NOTES #125
March 17, 1996 by Gene Carney · Leave a Comment
St Patrick Invented Baseball
I have suspected for some time that I’ve always
felt at home in the country of baseball, partly
because of my ancestry. Both of my grandfathers, long
gone from the planet long before I arrived, were
Irish.
So what? Well, if you look closely at the hairs on
baseball’s head, you will see a lot of green at the
roots. Go back to the days when Cy was Young, the
“rowdy ball” era of Mack and McGraw. There,
fighting, gambling and drinking seemed as essential
to the sport as pitching, hitting and running.
On St Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1871, at
Collier’s Cafe on the corner of 13th St and
Broadway in Manhattan, the pretense that
baseball was purely an amateur sport
officially came to an end. That evening, the
old National Assn. of Base Ball Players split
between those clubs determined to keep alive
the gentlemanly game pioneered by the
Knickerbockers, and a brand-new National
Assn. of Professional Base Ball Players.— BASEBALL , Ward
& Burns
Brawls and rhubarbs were not just anticipated on
the part of the players, managers and umps — fan
violence was a problem for baseball, too. Notre Dame
didn’t pick up that nickname “Fighting
Irish” in a vacuum.
Nor was gambling solely a fan activity, although
early on baseball had the goal of keeping the players
away from the bookies. I think baseball appealed to
gamblers partly because it’s a hard game to fix. (The
White Sox of 1919 proved it was possible, if the
stakes were high enough.) When I visited Ireland, I
was told that the Irish “bet on anything that
moves.” So baseball must have attracted Irishmen
like a grand sweepstakes — or a bingo!
As for drinking — well, the Irish may not be an
alcoholic nation, but baseball seemed to be, for a
long while, and drugs still ruin more careers than
curve balls. One of the first such casualties was one
of baseball’s first great stars, Mike
“King” Kelly, who was also one of the
game’s first Irish Catholic stars.
This issue is a tribute to the green roots of
baseball, and is not for the politically correct. OK,
maybe St Patrick didn’t invent it, but I bet he’d
have been a big baseball fan.
“SLIDE, KELLY,
SLIDE”: HE DID
THE STICKPIN
[This story has appeared in Notes
before,
but it fit so well with the themes of this issue …
and then Mike Schacht sent me this little ad from
Leland’s SCD.]
When my father died, I was the one who went
through his things for Mom, to sort out anything
valuable from the junk. I was 26 and had performed
this task before, the “archeologist”
sifting layers of someone else’s past, wondering
about the meaning of the stuff collected over a
lifetime. Poems and photos and rings and holy cards
from the funerals of friends and relatives.
In my father’s stockpile I found an old stickpin,
something I’d seen years before. It had been hisfather’s pin, perhaps excavated from my grandfather’s
belongings after he had died.
My paternal grandfather, Mike Carney, was an Irish
cop in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century. He died
before I was born, but I was told that he was the
first in my family to get hooked on baseball and the
Pirates. Baseball was an occupational hazard for him,
a rough sport played by rough men cheered on by rough
fans. Policemen were admitted to games free if they
were in uniform, to help keep order in the
grandstand. Mike Carney took in as many games as he
could.
No doubt he was on hand in 1909, when Forbes Field
opened. It was built in just four months. Sure, steel
was handy, but I like to think that the construction
crews were motivated like the cathedral builders of
Europe, by a sort of religious fervor — the fervor
of a city in a pennant race. The Pirates, descendants
of the Alleghenies, had been there a few times
before, winning in 1901, ’02 and ’03. But in 1909
they won 110 games, led by Honus Wagner and Fred
Clarke and Howie Camnitz and a kid pitcher with a
great nickname, Babe Adams.
Forbes Field opened on June 30. The Pirates lost
that day, but Mike Carney came home with a souvenir
metal stickpin. It was a few inches long, a tiny
catcher’s mitt with a baseball inside, engraved with
the historic date. He kept the pin until he died, and
so had my father.
Perhaps the pin was worn on those special days,
when my grandfather took his whole family to the old
ball game, dressed in their Sunday best (because they
rode the streetcar) to see Pie Traynor and the Waner
brothers. I imagine my father as a teen, and his
brother and sister being tremendously excited on
those trips to Oakland, while Gram Carney packed a
lunch and went along for the ride and understood none
of it.
When the pin became mine in 1972, it brought back
memories of the Mike Carney who was my father. Games
of catch, or hitting fungoes on warm summer evenings
at North Park. Dinnertime debates over whether Dick
Stuart was the new Ralph Kiner. Dozens of trips to
Forbes Field with my family, with lunches packed by
my Mom, to eat between the games of a Sunday
doubleheader. Always taking along pencils to keep
score, while we rooted for the Bucs.
Memories of 1960. That summer I was a teenager,
and when the Pirates charged to their first pennant
in 33 years, then beat the unbeatable Yankees (on
Maz’ homer), it was a climax of not just a season,
but of years of rooting.
When the Pirates won again in 1971, my father and
I got to go to the only World Series game either of
us would ever see. I was working in Cleveland, but my
father got two tickets to the first night game in
Series history, so I could drive home, root the Bucs
to a win with my Dad, and be back at work next day.
The pin also reminded me of hundreds of letters
that I exchanged with my father after I left
Pittsburgh for college. Baseball was a frequent
topic. I was out of range for KDKA and Bob Prince,
but my Dad wove the radio play-by-play into his
letters, digressing for a triple by “Cleem”
(his shorthand for Clemente) or noting Prince’s
colorful images (“… that was as close as fuzz
on a tick’s ear.”) His letters came several
times a week, sometimes twenty or fifty pages long,
in his distinctive, effortless longhand. In between
his predictions, in between hits and runs, I got to
know my father.
So when I found that stickpin from the 1909
birthday of Forbes Field, I decided that it belongedin Cooperstown, donated in my father’s name. He had
been a Hall of Fame fan.
I moved to upstate New York a few years later and
started my own family. My wife will never be a
baseball fan, but tolerance is one of her many other
virtues. My kids are learning and liking the game,
and we root for our local Blue Sox.
When the Pirates won the pennant in 1990, I was a
teenager all over again, rooting as hard as I everdid in 1960. But that season will also be memorable
for an event on a rainy June morning.
My sister was visiting from Pittsburgh, and
together with my son, we drove off to Cooperstown, to
see if we could find a certain stickpin in the
Baseball Hall of Fame. I found it first, in a wall
display commemorating Forbes Field. For us, it
recalled so much more than a ball park.
My father is buried in Pittsburgh, where family
visit with flowers and remember him. I visit
Cooperstown and do the same.
* * * * *
My father died on a golf course, exactly the way
he wanted to go. I got him addicted to golf, and
looking back, it was kind of revenge for his getting
me hooked on baseball. Mike Carney could have gone to
game 7 of the 1960 World Series, but didn’t. I have
since read about other fans who simply don’t want to
risk the extreme highs (or lows) of those rare
situations. Who knows? Maybe sending my mother in as
a pinch-rooter added a dozen more summers to his
life. Sometimes you play your hunches.
IN THE DUGOUT
Leonard Koppett, one of my favorite baseball
writers, traced the ancestry of baseball’s managers
(in The Man in the Dugout) back to three main
“creators”: John McGraw, Connie Mack, and
Branch Rickey. “Three exceptional men who not
only fashioned modern baseball’s development in the
first half of the twentieth century, but whose direct
influence is still visible and ubiquitous in every
ballpark in the final decade of this century.”
McGraw was born of an Irish immigrant father, less
than a decade after the Civil War, about sixty miles
west of Cooperstown. Connie Mack was born during the
war, of an Irish immigrant father who served in the
Union Army. Branch Rickey was a generation later, of
New England stock, but with roots on his mother’s
side that traveled back to Scotland. Close enough.
Koppett never suggests the influence of the
Emerald Isle on baseball, nor does he highlight the
flow of green blood in the dugout, through McCarthy
and Murtaugh, to today’s strategists. I will let you
draw your own conclusions.
I mentioned up top that I’ve been to Ireland. That
was 1973, and I was advised to avoid the north, where
a war was in progress. A fellow I met in London, who
was close to that civil war in Belfast, was
pessimistic. “The kids grow up with it. Hate is
passed down from one generation to the next.”
Baseball is a generational thing, too. Even if you
are skeptical about Koppett’s family trees, we all
have stories from the generations before ours, to
which we add our own, and pass down to the next
generation. I think baseball stories are better for
kids than war stories. On the whole, most people
prefer sports to war.
Maybe baseball would have spread like crazy in
this country anyway, once our own civil war ended.
But something in me wants to believe that the country
was sick and tired of war. We got hooked on baseball
to help us forget the war. To help us heal.
We take it for granted, that all over our land,
families of every ethnic descent, religion, political
persuasion, and color, can enjoy a ballgame,
together. It’s something pretty special.
RHAPSODY IN GREEN
BEER
“At one time the persons who drank
the most on a team were the ones held in the
highest esteem. Back in the days of the
Play-hard, Drink-hard Syndrome, it showed you
were someone, showed how much you could drink
and still stand on your feet.”
— Sam McDowell, recovering alcoholic
Keynote talk, 1990 SABR Convention“One of the prominent evils of the
season of 1883 … was the drunkenness which
prevailed in the ranks of many of the club
teams. The number of League and American
matches that were lost last season by
dissipation of players would surprise the
fraternity were they enumerated …. there
was scarcely one team in the arena that did
not have at least one “weak
brother” among its players.”
— Spaulding’s Official BB Guide
1884“At the turn of the century, Ed
Delahanty was one of the finest players in
the game. However, Ed … had a problem; he
drank too much. Whiskey, plus gambling and a
fiery Irish temper, led to his demise….
— Lewis Scheid
“The Tragedy of Ed Delahanty”
SABR BB Research Journal #20“Enjoying his celebrity status as
manager of baseball’s top franchise, McGraw
ran with the shady Broadway crowd that Damon
Runyon would make famous and invested in a
poll hall and racetrack, with Arnold
Rothstein, the nation’s top gambling
racketeer, who was behind the Black Sox
bribes of 1919….
“[Attorney] Fallon defended McGraw
against charges for assault and possession of
alcohol stemming from a drunken brawl at the
Lamb’s Club in 1920.”
— Eliot Cohen
“Rose Out, McGraw In. Why?”
SABR’s BB Research Journal #20Of course, there are those who learn after
the first few times. They grow out of sports.
And there are others who were born with the
wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are
the truly tough among us, the ones who can
live without illusion, or without even the
hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or
up-to-date. I am a simple creature, tied to
more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to
think something lasts forever, and it might
as well be that state of being that is a
game; it might as well be that, in a green
field, in the sun.
— A. Bart Giamatti
The Green Fields of the Mind
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LITTLE NAPOLEON
John McGraw
Fundamentalist before the
Fundamentals got around,
Baseball’s answer
to Franklin and Edison
Old Oriole invented new ways to win
Every time his team took the fieldSo much of baseball’s family
Bears a strong resemblance
To this patriarch
of the inside game
His genes dominant as his Giants
In the scrappy skippers who fight
Tooth and nail for their players
And their victories —
Anything goes
For the generals at warThe game has his eyes
Nothing escaped them
No opportunity
For the extra base or run
No chance to cut down
the enemy rally
Or slow the enemy runner
No occasion to instruct
Motivate
LeadEyes lit by fire
Eyes for talent buried in
Sons of miners and farmers
Eyes for intimidating
Authorities upstairs
or between the lines
And all those not on his side
Eyes for the advantage everywhere
His armies hit and ran
Like Colonial soldiers
Disciplined by a tyrant
Tactics was Mr McGraw’s
Business
— from Romancing the Horsehide
(McFarland, 1992)
RHAPSODY IN GREEN
BEER — Part II
In my favorite baseball “trivia” book
(it may not be confined to that category), The
Answer is Baseball
, Luke Salisbury has a
wonderful chapter, “The Riddle of the
Indian”. Lou Sockalexis, the Penobscot from
Maine after whom the Cleveland Indians were named (to
honor him, PCs), was not the first Native American to
make the bigs. James Madison Toy played in the
American Association in 1887. But Lou was the first
to make it big in the bigs.
According to Salisbury, “John McGraw and
Hughie Jennings said Sockalexis was the finest
natural talent they ever saw.” He had a
reputation as a drinker long before he reached
Cleveland. Salisbury notes that the media of the day
often used euphemisms — “pneumonia” (or,
in Boston, “Irish pneumonia”) often meant
complications from alcoholism. The riddle of this
Indian is not how or why he “disappeared into
the Indian burial ground of the bottle,” but how
he managed to succeed at all, playing baseball while
the slaughter of millions of Native Americans was
continuing, and no doubt was reported a short
distance from the box scores.
In the first Fireside Book of Baseball
,
my favorite library, is a chapter from Robert Smith’s
book Baseball
(Simon & Schuster, 1947),
“The Wild Irishman and the Gentle Indian”.
So you see I’m hardly the first to bring Lou
Sockalexis together in print with Ed Delahanty. It’s
a wonderful chapter. Smith notes that John McGraw
once made “a fat offer” to Big Ed, to play
for him in New York. But unfortunately for Ed, peace
broke out — between the National and American
leagues, that is — and the reserve clause condemned
him to remain in Washington a second summer. Most of
his career, he starred for the NL Phillies; in 1902,
his first AL season, he led the fledgling league with
.376
Arguably one of the top hitters of all-time (Big
Mac has Big Ed at .346, sandwiched between Shoeless
Joe and Ted Williams; he could kill the dead ball),
Delahanty had accepted a $4500 advance from McGraw,
and much of it was already lost at the race track. So
Big Ed was cranky when the 1903 season started. He
turned more and more to the bottle, was suspended
after a binge of several days in June, and
“began to devote his full time to
drinking.” The story of his mysterious and
tragic end — put off a train for drunken brawling,
Ed wound up falling off a bridge and going over
Niagara Falls — is a book all by itself.
And that book would be July 2, 1903
, by
Mike Sowell (MacMillan, 1992). Follow it up with Luke
Salisbury’s The Cleveland Indian: The Legend of
King Saturday
(Smith, 1992). Both have been in
my On Deck for … four years now!
It is fun to imagine Lou Sockalexis, Wild Irishman
Delahanty, and John McGraw sitting down for a game of
bridge, joined by Christy Mathewson. For $1,000 in
the category Designated Drivers, who is Big Six?
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A DISSENTING VIEW:
“[Bobby Thomson’s HR] gives us some idea
of what Greek tragedy was like. Baseball is
Greek in being national, heroic, and broken
up in the rivalries of city-states…. Is
there not a poetic symbol in the new meaning
— our meaning — of ‘Ruth hits Homer’?”
— Jacques Barzun
French-born historian
IRISH MEUSEL WASN’T
Besides learning more about Lou Sockalexis in that
chapter of The Answer is Baseball
(and be
sure to put your answer in the form of a question),
you will find out who the first Polish and Italian
ballplayers were. Salisbury has Oscar Bielaski as the
first Pole (he did not make the “Name Ending in
Ski All-Star Team” of Davis & Horne in their
irreverent little collection), and Eddie Abbaticchio
as the first Italian. “Abby” will be fine
in the box score, thanks. (Sockalexis makes the
Davis/Horne Native American All-Stars, but not their
Alcoholic Stars — Lou played outfield — so did
Ruth, Hack Wilson & Paul Waner.)
It says something that no one ever asks who the
first Irish player was (or English or German. German
roots for some of the all-timers, Gehrig, Honus
Wagner, Mike Schmidt. Babe Ruth is considered German,
but I believe that’s just half-true, isn’t it? Wasn’t
his mother Kate, Irish? It says something, too, about
our culture, that paternity outweighed maternity.
Chief Bender and Roy Campanella come quickly to
mind.)
Salisbury discovered that Eddie Collins and Mickey
“Black Mike” Cochrane were both Irish
Protestants, despite their Boston connections.
Most players with any Native American blood were
nicknamed “Chief,” and many of German
descent were called “Heinie.” But did you
know that Irish Meusel, older brother of Murderer’s
Row Bob, was Alsatian? He looked “Celtic,”
one source explains. Frankly, I see no resemblance at
all to Cousy, Bird or Russell.
I’ve mentioned before in Notes
that once
upon a time, fans could look up “ancestry”
as easily as “bats left, throws right.” My
old Pirate yearbooks are Exhibit A. For example,
1959: infielder Harry Bright (a perennial glowing
prospect) was “Pennsylvania Dutch.” ElRoy
Face, “English, French and German.” Freddie
Green, “Scotch-Irish.” Lots of English,
Irish & Germans on that team. Frank Thomas was
gone by ’59, but the ’56 yearbook lists that
Pittsburgh native as “Lithuanian-Slavic.”
The Cold War notwithstanding, the Bucs also carried a
Russian catcher, Danny Kravitz, who was never trusted
with the team’s signals. Just kidding there — I
liked Danny.
The old yearbooks, by the way, were jammed full of
baseball. Stats galore, photos galore, stories to
last thru the longest rain delays. The most recent
yearbooks I have are slick, glossy, and mostly
advertising. Thin on stats. And there would probably
be a lawsuit filed by the Players’ Association if
anyone was asked to list “ancestry” on a
file care for the PR folks.
I will argue that it is a good thing for fans to
recognize the ancestry of players. It is good to see
people of different races, creeds and colors playing
together, enjoying each other. I think this is no
small part of the game’s appeal for immigrants.
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HEARD IT THRU THE
GRAPE-LINE
Someone researching racial information for current
major leaguers drew this response from SABRite Chip
Hart (3/4/96):
“No team, at least since the fifties,
would dare to keep racial data. I can’t imagine
that the Yankees (or any official entity) would
keep a database that looks like:
Mike Greenwell: White
Darryl Strawberry: Black
Devon White: Black
Bud Black: White [whoops, having too much fun]“And there is significant argument as to
whether someone is black (or AA, or whatever term
you prefer) vs. Latino, etc. Is Guerrero black or
Latin? How about Bonilla? … Can we say that
Dennis Martinez (clearly Latin) has received the
same treatment as Barry Bonds (clearly black)? I
dunno.”
I dunno either. I recall reading that some races
(Hispanic was one) had lots of different words for
persons with different degrees of that race. The
question has come up when talking about Native
Americans who played ball in the major leagues —
would you include Willie Stargell, whose roots in
Oklahoma go back to a Native American tribe
(originally from Florida, I think) which was
well-integrated with runaway slaves? Isn’t Johnny
Bench one-sixteenth Native American, or
one-thirty-second?
It is difficult, here in 1995, to talk about race,
without raising somebody’s hackles. Before you know
it, the topic changes from race to stereotyping, to
racial/ethnic slurs, to O.J. Simpson, to the history
we’ve made in this nation: slavery, the Native
American holocaust, the treatment of
Japanese-Americans during WW II, the treatment of
women today. As Harry Caray (or Phil Rizzuto) might
say, Holy Cow! — but then again, if the phrase
offends Americans with roots in India….
The black players in my old Pirate yearbooks, in
case you are wondering, were listed as “American
Negro” — it was a simpler time. Roberto
Clemente, “Spanish-Puerto Rican Negro.”
Roman Mejias, who once hit three HRs into San
Francisco’s jet stream, “Spanish-Cuban
Negro.” Joe Christopher, from the Virgin
Islands, seems to be the only player with no ancestry
listed.
Jim O’Brien’s interview with Joseph O’Neal
Christopher — now an artist (pre-Columbian) in
Baltimore — is one of the more unusual in his book
Maz and the ’60 Bucs. “(Branch) Rickey told me
he chose Jackie Robinson (to break the color barrier
in baseball) because of his birthdate. He believed
that some people are pre-destined for success by
their birthdate,” Joe told Jim. (I wonder if
Spike Lee will have that detail in his film? Jackie
was born January 31 (1919), same as Ernie Banks …
Nolan Ryan … hey, maybe Rickey was onto something!)
Joe is apparently not related to ex-Buc
pitcher/photographer Alvin O’Neal McBean, also of the
Virgin Islands. Both Irish, O’Course.
D is for
Dreyfuss
Our first owner, Barney
And also for Danny
That’s Murtaugh —
as in blarney!
— from AlphaBuc Soup
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EXTRA INNINGS
This has been a strange issue indeed, but I’ve
tied in before other off-season holidays, likeThanksgiving and Halloween and New Years, with
baseball, so why not St Patrick’s Day?
It’s only fitting that I let Paddy Sullivan, frommy play MORNINGS AFTER have the last words (Act 1):
Paddy: Guess I caught the baseball bug from
Pap, all right. When I was just a leprechaun,
he’d carry me to and from on his shoulders.
(Paddy acts this out) When I growed up some, we’d
walk to the games from home, tossin’ a ball back
and forth, me on one side o’ the street, and Pap
on the other, and we’d yell back and forth and
salute the neighbors duckin’ our throws. Pap
hardly missed a game, summer after summer.Molly: Was he glad you became a ball player?
Paddy: When I showed Pap me first contact last
winter, even though it was just for weekends, his
smile ran from here to the Lakes of Kilarney —
couldn’t ‘a been more excited if I told him I was
joinin’ the seminary and aimin’ at bishop!PADDY ON APRIL: Ah, to be on the young side of
twenty, in good health, and in April. The air’s
never fresher than in April…. The poets have it
all wrong…. April is far from the cruelest
month. Nay, it’s the kindest, gentlest month of
all.
SEE YOU IN APRIL!
.
