Zach Wheat Experience

Monday, January 11, 2021

Joseph Walker (Shoeless Joe) Jackson
Philadelphia Athletics—Cleveland—Chicago White Sox, 1908-1920

One of the greatest pure hitters in baseball history, Shoeless Joe hit .356 in his career, third highest in baseball history behind only his great rival Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby. Babe Ruth copied his swing. Became a movie icon long after his death. “The thrill of the grass.” Took money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series.

In one of my early attempts to do the Baseball 100, I included Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
Who never ever learned to read or write so well
But he could play guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell
— “Johnny B. Goode,” Chuck Berry

Joe Jackson could play baseball just like a-ringin’ a bell. Nobody knows how he learned to play. Nobody knows who coached him. He shows up in his story a complete ballplayer, 13 years old, entirely unschooled, already a veteran of the Brandon Mill textile factory in his hometown of Greenville, S.C.

He can throw so hard the mill team makes him a pitcher — and he breaks a batter’s arm by plunking him with a fastball.

He hits so well the people in town chant his name and throw coins at him.

He is so beloved a local artisan named Charlie Ferguson decides Joe Jackson deserves the grandest and most beautiful baseball bat ever made. He sculpts and whittles a perfect 48-ounce bat, then darkens it with tobacco juice. Joe falls in love with the bat and would use it for the rest of his baseball life, even after it broke (he sent it to a bat company to fix). Joe calls it “Black Betsy.”

This is a folk hero’s story. I think that’s why so many people are drawn to it even now, more than 100 years later. Joe Jackson’s baseball life starts with the innocent exuberance of a boy who plays ball for the pure joy of it. Every minute on the field is a minute spent in the sunshine and on the grass, far outside the dank and gloomy confines of Brandon Mill. He plays baseball with boundless talent; there is nothing he cannot do in the game. He swings Black Betsy with such force and rhythm — “I copied my swing after Joe Jackson’s, it is the perfectest,” Babe Ruth once said — that people come from all over South Carolina to see him play. They call his longest home run drives “Saturday Specials.”

And here’s the heart of the story: All of this was enough for Joe Jackson. He would always think of this as the best time of his life. He is getting paid $2.50 a game — double his pay sweating at Brandon Mill — and opportunities are endless. Other mills hire him to play ball, too. Crowds chant his name. He plays ball and drinks corn whiskey and lives a bigger life than he ever could have hoped for, a bigger life than his father, George, who toils unhappily in the factory every day with no baseball to brighten things.

Three days after his 21st birthday, Joe Jackson marries Katie Wynn, and for the rest of his life, Katie will read to him, write for him, protect him, defend him. It would have been enough for Joe.

But you couldn’t play ball like Joe Jackson and stay a secret. Even before he marries Kate, a man named Tom Stouch — who had played ball for almost two decades from Philadelphia to Atlanta, Providence to Selma — offers Jackson a joy playing baseball full time for his team, the Greenville Spinners. Jackson turns him down. He is making 45 dollars every month playing for all those factory teams, more than he ever expected to make, and he is blissfully happy.

“I will pay you $75 a month,” Stouch said.

You can imagine Joe Jackson’s eyes opening wider than they ever had before.

“I’ll play my head off for $75 a month,” Jackson said.

He signs the contract with an X.

And that’s when the story of Johnny B. Goode ends and the story of Shoeless Joe begins.

Joe Jackson insisted all his life he only played one game without shoes, and that was when he played for Tom Stouch’s Greenville Spinners. Jackson developed agonizing blisters while wearing a new pair of cleats. He asked to sit out a game in Anderson, S.C., so his feet could recover. Tom Stouch wasn’t paying Jackson 75 bucks a month to sit, and he reminded Jackson of his promise to play his head off. So Joe Jackson played in his stocking feet.

“You shoeless bastard, you!” one fan shouted at him as Jackson slid into third for what might be professional baseball’s only shoeless triple.

Jackson hated the Shoeless Joe nickname for the rest of his life.

Tom Stouch knew before anybody else just how good a baseball player Joe Jackson was; he knew Jackson was destined to become a big-league star. He almost immediately began writing letters to the biggest man in baseball, Philadelphia manager Connie Mack himself, and described Jackson’s greatness. Mack was intrigued enough to send two scouts to watch Jackson play, and they both immediately wired back: Sign Jackson no matter the cost.

Connie Mack paid Stouch $900 — about $25,000 in today’s money — for the rights to Joe Jackson. Stouch was thrilled, not only for the money but because he loved Joe and believed he was fulfilling the young man’s dreams.

But he was wrong: Joe Jackson was already living his dream.

And he wasn’t going to Philadelphia.

“I hardly know as how I’d like it in those big Northern cities,” Jackson told Stouch. Joe had never left South Carolina. He had no interest in leaving South Carolina. He had no interest, as the newspapers reported, going up North and “bumping into strangers by himself.”

Stouch remained adamant Jackson was just having a little stage fright. He’d get up to Philadelphia and realize he had made the big time. Stouch even took the train up North with Jackson. As David Fleitz wrote in his book “Shoeless,” they met at the train station. Stouch made sure Jackson got on. Stouch made sure Jackson got seated comfortably. Stouch explained the plan a few times: When they got to Philadelphia, he would take Jackson to the ballpark and personally introduce him to Mack, and make sure he was settled.

Then, Stouch left Jackson alone to enjoy the ride. When the train reached Philadelphia, Joe Jackson was gone.

Stouch rushed to the ballpark in a panic; he worried Jackson had been kidnapped or worse. Mack shook his head and showed him the telegram he had just received.

“AM UNABLE TO COME TO PHILADELPHIA AT THIS TIME. JOE JACKSON.”

Joe Jackson had jumped the train in Charlotte and returned home.

Mack was outraged. He sent an injured ballplayer, Socks Seybold, down to South Carolina with the orders of bringing Jackson to Philadelphia even if it meant “his whole family to come back with you.”

Jackson did go to Philadelphia with Seybold … and he immediately showed off his great talent … and he hated every minute of it. Jackson’s teammates cruelly mocked him for being Southern, for being odd and, mostly, for being illiterate. Of all the Shoeless Joe images, the one I find most touching and haunting is of him pretending to read magazines on the train, sometimes even shouting out, “Wow, that’s some story!”

In all, Joe Jackson tried three times to sneak on a train and go back to the safety and warmth of his South Carolina home.

“Shoeless Joe Jackson has returned to his home in Greenville,” The Washington Post reported. “Big league life wasn’t just to the young man’s liking. … Joe had just about one week of mingling with city folk when he concluded he was never cut out for the Major League. He told Connie Mack so, and added that he’d rather be a star in the bushes than struggle for a regular place on a big-league team.”

Mack tried to win over Jackson. He offered everything he knew to offer, including a chance to go to school and learn how to read and write. “But the boy refused every inducement,” the Post wrote. “Promises of big salary, education, fine clothes for his girl wife and many other things were ignored.”

In the end, Joe Jackson played only 10 games for the Athletics and wasn’t about to play any more. Mack, at a loss, traded Jackson to Cleveland in 1910. It altered Joe Jackson’s baseball life, but Mack never quite got over it. In 1941, Ted Williams entered his final games against the Athletics in position to hit .400. He famously went 6-for-8 in a season-ending doubleheader to finish at .406, and Mack watched from the other dugout thinking of another lefty hitter.

“I wish I had a Williams,” Mack said. “I had one once. And I lost him.”

Joe & Ty compare batting stances.

Shoeless Joe Jackson never forgot that they came sweet-talking him. Once he accepted he couldn’t go back to South Carolina, that he was going to be a big-league ballplayer, he focused on two things: One, playing extraordinary, even unprecedented, baseball; and two, keeping an eye on the bastards to make sure they weren’t cheating him.

He hit .408 in his first full season with Cleveland. His friend and nemesis, Ty Cobb, won the batting title by hitting .420. Cobb used his fellow Southerner as a muse to bring out his own best baseball. Cobb had never before hit .400, but faced up against a new rival, he set career highs in doubles, triples, runs, hits and RBIs.

Even though their numbers look similar, Jackson and Cobb played the game differently. Cobb was a man of his time. He hit with hands held apart, and he bunted, slashed, intimidated, and willed his way forward. He had no use for Babe Ruth’s slugging baseball when it was thrust upon him, and he never stopped railing against it. He saw baseball as a sweet science, much in the same way pugilists of the time saw boxing.

Jackson was a man of the future. It’s no accident Ruth copied his swing. Jackson kept his hands together, his stroke was fluid and powerful and, yes, modern. As Fleitz wrote, people heard a different sound when the ball came off Joe Jackson’s bat. If Ruth was Elvis, Joe Jackson was the country blues singer who got there first.

Jackson hit .395 and led the league in hits and triples in his second year. He hit .373 and led the league in hits and doubles in his third.

But make no mistake, he wasn’t happy. Years later, in the movie “Field of Dreams,” Shoeless Joe lamented his life and talk about how he loved baseball so much he would have played it for free. This was probably never true of the real Joe Jackson, but it certainly wasn’t true after he made it to the major leagues. By 1913, he was entirely convinced the bastards were cheating him. Cleveland’s owner was a man named Charles Somers who had spent a lot of his money just keeping the American League afloat in its early years.

Jackson felt sure Somers was underpaying him. Cobb was making more. The owners were making more. Everybody was making more. He’d had enough.

Jackson threatened to quit baseball to go into vaudeville. He threatened to quit the American League and go play in the Federal League. Finally, he demanded Cleveland deal him to a winner so he could get “some of that sweet World Series money.”

Somers, who once was among the richest men in America but had lost everything, had no choice but to give in and trade Jackson to the Chicago White Sox.

And now, the story starts to become familiar, right? The White Sox owner was that famed cheapskate, Charles Comiskey, and everybody knows he treated his players poorly, backed out of giving them bonuses they were promised, made them launder their own uniforms, etc.

Jackson hit .395 and led the league in hits and triples in his second year. He hit .373 and led the league in hits and doubles in his third.

Jackson felt sure Somers was underpaying him. Cobb was making more. The owners were making more. Everybody was making more. He’d had enough.

Somers, who once was among the richest men in America but had lost everything, had no choice but to give in and trade Jackson to the Chicago White Sox.

Only … it’s not clear any of that is quite right. In studying the Black Sox scandal, and uncovering countless myths about it, the Society for American Baseball Research discovered Comiskey was actually among the highest-paying owners in baseball (his team had a significantly higher payroll than the Cincinnati Reds, who they faced in the World Series). This is not to say he wasn’t cheating the players; of course, he was. He just wasn’t cheating the players any more than other owners.

In any case, Comiskey was extremely popular in the press. So when Jackson got into those now-familiar battles with Comiskey over salary, back pay, and other things, reporters sided with Comiskey. They played up Jackson’s greed, his ungratefulness and, just to add color to the story, his inability to read. In 1918, with World War I raging on, Jackson — as the sole support for his wife and mother — was given the option to work for a shipbuilding company rather than going to fight.

Comiskey cruelly called Jackson a coward. “There is no room on my club for players who wish to evade the army draft by entering the employ of ship concerns,” he snarled. It was the harshest insult imaginable, and Joe Jackson would not forget.

Then came the end. Jackson, feeling cheated and betrayed and angry, took $5,000 from gamblers to help throw the 1919 World Series. There is no question he took the money. Not only that, but he admitted later he threatened to reveal the whole plot unless he got paid. He famously hit .375 for the series with a homer and did not commit an error, but a close look at the play-by-play showed he went hitless with runners in scoring position and didn’t really start hitting until after gamblers failed to come up with the money and the White Sox players decided to try to win.

Jackson always insisted he did not do anything to lose the actual games — which is dubious considering his insistence on getting paid later — but even if it’s true, his agreement was a big reason the fix ever got going in the first place. Once they had the team’s best pitcher in Eddie Cicotte, and the team’s best player in Jackson, the gamblers had what they needed to inspire faith the White Sox were going to lose.

Jackson returned to play ball in 1920 and even while the Black Sox investigation raged on, he had his best season in years. He hit .382, slugged .589, and led the league in triples at age 32.

And then he was banned for life.

After he was banished from the major leagues, Joe Jackson returned to the small Southern towns where his baseball life began. He played ball until he was almost 50. This has been played off as sad — a larger-than-life figure, now out of shape, playing in the sandlots against townsfolk.

But the truth is, those sandlots, that’s where he was happiest. He had known that instinctively, right from the start, even while supposedly smarter people had told him what he wanted. Jackson opened a liquor store a few blocks from where he grew up. He and Katie never had any children, but Shoeless Joe would spend much of his later years teaching the kids in the neighborhood how to play ball. Sometimes he would buy them ice cream.

Late in his life, Cobb and Jackson crossed paths. The story is quite famous, an older Joe Jackson looking away as the legend approached.

“Don’t you know me?” Cobb said.

“Sure I do, Ty,” Joe Jackson said. “But I didn’t think you knew me.”

My favorite part of the story, though, is less known. At one point, Ty Cobb told Shoeless Joe: “Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I’d stop … and take a good look at you.”

Joe Jackson died four years later. He was 63. Nearly four decades later, Ray Liotta played Shoeless Joe Jackson in the movie “Field of Dreams.” In the movie, he threw left-handed and batted right-handed, the opposite of real life. All of it was the opposite of real life, though.

Should Joe Jackson be in the Hall of Fame? Like with every player in this list, it depends on what you think the Hall of Fame represents. If you are one who believes all the greatest players, regardless of their more human flaws, regardless of how they might have hurt the game, belong in the Hall, then yes, Jackson should be in there.

If you believe the Hall of Fame is, instead, an honor meant for those great players who are, above all else, a credit to the game, then no, you can’t vote for him. Joe Jackson helped throw a World Series and, along the way, endangered the game’s very future. There aren’t many things you can do on the field that are worse than that.

My own view is Joe Jackson is an integral part of baseball history. There are others I’d put in first. But, eventually, yes, I would get to Shoeless Joe.

“If I had been the kind of fellow who brooded when things went wrong,” Jackson said, “I probably would have gone out of my mind … I would have been bitter and resentful because I would have felt I had been wronged. But I haven’t been resentful at all. … I gave baseball my best.”

(his team had a significantly higher payroll than the Cincinnati Reds, who they faced in the World Series). This is not to say he wasn’t cheating the players; of course, he was. He just wasn’t cheating the players any more than other owners.

Jackson returned to play ball in 1920 and even while the Black Sox investigation raged on, he had his best season in years. He hit .382, slugged .589, and led the league in triples at age 32.

And then he was banned for life.

Late in his life, Cobb and Jackson crossed paths. The story is quite famous, an older Joe Jackson looking away as the legend approached.

“Don’t you know me?” Cobb said.

“Sure I do, Ty,” Joe Jackson said. “But I didn’t think you knew me.”

My favorite part of the story, though, is less known. At one point, Ty Cobb told Shoeless Joe: “Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I’d stop … and take a good look at you.”

Joe Jackson died four years later. He was 63. Nearly four decades later, Ray Liotta played Shoeless Joe Jackson in the movie “Field of Dreams.” In the movie, he threw left-handed and batted right-handed, the opposite of real life. All of it was the opposite of real life, though. Couldn't be helped, thet had cast Liotta already, and he was a right handed thrower and left handed hitter.

My own view is Joe Jackson is an integral part of baseball history. There are others I’d put in first. But, eventually, yes, I would get to Shoeless Joe.

Monday, March 30, 2020

Ode to The Big Train

“Now I’m in Weiser, Idaho on a wild goose chase here to look over some palooka who was burning up the Snake River Valley Semi-Pro League. Someone sent the Senators a telegram, said there was a kid, Johnson, threw so fast you couldn’t see ’em, and that he knew where he was throwing it too because if he didn’t, there’d be dead bodies buried at home plates all over Idaho.
“I get to the field just in time to see him shamble out to the mound, all arms and legs, eyes down like he doesn’t even want to be there. Then, holy smoke, 19 years old and no one in big league ball ever had a fast one like this. So I offer the kid $500 to join the Senators. You know what that hayseed said? If I promise him train fare home in case he don’t make it, he’ll come. I say, ‘Kid, a one-way ticket’s all you’re gonna need.’”

This will sound corny, absolutely, but there’s something sacred about the fastball. At the heart of this American game, beneath the strategies, the analytics, the statistics, the sacrifices, the shifts, the legends, the movements, the infield fly rule, there’s a player with a ball and there’s a player with a bat, and they stand 60 feet, 6 inches away from each other.
The player with the ball throws it as hard as he can.
The player with the bat tries to hit it. Good Luck.
That is the spark of baseball, that little piece of magic that rises above and grabs the heart and gives this game something that resembles timelessness. You don’t have to understand anything about stealing signs or linear weights or launch angles or tunneling or working the count to grasp and feel awed by what my friend Jon Hock — who I worked with on the documentary “Fastball” — calls “a primal battle between a man with a stick and a man with a rock.”
And to think that the pitcher who might have thrown the most mind-blowing fastball of them all was just a nice guy from Humboldt, Kan. who threw sidearm more than 100 years ago — well, yes, it sounds corny, but that’s OK because if you can’t say something corny about baseball, especially now, what’s the point of anything?

There have been many, many pitchers with great fastballs. I keep an updated list of 50 on my computer, the 50 I believe threw the hardest fastballs of them all. You’d recognize most of the names: Rube Waddell; Smoky Joe Wood; Smokey Joe Williams; Lefty Grove; Van Lingle Mungo; Ryne Duren; Sandy Koufax; Herb Score; Sudden Sam McDowell; Goose Gossage; Roger Clemens; Rob Dibble; Randy Johnson Billy Wagner; Justin Verlander; Joel Zumaya; Noah Syndergaard; Jordan Hicks and so on.

But I believe there are seven fastball pitchers who transcended, seven pitchers who blew up the conception of what a fastball looks and sounds like. These are pitchers I like to think of as “X” in that famous algebraic equation: “Wow, this pitcher throws even harder than X” or “Nobody every threw harder than X.”
The first of these was Amos Rusie, the Hoosier Thunderbolt, who pitched in the 1890s and first inspired the famous quote, “You can’t hit ’em if you can’t see ’em.” John McGraw said that of Rusie’s pitches. There are those who believe that Rusie, more than any other player of the time, was responsible for the National League moving the pitcher’s box from 50 feet away to 60 feet, 6 inches. Hitters were that frightened of his fastball.

And for more than 20 years after Rusie began throwing that blazing fastball, newspaper writers would compare other pitchers to him. The list of comparables included Waddell, George Meakim, a Yale pitcher named Carter, a Philadelphia area semi-pro pitcher named Stein, Harry “Beans” Keener, Pink Hawley, Archie “Lumbago” Stimmel, Doc McJames, and no, I have not made up any of these names. Each of them, the writers claimed, “has as much speed as Rusie.”
None of them, obviously, really did have as much speed as Rusie. It’s just that they threw pretty hard and Rusie’s fastball was as far the imagination went.
Those comparisons continued until the mid-1910s when Walter Johnson came along. He’s second on the list.

Third was Bob Feller, who just showed up as a high school pitcher from little Van Meter, Iowa and threw fastballs so hard that major-league hitters flinched. Nobody in baseball history, by the way, worked harder to figure out the exact speed of his fastball. He raced a motorcycle with it. He threw it through numerous contraptions. His most famous reading was 98.6 mph, which seemed perfect since 98.6 is also supposed to be the temperature of the human body.*

Satchel Paige, fourth on the list, had a mythical fastball. It wasn’t just breathtakingly fast, it was also perfectly placed where Ol’ Satch wanted to throw it. That combination of power and control is probably unmatched in baseball history. “I never threw an illegal pitch,” Paige once said. “The trouble is, once in a while I would toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.”
Fifth on the list is a folk hero, Steve Dalkowski, who never threw a single pitch in the Major Leagues and, in fact, only managed to get into 15 games in Triple A. But he threw so impossibly hard that he was, at least in part, the inspiration for both Nuke Laloosh of “Bull Durham” and George Plimpton’s April Fool’s Day pitcher Sidd Finch. He really was an almost fictional character with a lightning bolt fastball. And he just couldn’t throw it for strikes. In 1960, in Class-C ball, he pitched 170 innings, struck out 262 and walked 262. But people who saw the pitch said no one ever threw it faster, and the witnesses included Ted Williams, who faced Dalkowski just once in batting practice and promised that he never would again.

Sixth is Nolan Ryan . His fastball needs no introduction or explanation. Nobody will ever strike out more batters. No one will ever walk more batters either. No one will ever throw more no-hitters. In “Fastball,” physicists concluded that Ryan most likely threw the ball harder than anyone in baseball history (his renowned 100.9 mph pitch, which for years was declared the fastest pitch ever by the Guinness Book of World Records, was, again by today’s standards, adjusted to 108.5 mph).
And, seventh, at last, is Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, who has thrown 17 of the 20 fastest pitches ever recorded by Statcast, including the top seven. He was clocked at 105.1 mph.
We can argue forever — and with no possibility of consensus — which one really threw the ball the hardest.
But it seems to me that, numbers aside, none of them had a fastball that was quite as revolutionary, quite as heart-stopping, quite as new as the one thrown by that 6-foot-1, 200-pound Kansan who went to high school in Southern California and was discovered in Idaho, that friendly hayseed Cliff Blankenship gave train fare to in 1908, Walter Perry Johnson.

Walter Johnson won 417 games, far and away the most in modern baseball — meaning since the American League was founded in 1901. He threw 110 shutouts, far and away the most. His 3,509 strikeouts still rank ninth all-time, even though hitters rarely struck out in his day.
His 147 career ERA+ is third all-time among starters (not including active pitchers like Clayton Kershaw and Jacob deGrom who have a lot of career left) behind only Pedro Martinez and Grove — but Martínez pitched fewer than half the innings Johnson pitched, and Grove’s raw ERA is almost a full run higher than Johnson’s 2.17.
His 164.5 Baseball-Reference Wins Above Replacement rank second in baseball history behind only Babe Ruth.
No, it’s true, you can’t really compare the pitching Johnson did during Deadball — or even in those early years after Deadball — with baseball 100 years later. Different games. Different times. We have nothing at all to compare with Johnson’s pitching from 1910-1915, when he went 174-80 with a 1.51 ERA, 1,494 strikeouts, 390 walks and 24 homers allowed in more than 2,100 innings.
In 1916, Johnson pitched 369 innings and gave up zero home runs. Zero.
There’s no conversion chart that can tell us how Johnson’s stuff would hold up today. All we have are the stories and the quotes — and from those, you can understand the awe that people felt when seeing how impossibly hard Johnson threw.
“When you see the arm starting forward,” Birdie McCree said, “swing.”
“The thing just hissed with danger,”Ty Cobb said.
“He’s got a gun concealed about his person,” Ring Lardner wrote, “and he shoots them.”
“On a cloudy day, you couldn’t see the ball half the time it came in so fast,” Jimmy Austin said.
“Most of the time you couldn’t see the ball,” Fred Snodgrass said.
“You batted against him for the first time,” Dutch Ruether said, “and that easy sweep of the arm, with a bullet coming out of it, made you blink and wonder if your eyes were failing.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve come to one inescapable conclusion,” George Sisler said. “If Ol’ Walter Johnson had a curve, no one ever would have gotten a hit off him. Every game he pitched would have been a no-hitter.”
Yes, he was purely a fastball pitcher until his later years. And it was enough. Legends? Oh, there are plenty of Walter Johnson legends. A former big-league pitcher named Al Schacht said that Johnson threw so hard, he once got a game called for darkness in the middle of bright sunshine. How’d that happen? The Senators’ regular catcher was injured, and the new catcher simply wasn’t up to the moment. On the first pitch of the game, the ball ticked the top of his glove and smashed into umpire Billy Evans’ shoulder. He howled in pain but after a moment or two, he was able to get back to work.
The next pitch was low, the catcher never saw it, and it smashed into Evans’ left shin.
“That’s it,” Evans shouted out. “Game called because of darkness.”
Evans himself told another story, one about a batter who faced Johnson, saw (or didn’t see) two fastballs go by for strikes, and headed back to the dugout.
“You’ve got another strike coming,” Evans shouted to the player.
“I don’t want it,” the hitter said. “I’ve seen enough.”

So many stories. Johnson said he once pitched for a Negro Leagues team — he didn’t know it was a Negro Leagues team until he showed up, but $800 was $800 — and the first batter he faced was a great slugger called Home Run Johnson.
“Come on, Walter Johnson, let me see that fastball,” Home Run shouted out as he stepped to the plate.”I’m going to hit it out.” And then he did hit it out. Big Train was impressed by that — he often talked about how great so many of the Negro Leagues players were — but he was not impressed by the way Home Run Johnson kept jawing after hitting it. In fact, he was so angry that he did something he never did: He began throwing the ball high and inside to Johnson. This sent Johnson tumbling to ground time and time again. Walter threw it high and inside so many times and with such speed, that the last time Home Run Johnson came up, facing no balls and two strikes, he hit the dirt before Big Train even let go of the pitch.
The ball curved over the center of the plate for strike three.
Clyde Milan, a fine center fielder who twice led the league in stolen bases, told another great Walter Johnson story. Washington was playing in an exhibition game against Boston, and the first time up, Johnny Evers cracked a hit off Johnson.
Evers was famously cocky, and so when he got to second base he shouted to Milan in center field: “So that’s the great Walter Johnson. Listen, we’ve got a half-dozen pitchers in our league who are faster than he is.”

Milan relayed exactly what Evers said to Johnson, who didn’t say a word. But the next time Evers came up, Johnson threw three rocket fastballs by Evers, who didn’t even move his bat he was so paralyzed. “Johnny hasn’t seen any of them yet,” Milan said.
At the end of that inning, Evers made sure to find Milan. Evers was still pale.
“You big blabbermouth,” Evers screamed. “You told Johnson what I said, didn’t you?”

How fast did Johnson actually throw? Let’s go down that rabbit hole for a minute, even though we can’t know for sure. Johnson always said that his ability to throw hard was just natural. “From the time I held a ball, it settled in the palm of my right hand as though it belonged there,” he said.
And while we can’t tell you exactly how fast the ball went, we do have a clue. Johnson was the first pitcher to have his fastball’s speed measured. True, it was measured by an archaic (and ingenious) apparatus developed by the Remington Arms Company. But it’s something. Remington had developed the machine to time the speed of bullets. Johnson’s fastball seemed the obvious next thing.
Johnson and another pitcher, Nap Rucker, showed up in a large room at the Remington lab in Connecticut. The scientists had him stand 60 feet, 6 inches away and throw his fastball through a mesh square. The ball would brush through the mesh, triggering the clock. Then, 15 feet later, the ball would slam into a metal plate, stopping the clock. Johnson’s fastball covered that distance in .1229 seconds, which means that it traveled 122 feet per second.*

This became a pretty famous measurement of the time: 122 feet per second! That’s fast! As newspapers reported in the day, “The Twentieth Century Limited, flying at a mile a minute gait over the rails, makes only 88 feet per second!” He threw it faster than a train!
This was not the reason Johnson was called Big Train, by the way. We’ll get to that.
What is 122 feet per second as we would understand it now?
It is 83.2 miles per hour.
It’s OK to feel let down. But the story isn’t over yet.
First, there’s the measurement point. As mentioned above when talking about how fast Feller and Ryan really threw, the speed of today’s pitchers is measured out of the hand. Feller’s pitch was measured as it crossed the plate. But Johnson’s pitch was measured seven and a half feet after it crossed the plate.
So, that requires a major adjustment. The “Fastball” physicists did the calculations and found that today Walter Johnson’s pitch would actually be measured at 94 mph or so.
That’s obviously very fast, though it certainly would not make anyone in today’s game back away. But there’s more: Johnson threw the ball with a shirt and tie on. He did not throw off of a mound. And most of all, he did not throw as hard as he could because he was trying to guide his pitches through the target. It was an awkward thing, and it took him numerous tries to get it right.
“He didn’t throw full speed or anything close,” Rucker said after the experiment. “If he had, he would have thrown over 150 feet per second.”
For the record, 150 feet per second is more than 102 mph. In church clothes. On flat ground.

Let’s talk for a moment about the nickname: The Big Train. Few nicknames have ever fit a player better. Johnson actually had a lot of nicknames — Barney*, the Coffeyville Express, the Kansas Cyclone, and, in 1907, the Washington Post briefly tried to call him “Jingles” because “he certainly has the bells on.” Whatever that means.

*The Barney nickname comes from a time when Johnson was pulled over for speeding. He was in the car with his teammate Germany Schaefer, who said to the officer, “Don’t you know who this is? Why, this is Barney Oldfield!” Barney Oldfield was the most famous race car driver of the day, a man whose name, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “was synonymous with speed.” The officer let the ballplayers go. And Walter Johnson became known as Barney.

But “Big Train” — that’s the nickname. It perfectly represents his fastball and his time, when a train symbolized the very pinnacle of speed and power — you’ll remember that Superman, created a decade after Johnson retired, was more powerful than a locomotive.
Here’s the funny part: Walter Johnson was not the original Big Train, not even close.
No, it was a horse’s nickname first.
When Johnson first got to the Washington Senators in 1907 at age 19, one of the most popular racehorses in the country was an enormous Thoroughbred named Roseben. The horse was so huge and strong that he routinely raced under monumental weight handicaps, meaning Roseben would carry 40 or 50 pounds more than the other horses. And he still won all the time, thrilling the nation.
As you guessed: Everybody called Roseben “Big Train.”
So how did that nickname get passed on to Johnson? Well, it didn’t at first. Other ballplayers were called Big Train before him. Sometimes, sportswriters called Christy Mathewson “Big Train.” Lefty George, a large left-handed pitcher, was called “big train” for a year or so, though it was usually in lower-case letters as if he wasn’t that big a train.
Most of all, that was the nickname for Ed Konetchy — a 6-foot-2, 200-pound first baseman who led the league in doubles and total bases in different years. Konetchy was particularly fast for a player so big, so you could see how he compared with Roseben … and big trains.
Best we can tell, Washington Herald sports editor William Peet was the first to call Johnson “Big Train,” on Sept. 6, 1913. This was after Johnson had pitched a three-hit shutout. It didn’t catch on, though Peet stubbornly continued to call Johnson “Big Train” even as few others did.
No, Johnson didn’t really become “Big Train,” until a decade or so later, when he was nearing the end. Everybody admired Johnson by then, of course, but until 1924 there was something missing from his record: A championship. Johnson had played just about his whole career for bad teams. From 1907 to 1923, his teams finished an average 25 games out of first place — only once finishing within five games of the pennant.
Those Senators were famous for being “first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” And as unfair as it was, yes, this affected the way people looked at Johnson. Great pitcher? Absolutely! Nice guy? The nicest! Good fastball? The fastest! But if he was so great, why did his teams never win anything?
In 1924, finally, the Senators put together a competitive team with Hall of Fame outfielders Sam Rice and Goose Goslin each having excellent years. Johnson was 36, and this was no longer Deadball, but he put together one more season for the ages. He won the last of his three pitcher triple crowns by leading the league in wins (23), ERA (2.72) and strikeouts (158). He also led the league in WHIP, hits per nine innings and strikeout-to-walk ratio. The Senators won the pennant. And Johnson was named the league’s MVP.
And that was when everybody started calling him the Big Train. In the World Series against the Giants, he started Game 1 and was off his game. He gamely kept getting out of jams, but the Giants got him in the 12th inning for two runs on a couple of walks and singles, and he took the loss.
He also took the loss in Game 5, giving up six runs in eight innings.
But in Game 7, on one day’s rest, he came into a tie game in the ninth. He promptly gave up a triple to Frankie Frisch and it seemed like he might be the goat of the series. But he got out of the jam, striking out future Hall of Famer High Pockets Kelly along the way.
In the 11th, he got into another situation, putting the winning run on second with one out. But he struck out Frisch and Kelly to end the threat.
He gave up a leadoff single in the 12th too, but he got the next three batters, and the Senators scored in the bottom of the inning to take the World Series title. Walter Johnson pitched four scoreless innings when the team needed them most. That was the only World Series victory in the history of the Washington Senators, and the only title in Washington until last year’s Nationals’ win. The Big Train was finally the hero.

When Johnson died, more people talked about his decency and his kindness than even his fastball. In a game where so many all-time great players are also supremely nice people — Honus Wagner, Stan Musial, Roy Campanella, Brooks Robinson, Tony Gwynn, Mike Trout, on and on — Walter Johnson might just have been the nicest of them all.
He was so nice that many people in his day saw it as his one fatal flaw. Ty Cobb used to crowd the plate against Johnson, knowing full well that he was too nice to throw at him. Babe Ruth used to talk about how he liked facing Johnson for the same reason (Ruth hit .350/.495/.675 against Johnson by the best stats we have).
“If he had been born a mean cuss and tried to dust off the hitters,” Joe Sewell said, “nobody would have had a chance.”
But he just couldn’t be mean. It wasn’t in him. He loved people, especially kids. He signed all the autographs. He talked baseball with anyone who wanted to talk baseball. He refused to question umpires. The umpire Billy Evans had another favorite Johnson story. Johnson had worked a 3-2 count against a hitter and then threw a clear strike three, but Evans called it a ball. “Sometimes,” Evans would say, “we as human beings just make mistakes.”
Evans felt terrible because the walk cost Johnson a couple of runs, so he gave Johnson an opportunity to complain. “How’d that one look to you, Walter?” he asked.
“Maybe a trifle low?” Johnson said kindly, and he smiled, and Evans later said, “A better man has never played the game of baseball.”
Here’s another one: You know the story about Wagner’s refusal to appear on a tobacco card — that’s why his T-206 card, the few that were printed before he made his refusal known, is the most valuable baseball card in the world.
Johnson had what might be an even more compelling story. A cigarette company offered him $10,000 — more than $250,000 in today’s money — to appear in an advertisement, and all he had to do was say that he smoked that brand. Unfortunately, he could not do that because he did not smoke at all.
“I needed that money badly,’ he would say. “But I couldn’t take it. I don’t object to cigarette smoking. But I don’t use them. And I believe it would have been worse than thievery if I had urged the kids to buy a package of my ‘favorite’ brand and helped to increase the habit of smoking among our youngsters.”
There are a million more examples. My favorite might be this: People often called Walter Johnson the “Big Swede.” This was somewhat disconcerting in that Johnson was not Swedish. He had, as far as he knew, no Swedish ancestry whatsoever. And yet, he accepted the nickname with the same gentle equanimity he accepted all well-intended things.
And when asked why, he simply said: “I didn’t want to offend anybody.

There are a lot of Swedes I know who are nice people.”

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

67 Heroes

There's Julian Javier linking arms with Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, and below a scene on the mound. In 1967 , boy I was blessed. My fave teams won in baseball and hockey.

The Toronto Maple Leafs defeated the Canandiens of Montreal 4 games to 2 to win the Stanley Cup, and the st. Louis Cardinals defeated the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series.

How could an 11 year stand it, I mean really, doesn't it always happen this way. The low rumbling of thunder passes over my house at 61 Browning Ave, East York, and in the stillness I can still hear my mother calling upstairs, "Jim, is your window open ". I always had it open, looking downwards onto Browning Ave., through the leafless branches of the maple tree on the front lawn.

Ice pellets turned into freezing rain and started to give the houses a cost of shinny shellac. Pretty soon, the electrical wires were heavy with ice, and cars were sliding thru stop signs ,like a video game.

People walking up and down Jackman Ave. , some on sleds being pulled by angry fathers, and mothers wondering why this storm had brought such a burden.

It is April, and it has started to snow again, well I guess the weather is getting colder, I can see a boy being pulled by the back bumper of a car and his feet sliding on the ice and snow on the street.

Back to hockey for a moment. Bower kicks out the puck against the Habs again, and Sawchuk stones them in another game. Keon, up to Pulford onto Armstrong and in the net for a score.

Oh how I love to replay these scenarios in my head, what with no real hockey to watch.

Yvan Cournoyer tests Terry Sawchuk of the Leafs with a deke, but Terry is quick with his trapper mitt to reach out and scoop up the puck.

In 1967, I was blessed with 2 of my favorite teams winning the prize, I want that feeling for my son.

I want the Leafs and Blue Jays to win their respective trophies.

For Kevin.

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

The story of the Honus Wagner baseball card

The most famous baseball card ever printed is the Honus Wagner T206. In mint condition — or as close to mint condition as you can get for a card that appeared in cigarette packs more than 100 years ago — it has sold for more than $3 million. There has been a book written about it, a movie made about it, there have been numerous scandals surrounding it (with one dealer going to prison).

Various Wagner cards have been owned by Wayne Gretzky and Charlie Sheen. The card has been auctioned off by nuns to raise money for their ministries.
The T206 Wagner is not the rarest of all baseball cards, though it is rare. It is certainly not the most unusual of all baseball cards — there’s a plainness about it with its orange background and an unsmiling Wagner and his wavy hair posing stiffly while wearing a collared uniform, the words “Wagner, Pittsburg” typed below.
But it is the most famous because it comes with a story, a story that goes beyond the card itself, a story that goes a bit beyond baseball itself, a story that just might (or might not) get to the heart of one of the greatest heroes to ever play the game.

Baseball cards go back more or less to the start of professional baseball. There were various cards celebrating baseball even before the 1869 Cincinnati Redlegs became the first openly professional team, but recognizable baseball cards — photographs of Major League Baseball players on cardboard that you can trade or flip or put in the spokes of your bicycle — began 10 or so years after the birth of the National League. They first appeared in packs of cigarettes. According to “The Card,” Michael O’Keeffe’s book about the T206 Honus Wagner, the first distinct baseball card was probably a 25-card set put out by the cigarette manufacturer Goodwin & Co. in 1886.

The idea, looking back, was quite brilliant. In addition to connecting tobacco to the sport that was rapidly becoming the national pastime and in addition to giving consumers an extra reason to stick with one brand of cigarettes, the baseball cards themselves helped keep the cigarette packs rigid and firm, preventing cigarette breakage. It was such a breakthrough idea that soon other cigarette companies joined in and began creating their own baseball card sets.
Yes, it seems incongruous to have baseball cards in a cigarette pack, not least because now it is illegal for anyone younger than 21 to buy one. But in those days, tobacco companies openly and unabashedly marketed cigarettes to minors. That might seem vulgar now, but it’s a good reminder of how different a time it was. Less than 40 percent of all teenagers were in school. Children were working in factories and on farms, working long hours. The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act did not pass until 1916.

When the American Tobacco Co. bought out everybody and became a monopoly — under the ferocious leadership of a man named Buck Duke, who later endowed a university that would take on his last name and go to a bunch of Final Fours — it took the baseball card business to another level. The crescendo came from 1909-11, when they put out a gigantic set of 524 baseball cards, the set now known at T206.
The set wasn’t called T206 at the time. No, that is a whole other rabbit hole, but one we must go down because it takes us all the way back to Honus Wagner. The set was classified as T206 by a fascinating, strange and utterly devoted man named Jefferson Burdick, known by many as the Father of Card Collecting.
We don’t know very much about Burdick’s life. He was born around 1900 and grew up in upstate New York, in a little town called Central Square, just outside of Syracuse. He fell in love with cards early — he once said that he and his friends would ask their fathers to change cigarette brands periodically so they could collect cards from different sets.

Burdick, however, was not a particularly big baseball fan — it is believed he never once attended a baseball game. No, he was an obsessive fan of cards — “I have an inherited love of pictures,” he said — and baseball cards just happened to be a big category in his obsession. Burdick’s definition of what made a card was pretty liberal. He collected postcards, playing cards, greeting cards, business cards, advertising cards as well as baseball cards, yes, but he also collected chewing gum wrappers, cigar wrappers, vaudeville flyers, political posters and so on.
“Some ask how anyone becomes interested in cards,” he said in one of the few interviews he ever gave. “You don’t. Collectors are born that way.”

He collected obsessively. In his lifetime, he accumulated more than 300,000 items, which he painstakingly categorized and mounted and donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. To say this was his life’s work would be to understate things. He walked into the museum for the last time on Jan. 10, 1963, worked a full eight hours on his cards, and then stood up and announced: “I shan’t be back.” He checked into the hospital the next day and died two months later.
Burdick is the one who named the famous set T206 with the T standing for “Tobacco.” But more to the point, he is the man who first alerted the world about the specialness of the T206 Wagner. He put out the first version of his American Card Catalog in 1933 and listed the values of the cards. Most were a nickel. Some were a dime.
But the T206 Honus Wagner card he listed as the most expensive and valuable card of them all — worth $50, about $1,000 in today’s money.

Why? Burdick had his reason. And finally, we get to our hero.

Honus Wagner was the greatest and most beloved player of his day. His full name was Johannes Peter Wagner, and during his playing days he was called Hans Wagner more often than he was called Honus. The Honus name really took hold after his playing days were over, after he had become a larger-than-life legend. I guess people thought “Honus Wagner” sounded more regal.
Bill James made the point in the New Historical Baseball Abstract that casual baseball fans (and even a few more devoted ones) sometimes confuse Rogers Hornsby and Honus Wagner. It’s a bizarre thing but I think he’s right. Maybe it’s because both of them were right-handed middle infielders who won a lot of batting titles. Your Baseball 100 editor Kaci Borowski points out they both have perfect old-timey baseball names.

But the comparison could not be more inapt. They were, in all ways that mattered, polar opposites. Hornsby was the worst in just about every way — a racist, a bully, a rogue, a terrible teammate, a defensive liability, a selfish son of a gun — while Wagner was friendly, admirable, openhearted, brilliant defensively and beloved.

Wagner was the best defensive player of his day. From Ogden Nash’s famous “Line-Up For Yesterday”

W is for Wagner
The bowlegged beauty
Short was closed to all traffic
With Honus on duty.

Wagner was, despite his famous bowed legs, breathtakingly fast, and he led the league in stolen bases five times and triples three more.
And he was universally admired. Don’t misunderstand: Wagner was not exactly a sweetheart. He could drink with the best of them, and he was a furious competitor. He jawed at umpires — once he was charged with throwing a ball wildly on purpose to hit an umpire. He vehemently denied it but was still suspended for three days.
One Wagner story, probably apocryphal but certainly indicative of Wagner’s relentlessness, goes that Ty Cobb once insulted his German heritage, and Wagner responded by slamming down a tag so hard on Cobb’s face that it almost knocked out his teeth. Baseball was a tough game and Wagner — who was a sturdy 5-foot-11, 200 pounds and came from Pennsylvania coal country — was as tough as he needed to be.
But he treated people with grace and respect. When told that people were calling a Negro Leagues star, Pop Lloyd, “The Black Honus Wagner,” he responded: “It is a privilege to have been compared with him.”
And he was smart. So smart. “I never saw Honus make a mental mistake, and I never heard of a person who saw him make one,” Wagner’s longtime teammate and, later, Hall of Fame manager Bill McKechnie said.
Burleigh Grimes told a great story of seeing an older Wagner facing a rookie pitcher. Wagner was a great old player. He hit an astonishing 20 triples at age 38 and 17 triples at age 41. The story goes that near the end, Wagner faced a rookie pitcher with a terrific curveball. The kid threw that curve and Wagner swung and missed so hard that he fell to his knees.
“Watch this,” Grimes said to a teammate. The pitcher, no doubt filled with boldness after making the legend look silly, threw the curve again. Wagner drilled the ball off the wall so hard that Grimes said the wall shook for five minutes. Five minutes..
Wagner truly had no weaknesses. He won eight batting titles and led the league multiple times in every major category except home runs, which wasn’t really a significant part of baseball in his day. There is a good argument to make that the Gold Glove should be named for him, that’s how revolutionary his defense was (he cut a hole in his glove so he could get the ball out more quickly on the exchange). He was a great bunter, a great handler of the bat — using a batting style where his hands were a few inches apart and a bat roughly the size of a telephone pole — and, as mentioned, an aggressive and spectacular base runner.
It should be added here — for the purposes of our story — that Wagner was also one of the great negotiators of his day. He “retired” several times in his career, most significantly before the 1908 season. He was just 34 then and coming off a typically great season when he led the National League in batting average, doubles, stolen bases, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and total bases. But he said he was through. His body was too beat up to keep going.
It became a daily story. Soon there were rumors about why he was REALLY quitting, the big one being that he was sick of the way fans (particularly gamblers) in the crowd booed him and gave him a hard time for not getting a hit every time up. He talked about going into show business — starting a circus, was the way he described his plans. The Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss pleaded with him to come back. So did the president of the National League, who said professional baseball would collapse without him.
And in the end, yes, Wagner returned and had perhaps his greatest season in 1908, finishing two home runs shy of the Triple Crown.
But in the years since, it has become canon that the whole thing was a negotiation. Wagner denied it ferociously (“There was no financial trouble or any other misunderstanding between the club and myself,” he said), but it’s pretty meaningful that he doubled his salary. It was not the only time Wagner played hardball.
This too is part of the T206 Wagner story.

In 1909, Wagner was far and away the most famous and beloved baseball player in America. As such, when the American Tobacco Co. decided to put together its baseball card set, he was the most important player to secure. It’s unclear how the ATC negotiated with players for photo rights. In most cases, they probably didn’t. A few players might have gotten a nominal fee, but most probably got nothing at all.
Wagner, though, was in a different category entirely, so much so that the ATC paid $10 to Pittsburgh’s most-read and influential sportswriter, John Gruber, to secure Wagner’s permission. Ten dollars was not insubstantial in 1909. It was a weekly salary for most families.
Gruber did not get Wagner’s permission. He did, however, get the most celebrated letter in baseball card collecting history.

Dear John,
I don’t want my picture in cigarets, but I don’t want you to lose the $10, so I’m enclosing my check for that sum.
Hans Wagner

Gruber never cashed the check. He framed it and kept it on his wall for the rest of his life.
The ATC had already printed some Wagner cards — estimates range from 50 to 200 cards. But after getting word from Gruber, they immediately stopped. That’s why Jefferson Burdick priced the card so high. In 1955, he said, “Only three or four copies have been found.”
To give you an idea of the rarity, baseball card historian Scot A. Reader estimates that there were 370 million T206 cards printed from 1909 to 1911. That would be about 700,000 copies per card. With so few Wagners out there, you can understand how rare it is.
But it should be added: The Wagner is not the rarest of the T206 cards. No, a mediocre pitcher named Slow Joe Doyle — called that because apparently he took FOREVER between pitches — was mistakenly put on the New York Giants instead of the New York Highlanders in an early version of his card. It’s believed the company caught the error after only one or two dozen got out.
It isn’t just the rarity of the Wagner that sets it apart. It’s the story. Why did Wagner refuse to be a part of the T206 set?
“It is because Wagner was a nonsmoker,” Burdick said, “who wouldn’t allow a picture on a cigarette card, as it would imply his approval of smoking.”
Yes. That’s the story that emerged: Wagner had refused to have his photo placed on a cigarette card because he did not want to play any role in encouraging kids to buy cigarettes. He loved kids; he was famous for going through the outside clubhouse entrance down the right-field line of Exposition Park and holding the door open just long enough for a few kids to get in and see the game.
So the Wagner card came to represent the moral principles of the great Honus Wagner.
But is the story true? Well, that’s an interesting question. Several people — including collector and baseball historian Keith Olbermann — have looked deeply into it and said it probably isn’t true. There are a couple of reasons to doubt. One, Wagner was a tobacco user. He chewed tobacco on and off the field. His granddaughter Leslie Blair recalled him always having a mouth full of chew. And he loved few things more than he loved a cigar. He was so devoted to cigars that he had appeared on a cigar trading card and on multiple occasions let his photo appear on the box cover of a particularly favored brand of cigars.
Two, well, we already told you: Wagner fought for his money. It seems every bit as likely as any other theory that he turned down the ATC offer because it was too low.
But, you know what? In this case, I would go with the romantic version of the story. We can never be sure, but the money thing seems less convincing because Wagner gave his friend Gruber a $10 check, suggesting that he felt bad about letting his friend down. If it had been a situation in which he felt like the company was trying to take advantage of him financially, would he really have given that check?
Second, we do know that he really WAS worried about children using tobacco. How do we know that? Well, in 1914, a short but wonderful letter from Wagner appeared in the Pittsburgh Press. It was filled with advice for a friend who was giving a talk to boys. The letter was headlined “Wagner’s Advice To Boy friends.”
“I don’t think you could use a better line of talk,” Wagner wrote, “than to tell a boy not to use tobacco and to let drink and lies alone; keep good hours, take plenty of exercise and not over-exert. And when a boy sets out to do a thing he should make up his mind to do it well, for a job not completed is no job at all. Tell ’em to take the advice of their parents on all things.

Here’s one more Wagner story, one I began to tell in the Arky Vaughan essay. This time let’s tell it from the perspective of Wagner. Honus was a natural ballplayer. There doesn’t seem to be much coaching in his early life; he learned the game on his own. His most famous quote is simply: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer if you’re a ballplayer.”
Fifteen years after Wagner retired as the greatest shortstop in the history of the game, Vaughan came along for the same team — this is like the shortstop version of the Sandy Koufax and Clayton Kershaw story for left-handed pitchers. Vaughan was immediately a great hitter. But he was an erratic shortstop. He made a lot of errors — 46 in each of his first two years. The Pirates brought Wagner in to help teach the kid a few things. “They said if I couldn’t make a shortstop out of Arky Vaughan, nobody could,” he told reporters.
Wagner did help. The two became as close as brothers; Wagner and Vaughan roomed together for the next nine years. Vaughan would later say that from Wagner, “I learned more baseball than I ever dreamed existed.”
And Wagner had a deep love for his protégé: “Vaughan is such a fine hitter and such a whirlwind on the bases. Of all the players I tried to help, he’s the best.”
But the funny part is that while Vaughan undoubtedly learned so much from Wagner by simply being around the great man, Honus was not what you might call a demonstrative or vivid teacher. Yes, Wagner worked with Vaughan for hours on the field, but when someone asked Vaughan how it was progressing, he smiled.
“I’m not sure,” Vaughan said. “When I asked Mr. Wagner what to do, he said, ‘You just run in fast, grab the ball and throw it to first base ahead of the runner.’ But he didn’t tell me how.”

Saturday, March 14, 2020

The loss of Thurman Munson

The anguish still rises unmistakably from the pages of the deposition, which is now nearly 40 years old. In it, a witness named David Hall hesitates as he testifies, and a lawyer asks if he needs a short break. Hall declines and continues.

By the time he is done, he has provided a devastating account of the final moments in the life of Thurman Munson, the Yankees catcher who died at age 32 when the plane he was flying crashed short of the runway at Akron-Canton Airport in Ohio on Aug. 2, 1979.

Hall was in the plane when it slammed into the ground. In the deposition, he describes how in the immediate aftermath of the crash, Munson lay motionless, his head turned sideways and pressed against the instrument panel.

Munson’s neck, it turned out, had been broken by the impact of the crash. His body was paralyzed. Still, Hall testified, Munson managed to ask him and Jerry Anderson, the other passenger in the plane, if they were O.K.

And then, Hall testified, flames began to lick at the fuselage of the Cessna Citation turbojet, and Munson gasped, “Fire extinguisher.” What followed, Hall said, were the final words uttered by Munson, the hard-nosed All-Star and team captain.

“Help me, Dave,” he said.

Hall and Anderson tried. They strained to lift Munson’s immobilized body from his seat, to free him from the wreckage, but they couldn’t. And as smoke and flames engulfed the cockpit, Hall, a flight instructor who had previously taught Munson to fly propeller planes, and Anderson, a friend and business associate of Munson’s, had no choice but to make their escape.

Much has been written over the years about Munson’s shocking death on that August day, but until now the depositions that were given in two lawsuits that were filed after the crash had remained stored away, out of the public realm. One of the suits, filed by the Yankees, was dismissed before it ever went to trial. The other, filed by Munson’s widow, Diana, did go to trial, but the case was quickly settled after some initial testimony.

Crash Site of the plane piloted by Thurman Munson

The depositions provide a kind of oral history of Munson’s life and death. They were uncovered this summer as a result of efforts made by Allan Blutstein, a lawyer who grew up on Long Island as a devoted Munson fan and has made a professional career of Freedom-of-Information actions, including recent, and controversial, filings involving employees at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Blutstein did not need to make a Freedom-of-Information filing to obtain the Munson depositions. He simply had to be diligent and spend some money. After acquiring the documents, he made them available to The New York Times.

The depositions, which include testimony from such notable Yankees as Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin and Graig Nettles, do not challenge the basic narrative of Munson’s death — that he was a standout athlete who began flying less than two years earlier, in part so he could get home to Ohio to see his family on days off, and that he died while practicing takeoffs and landings at the airport.

But what the depositions do provide is a revealing snapshot of Munson, who was sometimes a curmudgeon but was always the bedrock of a high-wattage Yankees team that had won the previous two World Series amid all the distractions served up by Jackson and Martin and George Steinbrenner, the team’s unpredictable owner.

It was Munson who continually played at a high level without creating controversies of his own. And it was Munson, the depositions suggest, who was both loyal and stubborn, both fierce and innocent.

“Thurman had a routine,” Gene Monahan, the longtime Yankees trainer, said in his deposition on May 29, 1981. “He used to come to the ballpark, have a couple of cookies and a glass of milk.”

It was a sad day when we lost Thurman, I don't know why I was compelled to write about him, just something I felt strongly about.

Friday, March 13, 2020

Turn back the clock

"There has been only one manager – and his name is McGraw.”

These were words used by Hall of Famer Connie Mack, baseball’s all-time winningest manager, to describe John McGraw. Mack’s praise was a testament to a man who was known for doing absolutely anything to win a baseball game.

Beginning as a player, the fiery McGraw was among the first to deploy strategy and guile to win. The oldest of eight children born to Irish immigrant parents, McGraw learned how to fight for everything that was given to him.

Standing just 5-foot-7 and weighing 155 pounds, McGraw broke into the National League with the Baltimore Orioles in 1891 and was one of the game’s original stars. He led the league in runs twice and sported a lifetime batting average of .334 while introducing the hit-and-run, the Baltimore chop, the squeeze and other tactics to scratch out runs during the Dead Ball Era.

McGraw played third base in Baltimore and St. Louis for 11 seasons before taking over as player-manager of the New York Giants in 1902. For the next 30 years, McGraw was the autocratic leader of the team. Nicknamed “Little Napoleon,” McGraw tirelessly developed players in the way he felt the game should be played. He also translated his aggressive tactics as a ball player to his managerial style, frequently calling for pinch-runners and encouraging his players to steal as many bases as possible.

With McGraw in the dugout, the Giants morphed into a perennial powerhouse. New York captured the NL pennant in 1904, but McGraw refused to enter his squad into the World Series due to his hatred of Ban Johnson and the fledgling American League. The Giants won the pennant again in 1905, this time defeating Mack’s AL champion Athletics to capture their first World Series title.
McGraw collected a total of 10 National League pennants and three Fall Classics while mixing brilliant strategy with tempestuous emotion. He was the first manager to win four consecutive pennants in either league, and set a major league record with 131 ejections (since surpassed by Hall of Famer Bobby Cox).

"I have seen McGraw go onto ball fields where he is as welcome as a man with the black smallpox,” said McGraw’s star pitcher, Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson. “He doesn't know what fear is."
McGraw finally retired in 1932 with 2,763 victories – still second only to Mack on the all-time list. The Giants posted just one losing record in his 26 full seasons at the helm.
"In playing or managing, the game of ball is only fun for me when I'm out in front and winning,” said McGraw. In 1937, he became a member of the Hall of Fame’s second induction class.

Well, I'm back to writing as I remembered that I had startred a blog on old timers.
Enjoy !!

Saturday, June 1, 2019

David Stieb

Dave Stieb made his only appearance on the writers' ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2004.

A case can be made with sabermetrics that Stieb - not Jack Morris - was the best pitcher of the 1980s and would be a worthy addition to Cooperstown. But by traditional measures, the former Toronto Blue Jays ace might have looked far short of a plaque, with sciatica and other ailments chasing Stieb away from the game in his mid-30s and limiting him to 176 wins. Stieb drew just 1.4 percent, or seven votes, of 506 votes cast in 2004 - and that was that.

On one hand, Stieb said he wasn't that surprised with the outcome.

"I said right off the bat, 'I don't belong in the Hall of Fame, I did not win enough games and so forth,'" Stieb told Sporting News in a recent phone interview from Reno, Nev., where he does land development work.

But there's a caveat.

"I surely did not deserve to be just wiped off the map after the first-year ballot," Stieb said. "It's like, please, amuse me and string me out for two, three years."

Hall of Fame voting can be brutal in this regard, with numerous fine one-and-done candidates from Stieb to Bobby Grich to Ted Simmons and many others.

"It's like an insult," Stieb said. "What it told me was in (the writers') minds, I didn't even do anything worth recognizing."

There's good news for Stieb, though. This fall, he'll be eligible for the first time as a veterans candidate on the Modern Baseball Committee ballot. Is Stieb about to be wiped off the map once more, or could delayed recognition come?

Why: A few significant hurdles remain for Stieb's Hall of Fame case. The first is that the Modern Baseball Committee ballot, which spans MLB figures who made their greatest contribution to the game between 1970 and 1987, looks like it will be packed.

Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Dale Murphy will all be newly eligible. So will Morris, who spent 15 years on the writers' ballot and just missed induction through it. Stieb has heard, by the way, that some people think Morris was the best pitcher of the 1980s because he had the most wins of the decade at 162. Stieb, who had the second-most wins in the decade at 140, doesn't think the stat should be the decider.

"The biggest thing to look at is the kind of team he was on (the Detroit Tigers) and the kind of team I was on," Stieb said. "They were pretty much real good already in the whole '80s, '80 to '89, whereas we didn't really get good until like '84, '85."

Morris had the most wins, but Stieb had the lower ERA "and he wasn't even close to me, I think.

"To me, ERA is indicative of who's better," Stieb said.

Other statistics attest to this as well. Stieb had the highest Wins Above Replacement among pitchers for the '80s, by a wide margin at 48.6, while Morris ranked 12th at 30.4.

In case anyone's wondering, Stieb's heard of WAR.

"Pat Hentgen told me years ago, he goes, 'Man, you know how they're using that WAR a lot, that stat?' I go, 'Yeah.' He goes, 'They use that like crazy now to gauge how good someone really is.' He goes, 'If they looked at that when you were playing, you would have won four Cy Young Awards in a row,'" Stieb said, noting it would have been 1982 through 1985 when he led for WAR three consecutive years and finished second the fourth.

By Wins Above Average, the chasm between Stieb and Morris in the '80s is even wider: 28.1, best in the decade for Stieb; 9.0, 31st-best for Morris.

"He was an awesome pitcher," Stieb said. "He was an animal, a bulldog-like [workhorse], and wanted to win like no one else. I totally respect him and his skills and what he did. But if you had to look at everything, I think I was the best."

The problem, of course, is that Hall of Fame committees don't generally get too deep into the weeds with sabermetrics.

Injuries also played a role in curtailing Stieb's career and preventing him from accumulating more of the counting stats Hall of Fame voters so value. Stieb never went on the disabled list until excessive working out in 1991 gave him a herniated disk in his back, aggravated by a collision near first base that spring. This led to other issues, which ultimately culminated with Stieb's release from the Blue Jays after the 1992 season.

After a short stint with the Chicago White Sox and a six-week run with the Kansas City Royals' Triple-A club, Stieb went home to his family.

"I was living in Lake Tahoe and just loving life and being with my kids and stuff," Stieb said. "I just didn't even care about baseball while I was on the mend."

Instead, he spent a few years playing in the outfield for a local softball team as one of its home run hitters before the majors beckoned again for a short comeback in 1998.

Stieb wound up at 176-137 with a 3.44 ERA for his career, respectable numbers no doubt in his eyes but not Hall of Fame worthy. He takes the same hard stance with other candidates, even friends. Asked to assess the Hall of Fame chances of good friend and fellow '80s ace Bret Saberhagen, Stieb pulled up Baseball-Reference.com.

"He's like me," Stieb said, looking at Saberhagen's numbers. "He's got no chance."

Stieb noted Saberhagen's JAWS rating, the stat created by Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated which rates Saberhagen as the 66th-best pitcher in baseball history and Stieb as 67th-best. Stieb looked at some of Saberhagen's other accomplishments.

"All he's got on me is two Cy Young's and a World Series that he actually pitched in," Stieb said. "And I don't think that's enough to make it to the Hall of Fame."

What is Stieb's standard for Cooperstown?

"The Hall of Fame is more indicative of somebody having consistency throughout their whole career and dominating numbers throughout their whole career," he said.

If only Stieb gave himself more credit for accomplishing this.