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Pains, Aches, and Hopefulness

Playing against the New York Giants on May 9, 1914, Boston Braves pitcher George “Lefty” Tyler “kicked” at umpire Cy Rigler. “Kicking,” in early twentieth-century baseball jargon, signified not a physical action, but a player’s strident complaining: his shouting, brow-beating, and intimidating an umpire. Tyler had allowed the Giants’ John “Chief” Meyers to double in Fred Merkle and Fred Snodgrass, players who, by 1914—and later in the annals of sports history—had committed two of baseball’s greatest blunders, and he blamed Rigler for his misfortunes. The assertive 240-pound Rigler judged the Braves pitcher’s kicking as offensive and “exiled Tyler to the clubhouse.” Tyler’s teammate, Braves’ captain Johnny Evers, experienced a similar rage. Evers “started to kick in the first inning and was still kicking when the game was over.”1 Fans expected players like Tyler and Evers to kick; in fact, kicking was so much a part of turn-of-the-century baseball that the era’s most celebrated manager, the Giants’ John McGraw, deemed “judicious kicking” just as valuable to a team as baserunning or bunting.2 But Tyler and Evers were not kicking judiciously. They were protesting frantically and furiously, reacting to a day of humiliation in a spring of bad breaks, missed opportunities, and gut-wrenching losses. By May 9, Tyler and Evers began to complain, snarl, and kick at umpires because the Braves—despite a successful spring training—had won 3 and lost 11 (.214 winning percentage) and sat 10 games out of first place. Their fury deepened as the season took a turn for the worse, and, by July 4, the 26–40 Braves lingered 15 games behind the first-place Giants. On July 7, their ineptitude plunged to a new low: They lost an exhibition game to a minor-league team.3

But then Tyler and Evers and the rest of the Braves players began to transform their rage into a relentless, unbeatable force. Climbing out of last place, they won 66 of their last 89 games, rushed past the previous year’s pennant winners, the New York Giants, and stood ready to face one of baseball’s great dynasties, the Philadelphia Athletics. How did the Braves, not only desperately behind in July, but also a notoriously weak team for more than a decade, manage to carry out one of baseball’s greatest comebacks? The indispensable man in the Braves’ revival was 46-year-old George Stallings. Stallings, the turnaround specialist, the chief executive officer on the field, the baseball genius, and the master psychologist, rallied these failing, kicking, and initially ineffectual ballplayers. An impeccably dressed Southern gentleman, Stallings acted like any skilled turnaround specialist. He generated assets out of liabilities—among his many weak outfielders he selected a few that he could “platoon”; he found opportunities that others had disregarded. He discovered a core of starting pitchers whom others had overlooked, and he anointed a new co-leader to carry out his mission, second baseman Johnny Evers. Indeed, Stallings simply reinvented his product, the Boston Braves.

The Gentleman

Stallings appears in the annals of baseball as an overly emotional, verbally abusive martinet. Yet, accounts of the Braves’ “Miracle Man” rarely reveal his contradictory nature. The dark-eyed “Gentleman George” lived an intensely private life, while he skillfully manipulated public relations; he spoke in a courteous manner to friends and family, even though he abusively berated players and umpires, and he carefully calculated the probabilities of every at bat, even though he devotedly followed a set of improbable superstitions.

Born in Georgia just two years after the Civil War had ended, Stallings, by some accounts, attended Virginia Military Institute and considered medical school, but he could not draw himself away from his passion, baseball; he then suffered a less-than-mediocre career as a professional ballplayer. A journeyman minor leaguer, Stallings appeared just briefly on the major-league circuit, where he knocked in two hits in just 20 at bats.4 Like other great managers, from Connie Mack to Tony La Russa, Stallings, perhaps because of his inadequacies as a player, taught himself the finer points of the game. As George Will noted in Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, “A lot of excellent managers were marginal players. Which is to say, they made playing careers out of the margin that mind could give them.”5

From Tammany Hall to Boston

Stallings joined the Braves’ organization in 1913, at the invitation of owner James Gaffney. Gaffney, a former New York City policeman, ascended the ranks of New York City politics through his connections with political boss Charles F. Murphy. In 1902, Murphy had risen to the boss of New York City’s political machine, Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall, named after a Lenape (Delaware) Indian sachem, started as a patriotic society in 1789, and, in the course of the nineteenth century, evolved into a political machine that offered services to immigrants in exchange for political support. The service-for-political-support exchange offered endless opportunities for political entrepreneurs, and Tammany bosses, including Boss Tweed and Richard Croker, earned notoriety for their graft and corruption. Yet, Murphy, a hard-nosed, crafty politician, opened up Tammany to a diverse set of political interests as he moved away from the corrupt practices of his predecessors. Although he followed the tradition of providing immigrant services in exchange for votes, Murphy, in the spirit of the Progressive Era, pushed for child labor laws and factory legislation. He also recruited professionally trained experts in health, education, and finance. Murphy mentored a new kind of Tammany politician in such reputable and reform-minded candidates as Al Smith, who, four years after Murphy’s death, served as the Democratic Party nominee for president.6

Braves president James Gaffney, another Murphy apprentice, climbed up through the Tammany Hall political machine, which labeled its various parts with Indian names: The meeting hall was a “wigwam,” and the leaders were “sachems.” Amassing financial wealth as a building contractor, by 1913, Gaffney had achieved sufficient financial leverage to buy the National League’s professional ball club in Boston. Gaffney, who started his career as a policeman and later won election as city alderman, moved his way up to serve as president of the New York Construction Company, a company that garnered contracts for excavating Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal.7 Displaying affection for the Tammany “Braves,” Gaffney rechristened the Boston team with its new nickname. The Braves namesake, he hoped, would please the fans, who had suffered the failures of the Boston Beaneaters, Doves, and Rustlers, teams that in the previous 10 years had only known losing seasons.8 (See table 1.1.) Like a good Tammany Hall politician, Gaffney sought to please his constituents: He anointed the team the “Braves”; renovated the South End Grounds ballpark (while seeking a site for a new stadium); and revamped the Braves uniforms, emblazoning them with the image of a Native American warrior. Most important, he replaced manager Johnny Kling with George Stallings.

Table 1.1. Boston Braves: The Ten Years before the 1914 Season

Year

Team Name

Finished

Won

Lost

Manager

Attendance (League Rank)

1904

Boston Beaneaters

7th

55

98

Al Buckenberger

140,694 (8th)

1905

Boston Beaneaters

7th

51

103

Fred Tenney

150,003 (8th)

1906

Boston Beaneaters

8th

49

102

Fred Tenney

143,280 (8th)

1907

Boston Doves

7th

58

90

Fred Tenney

203,221 (7th)

1908

Boston Doves

6th

63

91

Joe Kelley

253,750 (7th)

1909

Boston Doves

8th

45

108

Mike Bowerman, Harry Smith

195,188 (8th)

1910

Boston Doves

8th

53

100

Fred Lake

149,027 (8th)

1911

Boston Rustlers

8th

44

107

Fred Tenney

116,000 (8th)

1912

Boston Braves

8th

52

101

Johnny Kling

121,000 (8th)

1913

Boston Braves

5th

69

82

George Stallings

208,000 (7th)

Note: The National League included eight teams. Earlier names for the Boston organization were Beaneaters, Doves, and Rustlers. Source: http://www.baseball-reference.com.

Competing with the owners of the Yankees, Bill Devery and his old friend Frank Farrell, who also had connections to Tammany, Gaffney sought to rapidly build a winning baseball team. Stallings, he concluded, could immediately transform the Braves. Stallings had earned a reputation as a strong minor-league manager capable of revitalizing losing teams.9 Gaffney’s advisers also pointed to Stallings’s record of competence. Under Stallings’s guidance, players had regularly improved, and although he had faced controversies, his teams had risen in the standings. Immediately after hiring the vibrant, determined Stallings, Gaffney offered the new manager unconditional support. He spelled out his views on managerial authority, saying, “C-A-R-T-E- B-L-A-N-C-H-E—That’s carte blanche. It means full and unquestioned authority. That’s what you will have with the Braves. I think you’re the greatest manager in baseball.”10

In 1913, the term carte blanche meant full control of the team, trades, and player development; it equaled the twenty-first-century positions of manager, general manager, and director of minor-league operations. Still, it did not mean that Stallings could purchase, for instance, the contract of a Walter Johnson or Christy Mathewson, the two greatest pitchers of the era. But Gaffney’s offer of full control, at the very least, provided Stallings with the power to shape his team at will, and that level of power inspired confidence in Stallings: “Give me a club of only mediocre ability,” he said, “and if I can get the players in the right frame of mind, they’ll beat the world champions.”11

Johnny Evers, a onetime player-manager who possessed encyclopedic baseball knowledge, knowledge that he and coauthor Hugh Fullerton set out in the meticulously detailed book Touching Second, claimed, “Mr. Stallings knows more baseball than any man with whom I have ever come in contact during my connection with the game.”12

Baseball Magic

Yet, the analytical, baseball-by-the-numbers Stallings often conjured up a host of superstitious powers that he hoped would carry his team to victory. Most managers and ballplayers followed superstitious rituals, for example, wearing the same socks throughout a hitting streak or performing the same rites at each at bat. Players knew not to pass a funeral procession before a game; they thought it bad luck to touch the catcher’s mitt when at the plate. John McGraw fought off the “hoodoo” by not pitching superstar pitcher Christy Mathewson on Opening Day; Ty Cobb always swung three bats while waiting on deck; and Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins stood at bat with his gum placed on top of his ball cap—unless he got two strikes, and then he stuck the gum back in his mouth.13

But George Stallings practiced superstitious rites at the most advanced level ever witnessed in Major League Baseball. He issued a prohibition against the color yellow—a color associated with bad luck in sports. He forbade yellow clothing amongst his players, and he banned yellow ads at the ballpark. “Get that damn sign out of here or paint it over,” he once fumed.14 He arranged the dugout according to his prescribed set of ritualized practices: Bats were placed in exact order, never to be tampered with, and the drinking cup always found itself hanging in precisely the same manner from the water spigot. And trash, too, if it did not bring bad luck, upset the order of the dugout. Because Stallings would shout angrily when he caught sight of debris on the ground, opposing players provoked him before games by stealthily littering the dugout premises with bits of paper and peanuts (pigeons then regularly befriended the Braves’ dugout).15

In one instance, Stallings’s observations of rituals resulted in self-inflicted back pain. According to baseball lore, when the Braves started a rally, Stallings would freeze, maintaining his posture until the next out. In one game, a Braves batter smashed a hit through the infield just as Stallings halted, hunched over. Stallings remained stationary for the length of the rally—30 minutes—and then found himself locked into this hunched position, needing to be carried off the field.16

Stallings, a practitioner of a superstitious, “reverse psychology,” suffered painfully when outsiders wished him well. Supporters who offered encouragement and hope, he believed, only courted disaster. When before a game a group of fans brought a flowered horseshoe to the plate—a common practice during this era—he lamented, “My God, we’re jinxed.”17 He experienced grief when Braves players on the field were offered flowers or trophies, also Deadball Era traditions. And worst of all was the simple admonition, “Good luck.” Attempting to avoid well-wishers before the team left on a road trip, Stallings would arrive at a train station far ahead of departure time and board the train immediately, before any fan could jinx him with a friendly “Good luck” or any words of encouragement. Because fans would inevitably wish him well, there was only one escape from baseball hoodoo; to avoid jinxes he carried a small, extremely smooth triangular object, as well as a ragged, worn-out, and well-rubbed rabbit’s foot, a talisman that could protect him from both well-wishers and practitioners of superstitious evil. If litter and words of support brought chaos and defeat, lucky charms and talismans delivered blessings and victory. In a trunk that he brought to Braves’ games, Stallings held his collection of amulets, the most important of which was a 10-cent charm blessed by a witch doctor from Cuba.18

It is no surprise that baseball players and managers have been highly superstitious. Disciples of “baseball magic,” according to anthropologist and baseball scholar George Gmelch, behave like ritualistic Trobiander fishermen from the South Seas. These Pacific island fishermen, who drew their primary sustenance from the sea, found little help from superstitious rites when fishing in secure, regularly abundant fishing waters of the inner lagoon. Yet, when fishing in the dangerous open seas, where the daily catch was highly unpredictable, Trobianders resorted to an elaborate set of rites. The Trobiander fisherman, like a professional batter striding to the plate, knew that his livelihood depended on successfully plying his trade. When the ballplayer wears the same socks that he wore two days ago, during the last victory, when he tugs on his cap, when he pulls on his sleeves, he, like the Trobiander out on the high seas, practices magic that might give him success, especially in a demanding environment.19 The player performs a ritual that just might edge him toward success. Modern batters, who generally fail 7 out of 10 times to get a hit, experience remarkably demanding conditions. And success for the batter was especially rare in the Deadball Era. In the early twentieth century, pitchers held the advantage over batters because of their arsenal of trick pitches, especially the spitball. Pitchers rarely threw a new baseball; instead they tossed a “deadball.” They served up to batters a cut, tobacco-stained, dirt-worn, uneven, spit-laden sphere so unhittable that teams scored only a few runs per game.20 Stallings, trying to press out every possible run, relied on his own superstitious rites.

By the Numbers

Despite his excessive observance of superstitious practices, Stallings followed baseball by the numbers. He never composed a “guide to baseball statistics” (although his great admirer, Johnny Evers, produced a systematic treatise on the game), but Stallings’s colorful commentary on walks or “bases on balls” suggests that he would have understood the twenty-first-century mathematical, or “moneyball,” dimension of the game. Disdainful of any pitcher who could not throw strikes, he claimed, “It would be just my luck to go to hell and be chained to a bases on balls pitcher.”21 In 1928, close to death because of cardiac arrest, Stallings answered a physician who asked if he knew the source of his heart problem by saying, “Bases on balls, you son of a bitch, bases on balls.”22 Stallings, who displayed disgust when a fielder committed an error, when a pitcher yielded a home run, or when a batter missed a signal, feared, above all else, bases on balls. His “bases-on-balls-in-hell imagery” was founded on the seemingly simple baseball principle that not only hits, but walks, yielded run production. In 1914, Stallings clearly understood the modern notion of on-base percentage. On-base percentage, a statistic that came into prominence through the advocacy of renowned baseball statistician and scholar Bill James, was well received by fans and journalists only around 2000. In 2000, Paul Podesta, as described in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, claimed, moreover, that on-base percentage was the single most important offensive statistic. An assistant to Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, Podesta, in the words of Lewis, concluded, “A player’s ability to get on base—especially when he got on base in unspectacular ways—tended to be dramatically underpriced in relation to other abilities.”23 Well before 1914, Stallings understood the value of the unspectacular walk; he had acquired a profound understanding of baseball probabilities.

According to James, Stallings was one of the first managers to promote the idea of platooning, recognizing the statistical advantage of righty–lefty and lefty–righty offensive advantages. When a manager platoons, he inserts into the lineup a right-handed position player to face a left-handed pitcher (or vice versa). This notion of platooning, according to some students of baseball history, originated with the Yankees’ Casey Stengel, who started his managerial career with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1930s. Yet, it seems that Stallings and his contemporary, manager of the Giants, John McGraw, initiated the practice as far back as the 1910s.24

Does platooning even work? On the surface, the practice appeals to a baseball strategist’s common sense, but, in recent years, the authors of Baseball between the Numbers have questioned the idea. The Baseball between the Numbers statisticians claim that a manager might be much better off playing a good curveball hitter, regardless of his handedness, against a curveball pitcher.25 Yet, managers have occasionally been blessed with seasons of successful platooning, and Stallings, in 1914, rotated in a series of outfielders who produced timely runs. The platooning endeavor proved Stallings at his best. He would take calculated risks, attempting a relatively new practice, and he could detect talent and adapt it to his needs.

In the summer of 1914, he discovered outfielders for his platoon system whose specialized talents matched team needs: left-handed hitters, for instance, who could hit righties. He also knew how to provide psychological support for the platooned players, players who suffer slight wounds to their egos when relegated to the role of part-timer. The professional ballplayer whose sense of self was easily offended when required to take on the platooning role—the role, after all, implied that the player failed to succeed as a starter—might find solace through the support of a psychologically astute manager like George Stallings.

In baseball, a game in which there is a fine line between winning and losing, managers like Stallings sought any possible means to achieve the upper hand: platooning players, limiting walks, or wearing an amulet. In Men at Work, Will comments on Tony La Russa managing a modern team, writing, “Even a very good team like the 1988 Athletics has only a slim advantage. . . . To get that edge, often a manager must fret constantly.”26 And Stallings, although fearful that a particular omen—a black cat or a speck of yellow—would bring misfortune, remained adamant that he and his players would create their own luck. “Breaks,” he complained, “I’ll break the next man that talks to me about breaks. You make your own breaks in baseball.”27

The Boss

Stallings had also earned a reputation for his iron will, his determination to stand up to any player—even owners who might undermine his position. In 1909, Stallings took command of the New York Highlanders (later renamed the Yankees), who, in 1908, finished dead last. By mid-season 1910, Stallings’s Highlanders team had risen to second place to challenge the powerful Philadelphia A’s. Even as the team moved up in the standings, Stallings was forced to stand his ground against the attacks of the highly accomplished and notorious Hal Chase.

Chase, described in Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s novel The Celebrant as a “broad-shouldered, bull-necked rowdy,” proved himself as one of the best defensive first basemen in history: a slick fielder who could play far off the bag, snatching up with ease sacrifice bunt attempts.28 Because he was such an artful fielder, both contemporaries and baseball chroniclers have overlooked his prowess as a hitter and base stealer. Yet, Chase excelled at manufacturing runs: He stole bases (twice second in the American League), and he often advanced teammates along the base paths with the hit-and-run. In the American League, he finished in the top 10 in RBIs four times and in batting average three times; in 1916, he won the National League batting title (.339) and finished second in slugging percentage (.459). Refined and skillful as a ballplayer, “Prince Hal” caroused his way through New York’s theater districts, consorting with the likes of singer Al Jolson, playwright George M. Cohan, and billiards champion Willie Hoppe. Although reaching stardom in his eight and a half seasons as a Yankee, Chase suffered from a gambling habit that persisted throughout a 15-year professional baseball career and earned him a reputation as one of the most corrupt ballplayers in the game’s history.29

During Chase’s career, fans, players, and managers accused him of dishonesty on the playing field. When he took his position at first base, fans regularly shouted, “Well, Hal, what are the odds today?”30 His managers publicly decried him for unethical behavior. In 1916, Cincinnati Reds manager Christy Mathewson, widely respected for his integrity and honesty, suspended Chase for “indifferent play and insubordination.” Mathewson suspected Chase of bribing Giants pitcher Bill Perritt before a game at the Polo Grounds. And John McGraw, although he curiously hired the talented first baseman in 1919, years later explained that Chase had paid Giants’ players to intentionally lose games. Late in the 1910 season, when Stallings charged that Chase was throwing games, Chase gained the support of the Highlanders’ (Yankees) club president, Frank Farrell. Farrell, a noted gambler with strong ties to Tammany Hall, fired Stallings, replacing him with Chase. The Highlanders failed to win the pennant and, in 1911, plummeted to sixth place.31

Never yielding to Farrell or Chase, never willing to give up his honor and authority, Stallings proclaimed, “I’ve got to be the boss. . . . Boss all the way.”32 Certainly Stallings’s need to act as the unassailable “boss” helped him shape the youthful 1914 Braves into a winning team. But more important, his willingness to stand up to the likes of a star player, Hal Chase, and a prominent owner, Frank Farrell, proved an impenetrable integrity, a quality that inspired his players to battle relentlessly. Despite his very evident flaws—his explosive temper, offensive language, and fanatical devotion to superstition—Stallings earned the respect of his players.

Stallings, although disgusted with Chase’s “laying down,” would suspect that more than a few players threw games during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Gamblers, after all, had stalked baseball’s diamonds since the New York Knickerbockers played on the Elysian Fields in the 1840s. And after the World Series of 1905, suspicion arose that gamblers had influenced Rube Waddell, the A’s outrageous, gifted, man-child pitcher. Waddell, a 26-win pitcher in 1905, mysteriously injured his pitching shoulder when roughhousing with teammates just before the World Series.33 Before the renowned 1908 Giants–Cubs playoff game that had grown out of the “Merkle’s Boner,” Giants’ team physician Joseph M. Creamer attempted to bribe umpires Bill Klem and Jimmy Johnstone with a sum of $2,500 each (more than $64,000 in 2012 dollars) to ensure a Giants victory. Creamer was later banned from organized baseball, and baseball fans learned 16 years after the 1908 season that members of the Philadelphia Phillies had been offered $40,000 (more than $1 million in 2012 dollars) if they relaxed their standards and let the Giants win.34 The Phillies’ catcher, Red Dooin, claimed, “The money was placed in my lap by a noted catcher of the New York Giants while I was in a railroad station.”35 During the Deadball Era, fans often joined gambling pools and bet on every angle of the game. Daily newspapers printed the odds. Gamblers, who had easy access to bountiful sums of cash, might easily tempt a player who was scrambling for his next dollar. Stallings disdained gambling, and, in Buffalo, as a minor-league manager, he posted “No gambling” signs throughout the stadium and, according to one chronicler, hired plainclothes policemen to watch for fans gambling.36

After the 1919 World Series scandal, when gamblers and members of the Chicago White Sox, most likely assisted by Chase, breached the stronghold of the World Series, the sport—at least temporarily—lay in ruins. Yet, many Americans had great affection for baseball, largely because they believed it was relatively incorruptible. Indeed, throughout the early 1900s, most Americans believed that because baseball, unlike boxing or horse racing, was assembled from so many varied parts, cheating was nearly impossible. In 1910, John Montgomery Ward, a founding father of the major leagues, claimed, “No player would dare to be dishonest, no matter how willing he might be.” The usually caustic Rollin Hartt, a writer for Harper’s Weekly, was convinced that despite incidental acts of gambling, “[i]t is the very certainty that no such roguery can be practiced that makes a ball game so popular.”37

Throughout the Deadball Era, most Americans, like Ward and Hartt, hoped for a pure national pastime. This need to protect the integrity of the game reached high drama after the 1919 World Series scandal, when baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis decided to permanently ban eight Chicago “Black Sox” from baseball for fixing the World Series—despite their acquittal in court. Landis’s decision, so unbending, so permanent, reflected this deep-rooted belief that the United States must disassociate baseball from gamblers and uphold the honor of the game.

Behind the Scenes

Stallings, principled and resourceful, also earned acclaim for his skill as a shrewd baseball tactician. Tom Daly, a catcher for eight years during the Deadball Era who later coached the Red Sox for 14 years, claimed, “Stallings knows baseball better than Einstein knows algebra. It was a privilege to just sit and listen to him talk baseball.”38 Stallings’s greatest admirer was Braves second baseman Johnny Evers, one of baseball’s shrewdest minds. Evers, who had been at the helm of the Chicago Cubs in 1913, regarded managers as crucial planners and decision makers. At times, powerful managers, according to Evers, manipulated players as if they were marionettes. These behind-the-scenes managers dangled their puppets/players over the ballpark. Players on the field reacted to every move, sign, or voice command; indeed, an astute manager altered every swing, steal, catch, or throw. Yet, spectators, wrote Evers, rarely comprehended the planning and gamesmanship in baseball. “They imagine, most of them, that the players are individuals who walk to the plate, hit or miss the ball, and make a safe hit or out; they do not know that behind the way the man hits, behind the movements of the base runner, behind the position the men take, are hidden a code of signals and a series of orders to be obeyed without question, for the general good.”39

Turning toward a military metaphor, Evers asserted that the manager, like a general leading in battle, could devise a strategy that, if followed unquestionably and unfailingly by his charges, could bring victory. Evers and other top strategists in the 1900 to 1919 Deadball Era, a time when the assortment of trick pitches (and, it seems, a loosely wrapped ball) meant few home runs but countless “manufactured” runs, understood the importance of “waiting on pitches,” a practice strongly endorsed by the most modern of twenty-first-century general managers, Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s. The practice, lucidly described in Lewis’s Moneyball, requires that players show “plate discipline,” holding off on pitches out of the strike zone until they find just the right pitch to hit. Even if he has two strikes, the ballplayer should foul off pitches, achieving a “good at bat,” which, if nothing else, drives up the pitch count and wears down the opposing pitcher.40

Deadball Era managers never concerned themselves with pitch counts or innings pitched—in 1903, during a one-month span, Joe McGinnity, the first real “iron man,” three times pitched both games of a doubleheader and won all six games. In 1904, he pitched 408 innings. In 1908, Christy Mathewson pitched 391 innings, and Ed Walsh, 464. Today, a starting pitcher, if healthy, throws 200 innings per year.41 Yet, Deadball Era managers kept a close watch on pitchers, looking for the slightest indication of a tired arm. And they encouraged their batters to wait, knowing that when the pitcher was worn out, it was the optimal moment to attack.

In 1908, in the opinion of Johnny Evers, wearing down an opposing pitcher brought a World Series victory to the Chicago Cubs. Implementing the wait-for-the-right-pitch strategy, Chicago Cubs manager Frank Chance, the “Peerless Leader,” in the second game of the World Series, engineered a victory that, in the eyes of Evers, elevated Chance to the level of a “baseball Napoleon.” (At the time Evers was writing, John McGraw had already earned the title “Little Napoleon.”) Chance, alerted before the game that “Wild Bill” Donovan would pitch for the Tigers, concisely expressed his strategy to his Cubs, “Wait.” Succeeding, according to Evers, in “one of the most beautiful, strategic struggles ever fought,” players “[w]aited—waited—waited, while the huge crowd went wild as inning after inning reeled away and neither side was able to score a run.” The Tigers’ Donovan was formidable. He threw a blazing, moving fastball and a powerful, sharp-breaking curve. As Chance sent each player to face Donovan, a “human Gatling gun,” he steadfastly issued the command, “Wait.”42

And, claimed Evers, the manager’s loyal soldiers strode to the plate and patiently endured “[o]ne strike, one ball, two strikes, a foul, two balls, foul, foul, sometimes three strikes, sometimes a weak fly that netted nothing.” Players only hit when forced to do so; instead, they extended their at bats, causing Donovan to offer as many pitches as possible. In the top of the seventh, Chance sensed that the Detroit pitcher was beginning to tire. In the eighth, Art “Circus Solly” Hofman (known for his acrobatic fielding) pushed the count to the maximum and then desperately scratched a single into left field. During Hofman’s at bat, Chance observed Donovan wearily lowering his pitching arm. Determined that Donovan was tiring himself out with hard fastballs, Chance commanded, “Switch.” Joe Tinker, the next batter, complied faithfully and knocked the next ball into a sign above the right-field seats. The Cubs, “like soldiers attacking a breached wall . . . rushed to the assault, and, before the inning was over, they made six runs and their waiting game had won.”43

The Psychologist

Like Frank Chance, Stallings, in Evers’s judgement, could lead the baseball troops to victory. Evers recognized Stallings as a brilliant baseball manager, not only because of Stallings’s grasp of tactics, strategy, and statistical nuance, but also because of his profound understanding of human psychology. Baseball, Evers contended, “is almost as much psychological as it is athletic.” By 1914, the term psychology had secured its place within the vocabulary of educated Americans. The first professional psychology organization, the American Psychological Association, elected G. Stanley Hall as its first president in 1892. Hall, a Johns Hopkins professor, published his book on adolescent psychology in 1904, five years before he invited Sigmund Freud to guest lecture in the United States. When they wrote their 1910 baseball handbook Touching Second, Evers and Fullerton certainly had a sense for the subject; yet, for them, “baseball psychology” meant “motivation” and “momentum.”44

Psychology, used in the broadest sense by Evers and Fullerton, explains why a weaker team can consistently beat a stronger one, why a batter will hit three doubles one day and strike out four times the next, and why a pitcher, dominant over powerful teams, can give up 10 runs to a weaker opponent. The victor in the classic struggle in baseball—the conflict between pitcher and batter—can decisively solve baseball’s “psychological problems.” Evers and Fullerton concluded that Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker, an average batter, had cracked the psychological mystery behind one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, the Giants’ Christy Mathewson: the Mathewson of the 373 victories and a 2.13 ERA, the Mathewson with the virtually unhittable “fadeaway” or screwball. In 1908, Tinker, a mere .266 hitter, acquired sufficient psychological resolve so that he could regularly beat Mathewson.45 So confident was Tinker, so “imbued with the idea that he could hit Mathewson’s pitching at will, in four games against the Hall of Famer he crushed four game-breaking hits.”46

Tinker’s crucial at bats against Mathewson exemplified the psychological nature of baseball at its deepest level. “The psychological instant,” asserted Evers, is the crisis point, the key play in the game in which all is won or lost. Evers added,

Twenty men on the bench are watching closely and intently every move of the pitcher. The tide of battle rises, ebbs—and then suddenly, at the start of some inning, something happens. What it is no one outside the psychic sphere of influence ever will understand, but the silent, tight-lipped, alert fellow on the bench sees something or feels something, and the mysterious “break” has come.47

Frank Chance sensed this turning point, or “break,” when he ordered his Cubs to “Switch.” During another crucial game in the 1908 pennant drive, the Cubs defeated the Giants when Chance sensed the “break,” or “psychological instant.” Chance “won the game from the bench when he lifted his cap from his head,” signaling the delayed double steal. As Harry Steinfeldt sprinted toward second, the catcher threw to second, and then, Frank “Wildfire” Schulte dashed home.

An instant later, in a whirling cloud of dust, a runner [Schulte] pivoted around the plate, his foot dragging across the rubber just as the ball, hastily hurled back to the catcher, came down upon his leg. The umpire’s hands went down. The run had scored. The game was won. The crowd, in a tumult of enthusiasm, roared and screamed and shrilled its joy.48

An Act of Rage

Managers like Chance and George Stallings intuitively grasped this psychological phenomenon, and managers like Chance and Stallings best understood the psychological underpinnings of their players. Yet, managers—except for Connie Mack—also included in their psychological repertoire both an unrelenting caustic commentary and ironfisted disciplinary tactics. Chance often exploded into a tirade, and most accounts of Stallings refer to fiery temperament and abusive language. Journalist Edwin Pope said his language could “sear asbestos” and cited Hub Perdue, a pitcher traded away by the Braves in mid-season 1914,

He [Stallings] is all-fired strenuous in his talk. When I first went to the Braves I told him, “Mr. Stallings, I’m a southern boy like you, but I don’t cotton to your kind of talk; I jest isn’t been raised that way.” Well, Mr. Stallings’s answer was just about the most fearsome string of cusses I ever did hear.49

Braves’ historian Harold Kaese wrote that Stallings “[r]aved and raged like a maniac, sliding up and down the bench, bouncing his nervous foot furiously, and fining his players recklessly.”50

However, most players interpreted Stallings’s anger as his singular form of encouragement, in other words, an act, part of the game. In the early twentieth century, the game of baseball transformed itself into a relatively civilized pastime, yet it kept a strong element of rowdiness. With few exceptions, managers, through an assortment of fines, penalties, and harsh, humiliating language, sought to transform unruly young toughs into a disciplined team. The Cubs’ Frank Chance threatened to bench players or “plaster” (fine) them, and when a pitcher walked a batter in a close game, or when a position player committed a careless error, he kicked the ball bag, scattering baseballs from the bench to the foul line.51 John McGraw, the National League’s most successful manager, “plastered” his players for any listless effort, or he might leave a player at home on a road trip. McGraw was confident that he could control “Turkey Mike” Donlin, the carousing, pistol-shooting, often-jailed outfielder. McGraw suspended the outfielder and even ejected him from the Giants’ hotel.52 Few players would stand up to a manager who, according to umpire Arlie Latham, “ate gunpowder every morning and washed it down with warm blood.”53 The league suspended McGraw for 15 games in 1905, for fighting with Pittsburgh manager Fred Clarke and then cursing at Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss. Umpire James Johnstone ejected McGraw for protesting a call in nasty, crude language.54

Big Daddy

George Stallings earned a reputation for profanity that nearly matched McGraw’s. Stories of Stallings’s colorful, caustic criticisms of players have been passed along in Braves’ baseball lore for nearly 100 years. But his tirades formed only one device in his arsenal of psychological weaponry. Stallings’s ability to encourage individual players caused Evers to judge him as the “greatest genius in baseball.”55 Evers respected Stallings for his aggressive approach to baseball. In Evers’s view, no other major-league manager—and Evers had played for two managers before Stallings—attacked the game with more determination. Evers held deep reverence for Stallings as a motivator who adapted to each player’s personality: “Stallings handles men very skillfully. First he sizes up a player, and if thinks he is of the type that will have the spirit broken by ‘riding,’ he encourages him, jollies him along, and does little scolding.” But, if Stallings noticed a tough, thick-skinned player giving less than 100 percent, noted a player interviewed for an article in the October 14, 1914 installment of the New York Times, “[h]e can give him one of the best tongue-lashings I have ever heard, and I have listened to a good many.” Evers, capable of handing out a vicious tongue-lashing himself, witnessed a year in which Stallings transformed players “inclined to loaf” into “some of the best ballplayers in the business.” Stallings could push and pull the right psychological levers. His coarse language, impetuous fines, and timely encouragement brought out the best in the Braves. Stallings knew just when to stop riding a player. He instilled confidence—not boastfulness, arrogance, or false pride. “He had the knack of inspiring confidence in a player and making him believe that he was as good as any man that has ever put on a uniform without letting him lose his head.”56

The success of Stallings’s communication skills was rooted in his adaptability and pragmatism. “I believe,” he once asserted, “something could be done with him [any player] if he were handled right.”57 When Stallings issued a fine, he wanted to draw attention to a player’s shortcoming. He had no intention of cutting into a player’s salary. Stallings’s players knew, for instance, that he would levy excessive fines that would never be paid. His assessment of fines turned into a game. If he shouted out, “$500 fine!” to a player who missed a sign, the player would up the ante with “make that a thousand,” only to hear Stallings roar back, “Now it’s $1,500.”58 (John McGraw, who operated in a similar fashion, might have even quietly paid back the expense of a fine.) The Braves viewed Stallings not as an abusive tyrant, but as a kindly authority figure: It was no wonder that players referred to him as both a commander, when they called him “Chief,” and an affectionate father, calling him “Big Daddy.”59

But during spring training in 1914, players were more apt to view Stallings as an oppressive ruler than a kindly father. Spring training brought heat, strenuous conditioning, and bodily suffering, and yet the promise that a team might return home with a pennant or World Series title. “Under the blossoming magnolia trees,” wrote Cait Murphy in her colorful account of the 1908 season, Crazy ’08, “every one of the sixteen major-league teams can believe that this year will be better than the last; that rookies will sparkle and veterans prosper; that fans will pour through the gates; and that luck will be all good.”60 In the spring of 1914, Stallings, the hopeful, demanding “master psychologist,” would enter his second year of full command of the Braves.

Scientific Training

Stallings, like his counterparts Branch Rickey as manager of the St. Louis Browns and Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Stockings, approached spring training with a Progressive Era mind-set. In his renowned synthesis of the Progressive Era, Robert Wiebe, in The Search for Order, explained this new mind-set when he described the transformation of the United States from 1877 to 1920. The United States, said Wiebe, shifted from a set of “island communities” with late nineteenth-century small-town traditions to a more complex, interconnected, twentieth-century urbanized society. The American middle class, influenced by a progressive reform impulse toward professionalism and a new emphasis on scientific management, adopted a new set of values that allowed citizens to recapture a sense of order.61

Reflecting this faith, in 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer and efficiency expert, wrote The Principles of Scientific Management. The book outlined “Taylorism,” a process where factory managers categorized workers’ specialized tasks, describing optimal performance standards, a “series of discrete steps which workers performed repeatedly and quickly to the rhythm of machines.”62 Taylor conducted time and motion studies in which he broke down jobs to the hundredths of a second. He proposed the “art and science” of shoveling, where workers used up to 10 different shovels,

each one appropriate to handling a given type of material, not only so as to enable the men to handle an average load of 21 pounds, but also to adapt the shovel to several other requirements which become perfectly evident when this work is studied as a science.63

Although somewhat arbitrary and often based on “rules of thumb,” and never in a true sense “scientific,” Taylor’s work encouraged more systematic business practices.

In the spring of 1914, George Stallings’s counterpart, Branch Rickey, took the helm of the St. Louis Browns and applied scientific management, or “Taylorism,” to his spring training routines. Rickey, who wanted to prepare his players for the long season ahead, transformed the spring training regime through his “scientific” practices: “I shall have three batting cages,” he announced in camp, “three handball courts, one sliding pit, and a place for running dashes at the training camp . . . whether anyone approves of it or not. If this is theory, it is blamed good practical theory.” Rickey also added a Progressive Era, professional element to baseball, requiring his players to study new nuances of the game. Rickey, the “professor,” although facing a few rebellious students, required attendance at long blackboard discussions where he probed the skills of sliding and the art of base stealing.64

Brushing up on baseball tactics, and, more important, following a set of rigorous exercises, yielded better ballplayers. Players, often scraping by on their baseball salaries, took on nonathletic occupations during the off-season. They found little time for winter conditioning. While such celebrities of the game as Christy Mathewson and John McGraw played the highly lucrative Vaudeville circuit, most ballplayers engaged in more mundane tasks: insurance sales, piano moving, and, in the case of Johnny Evers, operating a shoe store. These jobs cut back on the time available to keep in shape. Players were also reluctant to pursue other sports; the 1914 contract barred players from playing in off-season athletic contests, including softball, baseball, football, or any other sport that could cause serious injury.65

Finding few opportunities to maintain playing shape in the off-season, players understood the reason for spring training. Yet, the physical ordeal of spring workouts went unnoticed by fans, at least in the eyes of Johnny Evers. In his view, fans neglected the need for conditioning; they believed that players’ success depended solely on innate ability: “Most fans think baseball is merely a question of natural speed of foot, quickness of eye, strength of arm, and accuracy of throwing.” Fans seemed to feel that players could just appear every spring and immediately throw, run, pitch, and catch; Northern fans (in 1914 there were no major-league teams in the South) surveyed the morning sports sections and concluded that spring training equaled a “pleasure junket,” or “one long, jubilant period of hopefulness.” The players’ reality remained far from the fans’ imagination; spring training meant “hard work . . . pains, aches, strenuous self-denial, and hours of thought.”66

Professionalism

At its inception in the 1890s, spring training involved constant barnstorming: Major-league teams played against minor-league and local teams. By 1910, the annual tradition had evolved into three distinct rites: a few weeks of conditioning, a few weeks of scheduled contests, and, finally, a long, winding journey home, a trip filled with games against semipro teams and minor-league affiliates. At turn of the last century, major-league teams, reflecting the Progressive Era ethos, sought to raise the level of baseball professionalism and set up permanent training camps by buying land for ballparks, baths, and gymnasia.67 Baseball shifted away from a game of amateurs to a sport dominated by skilled, well-trained professionals.

The initial rite of spring training—conditioning—resembled a curious blend of boot camp and health spa. Veterans and rookies endured hours of rigorous drills and exercises, and then spent equally long sessions recovering through heat and massages. Players on their first spring training day tried to slip gently into a regimen of exercise, only to have their tender sinews and muscles experience sharp, unrelenting pain. Describing the first moments of spring training, Evers wrote,

The sun is shining brightly, the air soft and redolent of the scent of growing things, spikes sink into the warm earth. Before 10 o’clock, 30 or more men, let loose from the snow drifts of the North and a long winter of inactivity, race out on the open, filled field for the first time, and begin throwing a dozen balls around.

A relaxed game of toss then shifted to the torture of “high-low,” a “ballplayer’s invention for tormenting the body and limbering the muscles.” Players would toss the ball short distances just too high, too low, too far left, or too far right. The “principal skill lies in looking at the top of Jones’s head and throwing the ball at Smith’s feet,” added Evers. The lightest of exercises, within five minutes of rapid playing, “high-low” brought the uninitiated to near exhaustion.68

Players, wearing heavy flannels and sweaters and working hard at this game of baseball, were expected to engage in a vigorous workout, and all would pursue their own set of exercises: gymnastic stretching, jogging, or another throwing drill. Toward the end of the three-hour training session, carried out in the heat of the day, the manager would order his charges to run two miles back to the bathhouse, where they would enjoy showers and “throw themselves down, one after another, for a hurried massage by the overworked trainer.” The trainer/masseuse—and there was only one—received unceasing calls for help, both in the evening and morning, from these tender-armed, limping, cranky athletes, who, “knowing they would have to undergo the soreness and stiffness all over again, moped in the hotel.”69

Just into the second day of practice, according to Evers and Fullerton, players arrived at the training ground. They wrote, “A thin, red line of cripples hobbles into the park, limps onto the diamond like a G.A.R. [Federal Civil War Veterans] parade, and the sound of creaking muscles and groaning swear words arises.” Yet, both players and managers appreciated the rationale for training: “Condition is the biggest asset of any club in the first six weeks of the season.” In the course of the first week, soreness, and then stiffness, would gradually vanish. For most, the bodily pain decreased with a steady ritual of conditioning drills. Pain management also required the health spa treatment: “Massage, baths, and the use of every conceivable device goes on steadily 14 hours a day during the preparatory season.”70

In the early 1900s, players were convinced that they could reach the highest level of conditioning through dietary habits and weight-loss programs. Players consumed large doses of treacle, a viscous, dark-brown molasses that dietary lore promised would preserve arm strength if consumed twice daily. Highly aware that too much weight limits agility, a pitcher like Cubs great Orval Overall—he won a key game in the 1908 Cubs’ World Series victory—proclaimed at the opening of spring training in 1909 that he intended to lose 25 pounds and keep his weight down to 194. “A team of 30 men arriving at the spring camp,” wrote Fullerton and Evers, “is usually between five and six hundred pounds heavier than it will be at mid-season.”71 Players assumed that they could sweat off weight, and in the rooms of the hotel spa, Evers and Fullerton would find “half a dozen players swathed like puffy mummies in blankets, sweaters, and flannels until they looked as if they were starting on an Arctic journey.” Other players, covered by half a dozen blankets, would sit on the radiators of hotel bathrooms that had been transformed into Turkish baths. Players shaped their abs by pressing 20-pound cannonballs and iron rolling pins across their abdomens or repeating elaborate, 13-step leg-raiser drills.72

After two weeks of physical therapy and strenuous physical exercise—the final workouts lasting as long as five hours—the majority of the team (pitchers kept up with the conditioning) directed all of their energies toward their true joy, batting. “About all [a player] wants to do during that period is bat,” notes Evers. “A ballplayer would get up at two o’clock any morning to bat.” Batting drills were soon complemented with team play, as the “Regulars” took on the “Yanigans” (players trying to make the team) in games so competitive that “there is enough squabbling and fighting and noise to fill a championship season.”73

Stallings planned for a Braves training camp, which, according to J. C. O’Leary of the Boston Globe, was “second to none in the South and elsewhere.” Reserving a large suite on the ninth floor of the Dempsey Hotel, in Macon, Georgia, Stallings would arrange for two rooms with shower baths and massage tables. Braves players, subject to Stallings’s demands for tough physical workouts, would at least receive the right care for relaxation and recovery. Pitchers, often complaining about Stallings’s absolute rule, were required to run four miles per day. Says O’Leary, in 1913, “He ran the Braves in spring training until they hated him.”74 Players would be expected to meet and discuss baseball tactics and strategy before heading to the ballpark. Stallings clearly conveyed that he was the commander, the man in charge. Yet, he encouraged players to offer suggestions, even questions, on any aspect of training camp.75

In 1914, Stallings, quite the realist, expressed his hope for progress in the year ahead. In his first year, 1913, he had unequivocally asserted the following to the Boston Globe: “The National League would have to furnish another team for the tail-end position.”76 Although journalists and fans had considered 1913 a rebuilding year, Stallings surprised critics as the Braves rose out of the basement and grabbed the fifth spot in the standings. At the outset of spring training in 1914, he proclaimed that the team would rise even higher, finding a place in the first four teams in the National League’s eight—in other words, the first division. The Braves, he predicted, would find only one competitive opponent, the New York Giants.77

The Braves on the Mound

Four pitchers, Stallings believed, could endure the rigors of spring training and then lift the team into the first division: Bill James, Dick Rudolph, George “Lefty” Tyler, and “Hub” Perdue. None of these players had achieved star designation; still, Braves fans, influenced by the hopeful aura of spring training, might see the group’s “potential.”

Bill James, a rugged, six-foot, three-inch, 195-pound, 22-year-old from California, inspired considerable optimism. A highly touted prospect, in 1912, James had pitched as a minor leaguer for Seattle in the Northwestern League, where he posted a 26–8 record, with a 2.17 ERA, at one point winning 16 consecutive games. In his first major-league season, 1913, “Seattle Bill” went 6–10, but he earned a respectable 2.79 ERA, showing a good spitball, changeup, and an outstanding fastball.78

Rudolph, like so many of the Braves, entered the 1914 season as a second-year man. After four solid years as a minor-league pitcher, he had performed miserably in a tryout with McGraw’s Giants in 1910. He then headed back to the minors, playing for Toronto of the International League, where he seemed destined for a strong, although never-ending, minor-league career. But Rudolph knew that his weak performance at the McGraw-directed tryout differed dramatically from his pitching prowess. Aware of his skills on the mound, he promoted himself relentlessly. (Promotion and advertising were ingrained in American culture, and the early 1900s represented a new era in marketing with the growth of Macy’s Department Store, the Sears catalog, and soaring corporate advertising budgets.) Rudolph networked among major leaguers, including Braves third-base coach Fred Mitchell, and, in 1913, he risked all by imposing upon himself an ultimatum: the majors or nothing. Rudolph succeeded. After he announced his decision to quit Toronto in May 1913, Jim McCaffery, the Toronto owner and a friend of Fred Mitchell, sold him to the Braves. For the remainder of 1913, Rudolph learned to skillfully mix his pitches—a spitball and a sharp curveball—and earned a 14–13 record, with a 2.92 ERA. Hailed years earlier by Toronto manager Joe Kelley as potentially “as great as Mathewson,” Rudolph looked extremely promising in the spring of 1914.79

Lefty Tyler, the pitcher with the longest tenure on the Braves, joined the club in 1910. Less than mediocre with his first managers, he flourished under Stallings’s guidance. In 1913, he threw four shutouts, while posting a 16–17 record, with a 2.79 ERA. He had acquired a 5.06 and 4.18 ERA in the previous two seasons, respectively, and, in 1912, with his 12–22 record, he had led the National League in losses. With his unorthodox “crossfire” delivery (since banned by Major League Baseball) and a deceiving “slowball” (changeup), he would, in 1913, lead the Braves pitching staff in innings pitched, with 290, strikeouts, with 143, and games started, with 34. By modern standards, he compiled a respectable 1.216 WHIP, or walks plus hits per inning pitched (Stallings at had at least an intuitive, if not actual, grasp of this statistic). And most impressive, by any standard, was his National League–leading 28 complete games.80

The Braves had high expectations for the courteous Tennessean, Hub Perdue (named after a vegetable, hubbard squash). Joining the Braves as a 29-year-old rookie in 1911, he pitched reasonably well in 1912 (13–16), and turned in a stellar pitching performance in 1913. The Braves placed their hopes in Perdue because in 1913, he pitched 212 innings and earned a 16–13 record—the team’s best win–loss percentage—a 3.26 ERA, and an outstanding 1.13 WHIP.81

In addition to James, Rudolph, Tyler, and Perdue, the Braves had acquired a number of serviceable pitchers who might throw a few innings of relief or spot start. These included the “towering” Texan Eugene Cocreham, a six-foot, four-inch right-hander who had pitched one inning for the Braves in 1913; Dick Crutcher, a 24-year-old rookie right-hander from Kentucky; Ensign Cottrell, a southpaw from Syracuse University who had just 15 innings of major-league experience prior to 1914; Paul Strand, another left-hander, 20 years old, drafted from a Spokane, Washington, minor-league team; and, finally, the eight-year veteran Otto Hess.82 Born in Switzerland, Hess had won 20 games for Cleveland in 1906. Yet, he had a reputation for inconsistency and unpredictability. Hess could pitch brilliantly for five innings, only to implode and lose.83

In the Outfield

In 1913, Stallings tried to shape a winning team by experimenting with 46 different players, including 12 outfielders. From that pool of outfielders he chose as his left fielder his most versatile player: Joe Connolly. Connolly, the ninth of 11 children of Irish immigrants and a native of nearby Rhode Island, entered the big leagues in 1913, as a 29-year-old rookie. The five-foot, eight-inch Connolly, a serviceable minor-league pitcher who had suffered arm ailments, resurrected his career when he switched to the outfield and joined the Braves in 1913. Despite breaking an ankle near the end of the season, he proved himself as the Braves’ best hitter: 79 runs, 57 RBIs, 11 triples, a .281 batting average, and a .410 slugging percentage. A stalwart left fielder, Connolly offered Stallings a swift player with a solid bat: having swiped 18 bases in 1913, the left-handed batter would hit third in Stallings’s lineup.84

Twenty-three-year-old Leslie Mann also endured the trials of 1913, and secured the role as backup outfielder. Mann, a student of the game, took copious notes on each pitcher. A star athlete in football, baseball, and track at Springfield College, Mann could achieve baseball’s most exciting hit, the triple (more than 100 in his career), and platoon against left-handers. Emil Yde, a left-handed pitcher for the Pirates, once labeled Mann the “greatest hitter in the world against left-handed pitchers.” Yde added, “If I knock him down with one pitch, Mann gets up and hits the next pitch against the fence.” In 1913, Mann played in 120 games and batted .243.85

Opening the season in center field was 22-year-old Larry Gilbert, a player whom the Boston Globe, in the hopeful spring of 1914, judged to be a potential star. A former pitcher, like Connolly, Gilbert had shifted to the outfield for the minor league Milwaukee club in 1913, where he showed potential as a power hitter. While playing for Double-A Milwaukee, he earned a .395 slugging percentage and hit 10 homers, outstanding in a year when Frank “Home Run” Baker of the Philadelphia A’s led the majors with 12 home runs.86

The Rest of the Field

Joining these three second-year players was the tall, pleasant, and unassuming catcher Hank Gowdy. Gowdy, with more time as a Brave than any other player, had joined the team in 1912. Before he signed with the Braves, he had seen action at first base for most of his career. When Gowdy played for the Giants in 1910, John McGraw had encouraged him to switch to catcher because 20-year-old Fred Merkle appeared to be the Giants’ first baseman of the future. Traded to the Braves in 1911, the six-foot, two-inch, 180-pound Gowdy played backup for one year at first base, and, in 1912, Stallings dispatched him to the minors to master the art of catching. The 24-year-old redhead entered the 1914 season, like most of his teammates, a novice at his position.87

Like Gowdy, the corner infielders lacked significant major-league experience. At third base, the Braves played a virtual rookie, 22-year-old Charlie Deal (present-day rookie status is defined by a 130 at bats threshold; Deal managed 192 at bats before joining the Braves).88 Deal, who had participated in only 68 major-league games in three years, including two seasons with the Detroit Tigers, played most of 1913 for Providence at the minor-league level, but he batted .312 in Providence and showed a glimmer of potential at the end of the season, when, as a member of the Braves, he earned a .306 average in 10 games. The young man from Pennsylvania would attend third base skillfully.89

Deal would fire across the diamond to a large target at first base: Charles “Butch” Schmidt. Described in the Boston Globe as the “largest man playing baseball today . . . yet a wonderfully fast man for his size,” Schmidt had also served a short apprenticeship in the majors—27 games with just 80 at bats.90 Like so many of Stallings’s charges, the 25-year-old had switched positions. The six-foot, one-inch, 200-pound Schmidt had first tried out with Stallings’s 1909 New York Highlanders (Yankees) as a pitcher. Stallings, again coaching Schmidt when he pitched for Buffalo in the International League in 1912, had moved this large, unmistakable target to first base.91 Having made a favorable impression in the last few games of the 1913 season, Schmidt arrived at camp early and in superb condition.92

Throwing to first from his shortstop position was the acrobatic, flamboyant, determined Walter “Rabbit” Maranville. Another second-year player, Rabbit had earned the nickname from a seven-year-old girl who, during a minor-league game, observed the five-foot, five-inch, 155-pound shortstop hopping around second base. This practical-joking, basket-catching shortstop joined the Braves in spring training of 1913. When Stallings first evaluated Maranville, he judged him sufficiently athletic to be a backup, but lacking the physical tools for everyday play. Yet, Maranville persisted in his quest to be a starter. In the spring of 1913, when Maranville learned that Stallings was prepared to choose nephew Art Bues as shortstop, he retorted, “If I couldn’t play ball better than that guy I would quit.” Maranville, although regularly enduring Stallings’s verbal outbursts, stayed with the team, and when, on the last day of spring training, Bues turned intensely ill, Maranville found his opportunity. Asked to start on Opening Day against the Giants’ superstar Christy Mathewson, Maranville told Stallings, “Yes, and you will never get me out of there.” Rabbit punched three singles in a Braves 8–3 victory, played 143 games that season, and entered the 1914 season as the Braves’ starting shortstop.93

In the spring of 1914, Maranville, like all of the young Braves, learned the nuances of the game from 31-year-old, newly acquired veteran Johnny Evers. Said Maranville, “Evers, with his brains, taught me more baseball than I ever dreamed about. He was psychic. He could sense where a player was going to hit if the pitcher threw the ball where he was supposed to.”94 Evers’s reputation as a zealous, brainy, confrontational, and highly skilled ballplayer preceded his tenure with the Braves. Always recognized as the second baseman in Franklin Pierce Adams’s poem “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” or “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” he also achieved notoriety for realizing that Fred Merkle, of the famed “Merkle’s Boner,” had, during a crucial Cubs–Giants game, failed to touch second base, thus preventing the New York Giants from winning the celebrated pennant race of 1908. Evers, the square-jawed, nervous, 125-pound, 12-year veteran, had served as player-manager for the Cubs in 1913, but at the end of that season, the Cubs and crosstown rivals the White Sox had played in the Chicago Series, an alternate playoff series for teams that failed to reach the World Series—and the Cubs lost. With the Cubs’ defeat, controversial team owner Charles W. Murphy, who, in the 1908 World Series, placed the press in the grandstands while he set up a ticket-scalping scheme, and who had already expressed antagonism toward his intense and sometimes impulsive manager, found a reason for firing Evers. “We ought to have beaten the White Sox easily,” groused Murphy, “and would have if the team had been properly handled. Evers’s bad judgment cost us the series and cost me about $60,000.” The Cubs then traded Evers—as a player—to the Braves for second baseman Bill Sweeney. When Evers threatened to join the newly formed Federal League, the Braves offered the contractually freed Evers $25,000, a sum too difficult for Evers to refuse. And when the Braves signed him, George Stallings immediately appointed Evers as captain.95

The Braves entered the 1914 season with much promise. Most of their hopes rested on the team’s captain, Johnny Evers, the star second baseman and a former manager, and on comeback specialist George Stallings. Stallings, now in his second year of shaping the team, had taken Gaffney’s “carte blanche” offer to heart: Stallings had selected almost every member of the team. He had searched the minors; conducted trades; brought in players, including Bill James from the Northwestern League; and even signed “free agent” Johnny Evers. Except for Evers and Otto Hess, a spot starter, few players had significant major-league experience. Many of the players were not yet 25 years of age. But Stallings believed that his team could become one of the top four teams, and Boston Globe writers remained hopeful that Stallings could deliver. The 1913 team had offered a touch of hope—after nine previous years of misery. They judged Stallings as a shrewd decision maker who could develop talent, and they believed that he had selected “materials that looks good.” As O’Leary concluded, “There is no doubt that the present Boston team is the strongest one, considered from every angle, that has represented the city in the National League in 10 years.”96