OCTOBER 9, 1910
The Chalmers Batting Race ends in acrimony as Ty Cobb is declared the batting title winner, allegedly leading Nap Lajoie by a difference of .00086. Both sides fling allegations of cheating, made more plausible by the league’s questionable record keeping. Seventy-one years later, statisticians conclude that Lajoie had been the rightful winner. Hugh Chalmers, an acclaimed marketing wizard, was thrilled by the controversy, but his sincerely held belief that marketing was more important than engineering would be his downfall.
On the final day of the season, Nap Lajoie produced eight hits in a double-header, thus finishing the season with the highest batting average—or so he thought. For the next six days, he thought he had won the title and a brand new Chalmers automobile—and for the rest of his life, he would think that he should have. But six days later, his fortunes were reversed, and both award and car went to Ty Cobb instead. Seventy-one years later, in one last twist, the Sporting News reported that there had been a mistake—record keepers had counted a Tigers box score twice.1 Lajoie had been right—he was the rightful batting champion of the 1910 season.
Batting average in baseball is a relatively simple concept—you divide the number of batters’ hits by the number of times they went up to bat. Of course, a “hit” is more than just making contact—you have to hit the ball well or far enough to enable you to get safely to first base or beyond, without an error by the opposing team, and without the fielders taking out another base runner. A hit, then, advances the team’s chances to score a run. Batting average is the most venerable of baseball statistics, originally developed and promoted in the 1870s by Henry Chadwick, the “father of baseball.” Even though some of today’s statistical purists are rather sniffy about it, it remains a good measure of batting effectiveness.2
Hugh Chalmers, president and proprietor of the Chalmers Automobile Company of Detroit, thought it a perfect measurement. As a man who had entered the auto industry just three years earlier, he did not know much about engineering, but he knew good publicity when he saw it. He came up with a scheme to promote his product that he took to be foolproof: early in 1910, he told the National Commission—representing the long-established National League and the newbie American League—that he was offering a Chalmers car, valued at $1,500, to the player with the highest batting average at the end of the season. In the previous season, the winner of the batting crown had received nothing more than a silver cup, and the commissioners3 saw in Chalmers’s offer a chance to promote their leagues along with his cars, and the deal was struck.4
Early on, Detroit’s Ty Cobb was everyone’s favorite to win the title. He had topped American League averages for the previous three seasons, and while Honus Wagner was thought a plausible contender, few others were considered credible competition. When, at the beginning of the season, Chalmers hosted a reception in Detroit to get the word out about his prize, most fans were not yet particularly focused on the batting contest—there were 155 games to come. By midseason, however, when the American League announced the official averages, fans started to take an interest.
Major League Baseball was still in its infancy in 1910, and it was much more challenging to collect data than it is today. The official scorer, appointed by each team, recorded the events of each game and mailed them to the league offices within five days, where they were, in turn, entered by hand into ledgers. Scorers were usually journalists, whose degree of familiarity with the game varied. There was no reason to think the official scorer’s tally would match exactly with those of the other journalists producing the unofficial box scores that were published in the papers. The official scorer did not share his record, and the league secretary did not reveal the season averages until the season was over. Published scores could differ in various ways. Some were a matter of judgment—what appeared as an error to one baseball expert might not seem so to another. But simple errors of recording or transcription were possible as well. Decades later, a baseball com missioner would even set up a committee to correct discrepancies in the records.5
However (un)reliable the figures might have been, when the American League announced theirs in the middle of the season (the National League would wait until the end of it), they certainly came as a surprise. Instead of Ty Cobb, it was Napoleon Lajoie who topped the chart, one of the great players of the early twentieth century. “Nap,” or “Larry,” as he was affectionately known, had played in the National League since 1896 and had won the batting title three times. He was so popular with players and fans alike that they had decided to nickname the Cleveland team “the Naps” in his honor. But by 1910, he was aging, and being both his team’s manager and a batter, he had struggled—not many fans expected him to return to form.
Ty and Nap were in a batting race now, and from the middle of the season onward, a baseball fever overtook the country as fans eagerly anticipated the outcome. After each game, newspapers issued updates on the state of the race, and each month, the fortunes of the players waxed and waned. As the climax of the season approached, the batting race appeared to generate a good deal more interest than the World Series. By early September, it looked as if Cobb had gained the lead, but when an eye infection forced him to take time off, the race tightened again.6 By the last week of the season in early October, however, his lead appeared solid.
And then the shenanigans started. Detroit were due to play their last two games of the season in Chicago, but Cobb suddenly asked to be excused. Allegedly, he needed to remain fresh for an all-star game in Philadelphia. Most fans suspected that he was simply protecting his lead: if he didn’t play, his batting average couldn’t get any worse.7
On the last day of the season, Cleveland was due to play a doubleheader in St. Louis, against the always-awful Browns. By common consent, Lajoie now needed something of a miracle—and something of a miracle he got. In his first at-bat, he hit the ball to centerfield for a triple—though some claimed the fielder should have caught it. In his second, he noticed that Red Corriden, the rookie third baseman, was standing well back, so he bunted. Shortstop fielded the ball and lobbed it to first base, rather than throwing hard, and Lajoie was ruled safe. In Lajoie’s third appearance, Corriden was still standing well back. Maybe it was out of respect for batter’s hitting power but Lajoie decided once again that the bunt was his best option and, sure enough, he had another hit. In his last at-bat of the first game, once again Corriden stood well back and Lajoie bunted—Lajoie had four hits in four at-bats now.8 According to the statisticians, another four-for-four showing in the nightcap would have him overtake Cobb. Surely that wasn’t possible?
It had been made possible, it seems. Later, the manager would say that Lajoie had simply outfoxed them by bunting when they expected him to drive. Each bunt was pretty much a guaranteed hit, and Lajoie accumulated four more—miracle achieved!9 Of the eight hits Lajoie needed that day, seven had come from bunts. Corriden claimed that the manager had ordered him to stand back; unsurprisingly, the bizarre denouement gave rise to speculation that the outcome had been fixed. After all, Lajoie was popular, Cobb was not—not even with some of his teammates, who sent a congratulatory telegram to Lajoie. Quite a few newspapers, however, even those in St. Louis, proclaimed that the Browns had disgraced baseball.10 The original agreement between Chalmers and the National Commission, which ran baseball at the time, stated that the final decision as to the winner would rest with the Commission. Chalmers, when asked, declared that “our company probably will not ask that the alleged quitting of the St. Louis club be investigated, relying on the commission to take any such action that it may deem necessary or expedient. I regret very much that any scandal should arise over the batting race…. We had no reason to anticipate anything of this sort and trust that the fans will reserve judgment until all the facts come out.”11
The twists were not yet over. The National Commission was in charge of announcing the winner, once they had calculated the official record for the season. Before doing so, Ban Johnson, founder and president of the American League, promised an inquiry into what had happened in St. Louis. On October 15, he released a statement exonerating the Browns—Lajoie’s hits, he had decided, were undisputed. He went as far as to argue that Lajoie should have been given a fifth hit in the last game instead of an error, based on the scoring of a St. Louis journalist. And then … he proclaimed Ty Cobb the winner of the batting title, with an average of .384944 over Lajoie’s .384084.12
To add to the shock and dismay, Johnson’s math, according to his own numbers, was wrong—Cobb had indeed won, but his 196 hits from 509 atbats actually put the percentage at .385069. The margin between the two batters, however, was a single hit—and Johnson himself had just declared that Lajoie should have been awarded that fifth hit, which would have put him over the top.13 Accordingly, Lajoie went to his grave believing he should have won that title and that car. And in 1981, twenty-two years after his death, an analysis of the American League records proved him right. He should have won—not because of the extra hit, but because they had misrecorded Cobb’s hits, who had two fewer than the official record showed. The injustice, however, could no longer be remedied—the commissioner declared that the statute of limitations had run out on the issue, and Ty Cobb would stand as the 1910 batting champion.14
Back in 1910, Ban Johnson promised that this race would never be run again, but Hugh Chalmers, of course, was delighted. The competition and the ensuing controversy had given him more publicity than he could have hoped for in his wildest dreams, and he was more than happy to smooth things over by agreeing to award both players a Chalmers. He even managed to persuade Johnson to run another competition the following year. This time, however, it would be for MVP of the American League, and the winner would be voted in by the leading journalists—averting another statistical headache.15
The 1910 batting race would turn out to be the high watermark of Chalmers’s career. He had risen to prominence about a decade earlier as the star salesman of the National Cash Register (NCR) Company, one of the nation’s fastest-growing businesses at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1900, at the age of twenty-seven, Chalmers had become NCR’s vice president and general manager, second only to company founder John Patterson, who had taken him under his wing. Over the next seven years Chalmers continued to thrive, and by 1907 he was earning an annual salary of $84,000, equivalent to over $2 million in today’s money—long before excessive corporate salaries made such sums seem normal. Patterson, however, was a difficult and aggressive man who frequently dismissed employees to whom he took a dislike. In 1907 it was Chalmers’s turn, and he was fired.16
Chalmers would have his revenge. With a market share of around 90 percent, NCR attracted an antitrust investigation into some of its more aggressive marketing policies. During a trial in 1912, Chalmers gave evidence against his former employer. Another salesman described in court the kinds of practices that Patterson had sanctioned: he would “blackjack the salesmen of competitors” and “bribe freight agents to hold up shipments, or drop sand in competitors’ machines to put them out of order, open offices next door to competitors and cut the prices to knock them out of business—these were all things that his knockout squad had been doing.”17 Patterson and several executives were convicted and handed down jail sentences, although these were eventually commuted.
Chalmers, by this point enjoying a national reputation, was persuaded by a group of automobile engineers to take over the Thomas-Detroit Motor Company. These engineers had previously worked for Ransom Olds, who had set up the first auto manufacturing plant in Detroit in 1899, and within two years they would leave to start up the Hudson Motor Car Company. By 1909, Chalmers was on his own, and he renamed the company for himself.18 Still, he had a brand new factory to move into, designed by the great Albert Kahn, who had also built Chalmers a home. The factory was located far out on the city’s East Side, and the house was a few blocks away in Indian Village, where a lot of the city’s wealth congregated—to this day a lovely, leafy, highly prosperous neighborhood of vast mansions.19
Chalmers was convinced that he knew how to be successful in this business because he thought of it as simply one business among others. The key to all, in his view, was marketing, and he was the best marketer around. By then, Chalmers was a well-regarded public speaker, and he used his public platform to downplay the importance of manufacturing expertise in the production of automobiles. In a number of speeches, he claimed that it was much easier to build things than to sell them.20 And in fact, Chalmers’s print advertising campaigns in 1908 were quite successful. While drab by today’s standards, the campaign entitled “This Astounding Car for $1500” prompted something of a revolution in car advertising and gave a significant boost to sales.21 In another ploy, widely used in the industry, he also entered his cars into auto races, under the name of the Bluebird racing team.22 There, too, he had some early success, but it was not enough to reach the well-to-do middle-class market for which he was aiming. Broad exposure came with his next idea, the baseball batting prize.
Some of his public lectures made more sense than others. On some issues, Chalmers seemed in tune with the industry that he had entered, for instance when he argued publicly for improving the roads at public expense. A self-serving proposal, needless to say, but the government would come to agree. On other topics, however, he was hopelessly at sea. When Ford raised the daily wage to $5, Chalmers pompously declared that Ford should have first consulted with the rest of the industry before doing so.23 And in 1912 he delivered a diatribe in Scientific American, decrying large-scale production:
Overproduction is the greatest danger to the automobile industry; or, at least, to those manufacturers who do not immediately realize that building and selling automobiles is a manufacturing proposition just like the building and selling of any other commodity. There is a great market, for instance, for adding machines. Yet it would be ridiculous to think that manufacturers could build two or three hundred thousand adding machines every year and not flood the market. I think some manufacturers of automobiles have not yet come to a full realization of the fact that they can build too many cars.24
This deep insight, which must have owed much to his time at a company building cash registers, of which there can, in fact, be too many, came during the time when Ford had raised annual production from 10,000 to 80,000 in the space of just four years and would further increase it to almost 750,000 in the next four years.
It seems likely that after 1910, Chalmers was simply losing interest in running his company, becoming more interested in participating in political life instead. He was involved in organizing the Employers’ Association of Detroit, which pioneered the industry opposition to unionization. The organization was created in 1902 but had little influence until 1910, when Chalmers created the automobile division.25 In 1912, Henry Leland, president of Cadillac, organized the Detroit Citizens League to lobby for municipal reform, culminating in the successful 1918 referendum to revise the city charter that we described in the previous chapter. Chalmers led the Citizens’ Charter Committee on the referendum campaign.26 He also became a leading light in the Detroit Athletic Club (DAC), which elected him president in 1913.
The DAC had formally come into existence in 1887, but it could trace its roots back to the Peninsula Cricket Club, founded in 1857. By 1910, it was largely moribund.27 With a committee consisting of Detroit’s elite, including the emerging aristocracy of the new motor industry, the club engaged Albert Kahn to build a grand new clubhouse. Modeled on a Renaissance Italian palace, the DAC was built on six floors with 108 bedrooms, fancy dining rooms, a Turkish bath, a gymnasium, and two squash courts. At the grand opening in 1915, Chalmers declared that “the DAC has become recognized all over the world as one of the greatest clubs. It will continue to impress our guests as the crystallized spirit of Detroit.”28 One of the best ways to admire the DAC nowadays is from behind home plate at Comerica Park. When the building was refurbished in 2011, one of the sixth-floor suites was transformed into the Hugh Chalmers Board Room in honor of the former president.
At around the same time the new DAC building was drawing acclaim, Chalmers’s car company began to struggle. The cars were good-looking, and in 1908, they had been state of the art, but by 1915 they were out of date. As the industry advanced, Chalmers stood still, technically speaking. Moreover, he imagined that the car would remain the plaything of the well-to-do middle and upper classes rather than reaching a mass market, so he was quite content to sustain his high prices. Inevitably, sales started to shrink, and in 1917 Chalmers Motor Company entered into a business alliance with the Maxwell Motor Company in order to share costs.29 By 1920, the shareholders had installed Walter Chrysler to bring the struggling Maxwell company back to life, and in 1922 a creditor forced Chalmers into receivership. Maxwell took over Chalmers entirely before eventually morphing into Chrysler.30 The last Chalmers car was produced in 1923.31
Chalmers had enough money to remain on the fringe of the Detroit social elites, throwing garden parties on his swanky estate in Bloomfield Hills. His factory would remain operational as part of the Chrysler Corporation until 1990, when it was demolished.32 The area today forms part of the much larger Chrysler complex—one of the last remaining car production sites located within the city of Detroit.
Chalmers passed away unexpectedly in 1932, already a largely forgotten figure. His obituary praised his marketing skills and his general contributions to the social life of Detroit, but there was no glossing over the fact that his car business had failed.33 As it turned out, making cars was more difficult than marketing them. At mid-century, auto industry veteran Eugene Lewis had this to say about the man: “If Hugh had been as fine a manufacturer as he was a salesman, his car would probably be well known today.”34 In the end, his invention of the Chalmers Batting Race may have been his most interesting contribution to history.