mineral Wells, Texas, Charles Comiskey decided his team’s confidence could be enhanced by scheduling only minor league oppo­nents, even though the Cardinals, Giants, Browns, and Tigers were then all training in Texas. That might not appear to be sound preparation for the regular season, but it obviously didn’t hurt the White Sox, as they were World Series champions that year.

During its heyday in Texas, spring training had at least as much in common with barnstorming as it did with spring training as we know it today. Then, as now, it provided an opportunity to evaluate rookies and other unknowns (or “Yannigans”) before the reg­ular season rosters had to be drawn up. Perhaps most important, from a fan’s point of view, it gave people in the hinterlands their only opportunity to see major league ballplayers plying their trade. Whatever the vagaries of springtime pilgrimages in the 19th century, by the early years of the 20th century, spring training in some form or fashion was an established fact of life for all major league ballplayers. From 1903 to the eve of World War II, Texas was a popular destination for major league teams in search of spring training facili­ties. Of the 16 major league teams in existence from 1903 to 1941, only two teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs, never trained in Texas.

The Rio Grande Valley, with its palm trees and citrus groves, embodies the subtropical ideal for spring training, yet aside from one season (1920 in Brownsville), it did not figure in major leaguers’ plans.

In the early years of the 20th century, the Valley was largely undeveloped, except for Brownsville, which dates back to 1846 and the establishment of Fort Brown during the Mexican War. The city hosted minor league baseball (the Brownsville Brownies of the Southwest Texas League) as early as 1910. The rest of the Valley didn’t begin to grow until midwestern farmers, attracted by the year-round growing season, headed south to see what crops their skills could coax from the south Texas soil. Harlingen and Edinburg, which have hosted independent minor league base­ball in recent years, were not even on the map in the first decade of the 20th century. Harlingen was not incorporated till 1910, Edinburg a year later.

Minor league baseball did not reach Edinburg till August 1926 (when the Victoria Rosebuds relocated there) and Harlingen till 1931 (Rio Grande Valley League), and by that time the golden age of spring training in Texas had passed. For the record, the Valley also hosted minor league teams in Mission, San Benito, and McAllen in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

If the Rio Grande Valley was too remote and undeveloped for spring training in the early years of the 20th century, the state of Texas offered many other options. Even with its wide-open spaces and wild reputation, Texas had no shortage of “civilized” locales for major league teams in search of sunshine and warm temperatures. The most popular host city was San Antonio, one of the oldest cities in Texas and, until the 1920s, the largest. The Alamo City hosted 29 seasons of spring training, including 10 of the 14 teams that ventured to Texas. Surprisingly, after San Antonio the most popular location was the small town of Marlin Springs (now known as merely Marlin), a resort town 26 miles southeast of Waco. The New York Giants were particularly fond of the town, as they trained there in 1908-1918. Like Mineral Wells, west of Fort Worth, and Hot Wells, southeast of San Antonio2, the town catered to tourists who came for the healing waters.

To anyone familiar with Texas history and geog­raphy, the lineup of towns and teams presents many tantalizing questions. For example, why was the established seaside city of Galveston given short shrift — a mere two seasons? Perhaps the answer lies with the weather. The Galveston hurricane of 1900 — still the most deadly natural disaster in American history — had surely embedded itself in the national consciousness, but even lesser storms had made their mark. One such storm on August 15, 1915, destroyed the ballparks in Galveston and Houston, and the Galveston Sandcrabs and Houston Buffaloes rerout­ed their “home” games to Brenham, Austin, and Corpus Christi. That was the end of spring training in Houston, and Galveston hosted but one more season (1921). Of course, tropical storms still present a major problem for spring training facilities in Florida, as the 2004 hurricane season proved, and have prob­ably played a key role in the increasing popularity of Arizona.

Other Texas Gulf Coast towns fared poorly as spring training locations. Corpus Christi — a fairly large port city similar in atmosphere and climate to Florida — was never selected for a spring training site, even though the city had hosted minor league ball as early as 1910 (the Corpus Christi Pelicans of the Southwest Texas League). Orange was limited to two seasons (1921 and 1922) and Brownsville to one (1920). While the avoidance of coastal cities may be understandable, it is difficult to fathom the total absence of Austin and Fort Worth, inland Texas League cities that were certainly capable of hosting major league teams in the spring.3 Perhaps the ultimate puzzler is the appearance of the Philadelphia A’s in the remote border town of Eagle Pass in 1922. What was Connie Mack thinking?

It’s easy to see why Texas was so popular with the Browns and Cardinals, as St. Louis was the closest major league city to the Lone Star State in the first four decades of the 20th century. Other teams based in the Midwest — the Cubs, White Sox, Tigers, and Reds — were not much farther away. But why were the Giants — who spent 18 springs in Texas, more than any other team — so fond of the state? Couldn’t they have found something back east a little closer to home? Here we must introduce Giants manager John McGraw and the key role he played in spring training history.

As a member of the Baltimore Orioles in 1894, McGraw attended an intensive eight-week spring training camp in Macon, Georgia, under manager Ned Hanlon. The players were drilled endlessly on the hit-and-run play and the Baltimore chop, among other “small ball” tactics. The results were immediate­ly apparent once the season began.

After a mediocre 1893, when the Orioles finished with a 60-70 record, eighth in a field of 12 teams, they came out swinging (sometimes literally) in 1894. They won 34 of their first 47 games, but did not clinch the pennant until September 28. Other teams couldn’t help but notice that the seeds for the Orioles’ successful season had been planted in Macon in the spring.

Without that fast start in April, the Orioles would not have won the pennant. The lesson was obvious: a leisurely spring training was no longer an option for a major league team seriously bent on contending.

When McGraw became manager of the New York Giants, he remained convinced that players should peak in the spring to be ready for the opening of the season. During his first spring training with McGraw at San Antonio in 1920, Frankie Frisch had one of his earliest tiffs with the Giant manager. “I woke at seven and walked four miles to the field,” recalled Frisch.”At nine, I jogged five laps. I hit, fielded, threw, and slid until noon. Then I lunched, hit, fielded, threw, and slid until dusk. Then I walked four miles back to the hotel.” A rigorous regimen, to be sure — and not sub­ject to the slightest modification.

One day when Frisch hitchhiked back to the hotel for lunch, his meal was interrupted by an irate McGraw, who fumed, “You rockhead. Next time I catch you riding anywhere I’ll fine you five bucks a mile. You know what legs are for … baseball.”

To that end, McGraw’s first foray into Texas was to Marlin Springs in 1908. He returned every year through 1918. Today, a town of about 6,400, in those days it was home to about 4,000 people. While not exactly “the sticks,” it was a long way from New York City in more ways than one. But McGraw was looking for a place where his men would find few distractions from their baseball discipline. Marlin Springs was big enough to provide good rail service to Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, and other cities where the Giants could play exhibition games against Texas League teams. Since the town catered to tourists, it had hotels, a Hilton and the Arlington,4 suitable for major league ballplayers. This was an important consideration for the status-conscious McGraw, who insisted his ball­players were not second-class citizens, no matter what the more respectable elements of society said.

Considering the large quantities of alcohol imbibed by players of that era, the elimination of toxins might have been a key factor in the selection of a spring train­ing venue. This would explain why Marlin Springs and other towns with spas were so popular. Since many Texas counties were (and still are) dry, the difficulty of buying liquor might have made some remote Texas towns particularly attractive as spring training sites before Prohibition. On the other hand, New Orleans was also a popular spring training locale, and a venue more conducive to boozing could hardly be found in the Deep South or anywhere else.

Then as now, a sweetheart deal with a municipality was a big inducement to a team in search of a spring home. In 1910, Marlin Springs deeded the local ball­ park, Emerson Field, to the Giants for as long as they trained in Marlin, which turned out to be another nine years. The Giants actually controlled the prop­erty until the 1970s.

The annual presence of the Giants, the “glamour” team of major league baseball during McGraw’s reign, was a big event in the social life of Marlin Springs, though some of the town’s leading families would not allow their daughters to socialize with the ballplay­ers. Fish fries and community dances were recurring events, and the Giants frequently played intra-squad games to benefit local charities.

In small Texas towns, the annual springtime sojourn of major leaguers provided a publicity boost that similarly sized hamlets could only dream of. Today it taxes the imagination to envision Ty Cobb sitting in the lobby of the Rogers Hotel (still stand­ing) in downtown Waxahachie5, Joe Jackson going out for a bite to eat in Mineral Wells, or Christy Mathewson playing checkers with the locals in Marlin Springs. But these legendary fig­ures and many other major leaguers of lesser repute were regular seasonal visitors to small towns in the Lone Star State.

The figures that dominated the headlines during the regular season also did so during spring training. Since the outcome of the games was of little importance, many of the more entertaining anecdotes from Texas spring training history are not from the games themselves but from game-related events.

During the Giants’ final spring (1918) in Marlin, the Giants played a team from the Waco Air Service Pilot Training Center. Doubtless more enter­taining than the game itself were the pilots performing stunts in biplanes above the field. John McGraw himself donned helmet and goggles for a 20-minute flight to Waco. This was possibly the first time a major league manager rode in an airplane.

One historic first took place when the Giants played their first night game during spring training in San Antonio in 1931. After witnessing a rookie outfielder undergo a coughing spasm due to inhaling insects attracted by the artificial lighting, McGraw, ever the canny strategist, advised his troops, “One thing to remember. You must keep your mouth shut when you play these night games.”

Sometimes the games were eclipsed by off-the-field activities, such as Rube Marquard firing a pistol at a billboard outside his Marlin Springs hotel room — an act frowned upon even in Texas and necessitating a visit from the local peace officer. The Falls County­ sheriff attempted to arrest Marquard, but he backed down after McGraw intimidated him by asserting, “The Giants put this town on the map, and the Giants can just as quickly wipe it off by leaving.”6

The best chronicled event in Texas spring training history was probably Ty Cobb’s set-to with Giants second baseman Buck Herzog. The rhubarb happened during spring training in 1917, when training camps in Texas, as well as other locales, were the scene of ballplayers engaging in military drills, supposedly to prepare them for America’s anticipated entry into the Great War.

The Giants and Tigers had set a string of exhibition games to be played in Texas and points north as the two teams made their way home after their training camps closed. Herzog ragged Cobb about showing up at the last minute for an exhibition game at Gardner Park in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Cobb took offense and spiked Herzog at the first opportunity. A brawl broke out, the dugouts emptied, and the cops stormed the field.

That evening at a banquet at the Oriental Hotel, Herzog challenged Cobb to fisticuffs and was soundly trounced by him in the latter’s hotel room. A confrontation between Cobb and McGraw took place the next day in the hotel lobby. Realizing he could be a marked man for the rest of the exhibition series, Cobb refused to play in any more games until the regular season began. While he trained with the Cincinnati Reds, the Tigers and Giants continued the exhibition series, punctuated by occasional scraps. Though the teams played in different leagues, the bad blood remained.

Four years later, when both teams were training in San Antonio, the teams were still not on speaking terms, even though they were headquartered just blocks apart downtown and civic leaders were imploring them to stage exhibition contests. McGraw said he would not play unless Cobb, who had just been named Manager of the Tigers, came to him in person and requested the matchup. Cobb refused, so that was that. This was despite the fact that Hughie Jennings, the former Detroit manager who had joined the Giants coaching staff, could have served as a go-between. Ironically, it was not until the death of Jennings in 1928 that Cobb and McGraw spoke to each other again.

Since World War I had cut into baseball revenues in 1918, owners decided to cut costs and play a truncated schedule in 1919, preceded by a shortened spring training. In mid-March McGraw moved the Giants to the college town of Gainesville, Florida, for one spring. As in Marlin, however, he had secured a sweetheart deal: free use of the university facilities.

When fan interest returned during the 1919 season, the owners went back to business as usual, and McGraw returned to Texas for four years. This time, however, the Giants trained in San Antonio, which offered far more in the way of distractions than Marlin Springs.7 The team stayed at the Crockett Hotel — just a long fly ball from the Alamo and still a popular downtown destination. It might be that McGraw felt that San Antonio was now a “safe” location, given that Prohibition was in force. Actually, the city ofl62,000 provided more opportunities for procuring illegal brew. In 1923, McGraw levied an unprecedented number of fines. Most of the players could afford it, however, as McGraw boasted that he had 12 of the 14 highest paid players ( the exceptions were Rogers Hornsby and Edd Roush) in the National League.

During the early 1920s, it looked as though Texas had the potential to develop into a permanent site for spring training. Seven teams trained in Texas in 1921 and six in 1922. But in 1923 only two teams chose Texas, in 1924 only one, and in 1925 none.

Why did spring training drop off so drastically after 1922? In a word: Florida. With the help of boosters, notably Al Lang (for whom the waterfront ballpark in St. Petersburg was named), Florida and spring training quickly became synonymous. Thanks largely to two railroad magnates, John Plant on the Florida peninsula’s west coast and Henry Flagler on the east coast, rail service to Florida had improved greatly since the turn of the century. The increasing popularity of motorcars and the building of highways also played a major role in transforming Florida from an inaccessible wilderness to a tourist destination. As a result, Florida underwent a real estate boom in the 1920s and the rest of the nation — including major league club owners — couldn’t help but pay attention.8 Also, teams knew that those cold fronts that periodically swept over southern states (Texans call them “blue northers” or sometimes just “northers”) usually petered out before they got too far down the Florida peninsula, thus minimizing the games and practice time lost to bad weather in late winter and early spring.

By 1924, nine teams were training in Florida. The Grapefruit League that we know today was starting to take shape. Spring training in Texas and other Southern states wasn’t entirely dead, but the pulse was weak. Between 1926 and 1941, Texas had no more than one spring training city per year (and hosted no teams in 1934-1935), with the exception of 1939, when the Browns returned to San Antonio and the Phillies made their lone appearance (at New Braunfels) in the Lone Star State.

World War II finished off spring training in Texas. Travel restrictions forced teams to choose northern spring training sites close to their homes, but the annual Florida migration resumed after the war. Arizona also beckoned, as the Cleveland Indians and the New York Giants trained there for the first time in 1947. But spring training in Texas was history.9

If Texas was a popular destination for baseball teams during the early years of the previous century, could it make a comeback during the current century? Doubtless the smart money folks would never bet on the return of major league spring training camps to the Lone Star State. But stranger things have happened in baseball history.

FRANK JACKSON is not a native Texan, but has lived in Dallas for 30 years. He grew up rooting for the Phillies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, something he considers excellent preparation for becoming a Rangers fan.

Sources

Alexander, Charles C. John McGraw. New York: Viking, 1988.

Cataneo, David. Peanuts and Cracker Jack. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.

Evans, Wilbur and Bill Little. Texas Longhorn Baseball-Kings of the Diamond. Huntsville, AL: Strode Publishing, 1983.

Falkner, David. The Short Season: The Hard Work and High Times of Baseball in the Spring, New York: Penguin, 1986.

Fehrenbach, T.R. Lone Star. New York: Wings Books, 1991.

Frommer, Harvey. Baseball’s Greatest Managers. New York: Franklin Watts, 1985.

Graham, Frank. The New York Giants: An Informal History of a Great Baseball Club. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002; originally published in 1952.

Holaday, Chris and Mark Presswood. Baseball in Dallas. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Press, 2004.

Holaday, Chris and Mark Presswood. Baseball in Fort Worth. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Press, 2004.

O’Neal, Bill. The Texas League, 1888-1987: A Century of Baseball. Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1987.

Torres, Noe. Ghost Leagues: A History of Minor League Baseball in South Texas. Tamarac, FL: Llumina Press, 2005.

Valenza, Janet Mace. Taking the Waters in Texas; Springs, Spas and Fountains of Youth. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Wilbert, Warren N. and William C. Hageman. The 1917 White Sox: Their World Championship Season, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.

Texas 2005 State Travel Guide (Austin, 2005)

www.springtrainingonline.com

Notes

“Do you think they’ll cop that old pennant?”

“Are they going to steam us up like this and then blow?”

Everywhere you go you hear such questions. The barber asks the customer, the elevator man asks the newsboy, bank tellers can’t cash a check without some gloomy or optimistic remark. The butcher boy talks so much baseball he brings you the liver meant for the neighbor’s bull pup. Caddies aren’t worth their hire. They gather under each tree and are so busy arguing about the Browns that they lose a ball on every fairway. Conductors are so busy craning their necks at sport finals that they don’t notice if you give them last week’s transfer or drop a cent into the box instead of a token.

Baseball and the Browns have taken hold of the city. From now until the affair is settled one way or the other everything must be relegated to the classification of nonessential industry.

—Roy Stockton, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 8, 1922

In 1922, the defending American League champion New York Yankees and the St. Louis Browns battled for first place all season long. The pennant was at stake when the Yanks came to the Mound City for a three-game series in mid-September, with only a half-game lead over the Browns. The third game of what was called the “Little World Series” was played before an enormous crowd at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. With first place and ultimately the AL pennant at stake (the teams split the first two contests), the game and its finish had incredible drama, including five late-inning bad breaks that saw the game slip away from the Browns. It was arguably the most heartbreaking loss in St. Louis baseball history. “It was one of the most nerve-racking finishes ever flaunted before a St. Louis public,” John B. Sheridan wrote in the Globe-Democrat. “That one inning will remain indelible in the memory of the fans who witnessed it—to the grave. It was a nightmare.”¹

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Browns, not the Cardinals, were usually the better and more popular St. Louis team, as reflected in their records and attendance figures. Neither team had won a pennant, though the Browns were in the pennant races of 1902 and 1908 into September, and the Cards challenged late in 1914, until the Miracle Boston Braves blew past them and the New York Giants that September.² Now in 1922, both St. Louis teams were fighting for the pennant. In early August they were both in first place for a number of days. While the Cards would fade and finish tied with the Pittsburgh Pirates for third place in the National League, the Browns would fall just one game short of the 1922 AL pennant. This Browns team was probably the strongest ever, even more so than the 1944 pennant winner. The best-hitting team in baseball in 1922—they led the majors in runs scored (867), batting average (.313), on-base percentage (.372), and slugging percentage (.455)—was complemented by, surprisingly, the best pitching staff, which led the majors with the lowest earned run average (3.38) and the most strikeouts (534).

*****

It was a see-saw race all season long, with the Browns and Yankees trading first place. The Yanks faced the first six weeks of the season without their slugging outfielders, Babe Ruth and Bob Meusel, who had been suspended by Commissioner Landis for barnstorming after the 1921 World Series, in contravention of a baseball rule. When they returned to action at the Polo Grounds on May 20, it was, ironically, against Urban Shocker and the Browns. The former Yankee pitcher, who loved besting his old team, beat the Yanks and handcuffed Ruth, who failed to get the ball out of the infield. As the season went on, the Babe was suspended a few times for arguing with umpires.

The Yankees were also fighting among themselves. On several occasions during the season, fisticuffs in their dugout were witnessed by fans. And a faction on the team was working to undermine their own beleaguered manager, Miller Huggins, whom team co-owner Til Huston had wanted to replace ever since he was hired before the 1918 season. Yet the Yankees stayed in the race because of their pitching, primarily what they had acquired from the Boston Red Sox in trades in the past three years.³ Former Boston stars Joe Bush, Waite Hoyt, Sam Jones, and Carl Mays were among baseball’s best hurlers. They would win 76 percent of the Yankees’ victories (71 of 94 wins) in 1922 and 63 percent (62 of 98 wins) in 1923.

The Yankees (and the New York Giants, for that matter) had generated a lot of criticism from their rivals for using their deep pockets to corner the market for talent and “buy” pennants. In late July 1922, the Yankees generated even more condemnation, with most of the howls emanating from St. Louis, when they acquired star third baseman Joe Dugan (along with Elmer Smith) from the Red Sox for four lesser players and $50,000. This shored up one position where the Yanks were really weak, with the aging Frank “Home Run” Baker slowing down and hobbled by an injury in what would be his final big-league season.⁴ Typical was the comment of Ed Wray in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “The New York team, by right of present possession and future purchase, will endeavor to surround all the available stars of the big league world.”⁵ Veteran New York sportswriter Sid Mercer captured the mood of Missourians when he wrote on the eve of the series, “The populace is aflame with civic pride and righteous resentment against the moneybags of the East as typified by the expensive cast of the Yankees.”⁶

As the Yankees arrived in St. Louis with their half-game lead over the Browns, the New York press was concerned about the St. Louis fans, who had a reputation for being very “demonstrative” against their teams’ opponents and umpires. “All they [the Yanks] ask for is protection from the bottle and cushion throwers, for which St. Louis is famous,” wrote the Globe.⁷ Browns owner Phil Ball had additional field boxes constructed, probably figuring they would serve him well when his team reached the World Series. Sportsman’s Park was to have a crowd of close to 30,000 for each of the games, including almost 10,000 behind ropes in the outfield, “making a farce of what should be the greatest series of the season to date.”⁸ Still, the demand for tickets was not sated. The New York American noted that ticket scalpers had appeared in St. Louis for the first time for this series, selling tickets “for upwards of $15.”⁹

Both New York and St. Louis were caught up in the excitement. The Browns had never won an AL pennant, and the Yankees had captured only their first one in 1921. “Everything else,” the normally staid New York Times declared before this series, “was second [to these games]—war clouds, Armenian massacres, rail strikes, coal shortages.”¹⁰ The diminished playing field figured to make the games high-scoring affairs, with many ground-rule doubles.

St. Louis first baseman George Sisler had been on fire at the plate. He had hit safely in 39 straight games. But he had injured his shoulder in Monday’s game against Detroit, reaching for an errant throw. He had not played in the four games since then and had been taking “electric treatments” to ease the pain.¹¹ When he came out for batting practice before the first game with New York, cheers rippled through the ballpark. It appeared that he would be in the lineup, though just how effective he would be remained a question.

*****

The first game, played on Saturday afternoon, September 16, pitted Urban Shocker against the Yankees’ Bob Shawkey. Shocker often insisted on starting twice against his former teammates, the Yankees, in a four-game series. After years of being known as a “Yankee jinx,” he had already lost to them five times that year (against four Shocker wins), though he had already extended his win total to 23. In the bottom of the ninth, with New York clinging to a 2–1 lead, Yankee center fielder Whitey Witt was hit by a pop bottle (thrown from the bleachers) and knocked unconscious as he and Meusel were going for Eddie Foster’s fly ball.

For a few seconds, as fans spilled out of the stands and the Yankees came charging out of their dugout, many with bats in hand, the game seemed in danger of slipping out of control. Police were able to regain control, perhaps because the crowd was subdued at the sight of a bloody and unconscious Witt. The incident seemed to sap the hometown fans of their will to win. Many were actually rooting for Shawkey to retire Sisler and Ken Williams to end the game. He did. Sisler said afterward that the incident “had taken the heart out of the Browns.”¹² The Browns’ star, obviously bothered by his bad shoulder, did get a hit, a double, to tie Ty Cobb’s AL mark of hitting safely in 40 consecutive games.¹³ For the third time in 1922, the Yankees had beaten Shocker by the score of 2–1.

The front-page headlines in the New York newspaper the World proclaimed, “Rabid Fans Hurl Pop Bottles” and “Comrades Fight Mob with Bats to Reach Unconscious Player.” The Yankees won the first game, wrote Monitor in the column below, “amid scenes of riot and disorder never before seen on an American ball field.”¹⁴ Home-plate umpire Billy Evans recalled the time a St. Louis bottle had knocked him unconscious and fractured his skull in this ballpark, on September 15, 1907.

The Browns’ team doctor, Robert Hyland, said that Witt was fortunate the injury was not more severe. “The blow from the bottle caused a severe contusion, and laceration of the forehead and slight concussion of the brain,” he declared.¹⁵ Phil Ball put up a $500 reward to apprehend the bottle-thrower, saying, “Certainly it is a most deploring [sic] incident, the act of a rank sport.” League president Ban Johnson added a $1,000 reward. Yankees co-owner Colonel Huston called it “a dirty attack,” but noted that it was “the act of an individual hoodlum and not to be blamed on the St. Louis crowd.”¹⁶

He urged manager Huggins not to endanger his men: “Insist on protection for your players, and if you don’t get it, withdraw your team from the field. I don’t propose to have New York players risk their lives to play this game.”¹⁷ Ball did announce that bottled refreshments would not be sold in the bleachers for the rest of the series.

*****

The Browns won the second game on Sunday, a 5–1 five-hitter tossed by screwball pitcher Hub Pruett, who “held the slugging Yanks in the hollow of his hand,” in the words of the New York Times.¹⁸ The rookie pitcher (who would finish the season at 7–7 and a 2.33 earned run average) had handcuffed the Babe all season long, repeatedly striking him out on that fadeaway pitch. In this game Ruth finally broke through against the screwballer with a home run that gave New York a 1–0 lead in the sixth inning. There was drama in the fifth, when Whitey Witt backed into the crowd to make a catch. In the Browns’ three-run sixth, George Sisler got a hit to extend his streak to forty-one games. In the top of the eighth, umpire Billy Evans stopped play until the center-field fans tucked away their white hankies, which they had been waving, making it almost impossible for the Yankee hitters to pick up the ball. In the bottom of the inning, Ken Williams capped the Browns’ scoring with a two-run shot, his thirty-eighth home run (off Sam Jones in relief of Waite Hoyt), on his way to amassing a league-leading 39. After the game, upper-grandstand fans hurled their heavy leather seat cushions onto the open New York press box below. “The St. Louis fans certainly all have good arms,” wrote Sid Mercer, “and they are undoubtedly the most savage rooters on the major league circuit.”¹⁹

*****

The third game of the series would determine first place. Would the Yankees leave St. Louis with a 11⁄2–game lead with less than two weeks remaining in the season, or would the Browns recapture the lead, albeit by only half a game? The pennant hanging in the balance, the series finale would reach its climax with a series of moves and countermoves befitting a World Series Game 7.

The Yankees started Joe Bush, going for his twenty-fifth win. The Browns were expected to start either Elam Vangilder (who was on his way to a 19-win season) or, seeing the success that the southpaw Pruett had against the Yankee lineup, lefty Billy Bayne. But manager Lee Fohl tabbed Dixie Davis instead. Davis had made three trips to the majors without a win in the 1910s (with the 1912 Reds, 1915 White Sox, and 1918 Phillies). He joined the Browns in 1920 and won 34 games for them in 1920–21. With so much at stake, Davis responded with the game of his life.

Although a Monday game, it drew around 30,000, the biggest crowd the Browns had drawn at home all season. Long before the age of blogs and the Internet, the center-field fans somehow communicated with each other and showed up wearing white shirts. Throughout the game, they would sway back and forth, arm in arm, an effective replacement for the waving hankies.

For seven innings, Davis held the Yankees to just two hits, both of them infield hits by Witt. Bush was almost as effective; without the crowd, he too would have had a shutout. “On an open field,” New York sportswriter Frank O’Neill wrote, “Joe was never better in his long and interesting life.”²⁰ In the fourth inning, the crowd behind the outfield ropes stepped back to let Browns outfielder Baby Doll Jacobson catch Wally Pipp’s fly ball. Yankees manager Miller Huggins jumped out of the dugout and protested that Pipp should be awarded a double. But the umpires ruled that Jacobson did not go behind the outfield ropes but fell against them. Twice during the game, Ruth tried to penetrate the wall of fans, unsuccessfully.

In the fifth inning, Jacobson’s drive into the crowd was a ground-rule double, as the crowd held firm against Witt, preventing him from making a play on the ball. It was the Browns’ first hit of the game. Marty McManus singled him to third, and Jacobson scored on Hank Severeid’s fly, for which Ruth did force himself into the crowd. In the seventh inning, Ken Williams hit a line drive that would have been an easy catch for Meusel but eluded the Babe and went into the crowd to become “another St. Louis two-bagger.”²¹ McManus then doubled him home, after Jacobson had sacrificed him to third. It would be the Browns’ final run of the game. At this point, the Yankees had scored but one run in 22 innings.

The eighth inning started well for the Browns, as for the first time that day Davis managed to retire Witt. Then Joe Dugan doubled for the first real hit of the game for New York. Davis then struck Ruth out on three pitches, including a curve for a called strike three—out number two. (Ruth went 0 for 4 that day and was not a factor.) Then came the first of five breaks—lucky breaks for the Yankees, bad breaks for the Browns. Wally Pipp singled off Davis’s glove. (Bad break 1.) The ball dribbled to second baseman McManus, who had no chance of throwing Pipp out, and he compounded the matter by throwing to first rather than holding onto the ball. He threw the ball away, and Dugan came in to score. (Bad break 2.) The Yankees had closed the score to 2–1. Davis then rebounded by striking out Meusel, again with a called strike three. The Browns were now just three outs away from taking back first place, but their lead had been shaved down to one run.

After Bush retired the Browns in the bottom of the eighth, Davis returned to the mound. Improbably, Yankees catcher Wally Schang got the second infield hit in two innings off Davis’s glove. (Bad break 3.) Miller Huggins now went to his bench and sent lefty Elmer Smith to the plate to pinch-hit for Aaron Ward. Smith was best known for his heroics in the 1920 World Series, when as an outfielder for the Cleveland Indians he became the first player to hit a grand slam in postseason play. Smith’s greatest value was actually as a pinch hitter—he would finish his career at 39 for 123, for a .317 batting average.²² The first pitch to Smith got away from catcher Severeid. (Bad break 4) On the passed ball, Schang moved to second.

Lee Fohl then made a move that would be discussed and analyzed for years. He decided to pull Davis. According to some accounts, Davis had weakened; the St. Louis Globe-Democrat said that Fohl had no choice, now that there was a runner in scoring position. But the Browns’ pitcher had not been hit hard. “Davis was to be pitied,” the World wrote. “He pitched a remarkable game, one entirely unexpected for him, but Fohl apparently had no confidence in him when things began to break badly.”²³ Fohl later explained that what he had in mind was something different. He went for the lefty–lefty matchup, a strategy not yet commonly used in those days.²⁴ “I took him [Davis] out because I thought we could win with the shift,” he said.²⁵

Fohl then brought in the previous day’s pitcher, the southpaw Pruett. Roy Stockton noted that this was where most of the second-guessers were focusing: not so much on whether Davis should have been pulled but on whether Pruett was the one to have been brought in. Why not Vangilder, who won impressively on Friday, or the team’s ace, Shocker? Clearly, these observers were not considering the advantages of a lefty–lefty matchup. Vangilder and Shocker were both right-handed. Sid Keener, sports editor of the St. Louis Times, understood. “Fohl’s plan was to get Smith out of the game by calling for a southpaw.”²⁶ In that he succeeded.

With the lefty now pitching, Huggins pulled Smith and put in the right-handed utilityman Mike McNally, who laid down a bunt. Catcher Severeid threw low and wide (to the foul side) to third, and Schang slid in safely. (Bad break 5) It was an aggressive move, going for the win, for the lead runner. A perfect throw would have nipped Schang at third. There were now two men on base, at the corners, and no one out. Pruett then walked Everett Scott on four pitches; the game accounts indicate that it was not intentional.²⁷ Fohl now pulled Pruett for Urban Shocker, who had saved a number of games for the Browns in the past three seasons.²⁸ Huggins decided to let Joe Bush, a good hitter, bat for himself. (A career .253 hitter with seven home runs and 59 doubles, Bush hit .325 in 1921 and .326 in 1922.) He grounded to McManus, who threw home. The throw was in the dirt, but Severeid got it on the first bounce to force Schang. Huggins then considered pinch-hitting the left-handed Frank Baker but stayed with Witt, another lefty. With the bandages still wrapped around his forehead, Witt stroked a clean single up the middle, scoring McNally and Scott. “Here was divine retribution, or poetic justice of the first order,” wrote Harry Schumacher.²⁹ The Yankees had taken the lead, 3–2. Shocker then retired Joe Dugan on an inning-ending double play.

Sisler, Williams, and Jacobson, the heart of the Browns’ lineup, went quietly in the bottom of the ninth. Sisler’s streak had ended at 41. He would finish the season with a .420 batting average, but late in the season the injury had begun to take its toll. In this critical series, he managed but two hits in 11 at bats.

In at least one New York newspaper, the dramatic finish was described gloatingly. “Already St. Louis had raised the brimming bowl to its lips to drink deep of the nectar      Almost before they knew it, the Browns were beaten and the sounds of reverie died. The silence was sepulchral.”³⁰ Accounts given by St. Louis sportswriters were less emotional and more balanced. Roy Stockton wrote that “it took a series of unfortunate breaks to give the Yankees that lead but then it took some good fortune to give the Browns the lead they had.”³¹ Ed Wray suggested baseball institute a rule banning fans on the field during a game. “A game played with the two-base rule for hits into the crowd is manifestly not a championship contest       The defending team is not permitted proper range for fielding hits.”³²

John Sheridan, who wrote for the Globe-Democrat in addition to his weekly column in The Sporting News, summed up the heartache of Brown fans: “Just like the old-time story books in which we used to read about fairies vanishing, so did a one-run lead the Brownies held going into the final inning waft into oblivion.”³³ Years later, George Sisler “murmured nostalgically,” saying of that fateful inning: “I’ll never forget that last inning. We just couldn’t get a break and they couldn’t get the ball out of the infield until that last fatal hit by Witt.”³⁴

The Yankees now had a record of 88–56, 11⁄2 games ahead of the Browns, at 87–58. But the season was not over. New York had ten games remaining, all on the road, while St. Louis had nine contests left, all at home. Harry Schumacher of the Globe understood what the Browns were up against. “The Browns will have to be game, indeed, to rally from this jolt, and the writer, for one, doubts if they can do it.”³⁵

St. Louis lost two to the Senators and split their first two games against the lowly Athletics, while New York swept the Tigers and won their first two games against Cleveland, to extend their streak to six. By Saturday, September 23, the Browns were 41⁄2 games back of the Yankees and all but finished. Then they “righted the ship” and won their last four games, while the Yankees lost three straight, including two to the last-place Red Sox. Bush and Shawkey were beaten by ex-Yanks Rip Collins and Jack Quinn, 3–1 and 1–0, respectively. But the Yanks beat the Red Sox on the second-to-last day of the season, when Herb Pennock was replaced as the Boston starter by another former Yankee, Alex Ferguson. The Yankees struck for three runs in the first inning. While Pennock was effective in long relief, Waite Hoyt beat Boston, 3–1, and the Yankees held on to win the pennant by one game.

Postscripts

Four months later, the Yankees would make their final big deal of this era with the Red Sox, acquiring Herb Pennock.

The Browns would declare that the bottle-thrower was a youngster. Supposedly, the bottle did not hit Witt directly but rather flew up to his forehead when Whitey had stepped on it. “Everybody in St. Louis felt that the man who made up that story deserved the $1000 [reward money],” Robert Creamer wrote.³⁶

In a sidebar to Dixie Davis’s obituary in The Sporting News on February 10, 1944, it was noted that this game of September 18, 1922, “has been the subject of more telephone inquiries than any other sports event of Mound City history,” including Grover Alexander’s dazzling performance in the 1926 World Series. 

This article is based on a presentation the author made at the SABR National Convention in St. Louis on July 26, 2007.

STEVE STEINBERG is author of Baseball in St. Louis, 1900-1925 (Arcadia, 2004) and co-author, with Lyle Spatz, of 1921: Babe Ruth, John McGraw, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York (Nebraska, 2010). He has a baseball history website, www.stevesteinberg.net.

NOTES

1. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 19 September 1922.
2. The Browns of the American Association won four straight AA pennants between 1885 and 1888. The American League’s Browns, who began play in 1902, had no connection with that franchise other than taking its name.
3. Besides the players they traded to Boston to secure these four pitchers, the Yankees also sent $240,000 in cash to Red Sox owner Harry See the author’s article “The Curse of the . . . Hurlers?” in The Baseball Research Journal 35 (2006): 63–73.
4. Ironically, an Urban Shocker fastball to Baker’s ribs had sidelined him earlier in the The Browns responded on August 22 by acquiring their own third baseman from the Red Sox. However, thirty-five-year-old Eddie Foster, nearing the end of his playing career, was no Joe Dugan.
5. 20 September 1922. One result of this outcry was that, before the next season, Major League Baseball would move the trading deadline up from July 31 to June 1.
6. New York Evening Journal, 16 September 1922.
7. Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York), 16 September 1922.
8. The Post-Dispatch reported an attendance of 27,000 for the first game. While it was not uncommon for teams of this era to allow fans on the field, it was a practice neither the Giants nor the Yankees permitted at home, at the Polo Grounds, despite the considerable potential revenue that was at stake.
9. New York American, 17 September 1922.
10. New York Times, 17 September 1922.
11. New York Times, 19 September 1922.
12. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 17 September 1922.
13. None of the newspapers mentioned the nineteenth-century records of Willie Keeler (44 games in 1897) or Bill Dahlen (42 in 1894).
14. 17 September 1922. “Monitor” was the pseudonym of sportswriter George Daley.
15. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 17 September 1922.
16. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 17 September 1922.
17. New York Evening Journal, 18 September 1922.
18. New York Times, 18 September 1922.
19. New York Evening Journal, 18 September 1922.
20. Sun (New York), 19 September 1922.
21. World (New York), 19 September Yet the New York American said it was almost a home run. Often there were such conflicting accounts of plays in different papers. Since this was long before the advent of video, there is no way for historians to resolve these differences.
22. The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, 10 ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1996). As a pinch-hitter, Smith was 6 for 21 (.286 batting average) in 1922 and would go 11 for 21 (.524 BA) in 1923.
23. World (New York), 19 September 1922.
24. On Tris Speaker’s Indians, Smith had regularly platooned in the outfield with Smoky Joe Speaker had popularized the concept, which was then called a “double-batting shift” or “reversible” hitters. The word “platooning” did not even exist in baseball at the time.
25. St. Louis Times, 19 September 1922.
26. St. Louis Times, 20 September 1922.
27. The Globe-Democrat, for example, said that Pruett appeared rattled after McNally’s bunt, suggesting the walk was not intentional (19 September 1922).
28. From 1920 to 1922, Shocker appeared in relief 29 times and got 12 saves, which were awarded retroactively many years later. Saves were not computed as early as 1922.
29. Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York), 19 September 1922.
30. Evening Telegram (New York), 19 September 1922.
31. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 September 1922.
32. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 20 September 1922.
33. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 19 September 1922.
34. Tom Meany, Baseball’s Greatest Hitters (New York: S. Barnes, 1950), 185–86.
35. Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York), 19 September 1922.
36. Robert Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 266.