Fun stuff, possibly true
As I was saying last week, all these years and all these books later, I have come to respect, more and more, the lore of the game: the stories that may not be altogether true, but are so good they ought to be. As threatened, I have returned with more. Some of these stories began with A Century of Baseball Lore (1976 edition shown below), others from later editions of Total Baseball, for which Eliot Cohen and Sean Lahman added tall tales of their own.
The knuckleball can be elusive. Fluttering up to the plate at a
half to two-thirds the speed of a fastball, the knuckler is difficult to master, an adventure to catch, and nearly impossible to hit. After his Brooklyn Dodgers lost on a ninth-inning homer, Casey Stengel asked catcher Babe Phelps why he’d called for a fastball from famed knuckleballer Dutch Leonard.
“His knuckler’s tough to catch,” Phelps explained.
“If his knuckler’s tough to catch, don’t you think it might be a little tough to hit, too?” Casey asked.
Famed batting coach Charley Lau said, “There are two theories about hitting the knuckleballer. Unfortunately, neither works.” Bobby Murcer observed that trying to hit flutterballer Phil Niekro was “like eating Jell-O with chopsticks.”
“You can’t hit what you can’t see.” — Joe Tinker reviews Rube Marquard
Fastball pitchers have been a staple of baseball legends since the overhand delivery was legalized in 1884. Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan inherited the mantle of their respective generations as the king of the radio ball — you heard it, but you couldn’t see it.
After striking out on three Johnson fastballs, no less an authority than Babe Ruth told the umpire, “You know, I didn’t see any of them either, but the last one sounded kind of high to me.” Writer Bugs Baer believed that Grove “could throw a lamb chop past a wolf.” Manager Bucky Harris offered his Senators these instructions for facing Feller: “Go up and hit what you see.
If you don’t see it, come on back.” Willie Stargell paid lefthander Steve
Carlton a high compliment when he admitted, “Sometimes I hit him like I used to hit Koufax, and that’s like drinking coffee with a fork.” Reggie Jackson labeled Ryan baseball’s exorcist because “he scares the devil out of you.”
Walter Johnson didn’t have the colorful personality to make himself a legend, just his fastball, but that was enough. Ray Chapman walked away from home plate after taking two strikes from Johnson. “You’ve another strike coming,” the umpire called. “Keep it. I don’t want it,” Chapman said and kept on walking.
Feller, like Koufax and Ryan to follow, was nearly as wild as he was
fast. One overcast day, Yankee pitcher Lefty Gomez had to face Feller in the gloaming. Gomez, who earned the nickname Goofy, brought a book of matches to the plate, lit one, and held it over his head as he stepped into the batter’s box.
“You think that match is going to help you see Feller’s fast one?” the umpire snarled. “You got it all wrong,” Gomez explained. “I just want to make sure he can see me.”
Gomez was quicker with his tongue than with his fastball. Still, he won nearly 65 percent of his decisions over fourteen seasons and went 6–0 in five World Series, earning his ticket to Cooperstown in 1972, attributing his success to “clean living and swift outfielders.” Of the two components, only one can be confirmed.
On occasion, an outfielder, even a great one, might come up short. Rookie Joe DiMaggio, who roomed with Gomez on the road for several seasons, bragged, “I’m going to make ’em forget about Tris Speaker.” like the Gray Eagle He crept in to play a shallow center field behind Gomez, and in the late innings, a drive to center outpaced DiMaggio for a triple, allowing the deciding runs to score.
At dinner with teammates after the game, DiMaggio was still saying that he was going to make the fans forget about Speaker. Gomez had had enough. “If you don’t back up a little,” he told the rookie, “you’ll make ’em forget about Gomez.”Yankee second baseman Tony Lazzeri had a reputation for heady play. So, in a bases-loaded jam, Gomez snared a comebacker, whirled, and threw to Lazzeri, who was stationed on the edge of the infield grass between first and second. When Lazzeri recovered from the shock, he charged toward Gomez and screamed, “Why in hell did you throw the ball to me?”
“I’d been reading in the papers how smart you are, and how you always know what to do with the ball,” Gomez cooed. “Well, I wanted to see what you’d do with that one.”
Gomez inherited the flaky lefthander tradition from Rube Waddell, the first oddball player of the twentieth century. Waddell liked to fish and chase fire engines, ready to desert the mound for either. (Fortunately for his teammates, fish didn’t roll past the ballpark with their alarms blaring.) On days when he wasn’t pitching, and on some when he was supposed to be, Waddell could be found at bars, firehouses, playgrounds, the heads of parades, or under the stands shooting marbles with youngsters.
Catcher Ossee Schreckengost was Waddell’s roommate and fellow carouser. The two were of similar mind on most issues, but one divisive item nearly ended their friendship. (History is unclear on the offender, but here’s the better version of the story.) After a typically successful season, Waddell informed Connie Mack that he wouldn’t sign his contract for the upcoming season. Mack, whose creativity had been stretched to the limits, he thought, to accommodate his southpaw, had already offered Waddell time off for fishing if he’d complete both ends of a doubleheader, had allowed him liberal visitation rights to local firehouses, and stood ready with bail money on those not infrequent occasions when the lefty required it.
So what was it Waddell wanted now? Well, in that era, players often shared beds on the road. Waddell had no problem with splitting the mattress, but objected to Schreckengost’s habit of eating crackers on it. So Mack wrote in a contract provision banning the practice, and Waddell was booked for another season. Otherwise, the battery mates got along famously. The catcher was hovering over Waddell’s bandaged body when the pitcher awoke in a hospital after a huge drunk with the boys the night before.
“How’d I get here?” Waddell asked.
Schreckengost explained that Waddell insisted he could fly, and when his teammates ridiculed the idea, the pitcher leaped out the second-story window, flapping his arms.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” Waddell implored.
“What? And lose the hundred bucks I bet on you?”
Waddell had more success on the ground. While watching an alligator wrestler, Waddell asked for a shot at the reptile. The alligator never had a chance. In 1904, Waddell opened a five-game series against the Red Sox with a one-hitter, allowing a bunt single to the leadoff man, then retiring the next twenty-seven hitters. A cocky Waddell was scheduled to pitch the series finale and warned his opponent, “I’m going to give you the same thing.” The opponent was a thirty-seven-year-old veteran named Cy Young, who responded to the challenge by pitching a perfect game. Alligators were simpler foes.
Satchel Paige copied Waddell’s stunt of calling in the outfield. But Paige had plenty of stories of his own to tell. The oldest rookie in major league history, Paige claimed he was thirty-nine (he was at least forty-two, possibly closer to fifty) when he signed with the Indians in 1948. He challenged the nation to find records of him pitching before 1927. When one of his clippings from 1926 turned up, Paige explained that a billy goat had eaten his birth certificate and asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” Paige also noted, “Age is a question of mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”
Paige’s routines included using a gum wrapper as his home plate, the hesitation pitch, and his be-ball, so named because “it always be where I want it to be.” Paige also reminded white fans of his contemporaries in the Negro Leagues. Lists of the greatest fastballers of all time were no longer complete without Bullet Joe Rogan and Smokey Joe Williams. Testimony that Josh Gibson hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium became more credible. Paige was
fond of telling about an offering that Gibson hit back between the pitcher’s legs that sailed over the fence. That was nothing compared to Cool Papa Bell, who, according to Paige, “hit a line drive by me that hit him on the ass when he was sliding into second.”
Paige also offered six rules for staying young, recorded by Richard
Donovan in Collier’s in 1953. Considering that he last appeared in a major league game in 1965, at age fifty-nine or more, they’re worth repeating:
- Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
- If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
- Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
- Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.
- Avoid running at all times.
- Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
Dizzy Dean combined devastating stuff, a gift for malapropisms, and a dose of braggadocio when he burst on the scene with the Cardinals in 1931. “The good Lord was good to me,” Dean conceded when inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1953. “He gave me a strong body, a good right arm, and a weak mind.”While the Deans were dominating the National League, Dizzy visited Brooklyn Dodgers manager Casey Stengel between games of a doubleheader. Half in jest, Stengel asked, “Are there any more at home like you and Paul?”
In a doubleheader against the Dodgers, Dean pitched a three-hitter in the first game. His brother Paul pitched a no-hitter in the nightcap. “I wished I’d’a known Paul was goin’ to pitch a no-hitter,” Dizzy said. “I’d’a pitched one, too.”
“We got another brother, Elmer. He’s down in Houston, burning up the league,” Dizzy told Casey. “You might get him cheap.” Stengel couldn’t contain his enthusiasm, and soon reporters were writing about the third Dean brother bound for Brooklyn. They stopped writing and started laughing when reports from the Texas League filtered back that Elmer was a peanut vendor at the Houston ballpark.
Dean once got caught out after curfew, along with three other Cardinals, in the midst of a pennant race. Manager Frankie Frisch fined all $200, except for Dean, whose fine was $400. When Dean complained to Frisch, the manager replied, “Why, Diz, you’re not the same as those guys. You’re the great Dizzy Dean. Everything about you has got to be bigger and better than anybody else. And that goes for fines, too.” Dean had to agree.
Dean was fond of noting, “It ain’t braggin’ if you do it.” Legend has it that Dean promised at a hospital ward to strike out Bill Terry, then the Giants’ heavy hitter, with the bases loaded. So with runners on first and second and two out, Dean walked second baseman Hugh Critz, hardly a threat, to load the bases and bring up Terry. “I hate to do this, Bill,” Dean told the slugger, “but I done promised a bunch of kids I’d fan you with the bases loaded.” So Dean did, on three pitches.
In the 1934 World Series, Dean won the first and seventh games, and got beaned by a double-play relay throw while pinch-running in the fourth game. He was carried from the field, but was not seriously hurt. “The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing,” Dean proclaimed.
However, Joe Medwick upstaged Dean’s antics in the ’34 Series. The muscular left fielder was an exception to the happy-go-lucky Gashouse Gang that featured Dean and Pepper Martin. Medwick later became the only man in baseball history to knock out his own relief pitcher when hurler Ed Heusser passed an impertinent remark about Medwick’s fielding in the dugout. But in the 1934 Series, Medwick reserved his ire for the Detroit Tigers, batting
.379.
In the seventh game, he slid into Detroit third baseman Marv Owen with his spikes high, business as usual for Medwick. The triple upped the Cards’ advantage of 8–0 and moments later Medwick scored. When he returned to his post in left for the bottom of the sixth, Detroit fans added a barrage of garbage to their torrents of verbal abuse. As the debris rained onto the field, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis ordered Medwick off the field, the first player ever tossed for his own protection.
Asked about the incident afterward, Medwick said, “I can understand the fans throwing fruit and vegetables at me. What I can’t grasp is why they brought that stuff to the ballpark in the first place.”
Dean understood public relations almost as well as pitching. When riding to the ballpark with a writer, Dean claimed he was puzzled by the science of locating gas stations. “Just how did these fellas know there was gas and oil under there?” he asked.
When a reporter challenged him because he told every writer that he was born in a different place or had a different given name (Jerome, Jay, whatever), Dean replied indignantly, “Them ain’t lies, they’s scoops.”
A liner off the bat of Earl Averill struck Dean on the toe in the third
inning of the 1937 All-Star Game. Billy Herman got the rebound and threw out Averill to end the inning, and Dean retired to the clubhouse with an aching toe. A doctor examined it and said it was fractured. “Fractured, hell,” Dean moaned. “The damned thing’s broke.” The injury caused him to alter his delivery and hurt his arm. After helping the Cubs to a pennant in 1938 with an assortment of junk and hanging on for a couple more years, Dean had to retire when he was just thirty years old.
Dean stayed in the game as a broadcaster, to the exasperation of English teachers. When chided for his ungrammatical calls, Dean reminded his critics, “A lot of people who don’t say ain’t ain’t eating.” When the St. Louis Board of Education circulated a petition against Dean’s butchery of the language, Dean replied, “You learn ’em English, and I’ll learn ’em baseball.” With Dean at the mike, batters strode “confidentially” to the plate, players returned to their “respectable” bases, runners “slud,” fielders “throwed,” and “empires” made the calls. He urged listeners, “Don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.”
While Dean was broadcasting for the 1947 St. Louis Browns, a team that lost 95 games, he didn’t sugarcoat the Browns’ ineptitude. He’d suggested on the radio that he could do better than some of the Browns’ hurlers. So club president Bill DeWitt offered Dean a chance to start for the Browns, and Dean couldn’t resist. On September 28, 1947, more than six years after his last major league action, Dean went to the hill for the Browns against the White Sox. He held the Sox scoreless through four innings, but had to retire, for good, with a pulled leg muscle, suffered when he singled.
After the game, Dean beamed, “I said I could pitch as good as most of these fellows and I can. But I’ll be doggoned if I’m ever going to try this stunt again. Talking’s my game now, and I’m just glad that the muscle I pulled wasn’t in my throat.”
More Baseball Lore was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.