The Boston Braves’ second baseman, Johnny Evers, reached baseball immortality in part because of his role in the notorious “Merkle’s Boner.” A pivotal moment in the 1908 pennant race, it centered around the New York Giants’ Fred Merkle’s failure to touch second on a walk-off hit. Merkle’s Boner is an affair in baseball history that has received infinite interpretations, yet, at its core, the event showed two of Evers’s brilliant traits: his unyielding determination and his belief that baseball players can win by studying every dimension of the game: angles, distances, and the rules. Without Evers’s baseball genius, a combination of his intimate knowledge of the game and lightning-quick response time, no such event would have taken place. Baseball reporters labeled the episode “Merkle’s Boner,” but they would have been more accurate had they tagged it “Evers’s Brilliance.”
The incident took place on Wednesday, September 23, 1908, when Evers (pronounced Eh–vers) played second for the Chicago Cubs.1 In a fiercely contested pennant race, the Cubs, one of the most dominant teams of the early 1900s, had moved to one and a half games ahead of the Giants, who, along with the Pirates, ruled as one of the National League’s superpowers. The Giants had captured the National League pennant in 1904 and 1905, the Cubs in 1906 and 1907, and the Pirates in 1903 and 1909. The 1908 season served as a scorching battleground for these three formidable teams.
Tempers between the Giants and Cubs had flared the previous day, when the Cubs’ tough, forceful player-manager, Frank Chance, had spiked Giants second baseman Buck Herzog.2 On the afternoon of the Merkle moment, 20,000 New Yorkers filled the stands at the Polo Grounds to watch the Cubs’ side-wheeling southpaw, Jack Pfiester, duel the great Christy Mathewson, the most celebrated athlete of the era. Giants fans rooted fiercely for the six-foot, two-inch, 195-pound Mathewson, who was headed toward a 37–11 season, with a 1.43 ERA.3 He pitched his usual masterful game for eight innings, committing only one mistake. In the fourth inning, he left a fastball on the outside corner of the plate to his longtime nemesis Joe Tinker, who drove the ball past the desperately lunging right fielder, Mike Donlin, into deep center, just up to the back edge of the Polo Ground outfield. Tinker scrambled around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. It was the only home run hit off Mathewson since July 17.
Later in the game, the Giants scraped together a few hits to score a run in classic Deadball Era fashion. In the sixth inning, Herzog reached first on an infield single, second on a throwing error, third on a Roger Bresnahan sacrifice bunt, and then home on a Mike Donlin RBI single.4 Yet, the Giants were hard pressed to score more than one run because they faced the Cubs’ unassailable strengths: extraordinary pitching and skillful defense. The 1908 Cubs, with a pitching staff that posted a 2.14 ERA, led the National League in fielding percentage (.969).5 Three times, the Cubs’ defense—Joe-Tinker-to-Johnny-Evers-to-Frank-Chance double plays—thwarted Giants rallies. Cubs pitcher Jack Pfiester, who would earn a 2.02 ERA throughout eight seasons, regularly annihilated the Giants lineup. Pfiester, who would acquire a 15–5 record against the Giants, including seven shutouts, had defeated John McGraw’s team three times in the 1908 season (twice in a four-day time span). After a late August victory over New York, I. E. Sanborn of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Pfiester, the spelling of which has been the occasion of as many wagers as mispronunciations, will be dropped as meaningless and inappropriate, and for the rest of time and part of eternity, Mr. Pfiester of private life will be known to the public and the historians as Jack the Giant Killer.”6
But during the September 23 Merkle game, the “Giant Killer” had suffered a near lethal baseball wound: a dislocated arm. Accounts suggest that Pfiester pitched the entire game with a severely injured arm, an injury that Evers described, saying, “A large lump had formed on Pfiester’s forearm, the muscle bunching. He could not bend his arm, and to pitch a curve brought agony.”7 Each time he threw a curve—only three times in the game—teammates helped him to the bench. The Giants, alert to Pfiester’s frailty, rallied in the bottom of the ninth. With one out, Art Devlin singled, and the next batter, “Moose” McCormick, hit a slow roller to Evers, who tossed the ball to Tinker for a force-out at second; however, because of Devlin’s knee-crunching slide into the second baseman, Tinker could not relay it to Chance for the double play. Moose trudged safely to first.8
The crowd scarcely recognized the next batter, Fred Merkle, a 19-year-old rookie. Like his fellow players, he displayed no name or number on his back, and now, in September, he was starting in his first major-league game. Merkle often received accolades for both his intelligence and curiosity to grasp the nuances of baseball, matters that he had learned by standing in the dugout close to baseball’s shrewd mastermind, John McGraw. Described by a New York journalist as a “fellow who uses intelligence in everything he does,” Merkle drew similar praise from his friends and teammates. Friends labeled him a “gentleman” and a “scholar,” and a “voracious reader.” Giants catcher John “Chief” Meyers described him as the “smartest man on the club.”9 Merkle had displayed great baseball potential: Wrote Bozeman Badger of the Chicago Tribune,
Suppose Fred Tenney should be crippled. That would be a calamity, wouldn’t it? Yes, it would in one way, but it wouldn’t keep the Giants from winning the pennant. There is a young fellow on the bench named Fred Merkle who can fill that job better than nine-tenths of the first basemen in the league. He is crying for a chance to work.10
Yet, the odds stood against Merkle. He was a rookie with about 40 at bats, he had grounded out twice that day, and he faced nearly agonizing pressure at this pivotal moment in a heated pennant race between two archrivals. There were two outs—and two strikes—as he stared down the Giant Killer, Jack Pfiester, but Merkle cleanly lined a base hit to right. With Merkle on first and McCormick on third, the crowd cheered on the next batter, Al Bridwell, who smashed Pfiester’s first pitch, a single to center. As McCormick plodded across the plate, the crowd swarmed onto the field. Merkle headed for second, but then, avoiding the fans and sensing victory for the Giants, he acted as nearly every other player would have at the time: He veered toward the clubhouse—the peculiarly located right-field clubhouse at the Polo Grounds—before ever touching second base. Merkle, Giants players, and Giants fans exulted in victory. The pennant appeared within reach.11
Not So Fast
Despite the excitement of the apparent “walk-off” hit, regardless of the frenzied Giants throng mobbing the field, and notwithstanding the confusion among the players as to whether the game was actually finished, Evers kept his cool and remembered the basic baseball rule: “A run is not scored if the runner advances to home base during a play in which the third out is made . . . by any runner being forced out.”12 Then he unwaveringly sought to seek justice. Evers, who, according to baseball lore, reviewed the baseball rulebook nightly, realized that because Merkle had never touched second, he could fetch the ball himself, touch second, and nullify the run. As recently as September 4, during a Cubs–Pirates game, Evers had faced a nearly identical situation. With two outs in the ninth, he noticed that rookie Warren Gill had failed to touch second as a winning run scored. Evers retrieved the ball, touched second, and then adamantly proclaimed to umpire Hank O’Day that Gill was out and that the run should be nullified. But O’Day overruled Evers. O’Day, focused on the runner at home, had not witnessed the scene at second base. O’Day later encountered Evers by chance at a hotel and found the opportunity to explain his rationale. O’Day understood Evers’s view but could not issue a call because he had not seen the offense. Now Evers had earned a second chance, because Hank O’Day was officiating the Cubs–Giants game.13
Amid the turmoil of the September 23 contest between the Cubs and Giants, Evers had to track down the ball, and this time he had to step on second in front of O’Day, who could witness the event. For Evers, hunting down the ball in the midst of hundreds of high-spirited, yelling, rushing fans (and in the face of Giants players who knew his design) proved a complicated, but not impossible, task. Where did the ball go? The fog of baseball, like the fog of war, is blurred by myth and legend. Reporters and eyewitnesses have offered multiple, conflicting views on this part of the story. As writer Cait Murphy observes, “There are tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, but they all see different things, mostly what they wish to see.”14
Apparently, “Iron Man” McGinnity, coaching first base that day for the Giants (three Giants pitchers—McGinnity, Wiltse, and Mathewson—also recalled coaching first base), snared the ball in right field and heaved it into the stands to a fan, a well-dressed brown bowler type, who almost immediately lost a battle with two Cubs players who ripped the ball away and tossed it to Joe Tinker, who threw it to Evers. Evers jumped up and down on the bag madly, arms uplifted, signaling to umpire O’Day. And O’Day, in concurrence with fellow ump Bob Emslie, ruled that Merkle was out, that the run did not count, and that the score was tied. Did Mathewson or any of the Giants actually see Merkle touch second? Did Tinker or, perhaps, third baseman Harry Steinfeldt grab the original ball from the stands, or did Evers find another ball in right field? Newspaper accounts and players’ later recollections (some of Evers’s earlier stories are at odds with his later renditions) differ on most matters, but in nearly all cases, three truths emerge: 1) Merkle never touched second; 2) Evers held a ball as he stood on second; and 3) O’Day testified that points one and two did occur.15
The incident ignited journalistic fires in Chicago and New York, earning front-page coverage. The next day, when the teams played again, fans taunted O’Day. An anxious Evers hired a security guard, but fans ripped off the guard’s badge, smeared his hat with mud, and stole his billy club. Later, as the pennant race intensified, the Merkle affair transcended its real importance; after all, Pittsburgh still was contending, not just New York and Chicago, and the fans for each team had already witnessed about 150 other games that season, each of which proved as important as the Merkle game. Nevertheless, when, at the end of the season, the Giants and Cubs finished with identical league-winning records, all eyes were directed at one play, the September 23 Merkle’s Boner. The Giants had lost, 4–2, in the pennant-deciding Cubs–Giants playoff game, a game so electrifying that more than 100,000 New York fans swarmed to the Polo Grounds—a game, according to Mathewson that “. . . stands out from everyday events like the battle of Waterloo and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”16 Yet, fans did not turn their attention to the playoff loss, but instead thought of the one misdeed of rookie first baseman Fred Merkle.17
Johnny Evers, “The Crab”
Evers’s key role in the incident represented his brand of baseball. He played with passion, determination, and intelligence. Although on the day of Merkle’s Boner Evers went 1-for-4, with no runs and no RBIs, and although he had fumbled a ball and later failed to complete a good throw on a double play in the crucial ninth—unlikely mishaps for so brilliant a defender—he shook off the mistakes, and then, at the decisive point in a key game, amid a raucous, unruly, swarming-all-over-the field crowd, kept his baseball wits. He understood that a minor rule might have been broken, and knew that he would need evidence—a ball and an official member of the judiciary, umpire Hank O’Day. And O’Day’s ruling, “perhaps the single most courageous call a baseball umpire ever commits on the field of play,” was prompted by Evers’s baseball shrewdness.18
Who was this clever, knowledgeable, in-your-face Cubs second baseman? The son of Irish immigrants Ellen Keating Evers and John Evers Sr., Johnny Evers was born in South Troy, New York, in 1881. Johnny Evers grew up in a culture defined by baseball. His father, a government clerk (and president of the school board), uncles, and six brothers all played the game. In 1884, his uncle Thomas played for the twenty-first-century equivalent of a Double-A team, batting .232 for the Washington Nationals. His younger brother Joe was skilled enough to earn a tryout with the New York Giants.19
Players like Johnny Evers, second generation Irish Americans, dominated baseball in the late nineteenth century, perhaps making up 40 percent of professional rosters.20 Frank Deford notes that “there developed the same sort of backlash against the Irish in baseball as, say, was directed at blacks in the 1970s, when they began to dominate the National Basketball Association.”21 The “Sons of Erin,” as the Sporting News called them, found baseball as a means of economic mobility. In Past Time: Baseball in History, historian Jules Tygiel examined three sons of Irish immigrants—Connie Mack, Charles Comiskey, and John McGraw—all of whom rose up and realized wealth and fame as baseball magnates.22
Baseball opened a path upward for Evers. A sign painter and a factory hand at a shirt collar plant, he drew from his factory earnings and, in 1900, organized his own amateur team, the “Cheer-ups.” Evers seized an opportunity to play on the local professional Troy team in 1902. Before an exhibition game against the Albany Giants, the Troy manager complained that his shortstop had suddenly fallen ill. The diminutive Evers, sitting in the stands when he heard the complaint, vaulted over the park railing and volunteered his services. Accepted as a team member, the 21-year-old, dressed in an oversized shirt and cap, appeared as an ill-prepared, gangly youth amongst the men of Troy. “Take the child out,” yelled one fan, and, “Yes, I saw him there; I saw him go under,” jeered another.23 But Evers played skillfully.
After he dug out a few hard grounders and hit a bases-loaded double, he earned a starting role and a $60 a month contract. He kept his job in the shirt collar factory while playing against teams in the New York State League. By midsummer, the Sporting News reported, “Johnny Evers, who is playing short, is considered by baseball writers in every city where he has appeared to be the find of the season. He has more than made good.”24
Scouts from the major leagues regularly toured the New York State League, and the talented Troy team produced a few major leaguers, including Ed Hilley, Alex Hardy, Chick Robitaille, and George “Hooks” Wiltse. Toward the end of the 1902 season, Chicago Colts’ (later Cubs’) manager Frank Selee sent George Huff, a scout, to evaluate Troy pitchers. Huff recruited Evers when he saw a “wiry little bunch of nerves and muscle” who “gave the unmistakable signs of a possessing a ‘baseball’ brain in his head.”25 Selee, who had lost second baseman Bobby Lowe because of a leg injury, purchased Evers’s contract from Troy for $200 and offered the short, scrawny young man with a protruding jaw a salary of $100 a month if he would play for the Chicago club.26 Signing with Selee required minimal reflection on Evers’s part. He could make more money than ever before, and he had a chance to play major-league ball.
Remaining on a major-league club demanded recognizable talent—no one at the major-league level had seen him play before—and Evers believed that his first playing opportunity would be a career-shaping public trial. He faced this challenge only 10 days after his father passed away. Unable to spend time grieving his loss, Evers boarded an overnight train from Albany so that he could join the club in Philadelphia. Resting uncomfortably in a smoker car, chewing black cigars to stave off hunger, he arrived hungry and exhausted at the ballpark. Suited up in an oversized uniform, the emaciated Evers inspired little confidence among teammates. “This kid will be killed, and we’ll all be accessories,” lamented a teammate to Selee. Selee rearranged his infield, moving Joe Tinker from second to third and placing Evers at short. Evers, undoubtedly tired, anxious, and distracted, muffed three grounders and threw wildly to first base.27
But, according to biographer Gil Bogen, Evers’s teammates surprised him with their empathy, and Selee reacted with unexpected restraint. Evers had expected Selee to send him back to the minors. “Then, you’re not going to can me after the fizzle I made?” queried Evers. Selee patiently looked beyond Evers’s failed audition: “I heard of you riding down from Troy in the smoker without eating anything except a sandwich. No wonder you had a bad afternoon. I’ll bet that you will have a better day tomorrow.” The next day, Selee placed Evers at second and moved Tinker to short. Said Bogen, he “sensed a smoothness in the way they handled double plays together.” Evers finished the year with only a .225 average, but he proved himself as a quick, energetic, mentally tough second baseman. When spectators watched him field grounders, they saw elbows, knees, and a Habsburg-like oversized jaw, all moving nervously near the ground. When they saw umpires make unfavorable calls, they witnessed an unyielding, griping, “kicking” Johnny Evers. Both his crablike movements and his irritable temperament inspired Chicago baseball writer Charles Dryden to label Evers “The Crab.”28
And major-league managers saw the skills offered by Evers, this active, omnivorous, five-pair-of-legs crustacean. “They claim he is a crab, and perhaps they are right,” said Cleveland Naps manager Joe Birmingham, who managed the Cleveland team (later Indians) from 1912 to 1915. “But I would like to have 25 such crabs playing for me. If I did, I would have no doubts over the pennant. They would win hands down.”29
The fiery and determined Evers was a kinder, slightly gentler version of Ty Cobb. Both Cobb and Evers tried to get on base by any means necessary, and if they failed, or if they perceived that they were treated unfairly, they bickered stridently with players, managers, and umpires. While Cobb earned a reputation as nasty, Evers warranted his “crabby,” highly irritating status. Evers’s physical presence, his thin, bony frame highlighted by his trademark jaw, suited the player who, when next to an umpire, was always “jawing.” A “keen little umpire-fighting bundle of nerves,” as one reporter depicted him, Evers was tossed out of more ball games than any player in the twentieth century, with 52 ejections.30
Evers and the Science of Baseball
Evers’s incessant “jawing” was matched by his unrelenting drive to reach base. He refused to go down swinging, and “by the end of his career he had been first or second in most at bats per strikeout six times.”31 Regularly earning the league’s highest walk-to-strikeout ratio, Evers ranked among the National League’s top 10 in runs scored four times, and on-base percentage five times.32 Second in the league with walks, with 108 in 1910, and always calculating how to get on base, he learned the value of the base on balls: “I am convinced that in my own career I could usually have hit 30 points higher if I had made a specialty of hitting. . . . In my own case I frequently faced the pitcher when I had no desire whatever to hit. I wanted to get a base on balls.”33
And once on base, he aggressively, although methodically, stole bases. Among the National League’s top 10 in steals three times, he stole 49 bases in 1906. Although he only averaged 13 stolen bases a year between 1912 and 1914, he was always a threat.34 Pitchers knew that Evers understood distances and times, in other words, the science of base stealing. Articulating the progressive, scientific attitude, he composed, just a year before Frederick W. Taylor penned The Principles of Scientific Management, an account of how to steal third base:
Figures prove positively that the runner can go 32 feet up the line toward third, and, if he starts back quickly enough, can beat the throw back to second. If he goes the other way, he has 58 feet to run and must slide only 23 feet farther, and the ball must travel almost twice as far and be relayed perfectly to catch him. If he makes the play correctly, the fastest possible handling of the ball will only catch him by three feet, unless he is blocked off the base.35
How about Evers’s defense? Most baseball fans are familiar with his fielding prowess because of Franklin Pierce Adams’s poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” or “Tinker to Evers to Chance”:
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double—
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Adams, a Chicagoan, composed the poem in New York City, on the way to a 1910 Cubs–Giants game at the Polo Grounds. Better known as “FPA,” his pen name for the New York Evening Mail, in 1910, Adams ignited one of baseball poetry’s all-time hits.36 The poem has endured, earning places in both general American pop culture and baseball lore. Baseball scholar Daniel Okrent discusses the poem in Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary and suggests that the trio of infielders earned their fame more because of the poem than their actual fielding abilities.37
Although the group did not stand at the top in terms of yearly, total double plays (in part because Chicago pitchers walked relatively few batters), Tinker, Chance, and Evers fielded brilliantly. Chance, according to baseball historian Bill James, was an “exceptional defensive first baseman.”38 Baseball scholars Gary Mitchem and Mark Durr claim that “[a]ll three had career fielding percentages and range factors above the league average. And in the 11 seasons with the Cubs, Evers or Tinker would finish in the National League in the top for Fielding Wins seven times, twice making the list together.”39 Leading all National League shortstops in 1906 with a .944 fielding percentage, Tinker led National League shortstops in the same category five times; he stood at the top in range factor four times and double plays twice.40
Evers’s ability, too, matched Adams’s description in “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon.” Throughout his career, Evers earned an above average fielding percentage, and he was ranked by Bill James in 2001 as the 25th best all-time second baseman in Win Shares, a statistic that determines a player’s offensive and defensive contributions to team victories. Writes James, “Evers deserved the Gold Glove as the National League’s best second baseman in 1904, 1906, and 1907.”41 But what raised Johnny Evers to another level was his fielding intelligence, the baseball brilliance behind the statistics and schemes in the book Touching Second. It was his shrewdness in the Merkle’s Boner incident. It was, according to the Braves’ keystone partner, Walter (Rabbit) Maranville, a form of baseball clairvoyance, a skill so special that “it was just Death Valley, whoever hit a ball our way.”42
Evers’s brilliant knowledge of the game allowed the Cubs to play a connected, collaborative defense, a defense similar to the one described in George Will’s Men at Work:
But imagine taut elastic bands connecting every player behind the pitcher. As the pitcher begins his delivery, every player should impart some slight change in the tension of the band, a change that would radiate through the team. Most of the change would be a slight movement, or leaning, denoting the essence of a defensive play—anticipation.43
Evers and Tinker could anticipate, “sometimes through signals, more often through a glance or a nod or sheer intuition,” what was going to happen on the field.44 Evers’s success was rooted in his tireless baseball intellect, his resourcefulness and far-reaching knowledge of the game.45
The Evers–Tinker Feud
Baseball enthusiasts remember Johnny Evers for more than just his great fielding, determination, braininess, and incessant scolding of umpires. They also recall his hypersensitivity, a defensiveness expressed through both anger and despondency. Baseball scholars are quick to point out that the Johnny Evers of “Tinker to Evers to Chance” fame refused to talk to shortstop Joe Tinker during two of the Cubs’ greatest seasons. Reporters and players from the time have generally agreed that the two players of baseball’s most renowned keystone combination despised one another. For much of their career as Cubs, whenever team members met, Evers would peer at Tinker with a vicious, glazed look. Beginning in 1905, Evers and Tinker stopped talking to one another off the field, stopping all dialogue until a final reconciliation—30 years later.
What so angered the two? And how could two seemingly compatible fielders even be angry? In Baseball Magazine, F. C. Lane describes Evers and Tinker as the “Siamese twins of baseball,” because “they play ball as if they were one man, not two.”46 Baseball author Gil Bogen comments that “Evers would make a lightning dash, scoop up a seemingly impossible grounder, and make a throw to second for the start of a double play without looking to see if anyone was there. It was as if he knew Tinker would be there.” In turn, Tinker could also snare a sharp grounder and “throw it to second for a lightning double play knowing Evers would be there.”47
Baseball experts have disputed the source of the friction. In Baseball, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns point to a “dispute over cab fare.”48 David Shiner, in Deadball Stars of the National League, discussed a brawl between the two. “One day early in 1905, he threw me a hard ball; it wasn’t any farther than from here to there,” Evers claimed, pointing to a lamp about 10 feet from where he sat. “It was a real hard ball, like a catcher throwing to second.” The throw bent back one of the fingers on Evers’s right hand.49 But Bogen, who has conducted the most in-depth account of the incident, suggests that this mutual loathing found its origins in a combination of factors: the dispute over cab fare; Tinker’s anger-laden, close-range throw; and a resulting on-field brawl.50
According to Tinker, in September 1905, before an exhibition game in Bedford, Indiana, Evers left the hotel in the only taxi available, leaving Tinker and his teammates behind. Evers’s negligence at the hotel probably led to both Tinker’s whipping a “hard ball” at Evers and the ensuing fistfight. But after both players were pulled apart, they agreed to a permanent truce, and, according to Tinker, “I said to Evers, ‘Now listen: If you and I talk to each other we’re only going to be fighting all the time. So don’t talk to me, and I won’t talk to you. You play your position and I’ll play mine, and let it go at that.’” “That suits me,” said Evers.51
Evers Arouses Sympathy
While the silent feud with Tinker gained Evers notoriety among baseball fans, his missing nearly an entire baseball season because of a “nervous breakdown” aroused their sympathy. Evers took temporary leave of the majors, not because of his irascibility, but because of profound mental anguish stemming from a severe injury, business bankruptcy, and personal trauma. Toward the end of the 1910 season—the season when Franklin Pierce Adams penned “Tinker to Evers to Chance”—Evers, in a game against Cincinnati, raced home from second base after Sol Hofman’s single to center. Evers sprinted down the third-base line, began to slide, and then held up when he noticed the low, poorly thrown ball from center. But as he hesitated, as he cut short his slide, he caught his cleat in the hard ground near the plate and tumbled to his side. Throughout the ballpark, fans heard his lower leg snap. Evers’s ankle cracked, and he yelled, “Oh my God, my ankle’s all gone to hell,” yet he made sure to touch the plate and score.52
The break caused Evers to miss the rest of the season, and the Cubs, now without their iron-willed, star second baseman, hobbled into the World Series. After five games against Connie Mack’s A’s, they fell to defeat. The Cubs missed Evers’s fielding and his teamwork with Tinker. The team needed his aggressiveness and, above all, his baseball intelligence, his ability to coach on the field. Heartbroken because he had not played for the Cubs in the World Series, the infielder thought that the injury was so severe that his baseball future stood in jeopardy. Later, only weeks after the break, Evers learned that his career beyond baseball, his investments in a Troy shoe store that he had begun to expand into a “Shoe Emporium” in Chicago, had collapsed. When he limped into Troy on crutches, he found that his former business partner had ripped out key pages of accounting ledgers and fled, leaving Evers with losses of around $25,000, an overwhelming sum in an era when a skilled craftsman earned $1,200 a year and a baseball player $3,000.53
Evers, who had thought that the shoe store investment would achieve a “comfortable” life for his family, with or without baseball, now found himself broke, nearly destitute, unable to support his family, and, perhaps, too severely injured to resume his baseball career. He commented, “It is no pleasant thing to find the savings of the best years of your life swept away and yourself in a crippled and uncertain physical condition to face the long climb again, once more penniless and without resources.” Evers seemed to suffer from depression, saying, “I won’t disguise the fact that that was a dark winter for me.”54
But Evers began to recover physically and saw hope both in his baseball and financial future. He anticipated a possible financial turnaround, largely because of the generosity of controversial owner Charles W. Murphy, a baseball magnate beloved for his great success—the Cubs’ four pennants and two world championships—yet despised for his impetuous verbal attacks on players and managers, brazen defiance of league rules, and insolent treatment of the press. Years earlier, Murphy had blundered through a series of ill-timed, inappropriate statements during the Merkle incident. He once asserted, “We can’t supply brains to the New York club’s dumb players.”55 Despite a league order, he refused to build a visiting clubhouse at Chicago’s West Side Park, and during the 1908 World Series, Murphy, a former reporter himself, consigned the press to the very back row of the grandstand.56
In Evers’s opinion, Murphy demonstrated rather obvious failings, yet they were failings that were common among baseball owners of the time:
I am not claiming that Murphy is a saint by any means, but I am saying that many things that Murphy had done for which he has been criticized have been supplicated by every other magnate in the game without that criticism. Murphy has his faults, but so have the rest, and fair play is only fair play.57
Murphy showed Evers his beneficent side when he offered Evers encouragement, a fully paid ocean cruise, and the “best contract for the ensuing season” that he had ever sent him.58 The contract buoyed Evers’s hopes during his dark winter. He fought his way back into playing shape. His leg healed markedly in the spring of 1911, and he was soon back at second base.
But five weeks into the season, he faced even greater adversity. On May 20, after a Brooklyn–Chicago rainout, Johnny Evers drove out of Chicago’s West Side Park with his brother Joe and two passengers, including his friend, Chicago journalist George McDonald. After colliding with a trolley, the car rolled onto its side. Although Evers and two passengers were spared, McDonald received a crushing blow to his skull and died later that day.59 Evers, who “felt like a murderer,” spiraled downward again, probably reaching a state of clinical depression. “The shock of that sudden death was more than I could stand. I again had a bad case of nervous prostration and was laid up for a very long time,” said Evers. He lost interest in baseball and life: “It didn’t seem to me that anything mattered.” No longer able to play, often suffering from sleeplessness, he acquired a fear of going to the second floor of any building. He once commented, “I don’t believe anyone who has never suffered from nervous disorders will understand the moods or action of one who has.”60
The Cubs provided a support group for the star second baseman. Murphy took Evers on road trips with the team and sat with him in the grandstands. Manager Frank Chance raised his spirits and allowed players to sit with the sleepless Evers well beyond curfew. Chance, notorious for his mental toughness on the field—he did not allow Cubs players to shake hands with opponents—displayed uncommon kindness, gently listening to Evers, cheerily supporting him, and sympathetically guiding him toward rehabilitation. According to Evers, “He sent me away to the mountains. I never did knew who did it, but when I arrived at Troy there was a big automobile waiting for me that took me direct to Camp Totem, where I spent several weeks. I lived out in the open air and went to bed every night at eight o’clock and slept.”61 Evers managed to play a few games toward the end of the 1911 season and was fully recuperated by the following spring.
Evers’s Star Rises
In 1912, Evers willed his way to healthiness and performed at a peak level, batting .341 and second in the National League with a .431 on-base percentage.62 He said, “Then I made up my mind that the only thing I could do under the circumstances was to do my best, and I did. In many ways it was my best season.”63 His season was so strong and his knowledge of the game so profound that at the end of 1912, when the Cubs sought a new manager, Charles Murphy turned to Evers. Murphy needed a new manager because longtime skipper Frank Chance was incapacitated. Deaf in one ear, partially deaf in the other, experiencing violent headaches, and suffering from blood clots in the brain, Chance was in need of brain surgery. A prizefighter in the off-season, and a player who had endured numerous beanings because of his bold crowding of the plate, Chance received his release from Murphy after both sides issued charges in the Chicago newspapers. Murphy, who had once called Chance the “greatest manager in the past quarter century,” made public his disappointment as Chance recovered in the hospital, accusing the “Peerless Leader” of having lost control of the team because he had failed to enforce a prohibition clause in the players’ contracts. Quick to the defense, Chance labeled Murphy an “ingrate” and a “cheap liar.” When the Cubs lost to the White Sox in an end-of-season intercity rivalry, Murphy refused to renew Chance’s contract.64
After Murphy offered Evers a four-year player-manager contract, Evers reluctantly accepted. Evers admired Chance, who had supported him through championship seasons and personal losses. He did not want to take the position at Chance’s expense. Evers, just a year since the pain of bankruptcy, severe injury, and the death of a friend, knew his own fragile state of mind, stating, “At first I did not think I could carry the burden of managing. I thought I would break down under it, and I will not deny that I thought so for the first month or so of my work.” When he was certain that Chance would never return to the Cubs, when he saw the opportunity of a $10,000 salary increase, he stood ready to seize the opportunity.65
Evers and the Progressive Era
Evers brought to his new position a cast of mind shaped by the Progressive Era. In an era of such Progressive presidents as Theodore Roosevelt, Evers’s baseball mind-set reflected one of the basic tenets of the movement: the quest for efficiency. Roosevelt displayed this way of thinking in his conservation policies, rooted not only in his belief in conserving the environment, but also in his faith in “national efficiency.” Saving our resources would, he believed, prove to be cost effective.66 Branch Rickey had exhibited this efficiency-first outlook in his approach to spring training exercises.
The movement toward efficiency manifested itself most prominently in Henry Ford’s noteworthy achievement: the assembly line. Ford initiated the assembly line in 1913, at first arranging for his workers to produce magneto coils in a systematic, sequential process. Ford later mass assembled crankcases, camshafts, and then the famous Model Ts. When reporter Julian Street visited Ford Motor’s Highland Park factory in 1914, he noted that “there was system—relentless system—terrible ‘efficiency.’”67 It was not simply that Henry Ford had “invented” the assembly line. Ford employees had absorbed the assembly line concept when they had earlier visited slaughterhouses in Chicago, where they had witnessed animals passing through a “disassembly” process. As observers at a Swift meatpacking plant, Ford’s employees noted the gruesome yet efficient process by which slaughtered swine moved from station to station, and were transformed from pig into pork.68 Indeed, industrial efficiency infused the workplace atmosphere of the Progressive Era United States.
About the same time Henry Ford ramped up the assembly-line process in Highland Park, Johnny Evers and Hugh Fullerton published their book, Touching Second. Baseball fans from the twenty-first century rarely judge baseball from 100 years ago as “scientific.” When they observe photos from 1914, they see players with oversized bats, undersized gloves, and baggy uniforms. Baseball enthusiasts read baseball histories that describe pitchers tossing filthy, worn-out, inaccurate spitballs, and show fans swarming out onto the fields at any moment. The twenty-first-century fan perceives an antiquated Deadball Era.
Yet, in 1910, Evers and Fullerton were convinced that baseball had been evolving for 70 years, reaching a scientific pinnacle so great that the 1910 version of the game was in danger of being reduced to a mechanical science, and that the game might lose its individualistic expression. “The game,” they wrote, “is the most highly developed, scientific, and logical form of athletic pastime evolved by man, and the ultimate evolution of the one universal game.”69 Other cultures throughout the world, from the Hottentots to the Australian bushmen, might toss and catch a “spheroid,” but inventive Americans had forged the near-perfect game: baseball. If the distance from home to first were 88 feet, players would score constantly; if the distance were 92 feet, few if any runners would score. But 90 feet proved ideal. Evers concludes,
The game is the only one played which is founded upon exact and scientific lines. The playing field is laid out with such geometrical exactness, and with such close study of the natural speed of foot and power of arm of the human animal, as to give the defensive team an equal chance with the attackers, and to compel both attacker and defender to approach the extreme limit of human speed and agility in every close play.70
Concerns about the Modern Game
Echoing the views of entrepreneurs like Henry Ford and such efficiency experts as Frederick Taylor, Evers and Fullerton saw the game progressing toward specialization. In the nineteenth century, they observe, most players entered the game as pitchers and catchers. Then, failing at these two key positions, they might sign on as a third baseman or right fielder.71 But in the twentieth century, “because baseball is one of the most highly specialized of all trades,” players early on sought mastery of a specific set of skills: “A second baseman is as distinct from a shortstop as a paying teller of a bank is from the individual ledgerman. . . . The right fielder may be able to play left field, but not nearly so well as he can his own position.”72 Highly specialized players found their way to the majors because of a modern scouting system. Organized at a national level, and staffed by veteran players and retired owners, the system relied on “dragnet methods.”73 Baseball authorities would inspect and review “league after league and club after club,” seeking men like Evers, the former shirt collar factory worker from Upstate New York.74
In 1909, as the scouting system mushroomed, and as the number of recruits swelled, the major clubs felt compelled to impose a limit on each team’s recruits, and Evers and Fullerton feared that the modern scouting system would bulldoze the old, informal, flexible network. Players would no longer be “discovered”; there would be no serendipitous findings on the baseball fields of Iowa. The new scouting system kept track of all the clubs, of all the players’ “habits, dispositions, speed, hitting ability, and intelligence.”75 Now a team could diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of a minor leaguer and, before a player reached the majors, acquire intimate knowledge of his baseball skills. In 1908, Fullerton and Evers noted that when a Braves batter arrived from the minors, the Cubs already knew his “peculiarities, batting habits, and disposition.”76 Before the game, pitchers and coaches reviewed in detail the player’s “position at bat, the way he swung at a ball, the kind of ball he could hit, and what he could not, and exactly how he could reach first base.”77
Evers regarded players as professionals who had successfully passed a “postgraduate course of a moral and physical training,” and who played the game in a style radically different from 15 years earlier; however, in 1911, the old informal network still complemented the new system.78 The Giants’ Fred Snodgrass noted that Deadball Era managers had not abandoned the traditional way of scouting: “The way they got young players was by direct observation themselves. Or some friend of the club would tip off John McGraw, or other managers, that here was a likely kid, and they would bring him and look him over.”79
Analyzing a pitcher’s skills was essential. Evers and Fullerton could dissect the action of each pitcher, and, in the manner that Henry Ford broke down the tasks of magneto coil production, they evaluated the “slow ball,” the twentieth-century version of the changeup:
It was discovered that if the ball be held far back in the palm of the hand, with the little finger and on the third finger on one side and the thumb on the other, with the other fingers held so as not to touch the ball at all, the result could be attained.80
The pitcher, gripping the ball tightly at the point of release, swinging his arm in full force, could toss a slightly wobbly, nonrotating ball that stopped by air pressure, “obeys the call of gravity, and drops quickly toward the earth after expending its force.”81 And pitching was complicated in 1910. As Bill James and Rob Neyer point out in their 2004 book on pitching, “By 1903, not literally but generally speaking, the pitchers were throwing everything we throw now. The forerunner of every modern pitch was in use somewhere by 1910.”82
While Evers understood the physics of baseball, he also quite clearly mastered what he called “geometric baseball.” Evers and Fullerton had concluded that each ball field held five infield “grooves” and four outfield “grooves.” If a batter knocked a ball down this groove or lane, he had a reasonably good chance of earning a hit—only a spectacular play might stop him. Evers knew that there was a seven-and-a-half-foot gap between the first and second basemen, but an eight-and-a-half-foot gap between the shortstop and third baseman, “because the ball goes faster in that direction, and the space between the third baseman’s extreme limit of finer reach and the foul line is a foot and a half.”83 Fullerton took highly detailed notes of games, marking grounders with wavy lines—a wave for each time the ball hit the ground—and marking, for instance, if the ball went to the left of the shortstop. It was the early twentieth-century way of videotaping a game. Evers comprehended these calculations, and Fullerton noted his friend’s astuteness in the field. The best testimonial to the ability of Johnny Evers, of the Chicago club, to fill these grooves was given on the bench of opposing team last summer: “Hit ’em where they ain’t,” growled one player to another, who had been thrown out by Evers. “I do, but he is always there,” retorted the other.84
Scientific baseball players, Evers believed, stood on the shoulders of earlier players: “The modern player has the benefit of the accumulated experience of a dozen baseball generations to study before he even starts to play.”85 But approaching baseball via physics and geometry, the forming of a “scientific pastime” presented dangers to the game: Players might be reduced to industrial automatons, operating in a “machine-like” fashion. Like many in the early twentieth century, Evers and Fullerton feared bureaucratic structures and corporate efficiency. The only salvation rested in the “fighting, aggressive player,” the Ty Cobb, or perhaps Evers himself, the “exponents of the unexpected,” those who stirred up the others, created new plays, and broke the rules.86
In the view of Evers and Fullerton, aggressive individuals exhibited a toughness rarely displayed by the modern, indulged player. Players acted in such a highly pampered style that they could ignore the manager and general rules of society.
The public does not realize that the manager is dealing with 22 ultra-independent athletes, vulgarly healthy, frankly outspoken, and unawed by any authority or pomp. Only persons who have one child, that possesses four grandparents, twenty or thirty aunts all trying to spoil it, can understand in full the difficulties of the manager’s job.87
Ballplayers, according to Evers, were mere youths who rose from low wages to comfortable salaries in a matter of weeks. They acted like “grown children” who received unceasing flattery and praise:
It is no wonder that the major-league players become spoiled. The hotel arrangements are all made for them; their baggage is checked, the train connections, berths, and carriages are all arranged for by the manager or secretary. The player is told when to go, where to go, and how to go, and some players, after years of traveling, are almost as helpless as if they had never been on a train.88
Dealing with the players/children of 1910 produced a prematurely gray Cubs manager in Frank Chance, who was “battered, grizzled, careworn, and weary” at the age of 32. The manager as father was “forced to soothe their injured feelings, condole with them in their troubles, cheer them in their blues, and check them in their exuberance.”89
Evers and Fullerton witnessed a modern baseball game in which players received not only unwarranted praise, but also unparalleled opportunities to enhance their income. By the first decade of the twentieth century, baseball players were earning endorsements for sweaters, socks, razors, and Coca-Cola. The popular beverage earned a label of “wholesomeness” through its endorsement by national idol Christy Mathewson. And players, including Mathewson, enhanced their celebrity status when, during the off-season, they performed on the vaudeville stage. Mathewson, the great American sports hero, performed comedy sketches in 1910, at New York’s Hammerstein Theater, clearing $1,000 per week, earnings far greater than his salary of $10,000 per year. And Mathewson’s celebrity brought him other income opportunities as well: He wrote a newspaper column during the 1911 World Series; put together a how-to baseball book entitled Pitching in a Pinch; authored a play, The Girl and the Pennant; endorsed a series of short stories for boys, the “Matty Books”; and even took on a feature role in the 1913 film Breaking into the Big Leagues.90 With players performing as vaudeville actors, movie stars, and authors, Evers and Fullerton saw themselves as part of an era dominated by commercialization.91
Managing in 1912
In 1912, Evers faced the challenges of the modern manager. Although he managed with even more ferocity than he played, his passion for the game could not compensate for a below-average Cubs team. A third-place finish that year, despite 91 victories, yielded moderate fan support for a team that had attained first or second place each year from 1906 to 1911, and that had, in 1907 and 1908, claimed World Series victories. As soon as Evers was hired, Joe Tinker, Evers’s double-play partner/nemesis, quit; then other Cub weaknesses surfaced. A Chicago reporter assessed Evers’s Cubs: “His pitching staff is a wreck. He has only one good catcher. His outfield needs rejuvenation. All in all, Johnny has taken on an enviable task, but we wish him well.”92
Evers fared better at complaining than leading. As a first-time manager, the anxious, combative adversary of major league umpires sometimes failed to effectively command his charges. A reporter from the Chicago Gazette pointed out that Evers was following a great managerial act, and “All this works on the mind of Evers, who even as a player was high-strung and sensitive. With the added responsibilities, he is irritable, nervous, and lacking in patience . . . nature did not endow him with the disposition of a natural leader, hence his tendency to crab.”93 Umpires reacted to Evers’s irritability and tossed him out with regularity. Murphy offered him a new suit if he could avoid an ejection for two weeks, and at one point, Evers behaved appropriately, earning the suit; yet, umpires ejected him a day after the two-week time limit had lapsed. In 1913, Evers’s edginess contributed to a third-place, 88–63 record. Another third-place finish, despite a strong last six weeks, proved inadequate for Murphy, and when the Cubs failed to defeat the White Sox in Chicago’s all-important intercity series, Murphy fired the hot-headed leader.94
Evers’s dismissal and Murphy’s apparent breaking of a questionably worded contract provoked reactions throughout the National League. National League owners judged Murphy as an outrageous, out-of-control owner who might push one of the brightest stars out of the league. A few American businessmen, seeking a piece of the baseball industry, had begun in the fall of 1913 to organize the Federal League. Magnates from the new league set their sights on National League and American League players who felt shackled by baseball’s reserve clause, a contractual arrangement that allowed owners to secure a player on a team in perpetuity.95
Evers, like other major leaguers, was tempted by a lucrative Federal League contract: five years at $15,000 a year and a $30,000 signing bonus. The upstart league had already secured contracts from minor leaguers, semipro players, and major leaguers who were past their prime. American League and National League executives feared that the Federal League’s higher salaries and reserve clause–free contracts would appeal to major-league players. Owners wanted to block the flow of star players to the new league and offered huge salary increases to such players as Ty Cobb, Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker, and Christy Mathewson.96 But Evers’s case was peculiar: His dismissal from the Cubs, compounded by a botched trade attempt by Murphy, allowed him to become, in many respects, baseball’s first free-agent star. A Federal League official tantalized Evers, depositing thousands of dollars of hard cash in front of him at New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel. Evers resisted the temptation, envisioning himself as a well-paid National Leaguer, and offered himself to the Boston Braves for bonuses, incentives, and $25,000.97
Few players in baseball history have experienced frequent, dramatic changes like Evers. After rising up from a low-paying, blue-collar job to stardom, pennants, and World Series championships, in 1910, his career plummeted. He suffered bankruptcy; a severe, nearly career-ending physical injury; and then, despondency. On the verge of a complete comeback, he drove his car into a trolley, leading to the death of his friend and a second experience of profound sorrow. Dropping out of baseball as he faced psychological depression for a second time, he pulled through, rising once again to become a successful player-manager, only to be unceremoniously fired after one and a half seasons. Then, beginning in 1914, he serendipitously found himself—even in the era of tight-fisted, reserve clause–supporting owners—as baseball’s only free agent. When the Braves offered him $25,000, he knew he could bring stability to his career. Married since 1908, and the father of two small children, Evers seized the chance to rebuild his life.98
Boston
When Evers reached Boston, he arrived in a city exploding with change. Bostonians had constructed dams, drained marshes, and filled in bays. They had built striking buildings: a Renaissance-style symphony hall (1900); a Greek Revival museum of fine arts (1909); and the modern concrete and steel Fenway Park (1912). They were absorbing thousands of immigrants from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. The city’s population of 670,000 exceeded by 50,000 the population nearly 100 years later, in 2010. And these new immigrants altered a social fabric that had only recently been transformed by Irish immigrants.99 The Irish had exited their homeland in mass numbers—37,000 in 1847—because of the potato famine and had migrated to cities in the northern United States. They had settled in East Boston, cleaning yards, mopping up stables, and loading ships as they barely survived in the wooden shacks of Boston’s cholera-infested slums.100 The landlords of these ramshackle dwellings, the Oldcomer Bostonians, the Puritan and Pilgrim descendants, adapted slowly and reluctantly to the newcomers, Irish Catholic laborers who, according to Noel Ignatiev in his brilliant book How the Irish Became White, struggled fiercely to achieve acceptance.101
During the Civil War, Boston’s Irish gained respectability by fighting in the Union army—sometimes as substitute conscripts—and then laboring in armories, factories, and shipyards. After the war, they built such municipal buildings as City Hospital and hauled gravel to fill in Back Bay. Some Irish immigrants found jobs that provided subsistence beyond their wages back home in Ireland, but few found opportunities to move to the top rung of the economic ladder, occupied by bankers and corporate board members who belonged to Boston’s Anglo-Saxon elite.
By the 1870s, the Irish had found an alternate way upward, and they successfully channeled their energies into politics. Local businessmen—grocers, saloon owners, and funeral directors—who served a wide variety of customers, might achieve political office and serve as a ward “boss,” providing services to Irish American families in return for their votes. The boss might provide assistance to a family low on coal or find a job for a newcomer, all within the political machine: “Once a local boss took over, his ward was divided into precincts, each with a captain in charge. Each captain supervised perhaps a dozen lieutenants who, in turn, supervised workers assigned to specific streets.” Citizens then upheld their end of the bargain on voting day. If the machine ran smoothly, an effective boss could turn out the electorate with “machine-like precision.”102
In Boston’s West End, Martin Lomasney, “The Mahatma,” emerged in the 1880s as a powerful political boss, so revered that, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, West Enders revered him as a “god.” Lomasney succinctly phrased his theory of politics, saying, “The great mass of people are interested in only three things—food, clothing, and shelter. A politician in a district such as mine sees to it that his people get these things. If he does, then he doesn’t have to worry about their loyalty.”103 In the North End, when the local ward boss died, he was replaced by the bright, active, 29-year-old son of Irish immigrants: John F. Fitzgerald. Across the harbor in the East End, a 30-year-old owner of a liquor importing business, Patrick J. Kennedy, ruled as political boss.104
At the turn of the twentieth century, the traditional rulers of Boston, Yankee Protestants, not only witnessed the Irish Catholics acquiring political power, they also observed new waves of immigrants from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, with cultures sharply different from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and with languages and traditions that appeared much more difficult to assimilate with than that of the Irish. Massachusetts experienced a transformation in the first decade of the century, when nearly 150,000 Italians, 80,000 Poles, and 25,000 Lithuanians entered the state, settling in urban areas. Overwhelmed by massive droughts in southern Italy, while attracted by American businesses that offered industrial jobs, Italians settled eastern U.S. cities; in Boston, they headed toward the North End and East Boston neighborhoods. Working at construction sites, at granite quarries on the railroads, or in the neighborhoods as cobblers, leather workers, or grocery owners, Italians formed their own institutions, including social clubs, benevolent societies, and churches. At church, they solemnly honored the feast of the Madonna delle Grazie, and they colorfully celebrated festivals in honor of St. Rocco, St. Joseph, and St. Anthony.105
Evers Arrives in Boston
Evers would open the season at South End Grounds, a ballpark in close proximity to Boston’s Anglo and Irish residents. South End Grounds stood in industrial Boston, across from the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad grounds. Smoke poured out of the nearby rail yards. The Hartford Railroad ran parallel to the third-base line, a roundhouse stood just beyond the outfield seats, and large warehouses bordered the park. The facility stood directly across from the Huntington Grounds, home of the Red Sox until 1912. Roxbury’s Irish could walk to the park, while other Bostonians could travel to South End Grounds via electric trolley. The South End Park, in its nineteenth-century form, loomed as a “fairytale, with covered viewing stands, turrets, and intricate ornamentation,” but after it burnt to the ground in 1894, ball club owner Arthur Soden, who was underinsured, recovered insufficient funds; he was unable to rebuild the park to its legendary, Camelot-like status. Also known as the Walpole Street Grounds, the aging, rickety South End Park, rebuilt three times and now in its final phase, held about 11,000 spectators.106
The city of Boston celebrated the acquisition of Evers, who many felt might be able to lead the Braves back up in the division standings, at least to a point of respectability. Baseball observers like John McGraw anticipated that Evers would guide a solid group of younger players to an improved record. Evers, anointed captain by Braves manager George Stallings, was a ripe 32 years old. Most of the team ranged from 20 to 25 years of age. In early May, the Boston fans arranged a welcoming game for Evers. Fans in the Deadball Era often set up gift-bearing events for their stars during pregame ceremonies. The Boston Globe announced a Johnny Evers welcoming tribute. In the spring of 1914, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who had left the mayor’s post a few months earlier, encouraged Boston fans, in particular the Royal Rooters, to show up at the South End Grounds on Tuesday, May 5. Fitzgerald called upon Boston fans to “give a welcome to Johnny Evers that will make the little fellow feel that we all appreciate his skills as a ballplayer and the traits that mark him a gentleman.”107 Yet, Boston fans never found the opportunity to greet their new player. A driving New England rain caused the game to be postponed, and the Braves soon left on a four-week road trip.
Early Optimism Dims
Despite the optimism generated by the arrival of Evers, the Braves’ first few games provided fans with few reasons for hope. When the Braves inaugurated the season on April 14, at Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn, they suffered misfortune. On Opening Day, Braves shortstop Walter “Rabbit” Maranville left the team to attend to his ill brother, and third baseman Charlie Deal strained a ligament in his leg, only to be replaced by the sore-armed Oscar Dugey, whose cheery outlook masked his frailty: “My arm is not very good, but I will try to get them over somehow.”108 But neither Dugey nor his teammates could stop the Brooklyn team, a sixth-place finisher in 1913. The first four batters in the Braves’ lineup could not hit safely all day, and the Braves surrendered, 8–2. Manager Stallings could offer “no alibis for defeat,” but he suggested to reporters that his players lacked experience, saying that on his “kid team . . . barring Evers, not a player was more than 25.”109
In the second game, the Braves demonstrated a model for incompetence: Evers popped up with the bases loaded, eliminating the team’s one chance to score. A Boston Globe writer concluded, “In a nutshell, the Braves did not bat, they did not field, they did not throw well, and the pitching of Mr. Rudolph of the Bronx was weak at critical stages of the conflict.” The Braves lost, 5–0.110
The Braves failed repeatedly, losing their third consecutive game to the Philadelphia Phillies. Finding new ways to lose, the Braves transformed well-hit balls into a series of “good outs.” In the third game of the season, the Braves’ batters made contact with the ball, but as a Boston Globe reporter noted, “usually straight into the hands of some waiting fielder.” Unable to hit the ball safely off of the Phillies’ Cy Marshall, players blasted the ball, “sailing at either an infielder or a man in the outer works with the precision of a bullet from a sharpshooter’s rifle.” Braves pitcher Hub Perdue, for whom the team held high expectations, held Philadelphia to one run in the first inning, but he met his undoing in an unexpected manner—through his success as a batter. With two out and outfielder Larry Gilbert on first and catcher Hank Gowdy on second, Perdue, normally a weak hitter, smashed a ball into left-center field, scoring both runners. But Perdue loped into third base, worn out and gasping for air. Maranville followed Perdue to the plate, and on the very next pitch, he grounded out to short. Perdue’s “laborious dash around the bases” proved costly, and in the next inning, “When he walked out to the middle of the diamond, he was puffing and panting and seemed tired out.” He lost command of his pitches, and the Phillies soon “batted his offerings around without mercy.”111
Facing the Orioles’ Ruth
After losing to the Phillies and two earlier games to the Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers), a team that had endured 10 straight losing seasons, the Braves next went down to defeat to the minor league Baltimore Orioles. On April 19, the Orioles, members of the International League, played the Braves in an exhibition game, and for the first three innings, the Orioles sent up their new pitching “recruit,” George Herman Ruth. The veteran Orioles players had, only weeks earlier, christened the talented pitcher “Babe” because of his immature, innocent-looking demeanor. Babe had signed his first contract in the winter of 1914, with Orioles owner-manager Jack Dunn. Dunn earned money as an owner by acquiring young talent like Ruth, showcasing him, and then selling him to the highest bidder. Ruth, who had pitched well against teams that included the Philadelphia Athletics during spring training, once again showed off his talent. He struck out two, walked two, and allowed two runs, contributing to the minor league Orioles’ 3–2 defeat of the Braves.112
During the exhibition game against the Orioles and five road games against the Phillies and Dodgers, the last-place, 1–4 Braves could not muster an offense. Despite hitting the ball smartly during spring training, in the first five regular-season games, the Braves batted .216, collecting only 36 hits in 167 at bats. They scored 10 runs to their opponents’ 24.113 Trying to “open their batting eyes a little wider,” the Braves returned to the South End Grounds of Boston and took extra batting practice during the morning before the April 24 home opener. Yet, their pathetic batting continued. They suffered a 1–8 defeat in the opener, and after an April 25, 0–4 loss to Brooklyn, a Boston Globe reporter lamented:
They did not hit a lick yesterday, nor have they been hitting since the session opened—and not very consistently previous to that. One hit, when it was needed in four of the six games that have been lost so far, would undoubtedly have meant just the difference between a defeat and a victory for the team. But the Braves failed to produce the hit, and hence their record stands six games lost and two won.114
Despite the Braves’ unrelenting misfortune, Braves’ reporters kept an upbeat frame of mind. Boston writer Melville Webb Jr., widely recognized for his in-depth knowledge of sports—especially Harvard football—surmised that the Braves would raise themselves out of the cellar. The team, he commented, “is not likely to stay there long if Stallings has drawn the right bead on the caliber of his outfit.”115
Outfielders Can’t Hit; Pitchers Can’t Throw
The Braves faced challenges on every front, and players, especially the outfielders, continued their wretched hitting. Giants manager John McGraw, who wrote a regular column on the National League, saw the Braves’ “outfield as the weakest department, none of the trio being able to come through with wallops.” Stallings, he notes, was “turning things upside down” to find new outfielders. Joe Connolly was batting .259, but center fielder Leslie Mann was batting .147 and right fielder Tommy Griffith .106. Wilson Collins, a part-time center fielder who played seven games, had an average of .222. When the outfielders’ batting averages began to heat up, the team improved just marginally, and by the end of May, after 26 games, the team batting rested at .225, with an average of three runs per game (significantly less than the 3.44 Deadball Era averages). By June, McGraw judged the Braves to be a nonfactor in the pennant race.116
The Braves pitchers did not atone for the wretchedness of the team’s hitters. On May 1, the Braves dropped to 2–8 after falling to the Giants, 11–2. This time feeble hitting was complemented by Dick Crutcher’s pathetic pitching. “Stallings started with Crutcher in the box, and the first four men to face the Boston pitcher delivered two doubles and two singles. George ‘Lefty’ Tyler took over in the third, only to fare worse.”117 The following day, the Phillies visited Boston and won, 6–2, hitting three homers and four doubles against the Braves, even making two homers back-to-back in the first inning off Hub Perdue.118 The home run totals in these games were staggering for 1914. The champion Cubs hit a total of 12 home runs in 1908; in the Deadball Era, Frank “Home Run” Baker led the American League in homers four times, with 12 home runs as his best in any season.119
And even when the Braves pitched well and limited another team’s sluggers, they panicked, lost confidence, and tossed that one pitch that brought on defeat. On May 9, Lefty Tyler pitched brilliantly against the Giants, holding them to no runs for six innings, but in the seventh, with two out and the bases loaded, Tyler turned “peevish” and “exasperated” when umpire Cy Rigler called close pitches “balls.” Losing his composure, his control, and “his former speed and accuracy,” Tyler got knocked out of the box with a two-run, game-winning double by the Giants’ John “Chief” Meyers.120
The level of pitching spiraled downward in part because of the Braves’ inept fielding. Against Brooklyn two weeks into the season, the Braves’ best fielder, Rabbit Maranville, mishandled a crucial although easy ground ball. With the bases loaded in the sixth, Maranville, probably distracted by Jake Daubert running from second to third, let a ball pass between his legs into left field, allowing two runs.121
Near Wins
On May 7, against the Giants, the Braves seemed close to victory, with a lead in the eighth, but they fumbled away the game when Maranville stabbed a hot grounder from Giants outfielder George Burns but stumbled. Burns reached first safely, and Red Murray crossed the plate with the tying run. A Boston Globe reporter described the next crucial blunder in the field, using imaginative language typical of 1914 sportswriters:
But that was not all of the misfortunes of the Braves. [Art] Fletcher hit a low liner to center and [Leslie] Mann came galloping in to intercept the leather. He prepared to take the ball on the short bound and hold the runners on their bases. But Mann did not make allowances for the perversity of the flying baseball. He set his lunch-hooks south-southeast-half-south, and the depraved ball bounded west-southwest-half-west, eluding his grapplers by seven inches. The ball rolled to the fence in center. Mr. Fletcher rolled to third, and Mr. Burns rolled home with the winning run.122
The reporter also noted with metaphorical humor how the Braves could put themselves in such a humiliating position: “But just when it appeared that victory was about to drop like a ripe peach into the laps of the Braves, the frost of defeat withered the fruit, and the Gaffneyites found themselves still more firmly anchored in the subterranean recesses.”123
Writers often used Native American terms for a team named the Braves: A defeat on May 8 earned a clever, but derogatory, remark: “Implacable fate, leering malevolently at the hapless Braves again buffeted them and sent them hapless to their teepees today. . . . Fate, the conscienceless jade, has apparently selected the seventh and eighth innings in which to humiliate and discourage the tribe of Stallings.”124
Twenty-nine games into the season, John McGraw, in one of his weekly commentaries on National League teams, seemed perplexed by Boston’s poor showing. He had met with Stallings, a “good friend of [his],” after a couple of Giants games and noted that Stallings was “all broken up,” yet “not discouraged.” Stallings declared mournfully, “I haven’t been getting any pitching or any hitting. You can’t win ball games when the other teams are making a million runs off your pitching and your players are not hitting a lick.” McGraw saw in the Braves a team that could make the “National League strong in the Hub [that] year,” because it was “fundamentally a much better club than Stallings finished with in fifth place last season.” Stallings remained optimistic even after the Giants swept a recent series, saying, “We will finish better than we did last season. That club of mine is bound to get going.”125
In early May, a New York Times reporter could write about the last-place Braves with total arrogance. The Times pointed out in a wry, acidly worded commentary that the Braves had no chance against a team like the Giants: “The New York Giants do not mind Brooklyn winning a game once in a while at the Polo Grounds, but when the Boston Braves assume that they can do the same thing, it is not only presumptuous but decidedly very bold.” On May 7, the Braves, “without a word of warning, became very selfish and piled up a big lead.” But the Giants, down 6–3 in the eighth, scored on Crutcher and Rudolph, administering a “smart lashing,” a 7–6 New York victory. The Times concluded that the Braves had resumed their appropriate, subservient position: “Hereafter perhaps the Braves will behave themselves.”126
Even the lowly Brooklyn Robins, a team that, according to the Boston Globe, “had been pummeled by every team in the Western circuit and had returned to Flatbush only to be used as doormats by the Giants,” even this Brooklyn team, offered a stiff challenge to the Braves.127 On June 1, after the Robins (called Dodgers or Trolley Dodgers by fans) had defeated the Braves, 6–2 and 4–2, the New York Times wrote about how the Dodgers’ manager must feel: “Wilbert Robinson’s ideas of success and pleasure, no doubt, is an endless succession of doubleheaders between the Dodgers and George Stallings’s Braves.” The Brooklyn Dodgers might lose to the Giants, but at least they could pass along the “humiliation they had suffered” to the Braves.128 On June 2, the Braves played the Dodgers in a second doubleheader, and Brooklyn fans “saw Boston win a game, which is something to brag about: The first game of yesterday’s doubleheader is the eleventh game the Boston team has won this year, and is naturally something of an epoch in the season for them.”129
Evers Banished
The Boston team found new ways of falling to defeat, and Evers created new antics that produced frequent ejections. In a May 26 away game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Evers began disputing ball and strike calls with his umpire nemesis, Cy Rigler. In the third inning, Evers, according to the Boston Globe, “slipped him the endearing term of ‘fathead,’ and afterward besieged Rigler to know why he was being banished.”130 Three weeks later, in a home game against the Cardinals, Evers released his furies even more dramatically when confronting umpire Mal Eason. In the eighth inning, the Braves were leading, 3–2, when left fielder “Cozy” Dolan led off with a single to right and, on the next pitch, tried to steal second. Bert Whaling, the Braves’ backup catcher, fired to Evers at second, who blocked the base with his wiry 125-pound frame, tagged Dolan, and then circled around the base with a heavy limp. When umpire Eason pronounced Dolan safe, Evers complained furiously, noting that Dolan’s spike had cut through the sole of his shoe, bruising his foot. For Evers, the slashed shoe and bruised foot provided absolute and undeniable proof that he had stood between Dolan and the bag. The “Little Trojan” took off his shoe, pointed to the bruise, and then waved the shoe in Eason’s face. Eason looked away from Evers and admonished him to just keep playing and “hurry up.” “I won’t hurry up,” retorted Evers, “I have been spiked.” Eason then tossed the defiant second baseman from the game, who, according to reporter J. C. O’Leary, “did not hurry up about it.”131
Evers’s feistiness signified the state of the Braves. Despite pathetic fielding, pitching, and hitting, and although they lost close games, strange games that seemed winnable, Boston Globe reporters wrote of the team’s “gameness.” The Braves’ gameness offered Stallings a glimpse of hope. On May 4, the Phillies banged 15 hits for 10 runs against the Braves. Pitcher Dick Rudolph, although beaten, stood tall: “He was pounded to a pulp and was wild as a hawk, but he never lost his head, so came off with flying colors.” Rudolph pitched high and inside to the Phillies, provoking accusations of attempted “beanings,” but Rudolph earned the accolade “‘game’ pitcher,” a description that he and other Braves received throughout the year. “Game” suggested a combination of toughness and persistence; it implied a high-spirited, determined outlook. Despite the unceasing losses, writers for the Boston Globe tried to be positive. When, on May 19, the umpire lost track of the count at a crucial moment in the eighth inning, helping the Braves lose to the Pirates, and dropping their record to 4–18, the paper reported that the “Braves were earnestly in the game from start to finish.”132
In the midst of their misery, the Braves more than likely underestimated a talent who might have put them on the right track. On May 20, struggling to find game-winning pitching, Stallings turned to Adolfo Luque, a Cuban, the first Latin American pitcher to achieve success in the major leagues in the years before World War II. Luque had pitched for the Braves in the preseason and was now being asked to pitch against the Pittsburgh Pirates. With the advantage of hindsight it is easy to see how the Braves misjudged a great talent. Luque pitched into the ninth for a five-hitter against the Pirates but lost, 4–1, largely because of the defensive ineptness: Rabbit Maranville, the Braves’ star infielder, committed four errors.133 In 1914, Luque would return to the International League, and the “Pride of Havana” would later earn nearly 200 victories in the majors, including a Giants’ victory in the 1933 World Series.134
The Braves’ ineptitude continued, and the team fell further in the standings. On May 26, second baseman Miller Huggins of St. Louis employed the rarely used “hidden ball trick” as another maneuver to help defeat the Braves. In the seventh inning, with outfielder Jim Murray on first base, Boston’s Jack Martin hit a grounder to Huggins at second and reached first on a fielder’s choice. Huggins casually hung on to the ball, not returning it to the pitcher and simply tucking it under his arm. He had spotted an inattentive Martin. As soon as Martin took a lead off first, Huggins tossed it to first baseman “Dots” Miller for an out. Martin’s mental lapse arrived at a pivotal moment in the game and stifled a Braves attempt to rally: They lost again, 4–2.135 On May 29, the Braves outhit the Phillies, 8–3, but lost, 3–1. Bill James issued walks that allowed Philadelphia base runners to score. The Braves put men into scoring position and then failed to drive them home.136 The Braves clearly understood all manners of losing.
Early June
By June 1, the team record stood at 10–24, a .294 winning percentage (see table 2.1). With 119 games to play, the odds of the Braves reaching the World Series rested at an astonishing 10,000 to 1. No team before 1914 (and no team since) had ever overcome such probabilities.137 Because of eight rainouts in early spring, five of them in Boston, the team was forced to play doubleheaders on May 30, June 1, and June 2. The Braves lost four out of six games. The first week of June, when they finished 2–6, only compounded their misery. Then the Braves saw progress.
|
Table 2.1. National League Standings at the Close of Play, June 1, 1914 |
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|
Team |
Games |
Wins |
Losses |
Ties |
Winning Percentage |
Games Behind |
Runs Scored |
Runs Allowed |
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|
New York Giants |
33 |
22 |
11 |
0 |
0.667 |
— |
158 |
127 |
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|
Cincinnati Reds |
42 |
26 |
15 |
1 |
0.634 |
— |
181 |
127 |
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|
Pittsburgh Pirates |
38 |
21 |
15 |
2 |
0.583 |
2.5 |
143 |
112 |
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|
Brooklyn Robins |
34 |
16 |
18 |
0 |
0.471 |
6.5 |
129 |
144 |
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|
Chicago Cubs |
43 |
19 |
22 |
2 |
0.463 |
7.0 |
159 |
166 |
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|
St. Louis Cardinals |
45 |
19 |
24 |
2 |
0.442 |
8.0 |
150 |
164 |
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|
Philadelphia Phillies |
34 |
15 |
19 |
0 |
0.441 |
7.5 |
139 |
171 |
||||||||
|
Boston Braves |
35 |
10 |
24 |
1 |
0.294 |
12.5 |
96 |
144 |
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|
Source: http://www.retrosheet.org. |
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In the next few weeks of June, they took series from the Cubs and Pirates, and they played even with the Cardinals and Giants, but they faltered in the last week of June, stumbling at 3–4 and then falling into a five-game losing streak.138 On July 4, the Braves hit another low point, losing to the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers), 7–5, in an 11-inning game, and then 4–3 after having gained a 3–0 lead in the first inning. Both games, near victories for the Braves, proved especially painful. In the first game, the Braves rallied in the ninth, earning three runs to tie the score—yet they fell to defeat in extra innings. In the second game, the Dodgers scored the winning run in the ninth because of a series of Braves’ mishaps. The Dodgers’ first baseman, Jake Daubert, reached first and stole second, but the Braves’ catcher, Hank Gowdy, overthrew second, sending the ball into center. Braves center fielder Josh Devore muffed the ball, and Daubert sprinted toward home. Devore fired a bullet to Gowdy, who, in a brutal collision with Daubert—the runner was knocked unconscious—dropped the ball.139
On July 5, Evers and the Braves stood 15 games behind the Giants; the odds of coming back to playoff contention remained close to impossible. Evers had faced agonizing trials before: a career-threatening injury, loss of his personal fortune, his firing as manager, and the death of a friend. He had climbed up from the depths of personal sorrow. And just when he seemed on the rebound—a lucrative new contract with a promising team whose fans had embraced him—Evers, who had played on 11-straight winning Chicago Cubs teams, found himself in baseball hell.