Famous in their day, yet uncaptured on film or video
Why do this year’s series? Because until a newsreel photographer captured Al Gionfriddo’s catch of a Joe DiMaggio blast to the bullpen gate, no great defensive play in baseball had ever been captured — neither as a photograph nor a motion picture. It helped that Brooklyn’s Gionfriddo robbed the Yankees’ DiMaggio, and that the catch occurred in a World Series: precisely, in the sixth inning of Game 6 of the 1947 Fall Classic. Baseball had licensed film companies to record the World Series early on, and a few tantalizing snippets survive, such as Fred Clarke’s home run in the fourth inning of Game 1 in 1909, a ten-second survivor from the Essanay recording.
The Lubin Company made a film of Rube Waddell pitching against Boston in 1902, but it does not survive. Charles Murphy, owner of the Cubs, authorized World Series rights in 1906 to Selig Polyscope, but it too has vanished.
But it is Willie Mays’ back-to the-plate grab of a Vic Wertz liner in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series that sticks in our memories because it was captured on film. Willie always said of The Catch that he “had it all the way,” and that he had made half a dozen better plays. Forever after, though, his glove became the place “where triples go to die,” in Jim Murray’s phrase. When he wrote those words, Murray knew Ring Lardner had used them to describe Tris Speaker’s glove.
Speaker may have been the game’s greatest center fielder before Mays: 139 double plays, six of them unassisted (no one else has had even three). But no footage survives of any remarkable Speaker play. And that fact is what has set my mind to wondering: what were the great, even legendary, catches of yesteryear? Among defensive plays, MLB’s Film Room commences with Gionfriddo.
In this series we’ll not consider great catches after 1947 uncaptured on film or video, like those of Jimmy Piersall or Al Luplow or Bill Tuttle … or even Willie Mays. We’ll not discuss the Negro Leagues, or Japan, or the minors. We’ll review great plays not in chronological order nor in implied rank order. (I made a back-to-the infield grab in center field when I was twelve, frozen in my own memory, but that will not figure in, either.)
Today’s players are better than ever, and so is the game. In the field they make plays on a daily basis that would have been season highlights not so long ago. Pitchers are better, too, though no one will approach Cy Young’s win total. Batters? I do believe that Shohei Ohtani is greater than Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb.
There is no point in comparing Jack Chapman’s barehand grab of the 1860s (which earned him the nickname of “Death to Flying Things”) with that of Sam Rice or Harry Hooper, or David Wright or Kevin Mitchell. We have been spoiled, you and I, by rewinding the great plays of Jim Edmonds, Endy Chavez, Ron Swoboda, Sandy Amoros, Ben Revere, Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey Jr., Ichiro, Kenny Lofton, Lance Berkman, Dwight Evans, Otis Nixon, Devon White, Aaron Rowand, DeWayne Wise, Mike Trout.
It is pleasant if unrealistic to think that George Wright, the gloveless nonpareil of the 1860s and ’70s, would excel at shortstop today. Oldtimers continued to extol his virtues, or those of Honus Wagner, for decades after their playing days were over. But memory plays tricks, so numbers come into play, and story, sometimes garbled in its detail.
Fielding stats, especially for distant days, can mislead. Why were assist totals and errors for middle infielders so high in the years before 1920? Or putouts by first basemen? The game was the same but different.
Bruce Catton wrote, in 1959: “A gaffer from the era of William McKinley, abruptly brought back to the second half of the twentieth century, would find very little in modern life that would not seem new, strange, and rather bewildering, but put in a good grandstand seat back of first base he would see nothing that was not completely familiar.”
But technology has changed how we view the game. Before the movies, radio, and television, we had to be at the ballgame, or read about it afterward, perhaps constructing a mind’s-eye picture from the box score and the game account. With the internet, viewers may no longer care for complete ballgames, preferring highlight snips.
Let’s start off this series with a play so spectacular in its day that its fame endured for decades: a catch by Red Murray (no relation to Jim Murray, cited above) at Forbes Field on August 16, 1909. Pittsburgh’s new concrete and steel stadium was not yet two months old, having opened on June 30.
John Joseph Murray (aka “Red” for the color of his hair) played football, basketball, and baseball at Notre Dame in 1904. When the 1906 school year ended, Murray signed with the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom in 1908 he became a star. That December the Cards traded him to the Giants for Roger Bresnahan, giving Bresnahan a chance to manage and Murray a chance to display his power and speed for a winning team.
Murray was no slouch in right field, either. His game-saving catch on August 16, 1909, has been called the greatest in the history of Forbes Field. Manager John McGraw called it the “greatest and most dramatic” catch he ever saw, and Honus Wagner echoed McGraw.
Before 10,811 fans, the skies had been threatening for an hour as a violent storm blew in just as the eighth inning started. Christy Mathewson of the Giants led Vic Willis and the Pirates, 2–1. Lightning flashed as Ham Hyatt, pinch hitting for Willis, tripled. Ed Abbaticchio, running for him, scored the tying run minutes on Jap Barbeau’s sacrifice fly, and with two out, Pittsburgh had runners on second (Tommy Leach, who had doubled) and first (Wagner, walked intentionally). The Giants dithered, hoping that rain would come and home plate umpire Bill Klem would call the game, with the score reverting to 2–1.
But he would not. Dots Miller smashed a ball deep into right center off Matty, into the gathering gloom. It looked like a possible home run, or at least a triple. But at the last instant Murray raced into the territory of center fielder Cy Seymour, reached out his bare right hand, and snatched the ball some three feet off the ground, just as a lightning bolt lit up the sky.
It was as though a thousand flash bulbs illuminated the catch. The rains came for some 30 minutes; then Klem had no choice but to suspend the game, which ended in a tie. Oldtimers were still saying, into the 1950s, that this was the greatest catch of all.
For years afterward the Giants loved to reenact the catch. In a train car with the lights out, Murray would pose as though he had just grabbed the ball and someone would light a match behind him, silhouetting his form as the lightning had in Forbes Field.
“If ever a fly looked safe, that fly did,” the New York Times reporter wrote. “But all that time young Murray was legging it athwart the sward. He ran so fast he looked like an inverted Y with the upper end dipped in the sunset’s hue. [They don’t write ’em like that anymore, for which we should be grateful.] Fielders in the past may have sprinted as fast before, but none present could name them offhand. Red’s spurt was glorious. It took him from a deep point in his own position way inside Cy’s bailiwick. Not until he was well inside the middle of center field did the spectators begin to reckon the chance of his getting under the ball.”
The Greatest Plays You Never Saw was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.