• 3 •

The Rabbit Springs Forward

For a team that seemed to be on the upswing in 1913, for a team that left spring training with a future brighter than most, and for a team for which baseball authorities had predicted inevitable success, the first two months of the season proved especially painful. Yet, statements from the time show that the Braves’ leaders, manager George Stallings and captain Johnny Evers, remained resolute, enduring criticism from the media and resisting any attempts by teammates to blame one another. It was especially challenging to stay positive because the deficits of April and May were so massive that even when the Braves strung together a few victories, as they did in June, they still lingered in last place.

Walter “Rabbit” Maranville later recalled the first major road trip in May: “The impression we left was very bad considering we were a big-league ball club.” After the first western trip, the press labeled them “misfits, country buttered ball tossers, and what not”; however, throughout the losing, Stallings continued to reassure them, saying, “Stick in there; we will show them.”1 The Braves began June playing as they had all spring, dropping six of their first eight games, but they won five in a row, beating Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and earning a 16–13 record for the month. The team then plummeted again, losing the first five games in July, and at that point, few baseball fans predicted success.2

Uncooperative Weather

Rainy, cold weather had compounded the Braves’ miseries throughout the spring: They rescheduled eight rained out games, and even in July, the New England cold chipped away at what might have been a pleasant summer baseball experience. Boston Globe reporter J. C. O’Leary suffered through a bleak July 1 doubleheader against the Philadelphia Phillies:

The low temperature was accentuated by the east wind, which blew at half a gale, and there was nothing in the work of the Braves to distract one’s mind from the fact that it was a cold day. . . . Sitting through a doubleheader in such weather as yesterday is no pastime, but doing it and at the same time seeing both games is a positive hardship.3

For O’Leary, the only solace for both the Braves’ disappointing play and the wretched weather was the games’ remarkable brevity. Baseball games in the early twenty-first century can consume nearly three hours. In the Deadball Era—minus TV advertisements, frequent pitching changes, and batters tugging at their baseball gloves between pitches—games lasted two hours or less.4 The first game of the doubleheader, O’Leary noted, took less time than any all season—one hour and 45 minutes. The second game flashed through baseball history in even less time—one hour and 35 minutes. Fans shivered through two losses: 7–2 and 5–0. “It was so cold,” O’Leary wrote, “that the players had to hustle or freeze.”5

Back in May—despite the losing and the cold—Stallings proclaimed, “Give me another month and we’ll be in first place.” Journalists in earshot coughed politely and then discussed whether such ranting deserved print.6 The Braves’ manager had forecast his team’s prospects with dreadful inaccuracy: The Braves had performed miserably. Stallings undoubtedly offered these wild predictions because of his unyielding, hard-as-granite temperament. “Stallings never gave up,” wrote Braves historian Harold Kaese. “He raved and raged like a maniac sliding up and down the bench, bouncing his nervous foot furiously and fining his players recklessly. He insisted that the Braves follow one principle, ‘Players had to show up at the park every day in condition to play.’”7 Kaese observed that Stallings remained hopeful. The Braves historian noted “The Braves lost games but they never lost the spirit of winning.8 This principle meant that whether the Braves suffered a close loss or near annihilation, Stallings still demanded that his team members perform to the best of their abilities on every play. Perhaps it was his intuitive understanding of ideas rooted in baseball statistics: concepts like good players will eventually produce good averages on both defense and offense; good pitchers will ultimately earn victories; and, yes, a good team will inevitably win. Stallings’s on-the-field commander, Johnny Evers, also pushed relentlessly forward. Evers continued to prod the team nervously and incessantly, “saucing them on the field.” Evers and Stallings relentlessly scolded the young Braves players, in part because the two leaders still believed that their players would ultimately fall under the influence of baseball karma. As Stallings noted, “I’ve never seen such luck. But don’t think we’re a tail-end team. It will take us a month to get back in shape, but then we’re going to be hard to beat.”9

Summer Doldrums

On consecutive days, June 30 and July 1, the Braves lost three out of four, including a doubleheader to the Phillies. They lost a single game to the Brooklyn Robins on July 3, and a doubleheader to Brooklyn on July 4.10 July 4 was a typical day for the Braves. Maranville made two errors in the first game and three in the second. “There were costly fumbles, bases on balls, wild pitches, and hit batsmen galore, and the work of the Braves on the bases was the poorest the Braves players have ever shown.”11 Boston’s National League team served as vulnerable prey for its opponents.

On July 4, starter Bill James allowed 17 Brooklyn hits in the first game. Despite the barrage of Robins hits (the Robins were later rechristened the Brooklyn Dodgers), Boston, down only 4–1 in the ninth, tied the score, but the team lost in ways characteristic of the Braves: James was picked off first base, and the newly acquired George “Possum” Whitted made an error in the bottom of the ninth.12 The day before the Braves lost in typical fashion, with pitchers Dick Crutcher and Paul Strand giving up six runs. The Braves, down three runs in the seventh, battled back only to come up short. Yet, they remained feisty as ever. Joe Connolly and coach Fred Mitchell were tossed out of the first July 4th game, and in the second game after “Lefty” Tyler hit (accidentally, according to reports) shortstop Ollie O’Mara in the back of the neck, both teams swarmed onto the field. Evers, eventually shoved away from the action, and Brooklyn’s Kid Elberfield were sent to the bench.13 Still, the Braves lost three out of five to the mediocre (31–35) Brooklyn team. After clambering up the standings in June, the Braves now appeared as a permanent fixture in the National League basement (see table 3.1).

Table 3.1. National League Standings at the Close of Play, July 4, 1914
Team		Games		Wins		Losses		Ties		Winning Percentage		Games Behind		Runs Scored		Runs Allowed
New York Giants		64		40		24		0		0.625		—		303		249
Chicago Cubs		73		39		32		2		0.549		4.5		310		295
St. Louis Cardinals		74		37		35		2		0.514		7.0		274		261
Cincinnati Reds		71		34		36		1		0.486		9.0		266		265
Brooklyn Robins		64		31		33		0		0.484		9.0		256		270
Pittsburgh Pirates		67		31		34		2		0.477		9.5		216		223
Philadelphia Phillies		64		30		34		0		0.469		10.0		284		301
Boston Braves		67		26		40		1		0.394		15.0		238		283
Source: http://www.retrosheet.org.

The dim view from the basement only darkened, when, on July 7, the Braves left Brooklyn and took the rails westward to Chicago, stopping at Buffalo to play an exhibition game against the minor league Buffalo Bisons. Major-league teams, filling every possible date on the schedule, added minor-league games on their “off” days. Professional teams played these games to broaden their fan base and for another source of revenue. Even though they played regulars, including Johnny Evers and Hank Gowdy, the Braves experienced the definitive humiliation: a 10–2 thrashing.14 This one game intensified the profound, interminable misery of the Boston Braves. The Braves had suffered losing seasons for 14 years. Now, in July, after losing three out of five to lowly Brooklyn, they languished in last place, 15 games behind the first-place Giants. The Buffalo game brought unacceptable shame and degradation to last-place Boston. Two Braves pitchers, Gene Cocreham and the usually solid Paul Strand (2.44 ERA in 1914) allowed the Bisons 11 hits, and the Braves, who fumbled the ball away three times, faced John Verbout, a career minor-league pitcher. They mustered only three hits.15 Years later, Hank Gowdy remembered the game as the turning point in the season, a loss so painful that it intensified the unyielding, combative spirit of the Braves.16 Evers later claimed that, although with some exaggeration, “We lost to a soap-company team. That’s how bad we were.”17

About the time that the Braves staggered into baseball hell, their counterparts across town, the Boston Red Sox, were fighting for the pennant. They sought to bolster their chances by adding to their roster a boyish-looking young talent: Babe Ruth. The Braves rarely measured up to the corresponding American League team, inhabitants of the magnificent iron and concrete Fenway Park. By July 4, the Red Sox, who had faced the same severe weather as the Braves, looked strong, with a 39–33 record. Up until this point in the season, and up until July 9, 1914, the Boston Red Sox baseball club had achieved the highest levels of success. The Red Sox burst into the twentieth century with the winningest pitcher of all time (511 games), a pitcher who had already won 286 games before his 192 as a Red Sox: Cy Young. They had also acquired Tris Speaker in 1907. Speaker, one of the greatest batters of all time, who averaged .337 in his nine years as a Red Sox (.345 lifetime), executed breathtaking catches in center field that made Boston fans swoon. In 1911, the Red Sox signed the great fireballer, “Smoky Joe” Wood, who won 34 games in 1912. The Red Sox (whose team names “The Americans” and then “The Pilgrims” graced the Boston American League uniforms until 1906) had earned three pennant-winning seasons: 1903, 1904, and 1912. In the first World Series in 1903, the Boston Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in eight games. In 1912, the Red Sox eliminated the John McGraw–led Giants in seven games.18 By 1914, the Red Sox strutted onto the baseball stage as a proud, proven franchise.

Cy, Tris, and “Smoky Joe”

In 1901, Denton “Cy” Young, who, as a young pitcher, blew fastballs by batters in the manner of a cyclone, joined the Boston Americans. Young, reputed to be a reserved country boy, once rushed into the stands to challenge a heckler who had questioned his tenacity. In 1900, Frank Robison, the owner of his previous team, the St. Louis Browns, had questioned his skills and announced that after 11 years and 286 victories, Young “was all washed up.” When he signed with Boston, Young appeared to Robison and others as shifting toward the downside of his career. Yet, even after 10 years of pitching, Cy Young, according to Pittsburgh Pirates superstar Honus Wagner, could throw even faster than Walter Johnson, who earned the reputation as being one of baseball’s fastest, if not the fastest, pitcher.

But by the time of the Boston trade in 1901, even Young knew that he would have to vary his pitches as he grew older, so he learned how to improve his pitching. He understood that at a less-than-svelte 34, he had better adapt. He mastered two curveballs, one overhand and sharply breaking, and the other sidearmed and looping. He learned to throw his pitches with unmatched precision. Only a few months after the “all washed up” affront, he led the American League in wins (33), ERA (1.62), and strikeouts (158)—baseball’s Triple Crown in pitching. In that same season, he threw five shutouts, including the American League’s first perfect game, and in a feat incomprehensible in modern times, he walked only 37 batters in 371 and a third innings. The apparently ineffective pitcher showed enough determination to win nearly 200 games for Boston19 (see table 3.2).

Table 3.2. Cy Young Pitching Statistics
Year		Age		Team		Lg.		W		L		ERA		GS		CG		SHO		SV		IP		H		R		ER		HR		BB		SO		WHIP		SO/BB
1890		23		CLV		NL		9		7		3.47		16		16		0		0		147.2		145		87		57		6		30		39		1.185		1.30
1891		24		CLV		NL		27		22		2.85		46		43		0		2		423.2		431		244		134		4		140		147		1.348		1.05
1892		25		CLV		NL		36		12		1.93		49		48		9		0		453.0		363		158		97		8		118		168		1.062		1.42
1893		26		CLV		NL		34		16		3.36		46		42		1		1		422.2		442		230		158		10		103		102		1.289		0.99
1894		27		CLV		NL		26		21		3.94		47		44		2		1		408.2		488		265		179		19		106		108		1.454		1.02
1895		28		CLV		NL		35		10		3.26		40		36		4		0		369.2		363		177		134		10		75		121		1.185		1.61
1896		29		CLV		NL		28		15		3.24		46		42		5		3		414.1		477		214		149		7		62		140		1.301		2.26
1897		30		CLV		NL		21		19		3.78		38		35		2		0		335.2		391		189		141		7		49		88		1.311		1.80
1898		31		CLV		NL		25		13		2.53		41		40		1		0		377.2		387		167		106		6		41		101		1.133		2.46
1899		32		STL		NL		26		16		2.58		42		40		4		1		369.1		368		173		106		10		44		111		1.116		2.52
1900		33		STL		NL		19		19		3.00		35		32		4		0		321.1		337		144		107		7		36		115		1.161		3.19
1901		34		BOS		AL		33		10		1.62		41		38		5		0		371.1		324		112		67		6		37		158		0.972		4.27
1902		35		BOS		AL		32		11		2.15		43		41		3		0		384.2		350		136		92		6		53		160		1.048		3.02
1903		36		BOS		AL		28		9		2.08		35		34		7		2		341.2		294		115		79		6		37		176		0.969		4.76
1904		37		BOS		AL		26		16		1.97		41		40		10		1		380.0		327		104		83		6		29		200		0.937		6.90
1905		38		BOS		AL		18		19		1.82		33		31		4		0		320.2		248		99		65		3		30		210		0.867		7.00
1906		39		BOS		AL		13		21		3.19		34		28		0		2		287.2		288		137		102		3		25		140		1.088		5.60
1907		40		BOS		AL		21		15		1.99		37		33		6		2		343.1		286		101		76		3		51		147		0.982		2.88
1908		41		BOS		AL		21		11		1.26		33		30		3		2		299.0		230		68		42		1		37		150		0.893		4.05
1909		42		CLE		AL		19		15		2.26		34		30		3		0		294.1		267		110		74		4		59		109		1.108		1.85
1910		43		CLE		AL		7		10		2.53		20		14		1		0		163.1		149		62		46		0		27		58		1.078		2.15
1911		44		TOT		MLB		7		9		3.78		18		12		2		0		126.1		137		75		53		6		28		55		1.306		1.96
1911		44		CLE		AL		3		4		3.88		7		4		0		0		46.1		54		28		20		2		13		20		1.446		1.54
1911		44		BSN		NL		4		5		3.71		11		8		2		0		80.0		83		47		33		4		15		35		1.225		2.33
22 Years								511		316		2.63		815		749		76		17		7,356.0		7,092		3,167		2,147		138		1,217		2,803		1.130		2.30
162-Game Avg.								20		12		2.63		32		30		3		1		291		280		125		85		5		48		111		1.130		2.30
CLV (9 years)								241		135		3.10		369		346		24		7		3,353.0		3,487		1,731		1,155		77		724		1,014		1.256		1.40
BOS (8 years)								192		112		2.00		297		275		38		9		2,728.1		2,347		872		606		34		299		1,341		0.970		4.48
CLE (3 years)								29		29		2.50		61		48		4		0		504.0		470		200		140		6		99		187		1.129		1.89
STL (2 years)								45		35		2.78		77		72		8		1		690.2		705		317		213		17		80		226		1.137		2.83
BSN (1 year)								4		5		3.71		11		8		2		0		80.0		83		47		33		4		15		35		1.225		2.33
NL (12 years)								290		175		3.06		457		426		34		8		4,123.2		4,275		2,095		1,401		98		819		1,275		1.235		1.56
AL (11 years)								221		141		2.08		358		323		42		9		3,232.1		2,817		1,072		746		40		398		1,528		0.995		3.84
Source: http://www.baseball-reference.com.

Young mentored and nurtured the Boston Red Sox star position player Tris Speaker. Speaker, branded “Spoke” and “The Grey Eagle” by Boston fans, desperately needed Young’s assistance because Speaker fared miserably in his early years as a professional ballplayer. A failed minor-league pitcher, he hit well enough for the Texas League’s Houston team to earn a Boston offer in 1907, yet his average for seven games was a pitiful .158. Rejected by the Red Sox and other major-league clubs, including John McGraw’s Giants, he paid his own way to Boston’s 1908 spring training in Little Rock, Arkansas. Not overwhelmed by Speaker’s prowess, the Red Sox front office sold his contract to Little Rock of the Southern League. Proceeds from the sale paid the rent for Boston’s spring training field. Boston later bought back his contract, yet he hit only .224 in 31 games in 1909. In the same year, Young helped Speaker hone his unpolished, although potentially brilliant, fielding skills. Reflecting on his rookie year, Speaker commented that Young “[u]sed to hit me flies to sharpen my abilities to judge in advance the direction and distance of an outfield ball.”20

Speaker learned the position so thoroughly that he developed into an absolutely spectacular fielder. And while he earned fame as the best fielding center fielder in his time, he also won accolades for his baserunning and hitting. In 1912, his MVP (called the Chalmers Award) World Series championship season, he hit .383, with three hit streaks of 20 or more games. As a fielder, he acquired a seemingly effortless, fluid motion. The illustrious early twentieth-century sportswriter Grantland Rice, commenting on Tris Speaker and Napoleon Lajoie, observed that they “neither wasted a motion or gave you any sign of extra effort. . . . They had the same elements that made a Bobby Jones or the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame—the smoothness of a summer wind.”21 And when the Deadball Era fan gazed out on the playing field to view the Red Sox fielders, the six-foot, 193-pound Texan—he had actually been a cowpuncher—was the most conspicuous of all players. (See table 3.3.)

Table 3.3. Tris Speaker Batting Statistics
Year		Age		Team		Lg.		G		PA		AB		R		H		HR		RBI		SB		BB		SO		BA		OBP		SLG		OPS		TB		SH
1907		19		BOS		AL		7		20		19		0		3		0		1		0		1		4		.158		.200		.158		.358		3		0
1908		20		BOS		AL		31		125		116		12		26		0		9		3		4		8		.224		.262		.276		.538		32		3
1909		21		BOS		AL		143		606		544		73		168		7		77		35		38		53		.309		.362		.443		.805		241		17
1910		22		BOS		AL		141		608		538		92		183		7		65		35		52		38		.340		.404		.468		.873		252		12
1911		23		BOS		AL		141		589		500		88		167		8		70		25		59		35		.334		.418		.502		.920		251		17
1912		24		BOS		AL		153		675		580		136		222		10		90		52		82		36		.383		.464		.567		1.031		329		7
1913		25		BOS		AL		141		608		520		94		189		3		71		46		65		22		.363		.441		.533		.974		277		16
1914		26		BOS		AL		158		668		571		101		193		4		90		42		77		25		.338		.423		.503		.926		287		13
1915		27		BOS		AL		150		652		547		108		176		0		69		29		81		14		.322		.416		.411		.827		225		17
1916		28		CLE		AL		151		646		546		102		211		2		79		35		82		20		.386		.470		.502		.972		274		15
1917		29		CLE		AL		142		614		523		90		184		2		60		30		67		14		.352		.432		.486		.918		254		15
1918		30		CLE		AL		127		553		471		73		150		0		61		27		64		9		.318		.403		.435		.839		205		11
1919		31		CLE		AL		134		591		494		83		146		2		63		19		73		12		.296		.395		.433		.828		214		20
1920		32		CLE		AL		150		674		552		137		214		8		107		10		97		13		.388		.483		.562		1.045		310		20
1921		33		CLE		AL		132		588		506		107		183		3		75		2		68		12		.362		.439		.538		.977		272		12
1922		34		CLE		AL		131		518		426		85		161		11		71		8		77		11		.378		.474		.606		1.080		258		12
1923		35		CLE		AL		150		695		574		133		218		17		130		8		93		15		.380		.469		.610		1.079		350		22
1924		36		CLE		AL		135		575		486		94		167		9		65		5		72		13		.344		.432		.510		.943		248		13
1925		37		CLE		AL		117		518		429		79		167		12		87		5		70		12		.389		.479		.578		1.057		248		15
1926		38		CLE		AL		150		661		539		96		164		7		88		6		94		15		.304		.408		.469		.877		253		28
1927		39		WSH		AL		141		596		523		71		171		2		73		9		55		8		.327		.395		.444		.839		232		15
1928		40		PHA		AL		64		212		191		28		51		3		30		5		10		5		.267		.310		.450		.761		86		9
22 Years								2,789		11,992		10,195		1,882		3,514		117		1,531		436		1,381		394		.345		.428		.500		.928		5,101		309
162-Game Avg.								162		697		592		109		204		7		89		25		80		23		.345		.428		.500		.928		296		18
CLE (11 years)								1,519		6,633		5,546		1,079		1,965		73		886		155		857		146		.354		.444		.520		.965		2,886		183
BOS (9 years)								1,065		4,551		3,935		704		1,327		39		542		267		459		235		.337		.414		.482		.896		1,897		102
WSH (1 year)								141		596		523		71		171		2		73		9		55		8		.327		.395		.444		.839		232		15
PHA (1 year)								64		212		191		28		51		3		30		5		10		5		.267		.310		.450		.761		86		9
Source: http://www.baseball-reference.com.

Speaker played, by most baseball standards, out of position. Moving in from center field, he looked like a fifth infielder. He could catch anything and led the American League in putouts, and from his special position in short center field, he would rob batters of singles, throw out base runners attempting to stretch a hit, and, most unusually, perform unassisted double plays. He would snare a low line drive and then step on the bag just in front of a hapless base runner. Pitchers appreciated his talents. As teammate “Smoky Joe” Wood once noted, “At the crack of the bat he’d be off with his back to the infield, and then he’d turn and glance over his shoulder at the last minute and catch the ball so easy it looked like there was nothing to it, nothing at all.”22

Wood and Speaker, teammates and the best of friends, brought fame to Boston in the 1912 season: Speaker for his MVP season and Wood for a remarkable season that included an unparalleled 16 straight wins. Wood won 57 games between 1911 and 1912. The son of a University of Pennsylvania lawyer, Wood later served as the school’s varsity baseball coach for 15 years. (See table 3.4.)

Table 3.4. “Smoky Joe” Wood Pitching Statistics
Year		Age		Team		Lg.		W		L		ERA		GS		CG		SHO		SV		IP		H		R		ER		HR		BB		SO		WHIP		SO/BB
1908		18		BOS		AL		1		1		2.38		2		1		1		0		22.2		14		12		6		0		16		11		1.324		0.69
1909		19		BOS		AL		11		7		2.18		19		13		4		0		160.2		121		51		39		1		43		88		1.021		2.05
1910		20		BOS		AL		12		13		1.69		17		14		3		0		196.2		155		81		37		3		56		145		1.073		2.59
1911		21		BOS		AL		23		17		2.02		33		25		5		3		275.2		226		113		62		2		76		231		1.096		3.04
1912		22		BOS		AL		34		5		1.91		38		35		10		1		344.0		267		104		73		2		82		258		1.015		3.15
1913		23		BOS		AL		11		5		2.29		18		12		1		2		145.2		120		54		37		0		61		123		1.243		2.02
1914		24		BOS		AL		10		3		2.62		14		11		1		0		113.1		94		38		33		1		34		67		1.129		1.97
1915		25		BOS		AL		15		5		1.49		16		10		3		2		157.1		120		32		26		1		44		63		1.042		1.43
1917		27		CLE		AL		0		1		3.45		1		0		0		1		15.2		17		7		6		0		7		2		1.532		0.29
1919		29		CLE		AL		0		0		0.00		0		0		0		1		0.2		0		0		0		0		0		0		0.000		0.00
1920		30		CLE		AL		0		0		22.50		0		0		0		0		2.0		4		5		5		0		2		1		3.000		0.50
11 Years								117		57		2.03		158		121		28		10		1,434.1		1,138		497		324		10		421		989		1.087		2.35
162-Game Avg.								21		10		2.03		28		21		5		2		255		202		88		58		2		75		176		1.087		2.35
BOS (8 years)								117		56		1.99		157		121		28		8		1,416.0		1,117		485		313		10		412		986		1.080		2.39
CLE (3 years)								0		1		5.40		1		0		0		2		18.1		21		12		11		0		9		3		1.636		0.33
Source: http://www.baseball-reference.com.

As a player, Smoky Joe roughhoused and cursed his way to notoriety. Tussling with Speaker at a hotel in the spring of 1909, he injured his foot so severely that he could not pitch until June. Few players escaped Wood’s vitriol. As respected journalist Hugh Fullerton noted, “He talked out of the corner of his mouth and used language that would have made a steeple horse jockey blush. He challenged all opponents and dilated upon their pedigrees.”23 He could scorch rival teams with both his language and his fastball. The great fastball pitcher Walter Johnson of the Senators once quipped, “Can I throw harder than Joe Wood? Listen, mister, no man alive can throw harder than Joe Wood.”24 On September 6, 1912, Johnson faced off against Wood in one of baseball’s legendary games. Wood, who had won 13 consecutive games and who was closing in on Johnson’s record of 16, defeated the great Washington pitcher, 1–0, in front of 35,000 riotous fans in Fenway Park.25

Fenway

In 1912, the world champion Red Sox played ball in a brand new, state-of-the-art stadium, Fenway Park. A year earlier, Boston owner General Charles Taylor had bought the Red Sox for his son, team president John I. Taylor. John had rechristened the old Boston Pilgrims the “Boston Red Sox,” and with the lease for the old Huntington Avenue field about to expire, sought to build a new ballpark. The Taylors, astute players in the Boston real estate market, saw potential in the undervalued lands in the neighborhood, a former swamp at Landsdowne and Ipswich, an eight-acre property called the Dana Lands. The Taylors had witnessed the old, hazardous, wooden stadiums with insufficient seating. The Braves’ old park, South End Grounds II, an arresting, double-deck park with medieval-style turrets, had burned to the ground in 1894. The Taylors also recognized that the newest concrete and steel stadiums, namely Shibe Park in Philadelphia and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, were safe venues that could hold thousands of fans. Builders started construction just as the 1911 Red Sox season came to a close and assembled the new ballpark before the spring of 1912. The Taylors built an architectural Mona Lisa, a singular ballpark.26

Fenway, renovated and altered dramatically since its opening, sparkled with its “ unique dimensions and properties,” as Roger Angell describes in his Once More around the Park, troubling fielders and entertaining fans with “variously angled blocks and planes and nooks and corners of the outfield fences.”27 With its brick and concrete grandstand, and dimensions of 320 feet in left, 488 feet in center, and less than 314 feet in right, and with its green landscape, the ballpark graciously invited the modern, Progressive Era baseball fan.28

The Red Sox team, inhabitants of a remarkable concrete and steel park, heirs to the legacy of superstar pitcher Cy Young, and possessors of two celebrity players in Smoky Joe Wood and Tris Speaker, contrasted strikingly with the lowly Braves. The Braves, who occupied a cramped, run-down, old, wooden stadium, could not boast of past superstars. They had acquired a celebrity ballplayer in Johnny Evers, but even with Evers anchoring the infield and directing teammates across the diamond, the Braves hovered in last place at mid-season. The Red Sox organization advanced toward the baseball summit, and as one baseball historian notes, “they were on their way to creating the American League’s first brief dynasty—winning the World Series four times in seven-year span, from 1912 to 1918.”29 Boston’s ever-singing, sometimes marching, and always-boisterous fan club, the Royal Rooters, originally enthusiasts for the Braves, now cheered on the Red Sox.

Babe Ruth

The Red Sox empire contrasted sharply with the lowly Braves community, and, in July 1914, just as the Braves season reached its nadir, the Red Sox acquired from the minor league Baltimore Orioles a fascinating young pitching talent, Babe Ruth. Ruth’s early life reads like the text of a Charles Dickens novel. Roaming the alleys and wharves of Baltimore harbor, the roguish, thieving, tobacco-chewing seven-year-old received from a judge the label “incorrigible.”

Placed in St. Mary’s Industrial Home, Ruth met Brother Mathias, his lifelong mentor, baseball instructor, and surrogate father. Ruth later reflected on Mathias, saying, “He was the father I needed and the greatest man I’ve ever known.”30 Mathias played Ruth in the infield (as a left-handed third baseman), in the outfield, and as pitcher, and he then allowed him to play for a semipro team on weekends. After witnessing Ruth strike out 22 batters in a St. Mary’s game, Jack Dunn, owner of the Orioles, signed him to a contract in the spring of 1914. Ruth excelled, pitching well against the Braves, and even defeating the Philadelphia A’s, the year’s previous World Series champions, in a complete game. Dunn, needing cash for his financially strapped Orioles, received a generous offer from Red Sox latest owner Joseph Lannin and sold him to the Red Sox.31

In July 1914, only 19 years old and only five months out of St. Mary’s, Ruth, definitely a “Babe,” was called on to uphold the Boston Red Sox tradition. He was a July call-up whose talent might take the team to a pennant. His first outing was a categorical success, a “quality start” by modern standards: a seven-inning, 4–3 victory against Cleveland. Holding the Cleveland Naps to five hits in six innings, he allowed three runs during a tough seventh inning. On July 12, the Boston Globe applauded his first game: “Ruth leads Red Sox to victory: Southpaw displays high class in game against Cleveland.” Fans scrutinized “Ruth, the giant left-hander, who proved a natural ballplayer and went through his act like a veteran of many wars. He has a natural delivery, fine control, and a curve ball that bothers batsmen, but has room for improvement and will undoubtedly become a fine pitcher.”32

Boston fans cheered on their Red Sox as pennant contenders as the team moved into third place, one game behind the Tigers, on July 17.33 The Red Sox played so proficiently that the team could afford to send Ruth down to the minor leagues. Bill Carrigan, the manager of the Red Sox , pitched Ruth for only 10 innings in six weeks, and when the Providence Grays, a minor-league team owned by Joseph Lannin, needed a pitcher for the International League pennant race, he transferred Ruth to the minors.34

The Braves’ Trace of Optimism

While the proud Red Sox, content in their gleaming new stadium, battled for the pennant, the Braves could look from their lowly station with a trace of optimism because of recently acquired talent. On June 28, Stallings traded Hub Perdue to the Cardinals for George “Possum” Whitted and Ted Cather. These new acquisitions, although journeymen by most baseball standards, brought hope to the struggling franchise. In spring training, Perdue’s star had shone brilliantly, and the young pitcher was one of the main reasons for Boston’s early cheery outlook. In 1913, he earned a 16–13 record, with a 3.26 ERA, yet, up until late June 1914, he had floundered with a 2–5 record and 5.82 ERA.35

The five-foot, eight-inch Whitted, who played outfield and third base, offered the team much more passion than talent: He had played only 20 games for St. Louis, batting .129, with just 31 at bats. Whitted, who, in 1918, wrote a Baseball Magazine article, “Making Good in the Majors: How a Ball Player May Improve Himself by Hard Work and Perseverance,” mastered the outfield by chasing “miles and miles” of fly balls and improved his batsmanship by grasping the nuances of hitting the curve. Under the tutelage of Stallings and Evers, he pushed his average up to .261.36 Ted Cather, another right-handed-hitting outfielder, had hit .273 in 39 games for the Cardinals. Cather found reassurance in his new environment and hit a career best .297 in 50 games for the Braves (in a year when the league average was .251).37

On July 2, Stallings traded backup shortstop Jack Martin to the Philadelphia Phillies for Josh Devore, a five-foot, six-inch left-handed-hitting outfielder, only one inch taller than Rabbit Maranville. “The Seelyville Speed Demon” had stolen 61 bases as a leadoff hitter for the pennant-winning 1911 Giants. Traded from New York to Cincinnati to Philadelphia in 1913, and although showing limited duty as a Phillie in 1914, he had hit .302 before the trade.38 Always optimistic, the Braves management saw the new acquisitions as a chance for improvement.

And hopes rose higher because of the hitting success of two other outfielders: Larry Gilbert and Joe (Joey) Connolly. Gilbert, a rookie out of Milwaukee in the American Association, had batted .282 as a minor leaguer. Until July 3, 1914, he had been batting .293. Connolly, the left-handed power hitter, was surpassing his 1913 effort, when, despite a season-ending broken ankle, he had led the Braves in runs and RBIs. Well into the 1914 season, after 50 games, he was batting .301. Perhaps because of Connolly and Gilbert, or perhaps because of the new acquisitions, the Boston media displayed glimmers of optimism. And even with the Braves 16 games out, the Boston Globe praised the Braves’ outfield, hoping that the team might at least crawl out of the cellar.39

After the July 7 debacle with Buffalo, the Braves won eight of 11, at one point sweeping a three-game series with the Cincinnati Reds. On July 19, the third game of the series, the Braves were down by two in the ninth, but they scored three runs to win. This victory pulled the team out of the basement, as they passed seventh-place Pittsburgh in the standings. The cap-tossing, shouting players celebrated like World Series champions. “They cheered like college boys. They almost smothered Stallings.” Stallings, in turn, encouraged his players: “Now we’ll catch New York. We’re playing 30 percent better than anyone in the league. They won’t be able to stop us.”40

After the Braves swept Cincinnati, Stallings witnessed an astonishing resurgence among his pitchers. In the third week of July, and then starting again at the end of the month, the Braves scorched National League teams with two six-game win streaks, when pitchers held the opposition to an average of less than one run per game. In a five-game series against the Pirates, they threw four shutouts. Up until mid-July, Braves pitchers had thrown two shutouts. Starting on July 17, they held opponents scoreless 17 times: The pitching was nothing less than miraculous.41

Miraculous Spitballs

The Braves owe their incredible winning streak to pitchers successfully throwing the Deadball Era’s trademark pitch: the spitball. During the Deadball Era, pitchers fired a filthy, scuffed, and irregularly shaped baseball, a baseball that might endure an entire game. Sam Crawford of the Tigers recalled, “We’d play a whole game with one ball, if it stayed in the park. Lopsided, and black, and full of tobacco juice and licorice stains.”42 If a pitcher added moisture to this slightly softened, mud-colored ball, the ball would sail toward the plate, darting down at the last moment, much like a split-finger fastball in the modern era, and the puzzled batter might sock a single or double, but rarely a home run. Home runs would flourish in the 1920s, once the umpires began to replenish the ball supply on a regular basis, and once the spitball was outlawed.43

The spitball offered the most confounding pitch to batters of the Deadball Era. The origins of the spitball are as mystifying as the pitch itself. Who, after all, would want to take credit for the spitball? But records suggest that spitball pitchers as far back as the 1860s were deceiving batters. A player for the Brooklyn Eckfords observed Baltimore’s Bobby Matthews, who pitched in 1868. Matthews would massage the ball and leave a portion of the ball untouched. After dampening the untouched part, he would hurl the ball toward the plate, and “[t]he ball not only would take a decided outcurve at times, but other times would drop and curve.”44 By 1910, pitchers were abusing the ball in new and creative ways, each outdoing the other. In the words of baseball analyst Rob Neyer, “They slathered every manner of slippery substance on the ball, and also competed with each other to come up with new ways of scuffling and discoloring it.”45 Spitball masters the likes of Ed Walsh of the Cubs would raise their gloves in front of their faces on every pitch so that the batter could not detect whether the ball had been moistened. Walsh, using a fastball motion, threw the pitch so that it went “down and away, straight down, and down and in.”46 Cleveland’s Stanley Coveleski could throw the spitter “down, out, or down and out,” with great control. His ploy was to go to the ball with his mouth on every pitch, faking it when necessary. “But I’d always have them looking for it.”47

Dick Rudolph of the Braves followed the same general approach. Rudolph generally threw four pitches: fastball, curve, and slow ball or change, adding the spitball to his repertoire just to keep the batter guessing.48 “I used the spit more as a blind, but the batter can never tell when I’m bluffing and when I am actually going to cut loose with a spit ball,” said Rudolph. Judged to be a “wise pitcher,” Rudolph knew that his pitch had not reached the quality of a Coveleski spitball: “The best you could say for it was that it was wet,” observed his catcher, Hank Gowdy.49 F. C. Lane, born in 1885, and later editor of Baseball Magazine in 1912, gained fame as one of baseball’s first sabermetricians. An exemplar of progressive, scientific baseball, he understood how Rudolph upset the timing of a batter: “What Rudolph does do, however,” Lane wrote in a 1919 installment of Baseball Magazine, “is to bluff at throwing the spitter, and this is just as bad as actually using the twister, as far as batting is concerned.”50

Rudolph showed pinpoint control with his other pitches, including a deceptive, sweeping curveball. He achieved mastery in part because, as Braves coach Fred Mitchell pointed out, “He could almost read a batter’s mind.” Mitchell would sit with Rudolph on the bench as the short, slight pitcher accurately predicted a batter’s next move.51 Rudolph could unexpectedly toss a changeup (or, as he called it, the “slow ball”), surprising the batter, the catcher, and even himself:

Half the time, when I wind up, I don’t know myself that I am going to throw a slow ball. Oftentimes the catcher will signal for a fastball. I will intend to give him a fastball. But the batter will shift his feet or change his position, or give some indication at the last minute, that it would be a good stunt to feed him a slow ball. And so I will give him one.52

Now, in the summer of 1914, Rudolph’s “study of the profession” yielded success: He won 12 games in a row.53

Teammate Lefty Tyler also baffled batters in the late summer of 1914. Tyler, according to sportswriter Tom Meany, was “untouchable, when he had to be, which was most of the time.” Somehow Tyler managed to win 1–0 games—10 in his career—tossing his slow ball or changeup, fastball, and curveball from the cross-fire delivery. Tyler would move over to the left side of the rubber, swing his foot toward first instead of toward the plate, and then throw sidearm. This unconventional pitching motion (now an outlawed practice) afforded him an extra moment to hide the ball. Batters often suffer when they face left-handed pitchers, and they experienced absolute agony when facing Tyler. In 1914, he earned a 16–13 record, with a 2.69 ERA, and at one point, he helped the team battle to the top with 23 consecutive scoreless innings.54

Bill James, the Braves’ six-foot, three-inch righty, began his ascent to pitching stardom in July 1914. Like Tyler, he threw a slow ball, or changeup, and, like Rudolph, he tossed the spitter, two pitches he acquired while pitching in 1912 for Seattle in the Northwestern League. By 1914, “Seattle Bill” had emerged as an unhittable spitball master. Beginning on July 9, the 22-year-old reeled off a spectacular record—19–1, with a 1.51 ERA. If James had not lost a 12-inning game, 3–2, in Pittsburgh, on August 22, he would have secured 20 straight victories, a major-league record. Although posting a 7–6 record up until July 9, James put together a second half so remarkable that he finished 26–7. He earned the league’s best winning percentage, at .788, and his innings pitched, with 322, his strikeouts, with 156, and his ERA placed him in the league’s top five. John J. Ward, of Baseball Magazine, lauded his skills: “[T]he further acquisition of experience should make him one of the best all-around pitchers in history.”55

A Rabbit at Shortstop

In July, the Braves surged upward, largely because of their pitching, but also because of their young, agile shortstop the impish, energetic, bold, eccentric, and always talented Walter “Rabbit” Maranville. Even if fans thought that the Braves’ pitchers would falter, even if fans cast doubt on George Stallings’s highly optimistic predictions, they were certain of the never-say-die attitude of their shortstop, Rabbit Maranville.56 While some baseball writers have claimed that he received his moniker because of his long, pointy ears, Maranville, according to his own account, earned the nickname Rabbit from an exuberant seven-year-old, who, after seeing him in a minor-league game, giggled, “You hop and bound like one.” Maranville approved of the label because there was a more disparaging alternative: “They’d been calling me Stumpy until then.”57

Rabbit played baseball with the exuberance of a young child, snaring the ball with acrobatic fielding, and teasing coaches, players, fans, and even umpires with entertaining belt-high basket catches. Willie Mays transformed the basket catch into a national phenomenon in the 1950s, but Maranville popularized the feat in 1914. Rabbit would extend his unwebbed, “pancake” baseball glove and snag routine fly balls at the last second, just after the ball grazed his uniform. He turned his catches into a fan favorite, earning the label “vest-pocket catch” for what even he labeled “peculiar.”58 Not all players appreciated the entertainment value, but Cubs left fielder Jimmie Sheckard recognized the underlying skill beneath the vest-pocket snare: “I’ll bet you he don’t drop three fly balls in his career, no matter how long or short he may be in the game.” Sheckard then explained, “Notice the Kid is perfectly still, directly under the ball, and in no way is there any vibration to make the ball bounce out of his glove.”59 A trick play for some grew into Maranville’s standard practice.

At five feet, five inches tall and 155 pounds (he claimed that he was 126 pounds in 1912, his rookie season), Rabbit was an undersized player, who, next to Braves first baseman Butch Schmidt, who stood at six feet, one inch tall and weighed in at 200 pounds, appeared to be the size of a child. When he first arrived at training, the Braves trainers, perhaps as part of a hazing ritual, gave him the uniform of a player equal in size to Schmidt, “Big Ed” Donnelly. Without complaining, Maranville received Big Ed’s uniform, which took more than a few rolls of the pants so that he could make himself “presentable.”60 For one moment in his career, Rabbit Maranville appeared less than confident. Even though Rabbit was diminutive by 1914 baseball standards, manager George Stallings saw his value:

He came into the league under a handicap—his build. He was too small to be a big leaguer in the opinion of critics. I told him he was just what I wanted: a small fellow for short. All he had to do was to run to his left or right, or come in, and size never handicapped speed in going after the ball.61

Rabbit Being Rabbit

In 1914, few fans, players, or journalists expected that Maranville would ever receive an honor as one of baseball’s best, namely enshrinement as a Hall of Famer. Maranville earned as much fame for his level of play as for his lighthearted pranking. He mimicked other players and played invisible pepper, a pregame drill where a batter rapidly hits the ball to nearby infielders. He achieved great notoriety when he handed out a spare set of eyeglasses to apparently nearsighted umpires. Baseball historian Harold Seymour recalled seeing Maranville at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Seymour, the batboy, appreciated Maranville’s novel way of arguing a low-ball strike: “[D]ropping to his knees and making a few practice swipes with his bat.” Seymour also witnessed one of Maranville’s mischievous attacks on the umpires. As a teammate was arguing with an umpire, Maranville, crawling on all fours behind the official, and then grinning, playfully encouraged his fellow player to gently shove the ump head over heels. He was known to crawl through an umpire’s legs and occasionally sit down on base runners as they slid into second.62 While on a summer road trip, he brought with him the strangest of companions, a pet monkey, whom his teammates claimed looked more attractive than Rabbit. Taking a shortcut, he once swam the Charles River, and he was well known for a stunt in which he “dove fully clothed into the fountain outside of the club’s St. Louis hotel and emerged soaking wet with a goldfish clenched between his grinning teeth.”63

Probably because he so often sought amusement and pleasure, Maranville, too, fell victim to pranksters . During the 1914 pennant race, he suffered at the hands of Germany Schaefer, who, like Maranville, had achieved a reputation as a high-spirited, fun-loving showman. Once, as a rain shower hit the ballpark, Schaefer showed up at the plate wearing a raincoat and rubber boots. A second baseman for the Detroit Tigers, Schaefer gained celebrity status in 1905, when he stepped to the plate in the ninth inning with two out, the Tigers down by one, and the game-winning run on first. Schaefer boldly proclaimed that he would belt a homer into the left-field bleachers. After he smashed the game winner as predicted, he slid into each base, shouting to the crowd as if he were in a horse race: “Schaefer leads at the half.” He slid dramatically into home, jumped up, removed his cap, and announced to the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes this afternoon’s performance. I thank you for your kind attention.”64

As the pennant race intensified, and as Boston edged up to New York, the Giants’ manager, John McGraw, a friend of Schaefer, apparently encouraged Schaefer to prank Maranville. Schaefer sought out Maranville when the Braves, just a half game behind the Giants, were playing an away game in Philadelphia. Schaefer wined and dined Maranville, introduced him to an engaging lady friend, and he sent them out partying for the night. When Maranville arrived back at the hotel around 10 the next morning, his roommate revealed the truth: “You big sucker, that’s one of McGraw’s pet tricks, and to think that you fell for that Germany Schaefer and girl act. Get to bed; you have been framed very nicely.” Maranville went to the ballpark late that day and “half asleep.” Although the exhausted Maranville made three errors, and even though he was blurry eyed, he managed three hits and four RBIs in an 8–3 victory.65

Feistiness

But as one player noted, despite his antics, Maranville “was a likable SOB.” Players and coaches valued the infielder, in part of because of his sense of humor, often self-deprecatory. He brought a fresh perspective to his diminutive size by saying “that he was just right, that everyone else was tall.”66 During spring training in 1913, he was absolutely single minded en route to his winning the starting position for shortstop over Art Bues, Stallings’s nephew. “Listen,” asserted Maranville, “I think I can beat out your nephew. What I want to know is how many cousins and uncles do you have behind him?” Stallings could only laugh at Maranville’s use of humor in the diplomatic maneuvering that was part of player selection. The Braves’ manager appreciated Maranville’s feistiness, and Maranville won and kept the job.67

Maranville’s ceaseless mischief highlights his 24-year baseball career. Baseball fans know of his pranks because in 1953, a year before his death, Rabbit penned an autobiographical account filled with colorful tales. Within the collective memory of baseball fans, these lively anecdotes, many of which were promoted by Rabbit himself, have superseded his talents. Maranville’s baseball skills, moreover, were unusual for a Hall of Famer. His .258 lifetime batting average, for instance, remains one of the lowest for any position player in the Hall of Fame, but, in 1914, Stallings often placed the lean shortstop in the cleanup spot, and the MVP runner-up (to Evers) knocked in 78 runs, leading the team. During his career, he hit an astonishing 21 of his 28 home runs inside the park, along with 177 triples, 19th in baseball history.68 His defense at shortstop was not just thrilling, but efficient. In his lengthy career, he led the league in putouts six times and double plays five times.69 The Baseball Page ranks him as the 22nd best shortstop in baseball history, ahead of Luis Aparicio and Phil Rizzuto,70 and in the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James ranks him 10th in “career value” amongst shortstops.71 Maranville biographer Bob Carroll contends that Boston’s Evers–Maranville second-to-short duo surpassed Chicago’s Evers-to-Tinker (-to-Chance) combination. “Maranville is the greatest player to enter baseball since Ty Cobb arrived,” Braves manager Stallings once said.72

Stallings could tend toward the hyperbolic. No one can compare to Ty Cobb. Cobb, after all, batted over .300 for 23 years, with a lifetime average of .367. Yet, Maranville experienced a long, successful baseball career, and working with his keystone partner Johnny Evers, he spurred the Braves on throughout July 1914.

Like many career ballplayers of the time, Maranville found his roots in the immigrant working class in the United States. The son of an Irish mother and French father who worked as a policeman, Maranville apprenticed to be a pipe fitter but found baseball as a means of moving up the economic ladder.73 Historian Steven A. Riess places Maranville and teammate Johnny Evers into a broader pattern, writing, “Baseball was probably more valuable as a source of vertical social mobility for the Irish than for any other ethnic group.”74 Grantland Rice thought of Rabbit at that point in his career, his early years in Boston, as the “link between the old days and the new in baseball”:

He broke in with the hard-bitten crew in Boston and wasn’t exactly a sissy, reveling in the atmosphere in which he found himself. For years he was a turbulent figure on the field, fighting enemy ballplayers and umpires—and even the players on his own team—when he found it necessary.75

It was this great, immeasurable, combative mind-set of Deadball Era players that gave Maranville his special quality.

The July 7 loss to minor league Buffalo traumatized Maranville and the Braves. After losing to the Buffalo International League team, 10–2, the Braves boarded the train for Chicago, where Stallings glared at players, formed his best Theodore Roosevelt machismo posture, and roared, “Baa! You couldn’t even beat a bunch of females,” and slammed the door to his stateroom.76 Maranville, angered yet inspired, jabbed at Evers. “Can you play better ball than you have been playing?” When Evers responded, “I think I can,” the two infielders joined together to cross-examine everyone on the team, pushing them to play harder. Driven by these tough, wiry infielders, the Rabbit and “The Crab,” the Braves, from July 8 until July 11, won three out of four in Chicago. Just before their next series against the Cardinals, the St. Louis newspapers announced, “Cardinals Will Be in First Place When Lowly Braves Leave Town.” But the Braves took two out of three from St. Louis, four out of five from Pittsburgh, and then 16 out of the next 19. “From misfits we became the talk of the baseball world,” wrote Rabbit.77

Ascending Slowly

Turning points in a baseball season are difficult to determine. Hundreds of variables influence a season; momentum slows, speeds, and shifts as each batter approaches the plate. Historians, like baseball fans, mistakenly dream up crucial moments, events that are not understood by the participants themselves as pivotal (U.S. citizens, north and south, did not see Gettysburg as crucial in 1863). Yet, in this case, players like Maranville judged the Braves’ defeat at the hands of the minor-league team in Buffalo as a decisive moment during the Braves’ 1914 season, and just after the Buffalo debacle, the team’s level of play rose sharply.

However, most baseball observers at the time believed that the Braves had displayed only incremental improvement, and that the two perennial powers of the National League, the Cubs and the Giants, would battle for the pennant. By July 13, John McGraw, writing in his biweekly evaluation of the National League, sensed that the pennant race was at a turning point: he saw the Cubs steadily gaining on the Giants: “It is disheartening to watch a rival slowly creep up.” On July 13, the Cubs, who had just split a two-game series with the Giants, were six games over .500, just three and a half games behind the Giants. McGraw judged lowly Boston as “improving . . . finally beginning to hit.” Better hitting, he observed, “is what Stallings has been crying for all year.” And while Boston might battle from game to game, at best they would crawl out of the cellar: “I don’t think Boston will come home in last place.”78

The Braves defied all baseball pundits, and by the third week in July, they had moved up in the standings, past both Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. “Coming into their own again . . . With sterling stuff,” the Boston Globe reported. The Braves, on July 20, put together a formula for their new winning: Stallings’s craftiness, stellar pitching, and Evers’s resolve. Tyler, the Braves’ left-handed pitcher, four-hit the Pirates for a 1–0 victory. Even the great Honus Wagner, the eight-time National League batting champion, failed to get a hit. Stallings had slyly manipulated the rules of the Deadball Era to his advantage. Announcing the lineup, even the pitcher, at the last second, Stallings penned left-handers Josh Devore and Joe Connolly into the starting lineup, but as soon as he saw Pirates’ left-handed pitcher, Wilbur Cooper, emerge from behind the grandstand, he recalled his list and substituted Oscar Dugey and Ted Cather, two right-handed-hitting outfielders. Dugey managed two of the Braves’ six hits.79 Stallings’s stealth lineup helped bring a victory.

During the game against the Pirates, Evers performed in his usual tempestuous manner and engaged in a “debate” with umpire Bill Hart. Evers asserted that Pirates first baseman Ed Konetchy had run 10 feet off the base path, and Hart claimed that he had not seen the apparent blunder. Evers retorted tartly, “but that’s what you are in the game for, to see everything.”80 Evers, temperamental throughout July, was “banished” on July 8, during a Cubs game, for arguing a call against Maranville. He channeled his rage into brilliance on the ball field, and during an eight-game span, until July 18, while the Braves journeyed on a “western” road trip, he fielded 98 out of 100 chances, while hitting .402.81 Maranville recalled his play with Evers throughout this time as a “charm.” Any batter who hit toward the middle of the infield sent the ball into “Death Valley.”82 Fans worshiped Evers’s “fighting spirit,” identifying with his “continuous arguments against umpires as to rules.” They judged his double-play partner, Rabbit Maranville, as equally determined. Deadball Era fans were enthusiastic. They flung hundreds of seat cushions onto the field to show their approval, tossed hundreds of cigars onto the field to celebrate a home run, and stridently chanted in unison a call that countered the umpire’s call.83 The fans, often labeled “cranks” or “bugs,” cheered for “The Crab” and “Rabbit” at every opportunity.

Ascending Sharply

Before they left on July 7 for the trip “west”—in 1914, Chicago and Cincinnati were in the western realm of professional baseball—the Braves were 28–40, with a winning percentage of .412 (the same as the year before). During the road trip, they won 12 of 16 games; observers witnessed the Braves playing a new, successful brand of baseball. Boston Globe sportswriter Melville Webb broke down the western trip, analyzing the batting data from every angle. In 1914, he viewed baseball through numbers, carefully observing fielding averages and batting averages for every series. Batters managed to hit just .247 during the trip, and they batted just .181 in a sweep of the Pirates. Yet, despite meager batting averages, the Braves played successful “small ball,” stealing 24 bases and, most impressive, hitting 26 sacrifices. More than anything else, it was pitching prowess that produced victory. On the trip west, their pitchers managed to shut Pittsburgh out four times in five games. Rudolph and James pitched one shutout each, and Tyler pitched shutouts in both the first and last games of the series.84

In the last three weeks of July, as the Braves captured series from Chicago, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, they moved up to another level of baseball esteem, rising from fifth place to fourth place in the standings and reaching the “first division.” Each league, American and National, included eight teams, only the best of which was eligible for the World Series. But the top four teams of each league earned the distinction of being in the first division, an honor in the Deadball Era baseball world. Braves manager George Stallings often mentioned this achievement, and Boston Globe reporters expressed a healthy respect for first-division teams. And on July 21, when the Braves passed St. Louis to move into the first division, the Boston press celebrated. The Braves won in a typical fashion: unhittable pitching and a heavy dose of Maranville: “The Braves’ Dick Rudolph mastered the Pirates lineup, shutting them out, 6–0,” the Globe reported, “Maranville was all over the infield, and nothing got past him. He outshone his distinguished rival Hans [Honus] Wagner.”85 On July 24, Globe cartoonist Wallace Goldsmith drew a picture of a headdress-wearing Indian, knife between the teeth, scalp clenched in hand. He is bursting through a giant map of the west, soaring over raucous Boston fans, and shouting out, “Ugh! Bust um heap wide open! Cheering Boston fans proclaim, ‘You’re in First Division, Kid!’”86 The Braves, at .500 by August 1, finished a stunning 18–10 in July.87 (See table 3.5.)

Table 3.5. National League Standings at the Close of Play, August 1, 1914
Team		Games		Wins		Losses		Ties		Winning Percentage		Games Behind		Runs Scored		Runs Allowed
New York Giants		88		52		36		0		0.591		—		404		340
Chicago Cubs		96		52		42		2		0.553		3.0		421		406
St. Louis Cardinals		98		51		45		2		0.531		5.0		375		367
Boston Braves		91		45		45		1		0.500		8.0		337		350
Cincinnati Reds		94		45		48		1		0.484		9.5		360		370
Philadelphia Phillies		91		42		49		0		0.462		11.5		402		424
Brooklyn Robins		88		39		49		0		0.443		13.0		362		369
Pittsburgh Pirates		92		39		51		2		0.433		14.0		283		318
Source: http://www.retrosheet.org.

Recklessness

In the midst of the pennant race, during the first week of August, Maranville and some of the Braves players broke all the training rules, consuming alcohol and almost inadvertently harming the team. Hank Gowdy, invited by a wine importer to dinner at his home in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, brought along a host of Braves, including Bert Whaling, Gene Cocreham, Butch Schmidt, Bill James, Josh Devore, and Rabbit Maranville.88 The players, who were originally looking forward to a delicious spread and amusing baseball banter, shifted their intentions after Gowdy proposed to homeowner Harry Levine, “Harry, let’s have a drink.” Maranville, aware of his tendency to overimbibe, had limited himself to beer, despite offerings of scotch, bourbon, wine, and champagne, but when Gowdy called him out as a sissy and claimed that “champagne was the best drink of them all,” Maranville acquired a taste for the beverage: “The first two glasses didn’t taste so good. The next ones did, but I forgot to count. I remember shooting out imaginary lights on the way home.”89 At the time, home was a boardinghouse near the ballpark on Massachusetts Avenue that came with rent of seven dollars per week.90 The possibility of turning the season around, and perhaps achieving a pennant, faded when teammates called him out to drink, challenging his manhood. Maranville was part of a culture that demonstrated masculinity, not just through athletic prowess, but also via alcohol consumption.91

Maranville awoke the next morning in misery, suffering from dehydration. “My mouth was as dry as if I had just come across the Sahara desert. I got started on that water and must have drunk a gallon when stars started shooting out of my head and my head was going around like a dynamo.”92 Next he contemplated whether he could even play the next day, as he queried his drinking buddy, Butch Schmidt, “Do you think we can make it?”93 The two knew that they “got to make it.” They went out to the ballpark, tried to “sweat this stuff out of us” and then disguised their hangover from Stallings: “We ate some [corned] beef for dinner and it made us most sick.”94 Stallings, shrewd enough to understand reality, offered medical advice: a bath and a couple hours of sleep before the game. Gowdy and the other scotch- and champagne-drinking players had advised Maranville not to drink water—some kind of Progressive Era urban legend to cure hangovers.95

By the time the game started, Maranville was suffering from the ills of dehydration: “I was so thirsty that I was spitting cotton, or so it felt that way to me.”96 He was disoriented, but his innate baseball skills broke through. In the 10th inning, with the Braves up to bat, Maranville’s thirst so overwhelmed him that he was swallowing water from a canister when he was supposed to be batting.

When teammates screamed that he was supposed to be at the plate, he yelled, “Up where?”

“Go up there and hit one, Rabbit,” urged outfielder Joe Connolly, as he handed Maranville an oversized bat.

“Hit who? I’ll fight anyone here,” Rabbit answered.

Directed to the plate, Maranville received a query from the umpire, who asked, “Where have you been?”

Rabbit, hungover, confused, and impertinent, responded, “None of your business; all you have to do is umpire.”

The umpire, patient as ever, said, “Don’t get too close to the plate, Rabbit; you are liable to get hurt.”

“Tell that pitcher out there to throw the ball,” Maranville responded.

“Strike one,” said the umpire.

Rabbit retorted, “What do you mean strike; he never threw the ball.”

“Yes he did,” said the umpire.

“He won’t throw any more by me,” Rabbit declared.

The pitcher started his windup, and Rabbit started to swing at his motion. When bat and ball met, the ball sailed over the left-field fence. Rabbit was still standing at home plate when Gowdy rushed up and said, “Run Rabbit; you made a home run, and the game is over.”

Rabbit, still bewildered, muttered, “Run from whom?” Gowdy pushed him toward first, and he stumbled around the diamond, proud that he managed to touch each base.

Rabbit later claimed, “I never did see the ball I hit.” The pitcher, Babe Adams, also later lamented, “I know darn well you never did.” He had seen Maranville’s talents at work in earlier innings, when he hit two singles and stole two bases.97

Maranville’s personal recklessness influenced in his baseball life in numerous ways. And during the 1914 pennant chase, he played without abandon, sacrificing himself for the good of the team. Up against Pittsburgh, and just a few games out of first place, the Braves once again faced Babe Adams, twelve days after the home run episode. Adams had earned accolades as one of the greatest control pitchers in baseball history—1.27 walks per game during a 17-year career. Adams’s control was so spectacular that on July 17, he had pitched against the Giants for 21 innings without walking a man (and yet lost, 3–1).98

According to Maranville, the dark-featured, round-faced pitcher held the Braves scoreless for seven innings, and Maranville, having whiffed at Adams’s precisely thrown curves and fastballs, conferred with Stallings, seeking other possibilities for reaching base. Stallings reminded Maranville of three of John McGraw’s players—Fred Snodgrass, Buck Herzog, and Art Fletcher—who all were regularly awarded first base because they managed to get hit by a pitch.99 Stallings advised him, “They were all choke hitters like yourself. You know how they would stick out their arms, get their sleeves hit, and go to first base.” But Maranville protested that he, unlike his Giants counterparts, did not have long sleeves. “Get on there somehow,” ordered Stallings. Maranville dutifully marched to the plate and stuck out his arm for the next two pitches. Adams missed the plate and his arm as the umpire, to Maranville’s surprise, yelled “Ball one,” followed by “Ball two.” Rabbit extended his arm out further on the next pitch, only to be hit squarely on the forehead. Knocked unconscious for a few minutes, he still managed to drag himself to first and help the Braves win, 4–2, taking two out of three from the Pirates.100 “Getting ahead in the game” is how Maranville labeled this incident, and it was the kind of play that his teammates found inspiring. “I don’t know whether he infected the team or the team infected him, but it got to the point where we believed we could win every game, and he got to the point where he believed he could make every play,” said Johnny Evers.101

Peace and War

In July 1914, while Maranville and his teammates were engaged in mischief, and while the Braves were scrapping their way out of last place, Americans learned of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and the subsequent diplomatic maneuverings of the European powers. Few observers of these events, American or European, anticipated the calamitous events that would follow. Throughout 1914, first as European tensions rose, and later as European societies rushed into humanity’s first total war and slaughtered one another by the thousands, Americans perceived themselves as a peace-loving, baseball-playing country.

Satirist William A. Phelon, writing for Baseball Magazine months before the war, showed a far better understanding of world politics than any politician or statesman of the time. Phelon imagined a set of scenes in which Charles Murphy, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, encountered European world leaders. Murphy actually traveled to Europe in the winter of 1914. In a comical, pseudo-dialogue six months before World War I broke out, Phelon has Murphy meeting President Poincaré of France and telling the French leader that the greatest living ballplayer is Napoleon Lajoie; Murphy then gets a kiss on both cheeks. When, a week later, he meets Kaiser Wilhelm, Murphy asserts “real quick” that the most talented American ballplayer is clearly Honus Wagner (German descent). “Never saw a man so pleased, grateful,” responds Murphy, who then contemplates the kaiser’s potential ability as a baseball magnate. As he drew his caricature of Charles Murphy, Phelon offered up a permanent peace solution for Europe: American baseball:

Europe is in regular ferment—a seething condition of interior unrest—and the only remedy, both in my opinion and that of other great statesmen, is baseball. Give them baseball and there will be no more wars. The rules of the game alone, now that there are so many of them, would keep the European nations busy for fifty years translating, learning, and applying them. What causes war? Too much surplus time, too much surplus energy. If a nation gets all wrapped up in baseball, it will spend its surplus time following the game, and its surplus energy following the umpires!102

In the spring of 1914, just as 19-year-old Babe Ruth was pitching his way to the major leagues, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, a self-avowed radical anarchist terrorist, was scheming to assassinate Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In May, Princip attended target practice in a Belgrade park; his inaccuracy prompted jeers from his fellow radicals. Born in 1894, in a town ravaged by the Balkan Wars, Princip coordinated his assassination plot with the Serbian Black Hand, a secret military society dedicated to forming a southern Slav nation independent of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, two longtime dominant powers. When the archduke attended Austrian military exercises in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Princip, assisted by the Black Hand and aided by a set of tragicomic circumstances—the archduke’s driver took a wrong turn—found himself face-to-face, or at point-blank range, with the next emperor and his wife, Sophia. As every high school student learns, Princip’s assassination of the archduke sparked a series of military and diplomatic maneuvers—still debated today—that enflamed Europe and launched the world into World War I.

The archduke had wanted to avoid war with the Serbs, and yet his assassination led to a set of violent acts perpetrated by Austrians against Serbs, and then to the great inferno of World War I. After the burial of Francis Ferdinand on July 4, 1914, the Austrian military leaders deliberated and then designed an attack on Serbia; on July 5, the Austrians received unqualified German support, the infamous “blank check.” In the weeks that followed, as Princip and other Serbians were tried, Austria knowingly formulated an ultimatum so strenuous that Serbia could not possibly comply. Still, at this point, a general war did not appear inevitable, and Kaiser Wilhelm traveled on his annual North Sea cruise. And on July 14, 1914, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson paid for his own admission to a baseball game and watched the Detroit Tigers defeat the Washington Senators, 2–0. As the Austrians, Germans, British, French, and Russian governments negotiated, postured, and ordered troops to “premobilize,” European powers—despite communications between cousins Kaiser William and Tsar Nicholas, in the notorious “Willy-Nicky telegrams”—headed down a seemingly unavoidable route to war. Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, and Russia initiated its mobilization on July 30. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia. France then mobilized, and, by August 3, Germany had declared war on France.103

American newspapers ran front-page stories covering these events. In Oregon, for instance, the small-town Medford Mail Tribune carried the following headline on August 1: “Germany Declares War on Russia.”104 And as war broke out, sports enthusiasts in the United States still followed baseball with passionate interest, and as war news intensified, Americans, intuitively grateful they were not at war, even more greatly appreciated their peaceful, leisurely, idyllic national pastime. American baseball fans, especially those in Boston, valued the Braves’ climb to the top.