Notes From the Shadows of Cooperstown: Play it Again, Jocko

You gotta like an umpire with the name “Jocko,” and indeed Mr. Conlan was a genial fellow, feisty and full of spunk, and he called ‘em as he saw ‘em for 25 years. There is a story that Jocko once left a game voluntarily in 1955, when his arthritis prevented him from bending enough to see low pitches. So I wonder how Jocko, an ump I enjoyed, or Bill Klem, and ump I enjoy reading about, would receive instant replay.

Replay has made its debut in MLB, and seems off to a good start. It is too late to correct some past blunders (see my comments on Jeffrey Maier below), but I, for one, hope it is here to stay.

These days, avoiding blunders seems to be what political campaigns are all about. Replays make gaffes (or just plain looney ideas) widely accessible, no matter where they are voiced. We all mis-speak, but we are not all willing to accept correction or to apologize or to admit we are wrong. When we fail to admit our humanity, we lose respect, I think.

On Friday, September 19, there will be a panel to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the film Bull Durham, and I hope to be there, and to report on it in the next issue of Notes. This is an event that was scheduled over five years ago, and it was cancelled because of a blunder over politics. In case you were not following things then, I will replay here my take in Notes, which was not nearly as perceptive and instructive as the takes of several others, also reprinted below. If you are a political junkie and just can’t get enough of my horsehide satire, go to the Notes Archive, #226 , for a feast served up in 2000.

But this issue is not all politics, and ends with something that might bring us together, no matter the color of our skin or our politics (blue or red).

A BASEBALL HISTORY POSTSCRIPT

In Notes #437-447, I wrote a history of baseball — my own version. It was fun, and I recommend it to every fan. I think we all have strong suits (certain teams or eras or themes), and probably, because the subject is so vast, certain blind spots. I tried to remove some of the latter by researching the seasons with which I was not familiar. But when I was done, it was very obvious to me that I had skipped a lot.

For example, in writing about the 1930s, I made no mention of the innovation that came along in 1933 — the All Star Game. I am not a fan of the ‘Star Games, but I should have mentioned it. I do like the idea of players & coaches voting annually on who is the top player at each position — peer recognition. But that’s not the way it is anymore, making the ‘Star teams an annual log to toss on the Hot Stove, a subject for argument — which is OK, but unnecessary. The games themselves no longer interest me, and I think that would be the case even if they were played during the daytime, or started at 7 PM, eastern. Or if my team, the Pirates, was represented better. Or if we didn’t see so much of the All Stars on a regular basis on highlight shows. Or if we eliminated interleague plague.

The other glaring omission in my history is the Negro Leagues. I still don’t feel qualified to write much about the Negro Leagues, even though I’ve attended a couple of terrific workshops sponsored by SABR’s NL Committee, one in Harrisburg (see NOTES #219 ), and another in Memphis (see #264 ). I know that research continues to fill in blanks in this chapter of baseball history, and for those interested, there is much more available today than ever before — certainly more than was available when I was growing up and reading about baseball; much more than just a decade ago. And so much more that it deserves more than just the passing references I could have added to my history. But I should have added something. I think the future is bright, for the Negro Leagues — I know young fans who are interested, and I’ve donated my small library of NL books to a local school — not just any school, but one with an active SABR chapter.

INSIDERS

Over the past six years or so, I’ve learned a lot about the B-Sox, and I’ve learned some things about the newspaper business. We all want to believe that what we read is the unvarnished, unbiased truth. Hey, it’s in print. Alas, it turns out that bias is omnipresent. So when we look it up, we need to ask a couple questions. What is the bias of the publication?  Of the author?

This was never more plain than when I was learning about Ban Johnson and Charles Comiskey, and toss in Judge Landis, too. Many editors had aligned themselves for or against these men, and that was often reflected in their coverage, and in their quotes. And writers were not always objective, either. Frank Menke was a booster of Ban Johnson, Hugh Fullerton a close friend of Commy.

And then I learned that there was a group of writers who took a special interest in the B-Sox case. Their names appear more often than others, if you try to read everything written about the B-Sox, not just near the events of 1919-1921, but in the decades that followed. When he was nagging baseball to look into the post-Series rumors, Hugh Fullerton mentioned some of the reporters (besides himself) who were “in the know”: Ed Wray of St Louis, and Jimmy Crusinberry of the Chicago Tribune. He could have added Ed Bang (Cleveland), Joe Jackson (Detroit), maybe Otto Floto (Denver) and certainly Christy Mathewson, except that Matty had already decided to go in the other direction.

Harry Williams (Los Angeles) seemed to get hooked on the B-Sox early on, as Joe Williams (no relation, far as I know) did later, altho Joe may have been more interested in the case of Shoeless Joe Jackson, than in the larger story. Irving Vaughn (Chicago) got hooked, and so did Menke, and Earl Obenshain (Sporting News) and F.C. Lane (Baseball Magazine); Lane, of course, was the one who took Fullerton to task for tossing mud at baseball with his prying questions. Even after the scandal broke, Lane would not apologize. Bert Collyer and Frank O. Klein of Collyer’s Eye deserve special mention, of course. We can wish that Ring Lardner wrote more about it; Damon Runyon, too. As much as, say, Alan Hynd wrote in True Detective, November 1938, just months after Ring’s son John Lardner wrote “Remember the Black Sox?” in The Saturday Evening Post.

On it goes, but this is really just a long intro to a salute to one other B-Sox addict from the inner circle. James L. Kilgallen was a United News Staff Correspondent and I discovered his stuff when ProQuest added The Atlanta Constitution to its menu. Take, for example, his column of October 31, 1920.

The scandal was just a month old when JLK topped his piece with the brash headline, “Here’s the Inside Story Of the Baseball Scandal.”  As if he had it all. Well, maybe he did, but that Halloween he only gave out a few treats. He “broke” the story of how James Crusinberry and Sam Pass combined in the undoing of the cover-up (my phrase, not JLK’s). Pass was the best man of Ray Schalk and godfather his baby, and so much a Sox fan that he traveled with the team.

According to JLK, the Cook County grand jury was getting nowhere (nowhere near the WS fix of 1919, that is), when an unnamed witness told them to quiz Crusinberry. “I know a little,” JC said, “but Sam Pass knows a whole lot. Call him, too.”  To refresh memories, Crusinberry was among those who listened to Abe Attell spill his beans to Kid Gleason, in July 1920, at the famous Dinty Moore meeting. Ring Lardner was along, too. JC had heard that Attell and Hal Chase and Arnold Rothstein were behind the plot, had heard of the $100,000 price tag. But apparently the grand jury had been sheltered from these particulars, until JC took the stand.

Sam Pass knew all the Sox and not only traveled with them, he partied with them, so who knows what he had heard over the past year. JLK: “He was on the inside.”  It was Pass, according to JLK, who told the grand jury to call on Mrs Henrietta Kelley, who then became “the mystery woman” of the day. Even after she testified — after Cicotte blew the lid off the cover-up, I’m pretty sure — JFK knew her only as Cicotte’s landlady, and not his sister.

Reading old newspaper accounts can be maddening. Sometimes the editors ran short of space, and seemed to just lop off whole sections of a story. For example, “Hugh S. Fullerton Vividly Describes the Full Details Of Great Baseball Scandal,” appeared in The Atlanta Constitution on October 3, 1920. The same article appeared days before in the Chicago Journal — with twelve paragraphs removed. The AC 10/31/20 JLK article has this, about midway through:

Pass said he got this information [about a Warner Hotel conference between the Sox and gamblers, to fix the Series] from one of the gamblers who was present. At the time Pass didn’t know he was a gambler.bers has been saying of the others, and how former friendships on the club had been severed.

Huh?  What was lopped off there?  If someone has the Chicago Journal (or any paper which carried JLK) handy, please let me know!

Above, I said that Eddie Cicotte testified before Henrietta Kelley, and I think he did. He may even have testified to prevent his sister from needing to give him up, in her story. (Remember, she overheard Eddie tell his brother in the bathroom, “Well, what do I care — I got mine.”  That is usually understood to mean that Cicotte had taken his money up front. I like to play Devil’s Advocate, or Eddie’s Lawyer, and argue that the Cicotte brothers were discussing not bribery, but integrity.)

But Kilgallen has it the other way around: he has Mrs Kelley testifying, Eddie reading her testimony the next day, and then he “began to weaken,” so when he is called by Harry Grabiner from his morning practice on 9/28/20 to go to Alfred Austrian’s office (he “cools his heels” for half an hour in the corridor outside), Eddie is ready to spill his beans.

* * * * *

If the name Kilgallen rings a bell with older readers, it should: he was the father of columnist and TV panelist on What’s My Line?, Dorothy Kilgallen. James L. was just at the start of a long career in journalism (1919 – 1978) when he probed the B-Sox. Daughter Dorothy did some probing of her own, into Frank Sinatra’s connections, and the assassination of John Kennedy. I hope to follow up on JLK with his It’s a Great Life: My 50 Years as a Newspaperman.

HUTCH

Fred Hutchinson was nicknamed The Bear, although some books have The Moose and The Great Stone Face as well. I only remember The Bear, and it seemed to fit, if you think of bears as gruff types who will trash a clubhouse after the loss of an argument to an umpire, or the loss of a game that he felt he should have won. I knew Hutch as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, because that’s what we became midway thru the 1959 season. Before that he had been a pitcher, and had managed other teams, but he’s stuck in my memory as the Reds’ skipper. In 1961, he piloted the Reds to a pennant, but his greatest success was muted by a Series loss to the NY Yankees of Maris & Mantle — ‘61 was their year, too.

I hadn’t thought of Hutch in a long time, then in 2006, the SABR convention was in Seattle, and I learned that Hutch had been a legend there, long before he ever came on my radar screen. Seattle was his hometown, he was born there in 1919, in the summer the city staged an amazingly successful general strike.

Hutch was a Pacific Coast League hero before he made it to the bigs, and before he served in the Navy. His career as a pitcher was OK, 95-71, 3.73 in eleven summers; he was also a decent hitter, for a pitcher, .263. In 1959, I was 13 and Hutch was just 40, but he seemed grizzled and wizened and a tough old man.

About a week after the SABR convention in Seattle, my daughter moved to that city, and eventually was hired to work at the Fred Hutchinson Center for cancer research — “The Hutch.” His father and brother were doctors, and the brother dedicated the center to Hutch, and it makes sense to me, because if we are ever going to defeat cancer, it will take a lot of grit, Fred Hutchinson’s strong suit.

But that is not why I am writing this. Not because I remember The Bear, calling the shots as the Reds went at it with my Pirates. And not because, by coincidence, my daughter now works at The Hutch.

What I want to recall here is 1964. That’s when Fred Hutchinson, at age 44, was diagnosed with cancer. And this may sound strange today, but Hutch decided not to let it beat him. In those days, cancer was a word that people whispered, a disease they feared. It was worse than death, it meant months or years of pain. And it was feared because it was often terminal. If you know Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly, you know what I mean. If you had cancer, you kept it quiet, and you quietly faded away.

But Fred Hutchinson did not do that. He kept on managing, and talked freely about cancer. He coached in the 1964 All Star game, “moving with great effort and pain, but he would not miss it” (Norman Macht, in The Ballplayers). He was unable to finish the season, and died on November 12, 1964, spending his last months at his home in Bradenton, Florida. He was voted Most Courageous Athlete, and his death inspired many fund-raisers for cancer research.

And Hutch inspired something else, too. An essay in a book by Mickey Mantle, published in 1964. Whether Mantle wrote the piece, “Brave and Honest Hutch,” doesn’t matter. (My guess is that few know about The Quality of Courage, and we have to wonder if the words came back to Mantle at the end of his own life, when he showed his own courage, publicly battling alcoholism and calling attention to the need for organ donations.)

Mantle’s essay contains a story about Hutch’s father taking on the trolley company when they raised the fare, and the expected praises of Hutch’s competitiveness. Hutch was not only liked, as a manager, but widely respected. He was not the most successful player or manager, but he was candid. “It takes a lot of courage to be honest all the time. Think of the times you’ve bent the truth a little to get out of an awkward or embarrassing situation.”

Another story has Hutch, as manager of the Cardinals, bumping heads with GM Frank Lane and owner Busch. They wanted him to play a colorful first-baseman who couldn’t hit. “If you want a clown to play first base, why don’t you hire Emmett Kelly?” is the line that has survived. Not polite, not diplomatic. But it was honest and right.

About 80% of Mantle’s essay is prelude, as if he is having a hard time typing the word “cancer.” He postpones it a bit, using the word “malignancy.” He recalls his own reaction to that word: he felt sick. Then the miracle: Hutch talked freely about it. He talked plainly about his treatment and his chances. And he told them the truth with a grin.

“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”  Those words are Lou Gehrig’s, and looking back, we marvel at them because now we know he spoke them as a dying man. And we might think the fans in Yankee Stadium heard them that way, but they probably didn’t, Gehrig lived a few more years.

Mantle’s essay — you can read the whole thing in The Third Fireside Book of Baseball, edited by Charles Einstein in 1968 — ends with this:

Happily, courage like [Hutch’s] rubs off on other people. One of the reporters said, “I thought I would feel sorry for Hutch. Instead, I feel — I don’t know  — proud. I feel proud to be a human being because Hutchinson is one. I mean, he has cancer but instead of letting me feel sorry for him he makes me feel good just because I know him. What a man he is.”

To me, the book and movie version of Bang the Drum Slowly are summed up in the words of Henry Wiggen: “Everybody knows everybody’s dying, that’s why people are as good as they are.” (For more on Mark Harris, see Notes #399 , “Requiem for an Arthur.”)  In that fiction, we see a group of ballplayers and others, before and after: that is, before and after they learn that Bruce Pearson has a terminal illness. The contrast in how they treat Pearson is striking, but so is the difference in the way they see their own lives.

* * * * *

We have come a long way since 1964. Cancer is no longer a word we whisper, and now we can battle it in many ways, often defeating it. It looks like there will always be a need for more research, to give us more weapons. But I bet we all know people who have battled, or are battling cancer. In 1964, Fred Hutchinson stood out, and his honesty made others uncomfortable. Well, that still happens. But his courage was contagious, and has lived on long after he passed.

This issue began with my take on replays; I think they are a good idea, because even umpires are human. Then I mentioned an error or two of my own, some omissions in my baseball history in Notes 437-447. Then we looked at some imperfect reporting and editing from the B-Sox days, and managed to stretch a link between that conspiracy and cover-up to JFK’s assassination. The main piece was a look back to an incident five years ago, that had politics intruding into baseball, and I ended with something that is as far from politics as we can get. If there’s a theme here, I guess it is the cliche: “Honesty is the best policy.” But I could be wrong.

The above is an excerpt from Issue #458 of Gene’s Notes From the Shadows of Cooperstown. To read the rest of the issue (or past issues), click here .