Notes #484 — Cradle to the Grave

                             NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
                                           Observations from Outside the Lines
                                     By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@adelphia.net)
 

#484                                                                                                                       APRIL 13, 2009
                                        CRADLE TO THE GRAVE
 

            The phrase seemed to fit this issue, after the opening essay was written. Requiem for a Rookie is, I believe the sixteenth Requiem that has appeared here in NOTES over the past, well, sixteen years. But they are not annual features, and never planned. Never really wanted . But they happen.
 

            In baseball, we usually have a narrower focus. We don’t much care about the births and childhoods of the players we follow. We probably don’t know what schools they attended. They come onto our radar screen when they sign with our teams , and start working their way up the ladder, in the minors. This is reflected in the old phrase, “bonus baby” (apparently coined by Pat Jordan in one of the best baseball books I’ve read, A False Spring ). The young men signed for big bucks (in Jordan’s day, $10,000 or more!) are “treated more tenderly” than the players in whom the investment is smaller. And they rise to the top more quickly, sometimes too fast, with dismal results. Which reminds me of a favorite adage, “TTT — Things Take Time.”
 

            Once in the big leagues, we watch players come of age — and these days, if they don’t mature quickly, they are gone. Careers can be incredibly brief. I’m not sure what the average is these days, but only a very few players will stretch their playing days to fifteen or twenty seasons. Since free agency, few will remain with one team for their whole career. This has made baseball, for me, harder to follow. I gave up long ago trying to keep up with all of the rosters. I still know the National League better than the AL, and the Central Division teams better than the others; but I confess, there are strangers on my home team, the Pirates. Fifty years ago, that was unthinkable.
 

            As a minor league fan, I enjoyed watching the kids (and they were younger every year) break in, and move on up. When they made it to the majors, I celebrated with them.
 

            As for “the grave,” I think of Cooperstown. Willie Stargell is the first player that I followed from the minor leagues all the way to the Hall of Fame. From a skinny “Pirate Possibility”  — what many kids in the system were called in the annual Pirate yearbooks — to “Pops” in 1979 and HOF in ’88, Stargell got my attention with his slugging in the minors. The Pirates always needed more left-handed power at Forbes Field.
 

            But few players are buried at Cooperstown, while all die. Every fan can probably recall the death of some player that came ‘way too soon. For Pirate fans, there was Clemente, but before Roberto, Don Hoak, in 1969. Not a player then, but not long gone and the guys who hang around, becoming coaches and managers, earn a special place in our hearts. If they become broadcasters, we get to know them better than ever. So when they go, like Bob Prince, they leave an even bigger hole behind.
 

            We are not accustomed to thinking of ballplayers from the cradle to the grave , as in birth to death. The truth is, we are selective, we tend to follow them for just that part of their lives that they spend at the top. We really get to know them very little. Then they are gone.
 

            When they die while they are still playing ball, it is jarring. We realize how superficial our relationship is, yet we grieve, because they are, well, family . Baseball is not real, yet it is a parallel universe that offers a version of reality. We can be excited there, consoled, and experience real emotions, all from a distance, while feeling close. Enough intro.
 

REQUIEM FOR A ROOKIE  
 

            The death of an athlete is always a shock. Athletes are supposed to be victims of charley horses and sore elbows, strained muscles earned in combat. And ballplayers play the game outside of real time, in a zone where hours and minutes mean nothing, only innings and outs matter. Death is always an intruder, but an especially rude one in sports.
 

            And death is never more unwelcome than in April, when fans are full of hope. When Addie Joss died suddenly, just after Opening Day in 1911, the folks following baseball were stunned. The Clevelanders’ ace pitcher was so well-liked by his peers that a benefit game for his widow and kids was scheduled that summer, and the best players from the other AL teams came to Cleveland out of respect for Joss. Addie had pitched just nine summers in the majors, but so brilliantly that the Hall of Fame eventually waived the ten-year requirement and admitted him to Cooperstown.
 

            I think that the first baseball death I recall is that of Fred Hutchinson, in 1964; but the popular manager fell to cancer, a disease he spoke about candidly when hardly anyone else did, and so the shock was lessened. When Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1972, that was a shock. (The Hall of Fame waived its five-year wait rule for Roberto.) Like Joss, Clemente had performed brilliantly, but seemed to have more seasons ahead.
 

            The sudden, senseless death of LA Angels pitcher Ken Adenhart, is different, and in some ways harder to accept. He was a rookie, just 22, his career in MLB lay in his future. He had worked hard for four years to climb to the top rung of baseball, overcoming arm problems and surgery. He seemed, with a good start this spring, to have finally made it for good.
 

            In recent months, I have seen hundreds of questionnaires, completed mostly by men who played in the major leagues, but sometimes by a relative, if they were deceased. Some played in the nineteenth century, some are current. At the end of the survey, which was sent out by and returned to the National Baseball Library at the HOF in Cooperstown, all were asked their greatest achievement. Many players, especially if they were replying in their first seasons, said that their greatest thrill was just making it to the majors.
 

            To fully appreciate that, we must remember how many never get to the top, not even for a cup of coffee. All the way up, the odds are against them.
 

            The saddest funeral I’ve ever attended was for a toddler, the child of friends. The death was sudden and senseless, a very accidental drowning. The death of someone who has lived seventy or eighty years is sad, too, but it is nothing like that of a child, who was all innocence, all future.
 

            The death of a rookie is something like the death of a child. Just as the world welcomes babies, baseball fans like the new kids on the team. They have no baggage, and everything to prove. They are fun to watch, they try harder , their enthusiasm makes us all young. They are baseball’s children, and like all kids, are mysteries, to be celebrated, rooted for, no matter what uniforms they wear.
 

            Once upon a time, to this fan, a 22-year-old was an adult , an older guy; back then, 30 seemed ancient. Today, 22 seems a lifetime away, and in some ways, it is. My own kids are not that much older than 22; had I married earlier, 22 could easily be the age of my grandson . (This is the way the mind works, beyond age 60.)
            Over the past two decades, I’ve written a lot of requiems . Each time, lately, the feeling is too many . Each time, I know there will me more to come. There is always nothing to say, really, about death. It is part of life, there is nothing surer. As for the death of athletes, a poem by A.E. Houseman comes to my mind. I guess it has been semi-famous for a long time; it ran in some newspapers after the passing of Addie Joss, in 1911. I’ll use it as my closer.
 

To an Athlete Dying Young
 

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the marketplace
Man and boy stood cheerin’ by
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
 

Today, the road all runners come
Shoulder-high we bring you home
And set you at your threshold down
Townsmen of a stiller town.
 

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay.
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
 

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut.
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
 

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
 

So set, before its echoes fade
The fleet foot on the sill of shade
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge cup.
 

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthened dead
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
 

A FUTURE ROOKIE?  
 

            Thanx to Mike Nola for sending along a link to a story that appeared at The State, South Carolina’s home page, on April 9. “A Familiar Joe,” by Neil White, tells us that there is a high school catcher today named Joe Jackson. Yes, he’s from Greenville, and yes, he is related to Shoeless. He regularly hears fans call on him to remove his spikes. How does he feel about having such a famous, or infamous, ancestor?  “It’s pretty cool. I enjoy it.”
 

            This Joe is a long way from the majors — he’s committed to play next season for The Citadel. He’s 6 foot, 175 lbs, and in love with baseball. And apparently he plays it hard.
 

            His stance is similar to his great-great-great uncle’s — the same stance copied by Babe Ruth. “It’s eerie,” says his father.
 

            Within the family, Shoeless Joe did nothing wrong. But they are not part of the push to have his named cleared. “He’s gone now, let him rest in peace,” said young Joe’s dad.
 

ROOTS  
 

            I have written here before that the first time I ever heard of “the Black Sox” was from a short story I read in the fifties, and I could never recall the name or author. Recently, I was surfing, using one of those fancy research tools that many library web sites offer to members, and I came up with the answers: Flashing Spikes , by Frank O’Rourke.
 

            O’Rourke was a prolific short story writer, over a hundred, but Flashing Spikes was a 245-page novel, written in 1948. But it appeared later in the form of a short story, in collections as recent as 2002’s The Heavenly World Series , a collection of O’Rourke’s baseball stuff. The novel’s prologue also appeared in The Saturday Evening Post , as a short story. And Flashing Spikes also made it to television, on Alcoa Premiere in 1962, John Ford’s only TV directing work. That show featured Don Drysdale as a player named Gomer; Jack Warden, and none other than Jimmy Stewart as the protagonist, Slim Conway.
 

            Slim’s character is loosely based on Swede Risberg. The shortstop banned in 1920 and forever labeled “one of the Black Sox,” he still loves baseball, loves to play it — and to teach it to youngsters. When his identity becomes known, as his team wanders the countryside, playing at county fairs and against teams from small towns, Slim becomes a target for — flashing spikes. His scarred legs are a symbol of all the abuse heaped on all the banned players. And if I can recall this plot fifty years later — a powerful symbol, indeed.
 

            Now I want to read the novel, and find out more about O’Rourke. Did he ever meet Risberg, or see him play?  Does the Swede hold a clue to the B-Sox mystery?  If this guy is hard, so is it hard to make his case, given his role in some suspicious plays afield, and his awful 2-for-25 at the plate in the 1919 WS. Yet, he never admitted doing anything to lose the Series, never said he took a dime. When Risberg thrust himself into the national spotlight, years later, his motive seemed to be to defend Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, more than to embarrass his 1917 Sox teammates and the Detroit players who received some money from the Sox.
 

            Swede is also a hard guy to follow. Like his fictional counterpart, he loved baseball and played it as long as he could, wherever he could. I like to think that somewhere along the way to his final resting place, the Swede was an easy interview, and left his version of things in some newspaper in the southwest, northwest, midwest, or maybe Canada. The good news, for those who enjoy the search in the hundreds of newspapers that can now be digitally searched — Swede Risberg, like Gandil and Cicotte (and unlike Jackson and Williams), has a somewhat unique name. Something to keep in mind, when you are naming your kids?
 

A PHYSICIST ON THE B-SOX TRAIL  
              Niels Bohr died in 1962, the year before Eight Men Outwas published. Had he lived a bit longer, and gotten interested in the subject of “the Black Sox,” I think these quotes of his might well have been his commentary on his baseball research.
 

            An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. (OR: An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.) 
 
            Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.   
            Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.  
 
            Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.   
 
            How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
 
            If anybody says he can think about quantum physics [substitute “the B-Sox”] without getting giddy, that only
shows he has not understood the first thing about them. 
 
            If quantum mechanics [the B-Sox story] hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. 
 
            Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. AND: No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical. AND: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
            Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. [I think he stole this one from Yogi.]
 
            The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a
great truth is also true. AND: The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very
well be another profound truth. AND: There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly
false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. 
 
            The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. 
 
            There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
 
            We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough. AND: Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.
 

ON THE SCREEN OF SPORT  
 

            Now that Mr Bohr has tossed us down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of the B-Sox, let’s take a look at something different from Hugh Fullerton. If you know Hughie, you know that he was upset about the results in the 1919 World Series, not just because he heard from gamblers (including Sleepy Bill Burns) that the fix was in — but also because his “dope” suggested that the Sox should have won handily.
 

            I’ve replayed the 1919 WS myself, four or five times now, using the APBA simulation game — a kind of “dope” — and the Reds only came close to winning once. So I feel his pain. Before he could write openly about the Fix, Hughie said his suspicions about the series were aroused precisely because of his “doping.”
 

            Well, thanks to ProQuest , we can now read the details about Fullerton’s predictions for October 1919. They appear in the Atlanta Constitution , as a 100-part series (!) he did on How to Play Baseball was winding down. You can look that up, too.
 

            The Sox did not clinch the pennant until September 24, I think (the box score of that game is also easy to find with ProQuest ). But on September 19, Hughie launched his pre-Series series, with “White Sox Get Away Leading ‘Dope’ With Best First Baseman.”  Using his point system, Hughie rated Gandil 1.140, and Jake Daubert of the Reds 1.103. You want that broken down some?  OK, on offense, he had Chick up .803 to .784, and on defense, .337 to .319. (APBA gives both players 5 points, the maximum, for defense. Daubert, although 35 years old, to Chick’s 30, was rated the faster runner. Chick does have the edge on offense.)
 

            Hugh Fullerton was a kind of dean of sportswriters in 1919, and had earned a reputation for “doping” the “world’s series” since his dazzling pick of the Hitless Wonders (White Sox) over the dynastic crosstown rival Cubs in 1906. He even forecast the rainout, which would today result in offers to host a show on The Weather Channel. Betting was huge in America, since long before 1919 and long after, so Hughie’s “dope” no doubt was taken very seriously by his readers.
 

            Hughie notes Daubert’s edge in speed and in getting to balls “rolled slowly toward him.” Gandil is the better target for his infield mates; everything I’ve read praises Chick’s ability to hang onto anything thrown in his direction. In the 1919 WS, he handled 81 of 82 chances; Daubert, 86 of 88. I know some folks think Jake belongs in the Hall of Fame; no one thinks Gandil deserves that honor.
 

            Fullerton doesn’t just compare the past season’s batting averages, he writes about how each batter will do against each likely starting pitcher of the opposition. Hughie has seen both players, and seen them perform in a world’s series. Chick was steady and solid (6 for 23, in 1917), Daubert not so good (3 for 17 in 1916). Fullerton rambles on for fifteen column inches; was he getting paid by the word?  In the end, he puts his money on Chick — who preferred “Chic,” by the way.
 

            I’m not going to report on the whole series of HSF articles, which were edited by Leslie Rawlings. Anyone interested can look them up. On September 22, he gave the Sox the edge at shortstop, rating Swede 734 on offense, 314 on defense, for a 1048 total; Larry Kopf is 687-323-1010. (APBA gives Swede the edge, too.) With this article is a nice collection of individual photos of Kid Gleason and 17 White Sox players. They look much like the Reds, whose photos appear September 23. In that piece, Fullerton gives a big edge to Heinie Groh over Buck Weaver at third, so big an edge that the Reds were now ahead in total points. (Buck has the better hitting card in APBA’s view, but Heinie draws a lot more walks, so he has the edge in OBA.)
 

            On September 29, two days before the Series opened, Hughie gave the Reds the edge in pitching, 1666 to 1610. Part of that is their pitchers’ better hitting ability, and that proved decisive in October. On September 30, Hughie does the math, tallies everything up, and announces Sox Have Advantage, Comparing Clubs . The Sox are about two and a half percent better than the Reds, and for you stat-rats, that translates to 10,701 to 10,428. Hughie give the Sox the edge in the infield, outfield, and catching. He gives “no allowance for luck” and admits that anything can happen. After all, the “Miracle Braves” upset the dope in 1914, although Hughie rated them just a shade weaker than the Athletics. On the morning of Game One, Hughie made his picks even more specific: Chicago Doped to Win Five Out of Eight in 1919 Baseball Classic .
 

            Hughie has Cicotte over Eller (but Reuther got the call) in Game One, by a 4-2 score, with the Sox getting 10 hits to the Reds’ 7. Hod tossed a 3-hit shutout in Game Five, but did yield ten hits while winning Game Eight. Hughie had Lefty Williams defeating Reuther in Game Two, 5-3, altho the Reds would be up 12-7 in hits. He forecast no shutouts — there were three. He ends his series on the Series, “May the best team win.”
 

            Sandwiched in amongst these doping articles is Fullerton’s regular On the Screen of Sports column of September 20. There, he looks ahead and writes about the unimaginable. No, not a fixed World Series. A dry one! He cannot believe the national commission (I don’t know about Heydler, but Ban Johnson and Garry Herrmann were known to get tipsy on occasion) will be sipping “charged water and grape juice.” Or the reporters “imbibing sweet cider and buttermilk.” Or the magnates and other bigwigs “waxing reminiscent under the warming influence of near beer.”
 

            Hughie himself liked his booze, and sometimes wrote about that in his columns. So he looks ahead to October and says “what a sad series that is going to be for some of us.”  As if prohibition was actually in effect and enforced!  “Take the fizz and the sparkle out of the series and the annual reunion of five or six hundred persons … becomes a rather drab and hippodromic event….”
 

            There is one more pre-Series column of Fullerton’s that is worth a mention. On September 6, Hughie begins with a question: “Why a world’s series?”  For revenue only, to reward the players? He regards the title as a joke, because the two best teams are not always in the WS. In the past, the WS has been “the most productive of scandal and dissatisfaction.” He recalls “the sickening scandal of last autumn” (1918) and notes that the officials of MLB “seem to have paid no more attention to safeguarding the sport this year than last.” In fact, the return of baseball to prosperity has made them think they can “get away with almost anything and that the public will stand for it.”
 

            Hughie’s forecast of scandal was a lot closer than his doping of the games.
 

            He also tees of in this column on the problem of the teams from the big cities, with the most money, “buying pennants” by picking up players as needed, and he lists six out of eighteen picked up by the Giants and Yankees. He’s delighted that the “small market” (my term, not his) team of Cincinnati has won the NL pennant. Some argue that “the small clubs that are weak financially have no chance to win excepting through breaks of the luck.”  (As a Pirate fan — again, I feel his pain.)
 

            Hughie then expresses his belief that at least the players try their best to win, no matter what team they are on. He can recall just one “fixed series” — back in the days of the Temple Cup. Two teams (Indianapolis and Minneapolis) arranged to play their own post-season series, and further agreed that each team would win four games, before they played the last two on the square. But they couldn’t pull it off, the first games were seen as farces, the fans revolted, and the players called off the fix after Game Two. (Minneapolis then won four straight.)
 

            Fullerton knows about the expulsion of players by Hulbert, and tells a story about the crooked days before that happened. A fix was planned, but an honest player (Joe Start) “upset all the plans” by hitting a home run. The story supports that belief that baseball was just too hard to fix. Another story has a club owner betting big on his team to lose, and then ordering his starting pitcher to dump; but instead he tosses the game of his life, and is let go that evening. Hughie’s conclusion is that “the old sport is safe as far as the playing field is concerned.”
 

            What a difference a month would make.
 

Next Issue: More from Hughie after the 1919 Series.
 

A PEEK AT THE ASINOF PAPERS  
 

            I’ve mentioned here before that the papers of the late Eliot Asinof, author of 1963’s Eight Men Out , now reside at the Chicago History Museum, where they are being properly preserved before they can be researched. Buck Weaver advocate Dr. David Fletcher recently got a look at the collection, and shared some of his report with me.
 

            A lot of the material is from James T. Farrell, who guided Asinof when he was at the B-Sox trailhead. There is also a lot of material Asinof had to put together when he was sued by Talent Associates, and by Dutch Reuther (see Bleeding Between the Lines ). David says that he saw no mention, in Asinof’s notes from his talks with Happy Felsch or Red Faber, about either player passing on the “Joe Jackson asked to be benched before Game One” anecdote.
 

            Faber did have an interesting remark, though, and David says he copied Eliot’s handwritten note verbatim: “Risberg threatened to kill anyone who talked + he was the type that might.” We are left to wonder if Faber himself felt threatened, since the whole team had some sense that there was a Fix arranged; or was he just passing on an observation made from an outsider?
 

            Among the interesting items (to me) that David saw was one that I guess we can call “Asinof’s List” — a handwritten record of the sources he used for 8MO , prepared for the TA lawsuit, and dated March 9, 1977. Here it is:
 

1. Abe Attell
2. Red Faber
3. Judge Hugo Friend
4. Ray Fisher
5. Harry Grabiner
6. Harry F.
7. Dickie Kerr
8. Dutch Reuther
9. Edd Roush
10. Lefty O’Doul
11. Happy Felsch
12. Chick Gandil
 

            “Harry F.” — the thug who threatened Lefty before Game Eight, in 8MO — was a fictional name, invented by Asinof, and it is unlikely that he was able to track down any hit man from 1919.
            I’m not sure the other Harry, Comiskey’s secretary (GM) Grabiner, was alive in 1960, when Asinof started his research. We know his diary was not found by Bill Veeck until after 8MO was published.
 

            I’m not sure that Faber, Kerr, and even Felsch knew that much about the fixing — that was the work of Cicotte (who refused to talk to Asinof) and Gandil (ditto; in Bleeding , Asinof says Felsch was the only banned player who would see him). So why is Chick on the list?
 

            And why Lefty O’Doul?  I’ve never seen his name come up before in the B-Sox story. O’Doul was a rookie with the Yankees in 1919; if he’d been with the Giants, he’d have probably had more to contribute. I think Asinof was simply padding his list.
 

            If he had actually talked with Reuther for the book, he might have avoided the later lawsuit. If he actually interviewed Edd Roush, we no doubt would have had Edd’s stories from his own “deep throat” source in October 1919, and the anecdote about the Reds (at least Eller) who were offered bribes.
 

            By the way, David Fletcher shared with me a letter written to Bud Selig in the Fall of 2005 — remember, the Sox won the World Series? — by Senator Barack Obama. Seems that the senator was on Buck’s side — Selig gave his standard reply, that he was leaving the matter to Jerome Hotlzman. Mr Holtzman passed away last year, and Obama was elected president, so we now wonder if Mr Selig will react to a presidential pardon, if it happens. I rate the issue as less important than the economy, but more than the dog. But the dog was easier.
 

THE NEXT ISSUE OF NOTES IS NOT LIKELY TO BE POSTED BEFORE MAY, AS I’LL BE ON THE ROAD MOST OF THE REST OF THIS MONTH. HOPE TO SEE SOME READERS AT THE SEYMOUR CONFERENCE IN CLEVELAND.