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NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
Observations from Outside the Lines
By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)
#295 JUNE 3, 2003
ANOTHER TALE OF THE TAPE
Writers these days must be sobered by the realization that books are nice, but more people will see the movie, and if it's well made, even more will rent the video. Well, this writers is, anyway. It doesn't discourage me from writing, though; it makes me want to write so well, that a movie and video will follow.
The "tale of the tape" (a boxing term, methinx) of the title refers to the video I recently viewed that I review directly below. I thank Mike Nola for lending it to me.
The rest of the issue is a mixed bag: more "notes from the trail" I stepped on last September, that took me back to 1919 -- I'm very much at home there these days. Then I'm tossing out Chapter 2 of Dear Patrick, the first baseball I ever wrote; I dredge up my earliest baseball memories in "When Kiner Was King." I'm sure when I wrote those words back in 1989, I never imagined corresponding some with Ralph, three years later. Finally, there are two stories under the heading "Great-Great" -- which answer the musical question, "What happens when you mix together Germany Schaefer, Paddy Livingston, and the internet?"
My research on my "Black Sox book" -- the working title I'm using now, by the way, is Never on Friday (read on for the explanation) -- is really winding down. This month, I plan to make one more visit to the Cooperstown library, one more to my local library (to view microfilm from the Chicago Herald & Examiner), and one to Cornell University, where The (Harold) Seymour Collection reposes. My fingers are crossed that I will also be visiting soon a law firm in Milwaukee, for a long-awaited meeting with some old trial transcripts. And if I get really lucky, I might cap it off with an interview with Eliot Asinof.
IT MUST BE TRUE, I SAW IT ON THE HISTORY CHANNEL
The 1997 documentary produced by The History Channel (credit Kathleen Earle Killeen) has its good points, but history, it ain't. "World Series Fixed!" The Black Sox Scandal tells the tale pretty much along the lines of Eight Men Out, with talking heads inserted here and there. When ESPN Classic did their documentary, I complained about too many different talking heads; so I was pleased that THC utilized just four, and all four were familiar: Eliot Asinof, filmmaker/writer Ron Shelton, and historians Richard C. Lindberg (of Chicago) and Kevin Grace (of Cincinnati). Nice balance there. Except what was Ron Shelton doing with these historians? Well, he held his own until the end, when he suggested that Ty Cobb blackmailed Landis into burying the little scandal involving The Peach and Tris Speaker, because it would reflect on Landis' record. No, that came to a head in 1926, but the game involved in Cobb-Speaker was back before Landis' watch.
Perhaps the best thing about this video is its collection of old film footage from circa 1919. Probably the worst thing is the actors whose faces we never see, going thru the motions in their old Sox unis, as if color video had been invented for the occasion of the fixed World Series.
The problem I have with this show appearing on the History channel, is that it cites no sources, included no bibliography, gave a single version of a number of very controversial events (eg, how the gamblers worked out the fix with the players), and avoided completely the question of Buck Weaver, the role of Commy's lawyer Austrian, and the politics that produced Landis as Commish. I don't mind some telescoping, but Ban Johnson deserved a bigger role. Oh yes, and they let Asinof tell the story about Cicotte's bonus -- hey, he had his shots at 30 wins -- you can look it up! Hasn't anyone gotten to Asinof about this yet?
There were also some factual errors, though not as many as in Ken Burns' treatment: they had the score of Cicotte's Game 7 win as 5-4 (that was Game 6; Game 7, the Sox won 4-1); and they had "most of the (8) players" signing away their immunity, while only three did that (thanx to Austrian, working for Comiskey). The grand jury summons Cicotte, vs him being led there by Austrian.
About Jackson, there was no hint that he ever "asked to be benched" before Game One (something Asinof and The Sporting News are sure about), but they do have Joe trying to communicate with Comiskey about the fix twice after the Series (that's as specific as they get).
I guess I over-react now to anything I see or read which seems too sure of itself, which lacks the nuances, which simplifies and selects. The video is not that awful, really, and the talking heads are instructive and interesting. (But why didn't anyone ask Asinof on camera -- HEY, where did you get that detail about Jackson before Game One?
NOTES FROM THE TRAIL
Very few days go by that I do not look up or read or receive from others, something related to the fixed World Series of 1919 or related events and people. Sometimes it is a totally new article tracked down by my Utica public Library friends, like "The Big Baseball Scandal" by J.L. Brown, in The American Mercury, May, 1939. There, Brown writes that the players in on the fix were superstitious, and therefore they all agreed that it would be bad luck to be paid off on a Friday. (I think I saw that somewhere else, too -- The Last Carousel?)
In Notes #293, I wrote of the "Frank Mills" of the scandal:
So Elias Hoagland -- and his partner Jim Vasey -- remain rumors, not celebrities. Were they figments of a writer's imagination? Or were they uncredited heroes who deserve recognition for their small, and perhaps illegal role in "the start of the whole thing"? Most likely we shall never know.
Then David Fletcher visits the archives of The Sporting News and sends me a full-page article from the 10/9/57 issue, which confirms that Hoagland & Vasey indeed were real characters, who never get a mention in the descriptions of the Fix' uncovering.
A long search for a 1988 article by James Kirby in the American Bar Association Journal (February 1) ended with the discovery of a great little law library, just a few blocks from where I work. (If the legal aspects of the B-Sox trials are of interest to you, this one is worth looking up.)
Some of the books and articles on the Big Fix discuss the anti-Semitism that the scandal stirred up, when it was uncovered, and many of the gamblers involved were Jewish. (Daniel Nathan's book has the best treatment of this, that I've seen so far.) Surfing the 'net for something totally unrelated, I stumbled on a web site where some or all of the issues of The Dearborn Independent are posted, including two from September 1921 that are sometimes referenced in B-Sox literature: "Jewish Gamblers Corrupt American Baseball" and "Jewish Degradation of American Baseball." The Dearborn Independent was Henry Ford's publication, although Ford's by-line is not on the articles. These documents are very scary, 82 years later; their tone is positively Hitlerian. If you have the stomach for it, you can look the articles up at www.thelordswork.ws/Ford/46 HTM or 45/HTM. (I do not know anything about the web site; I found it by accident.)
And then there is "The Great World Series Baseball Mystery," a book-length feature by Alan Hynd that appeared in True Detective in 1938. I first saw this document when I was paging through one of the several files in Cooperstown's library with the label "Black Sox Scandal." I skimmed its twenty pages, then moved on -- miles to go before I had to return home that day. However, after discussing it a bit via email with David Fletcher, he offered to send me a copy, so I could read the whole thing at a leisurely pace -- the way True Detective was no doubt meant to be read. (Does anyone know more about this magazine?)
One thing that impressed David was how similar Hynd's account was to Eliot Asinof's 1963 Eight Men Out -- and I have to agree. Nineteen years after the Fix, Hynd has the story pretty well nailed down. If I ever interview Asinof -- hey, it could happen -- I'd love to know if he read Hynd's account in TD.
Hynd has Comiskey figuring out that the fix is in after the 9-1 loss in Game One -- he'd heard all the rumors -- but Commy has a hard time convincing his manager, Kid Gleason. That's a bit different -- most sources have Gleason coming to that conclusion himself (he'd received telegrams, too) and taking his worries to Comiskey -- who eventually takes them to Heydler, or delivers them via Harry Grabiner (that account is in "Harry's Diary.")
Hynd has Comiskey shocking Christy Mathewson with the news, too -- which means he did not know Matty was sitting with Fullerton looking for fishy plays from the start. (He has McGraw making notes during the Series.) Hynd lumps the "eight men out" together in the fix, making a case for no one to be excepted.
In the category of "He Broke the Case Open," Hynd nominates an investigator for the Chicago D.A.'s office, William Sullivan. Bill endears himself to Eddie Cicotte during spring training of 1920 (Sullivan is a big fan) and works on Eddie to confess. Hynd really over-simplifies the events that led to the grand jury. He has Happy Felsch testifying there (he didn't) and misses a lot of details (but not the "Say it ain't so" fable) and has some that are not found elsewhere (Sleepy Bill Burns falling asleep while on the stand in the 1921 trial, while the lawyers wrangled). And he has the owners getting together after the acquittal, to ban the crooked players (Judge Kenesaw Mountain Who?) But the great charm of the "book" is its dialog -- dozens upon dozens of imagined conversations among all the principals -- and some of the obscures, like Sullivan.
Hynd lists no sources and does not use footnotes. That is disappointing for researchers, but probably standard for True Detective. I was surprised that my search engines (I like Dogpile) were unable to turn up much on this magazine. Is there a pulp fiction fan out there who can add to this story?
And so it goes. I am now resigned to the likelihood that I will be reading every new book and article on the B-Sox, until my mind goes. Once my own book is published, I know I'll still be taking notes -- for the revised edition(s).
Anyone know if Fay Young wrote about the Fix or the B-Sox trial in The Chicago Defender? The black baseball press enjoyed a freedom that the mainstream papers did not have....
DEAR PATRICK -- CHAPTER 2
Last issue, I included the intro and the first chapter from the first baseball book I wrote. I started Dear Patrick: Hot Stove Deliveries from a Father to a Son in Fall 1989, and worked on it for a couple of years, before setting it aside and working on building a writing resume. Here is Chapter 2. I am likely to keep this up until someone is brave enough to tell me to stop.
CHAPTER 2
WHEN KINER WAS KING
November 17, 1989
Dear Patrick,
A month ago today, we were settling down in front of our living room television, snacks at hand, to watch Game Three of the World Series, your Oakland favorites against the Giants in San Francisco -- you were determined to go the distance, if you could last -- when news came of The Earthquake. No Game? We looked at each other, stunned. Then, as we watched the pictures flow in, the importance of baseball faded rapidly away.
As fans, we had been comfy in baseball's safe confines, where death and destruction are just metaphors for the fate of teams and players. The quake plucked us out of that world, into the real one.
Now, both the quake and the Series are history. The season ended, almost fittingly, on that shaky note -- because we lost, in 1989, baseball's promising rookie Commissioner, and the game was shrouded by the Pete Rose affair and more headlines of drugs and big salaries and big egos, than we, as fans, deserved.
And a darker cloud is hanging over baseball -- the threat that the 1990 season may not even be played, unless the players and the team owners can work things out. The winter is chilled already by that prospect.
A world without baseball -- I've never lived in one. I'm sure that I'd survive, but how less interesting life would be for me. Why? To answer that, it is going to take a while.
You are moving on into your ninth Spring, and I into my forty-fourth. Growing closer, more than older, I hope. Spring: time to untie our baseball gloves, after they've hung all winter in the basement. Remember rubbing them down, together, with glove oil, after the last warm days of last month? Rubbing, then binding them tight with a ball tucked inside, for a long winter's nap and, come spring, a better pocket. That was an annual boyhood ritual for me, starting from about the time that I was your age.
We used something called "neat's-foot oil" -- don't ask me what a neat is, I never knew that, or why its oily feet were ideal for softening leather. (I just looked it up in the dictionary. The oil's from cattle bones. Neat, huh?)
I gave the fancy massage to my first glove, a Johnny Kucks model. I had picked it out at the North Side Army & Navy Store, with my father looking over my shoulder to see if the price was right. I had no idea who Johnny Kucks was -- I later learned that he pitched for the Yankees. I picked that glove for its feel, nothing more. I had no bike and I was outgrowing my Davy Crockett coonskin cap, so my glove instantly became my most prized possession.
I guess other kids rubbed and hung their gloves, too, but in my mind it was a family event. I never read any instructions about how to do it. I learned it from my older brother Mick, and he learned it from Dad, and Dad -- ? From his father?
Throughout the cold, short-day hot-stove months, the gloves hung, looking like sleeping bats (not ball bats), wings wrapped snugly and securely. In March or April we woke them from their cocoon states, our hands gently prying off the stretched rubber ribbons. The baseballs they had trapped inside were plucked out, pearls from a loving oyster. We slipped our gloves on, then balls were slapped back in, over and over, into the pockets that we hoped would hold that perfect shape all summer long.
Just thinking of spring makes me look forward to our after-dinner and weekend games of catch, and to talking with you, while we're at it, about -- everything and anything! But always at least a little bit about -- baseball.
We owned a few gloves that never got rubbed or hung. When I was in second grade, we moved into a house that came with some furniture that the former owner no longer wanted. One tall piece, which remained on our sun porch, was a hall tree, with a large mirror, hooks for hats, and umbrella rings, and a seat that lifted up -- a natural toy chest. Inside were a flat baseball glove with webbing only between the thumb and index finger, and a catcher's mitt.
The mitt was stuffed full of straw, and it was almost impossible to catch anything with it unless you used both hands. The mitt was a cushion that could shield you from a Sandy Koufax fast ball, but nothing stuck in the "pocket" -- and we never could break it in so it might be useful.
The other item was absolutely old-fashioned, and we nicknamed it "the Al Schacht glove" after the fellow who was baseball's "Clown Prince." (We never saw him perform, but the legend lived on.) We'd switch to this glove in games of catch when we wanted to perform. Hey, if I can catch a ball with this pancake, I must be pretty good!
Those old pieces of equipment no doubt had a history of their own, but we never knew it. If they had belonged to my grandfather, then maybe they would have survived.
Baseball had made an impression on me long before my ninth Spring -- literally! I was four or five, watching the bigger kids (probably my older brother and sister were in the game) playing ball at a field we called Acorn, in "the Alley" -- the nickname for my first neighborhood in Pittsburgh. A wildly tossed bat caught me on the forehead, and it took something that Dr King called a clamp to close the hole. I carried the bandage, and then a nice scar, to kindergarten, and then around with me for years.
I'm sure I was back watching the next day. OK, so I was behind a tree! The important thing is that I returned. I never held anything against the bat or baseball.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, a Pirate fan. In those days, the early fifties, the Pirates were not a great, or even a good team. They regularly finished last, and that meant eighth out of eight teams, in the National League. "Cellar-dwellers." Their manager was quoted as saying that the team could have gone on What's My Line? -- a TV show where a panel tried to guess your profession -- wearing their uniforms, and stumped the guessers.
They had another nickname, too: "Rickey-dinks." After Branch Rickey, who chaired their Board. Rickey will always be famous for successfully introducing Jackie Robinson into major league baseball in 1947 via the Brooklyn Dodgers. But he also helped create baseball's scouting and farm system. The Pirates had more than a dozen farm teams at their peak, strung out all across the country and the alphabet, from AAA to B, C and D.
I guess you could think of the farm systems as places where players worked their way from the bottom up -- like you do on some video games. No one started at the highest level, where competition was toughest. Only the best, the cream, rose to the top, to the Majors.
But the farms weren't producing much cream in those days -- just Rickey-dinks.
However, as the famous song says, "It's root, root, root for the home team," and if they didn't win, it was only a shame -- not a reason to change loyalties!
Chances were good that if you grew up in Pittsburgh, you were also a National League fan, for All-Star Games and for the World Series. And that meant that you grew up rooting against the New York Yankees, the team that usually finished first among the eight American League teams. So it is strange for me to see you grow up, here in Utica, New York, rooting for the Yankees, as fiercely as I did for the beloved Bucs. But I can live with that.
I've never lived in a world without television, either. My generation is the first to be able to say that. Our family's old Philco was not a color set, and the picture was small, but it mesmerized us. Did TV plant the seeds of my interest in baseball? Probably not.
I always suspected that the Pittsburgh stations showed more Joe E. Brown movies than normal, because his son, Joe L., became the Pirates' General Manager in the mid-fifties. Joe E. was an actor and comedian, and we became familiar with his baseball films, Alibi Ike and Elmer the Great.
By the way, another famous name in the Pirate front office was a Vice President named Bing Crosby. Imagine how you'd feel if you learned that Billy Joel was connected to the Utica Blue Sox! He isn't, but Bing was with the Bucs, and that was one more thing that made the home team special.
We were exposed by the TV to other baseball movies, too. William Bendix played Babe Ruth; Gary Cooper, Lou Gehrig; and Dan Dailey was Dizzy Dean.
Ronald Reagan starred as Grover Cleveland Alexander. (Later, as President, when you knew him, he played Casey Stengel, giving Americans what they loved -- "wisdom" that was really incoherence and details, "Stengelese.") Looking back, our attachment to baseball probably grew more despite these portrayals, than because of them!
In Pittsburgh, these movies might have been interrupted by a heating company commercial featuring Pie Traynor, a Hall of Fame thirdbaseman -- maybe the best-ever at that position. Pie was one of the most popular Pirates ever, too, and I only wish that I had got to see him play, as often as those darn commercials ran!
The printed word had more influence on me, I think. I still recall some of the books we had at home when I was learning how to read. One was a Yankee yearbook, which was full of names (and nicknames, like Whitey and Yogi and Scooter) and pictures and numbers -- all a foreign language to me then. B.B.: base on balls, also called a walk, no time at bat charged. Little by little I learned to understand and speak that tongue -- asking a question here of my father, another one later of my sister (I think the yearbook was hers), and keeping my eyes and ears open. R.B.I.: runs batted in; a hundred per season was the target for sluggers. E.R.A.: earned run average; under 3.00 is good. And in Pittsburgh only, F.O.B.: the bases were Full of Bucs! Like living in a land where English is not spoken -- learning takes place quickly. It's fitting in, and coping with the now strange, but soon-to-be-familiar culture. S.B.: stolen base, right? Right! H.R.: that's easy, home run!
Sooner or later, the language of the family, the neighborhood is picked up, and for me, "talkin' baseball" was as natural as chatting about the weather. Nobody could do anything about those Pirates, either!
Some of those yearbook Yankees, I can still see -- Johnny Sain and Casey Stengel and maybe that's where I first heard of Mickey Mantle.
I can't be sure about Mantle, but I am certain that the first player I truly connected with was another slugger: Ralph Kiner. If I had been born in New York, as you were, it likely would have been DiMaggio; if in Boston, Ted Williams. St. Louis had Stan the Man Musial. But destiny had penciled in Kiner for me.
Ralph arrived as a 23-year-old rookie in Pittsburgh the same year I did, 1946. He hit twenty-three homers, while I worked on crawling. Twenty-three was good enough to lead the league -- no Pirate had accomplished that since 1902. (One of your heroes, Don Mattingly, also hit that many HRs in his first year.)
Babe Ruth, still alive in 1946, was gone from baseball's stage -- but before leaving, he had transformed that stage in his decades of dominance. He hit home runs, long ones, and people came out to see him do it in record numbers. He made home runs the backbone of the Yankee offense, and the Yankees were winners. So many teams were hoping for someone like Ruth, who could draw fans and start a dynasty in their own cities.
Home runs were macho (as Leonard Koppett once wrote) -- they required power, strength, might, courage, muscle. And in those days, the parks were bigger, and not everyone who swung for the fences really had much of a chance to drive the ball that far. Kiner could do it. And he could draw fans. Now the big question -- could he turn the Pirates into a dynasty? Or a contender?
Kiner was a real hero, probably the only one that Pittsburghers could boast of in those years. He represented the city's best chance that the national spotlight would shine on us for a while! In our house, Ralph Kiner was spoken of with respect and awe, as if he was President Truman or General Eisenhower. You cannot imagine how immensely popular he was. If local Mt. Washington was carved up like Rushmore in those days, Kiner's face would have been on there. He earned a place in Pittsburgh's Hall of Fame two and a half decades before he was inducted into Baseball's.
Why was Ralph Kiner so admired? Well, as I said, he could hit home runs -- lots of them. Fifty-one the year I learned to walk, fifty-four two seasons later, when I mastered the alphabet. Not many men have hit fifty, before or since; "it ain't easy."
If he'd have done it thirty years sooner, he might be as famous today as Babe Ruth. Or, he might have been bought by the Yankees!
He hit over three hundred four-base-hits as a Pirate, and -- this is really amazing -- Ralph led the league in circuit clouts seven years in a row, every season that he wore a Pirate uniform. No one else had ever done that before -- or since.
So while the team was at or near the bottom of the standings, Ralph Kiner put Pittsburghers at the top of the world. The city's name was at the top of at least one "league-leader" category in the sports section. This athlete thus saved the city's self-respect, and in return the city idolized him. And still does, as near as I can tell, especially the generations before mine.
Kiner never did become the national folk hero that Babe Ruth was. And I've never heard him compared with Ty Cobb, either. My impression is that Kiner was a "nice guy" -- not the type to "call his shot" (predict a homer, then hit it.) Unfortunately, with the Pirates he was a nice guy that finished last or next-to-last -- far out of the October spotlight. Maybe what he needed to get the country's attention was a better nickname, like Duke or Big Cat, something more colorful than just Ralph.
When the country needed heroes and their legends, after the Civil War, baseball was there to provide them. Cities found their own. Pittsburgh needed Honus Wagner and his eight batting titles, then (after World War I) Pie Traynor and the Waners and Arky Vaughn. After WW II, Pittsburgh needed Ralph Kiner.
Baseball's popularity in America has soared after each war, from the Civil War to Vietnam. Maybe that's because war is hell, and baseball, a taste of heaven -- where the campaign to win isn't bloody, and everyone knows exactly what the fighting is for. And if the team is clobbered -- there's always next year.
Kids (and their parents) didn't "shop around" for heroes -- we rooted for the ones that played in and for (we were sure) our city. Sure, we heard about, say, Yogi Berra or Mickey Mantle or Whitey Ford -- and saw them in the World Series on TV. But they were remote stars. For those who followed the Pirates, Ralph Kiner had little competition.
Ralph Kiner was, I think, a special kind of hero, more like Don Mattingly than Jose Canseco, another of your current favorites. Or maybe he was more like Dale Murphy, without the national exposure of TBS.
Fans weren't as distracted then in their hero-worship, by reports of enormous salaries, or suspicions of drugs and steroids, or rumors about the off-the-field activities of players that are so played up nowadays. Or by strikes, or lockouts like the one that threatens next spring. The press was gentle then, and preferred gentlemen heroes.
By the mid-fifties, baseball had fully recovered from the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, and America had recovered from the agony of World War II and Korea. Baseball was truly the "national pastime" -- no other sport held Americans' attention in the same way. America felt good about itself, and was proud of its warriors.
For Pittsburghers, major league baseball was a game played out in Oakland at Forbes Field, or listened to on the radio, or read about in one of the three or four daily newspapers. Some games were televised, but the color had to come from our imagination. It mattered to me, simply because it mattered to those who mattered to me.
By the time I really understood baseball, Ralph Kiner was gone. I never got to see him play a game, even on TV. He had departed from the Pirate family, leaving behind only fond memories. But he had secured a place in Pittsburgh's history like Abe Lincoln had in America's: we would always need and hope for someone like him. And as each season passed, for Pittsburgh and for America, it would be clearer and clearer, that we would never again have anyone like them.
GREAT-GREAT
I recall being impressed by carbon paper, by ditto machines and mimeographs, by the wizardry of reel-to-reel audio tapes, and the sheer genius of those little rolls or rectangles with a white chalky substance on one side, which meant you could type (on your typewriter) over your mistakes without having to recopy the whole page. So you can imagine how I instantly fell in love with the technology of word processing. Then came the internet, and it still boggles my mind that I can bang out words at my desk one minute, and in the next, make them accessible to millions of people all over the planet.
And because Notes has been archived at a website since issue #184, February 1999, I receive e-mail from time to time from absolute strangers, who surfed into Notes while looking up someone or something I've written about (or by sheer accident).
For example, since last issue, the great-great nephew of Germany Schaefer contacted me. I had written long ago about the legend of Germany stealing first base (from second), in order to set up a double steal. The story gained fame when it appeared in The Glory of Their Time, but the oral history proved to be hard to document. However, Germany's descendant had a reference to a piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 5, 1911, by Sam Weller. Here is Weller on what happened in the first game of a doubleheader the day before -- the Senators (Germany's team) took both ends from the White Sox:
To make the first game more spectacular than ever there was a ninth inning riot caused by some weird base running by Germany Schaefer, and it set a problem for the umpires that will keep the experts guessing all summer.
Washington started in the last of the ninth as if it would surely put the winning run over in a hurry. Milan began with a double and when Schaefer bunted a play was made at third base, but it was too late to get a man. With none out Elberfeld popped to McConnell and then Schaefer stole second. Gessler fanned, making two out, then Schaefer was sorry he was on second, so with Walker at bat the Dutchman took a lead off second on the other side and stole first base. This brought Manager Duffy out on the field, right out by the pitcher's box, where he argued with Umpire Parker for permitting the play, and while this argument was going on Schaefer thought it would be a good time to steal second again.
He started down and allowed himself to be trapped between the gases, then Milan began edging from third for home. Finally the latter made a dash for the plate and Collins shot home to Payne, who tagged the man three feet away. Umpire Connolly called him out and immediately it seemed all the ball players in uniform surrounded him, the Washington players protesting that the play shouldn't go because Chicago had ten men on the field. Manager Duffy having stayed out in the middle of the diamond during it all.
Umpire Calls Man Out.
Umpire Connolly waded around behind the plate trying to brush off the players as they crowded upon him, and ruled that the play should stand and the man be out. It seemed the sensible decision, too, for Washington had started the play in spite of the fact that there was a pause in the game while the managers were arguing with the umpires. That decision led the game into extra innings.... [Washington won, 1-0 in the 11th inning; they beat Ed Walsh 3-2 in the nightcap.]
WELLERISMS
Schaefer's trick of stealing first base after he had stolen second is one that is seldom turned, and has been ruled upon differently by umpires. When he stole second only one was out, and the run needed to win was on third. He wanted to avoid a double play when he stole second. Then the batter struck out, and he stole first base, so as to be in a position to work a double steal.
As near as I can tell, from Retrosheet, the account is accurate. Bob "No Relation" Schaefer has been one of the SABRites who has been trying to track down Germany stealing first, for some years now. When I sent Bob this account, he was excited, calling the find "a Holy Grail" for deadball era research. Of course, I didn't dig up this game account -- it came to me serendipitously, because a relative of Germany Schaefer came across something I'd written long ago in Notes.
* * * * *
Another e-mail arrived this week from the great-great grandaughter of Paddy Livingston. Who? Well, Paddy is a very obscure catcher, whose ML career spanned (off and on) 1901-1917. I ran into Paddy while researching Addie Joss -- Paddy played on an All Star team, with Cobb, Speaker, Collins, Cy Young and others, in a 1911 benefit for Addie's widow and children. I was struck first by that fact, then by how many times Paddy's and Addie's paths almost crossed -- they were never teammates, but came close a number of times. I fictionalized Paddy when I made him the central character of a full-length play (now a musical) I wrote back in 1993. Mornings After remains obscure, too, although I get nibbles now and then.
The note from Paddy's great-great grandaughter was fun to read. She told me Paddy's youngest son is still alive (at 83). Paddy himself was for a stretch, MLB's oldest living ex-ballplayer -- he died at age 97 in 1977. (That's in my play.) His great-great grandaughter is just 21; she has a long way to go. I suppose it was just a matter of time that one of Paddy's kin would find me. My old notes on Paddy had him with 13 grandkids and 27 great-grandkids when he passed on, so there are probably hundreds of Paddy's relatives out there surfing the web at any given moment.