Wilbur Schramm is most famous for being one of the critical founders of the scholarly study of communications and mass communications. In those fields his work is considered foundational and legendary. What is sometimes forgotten is that he got his start as a creative writer and even founded the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1936. He won the O. Henry Prize for short fiction in 1942, and in 1944 he published this story in the Saturday Evening Post. Disarmingly witty and charming, “My Kingdom for Jones” can easily be read as a pointed satire on baseball’s struggle to integrate the game in the 1940s.
THE FIRST DAY JONES played third base for Brooklyn was like the day Galileo turned his telescope on the planets or Columbus sailed back to Spain. First, people said it couldn’t be true; then they said things will never be the same.
Timothy McGuire, of the Brooklyn Eagle, told me how he felt the first time he saw Jones. He said that if a bird had stepped out of a cuckoo clock that day and asked him what time it was, he wouldn’t have been surprised enough to blink an Irish eye. And still he knew that the whole future of baseball hung that day by a cotton thread.
Don’t ask Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis about this. He has never yet admitted publicly that Jones ever played for Brooklyn. He has good reason not to. But ask an old-time sports writer. Ask Tim McGuire.
It happened so long ago it was even before Mr. Roosevelt became President. It was a lazy Georgia spring afternoon, the first time McGuire and I saw Jones. There was a light-footed little breeze and just enough haze to keep the sun from burning. The air was full of fresh-cut grass, wisteria, fruit blossoms, and the ping of baseballs on well-oiled mitts. Everyone in Georgia knows that the only sensible thing to do on an afternoon like that is sleep. If you can’t do that, if you are a baseball writer down from New York to cover Brooklyn’s spring-training camp, you can stretch out on the grass and raise yourself every hour or so on one elbow to steal a glance at fielding practice. That was what we were doing—meanwhile amusing ourselves halfheartedly with a game involving small cubes and numbers—when we first saw Jones.
The Times wasn’t there. Even in those days they were keeping their sports staff at home to study for Information Please. But four of us were down from the New York papers—the World, the Herald, Tim, and I. I can even remember what we were talking about.
I was asking the World, “How do they look to you?”
“Pitchers and no punch,” the World said. “No big bats. No great fielders. No Honus Wagner. No Hal Chase. No Ty Cobb.”
“No Tinker to Evers to Chance,” said the Herald. “Seven come to Susy,” he added soothingly, blowing on his hands.
“What’s your angle today?” the World asked Tim.
Tim doesn’t remember exactly how he answered. To the best of my knowledge, he merely said, “Ulk.” It occurred to me that the Brooklyn Eagle was usually more eloquent than that, but the Southern weather must have slowed up my reaction.
The World said, “What?”
“There’s a sorsh,” Tim said in a weak, strangled sort of voice—“a horse…on third…base.”
“Why don’t they chase it off?” said the Herald impatiently. “Your dice.”
“They don’t…;want to,” Tim said in that funny voice.
I glanced up at Tim then. Now Tim, as you probably remember, was built from the same blueprints as a truck, with a magnificent red nose for a headlight. But when I looked at him, all the color was draining out of that nose slowly, from top to bottom, like turning off a gas mantle. I should estimate Tim was, at the moment, the whitest McGuire in four generations.
Then I looked over my shoulder to see where Tim was staring. He was the only one of us facing the ball diamond. I looked for some time. Then I tapped the World on the back.
“Pardon me,” I asked politely, “do you notice anything unusual?”
“If you refer to my luck,” said the World, “it’s the same pitiful kind I’ve had since Christmas.”
“Look at the infield,” I suggested.
“Hey,” said the Herald, “if you don’t want the dice, give them to me.”
“I know this can’t be true,” mused the World, “but I could swear I see a horse on third base.”
The Herald climbed to his feet with some effort. He was built in the days when there was no shortage of materials.
“If the only way to get you guys to put your minds on this game is to chase that horse off the field,” he said testily, “I’ll do it myself.”
He started toward the infield, rubbed his eyes, and fainted dead away.
“I had the queerest dream,” he said, when we revived him. “I dreamed there was a horse playing third base. My God!” he shouted, glancing toward the diamond. “I’m still asleep!”
That is, word for word, what happened the first day Jones played third base for Brooklyn. Ask McGuire.
When we felt able, we hunted up the Brooklyn manager, who was a chunky, red-haired individual with a whisper like a foghorn. A foghorn with a Brooklyn accent. His name was Pop O’Donnell.
“I see you’ve noticed,” Pop boomed defensively.
“What do you mean,” the Herald said severely, “by not notifying us you had a horse playing third base?”
“I didn’t guess you’d believe it,” Pop said.
Pop was still a little bewildered himself. He said the horse had wandered on the field that morning during practice. Someone tried to chase it off by hitting a baseball toward it. The horse calmly opened its mouth and caught the ball. Nothing could be neater.
While they were still marveling over that, the horse galloped 30 yards and took a ball almost out of the hands of an outfielder who was poised for the catch. They said Willie Keeler couldn’t have done it better. So they spent an hour hitting fungo flies—or, as some wit called them, horse flies—to the horse. Short ones, long ones, high ones, grass cutters, line drivers—it made no difference; the animal covered Dixie like the dew.
They tried the horse at second and short, but he was a little slow on the pivot when compared with men like Napoleon Lajoie. Then they tried him at third base and knew that was the right, the inevitable, place. He was a Great Wall of China. He was a flash of brown lightning. In fact, he covered half the shortstop’s territory and two-thirds of left field, and even came behind the plate to help the catcher with foul tips. The catcher got pretty sore about it. He said that anybody who was going to steal his easy putouts would have to wear an umpire’s uniform like the other thieves.
“Can he hit?” asked the World.
“See for yourself,” Pop O’Donnell invited.
The Superbas—they hadn’t begun calling them the Dodgers yet—were just starting batting practice. Nap Rucker was tossing them in with that beautiful, smooth motion of his, and the horse was at bat. He met the first ball on the nose and smashed it into left field. He laid down a bunt that waddled like a turtle along the base line. He sizzled a liner over second like a clothesline.
“What a story!” said the World.
“I wonder,” said the Herald. “I wonder how good it is.”
We stared at him.
“I wouldn’t say it is quite as good as the sinking of the Maine, if you mean that,” said Tim.
“I wonder how many people are going to believe it,” said the Herald.
“I’ll race you to the phone,” Tim said.
Tim won. He admits he had a long start. Twenty minutes later he came back, walking slowly.
“I wish to announce,” he said, “that I have been insulted by my editor and am no longer connected with the Brooklyn Eagle. If I can prove that I am sober tomorrow, they may hire me back,” he added.
“You see what I mean,” said the Herald.
We all filed telegraph stories about the horse. We swore that every word was true. We said it was a turning point in baseball. Two of us mentioned Columbus; and one, Galileo. In return, we got advice.
THESE TROUBLED TIMES, NEWSPAPERS NO SPACE FOR FICTION. EXPENSE ACCOUNT NO PROVISION DRUNKEN LEVITY, the Herald’s wire read. The World read, ACCURACY, ACCURACY, ACCURACY, followed by three exclamation points, and signed “Joseph Pulitzer.” CHARGING YOUR TELEGRAM RE BROOKLYN HORSE TO YOUR SALARY, my wire said. THAT’S A HORSE ON YOU!
Have you ever thought what you would do with a purple cow if you had one? I know. You would paint it over. We had a horse that could play third base, and all we could do was sit in the middle of Georgia and cuss our editors. I blame the editors. It is their fault that for the last 30 years you have had to go to smoking rooms or Pullman cars to hear about Jones.
But I don’t blame them entirely, either. My first question would have been: How on earth can a horse possibly bat and throw? That’s what the editors wondered. It’s hard to explain. It’s something you have to see to believe—like dogfish and political conventions.
And I’ve got to admit that the next morning we sat around and asked one another whether we really had seen a horse playing third base. Pop O’Donnell confessed that when he woke up he said to himself, “It must be shrimp that makes me dream about horses.” Then all of us went down to the park, not really knowing whether we would see a horse there or not.
We asked Pop was he going to use the horse in games.
“I don’t know,” he thundered musingly. “I wonder. There are many angles. I don’t know,” he said, pulling at his chin.
That afternoon the Cubs, the world champs, came for an exhibition game. A chap from Pennsylvania—I forget his name—played third base for Brooklyn, and the horse grazed quietly beside the dugout. Going into the eighth, the Cubs were ahead, 2–0, and Three-Finger Brown was tying Brooklyn in knots. A curve would come over, then a fast one inside, and then the drop, and the Superbas would beat the air or hit puny little rollers to the infield, which Tinker or Evers would grab up and toss like a beanbag to Frank Chance. It was sickening. But in the eighth, Maloney got on base on an error, and Jordan walked. Then Lumley went down swinging, and Lewis watched perfect ones sail past him. The horse still was grazing over by the Brooklyn dugout.
“Put in the horse!” Frank Chance yelled. The Cubs laughed themselves sick.
Pop O’Donnell looked at Chance, and then at the horse, and back at Chance, as though he had made up his mind about something. “Go in there, son, and get a hit,” he said. “Watch out for the curve.” “Coive,” Pop said.
The horse picked up a bat and cantered out to the plate.
“Pinch hitting for Batch,” announced the umpire dreamily, “this horse.” A second later he shook himself violently. “What am I saying?” he shouted.
On the Cubs’ bench, every jaw had dropped somewhere around the owner’s waist. Chance jumped to his feet, his face muscles worked like a coffee grinder, but nothing came out. It was the only time in baseball history, so far as I can find out, that Frank Chance was ever without words.
When he finally pulled himself together, he argued, with a good deal of punctuation, that there was no rule saying you could play a horse in the big leagues. Pop roared quietly that there was no rule saying you couldn’t, either. They stood there nose to nose, Pop firing methodically like a cannon and Chance crackling like a machine gun. Chance gave up too easily. He was probably a little stunned. He said that he was used to seeing queer things in Brooklyn, anyway. Pop O’Donnell just smiled grimly.
Well, that was Jones’ first game for Brooklyn. It could have been a reel out of a movie. There was that great infield—Steinfeldt, Tinker, Evers, and Chance—so precise, so much a machine that any ball hit on the ground was like an apple into a sorter. The infield was so famous that not many people remember Sheckard. Slagle, and Schulte in the outfield, but the teams of that day knew them. Behind the plate was Johnny Kling, who could rifle a ball to second like an 88-mm cannon. And on the mound stood Three-Finger Brown, whose drop faded away as though someone were pulling it back with a string.
Brown took a long time getting ready. His hand shook a little, and the first one he threw was 10 feet over Kling’s head into the grandstand. Maloney and Jordan advanced to second and third. Brown threw the next one in the dirt. Then he calmed down, grooved one, and whistled a curve in around the withers.
“The glue works for you, Dobbin!” yelled Chance, feeling more like himself. Pop O’Donnell was mopping his forehead.
The next pitch came in fast, over the outside corner. The horse was waiting. He leaned into it. The ball whined all the way to the fence, Ted Williams was the only player I ever saw hit one like it. When Slagle finally got to the ball, the two runners had scored and the horse was on third. Brown’s next pitch got a few yards away from Kling, and the horse stole home in a cloud of dust, all four feet flying. He got up, dusted himself off, looked at Chance, and gave a horselaugh.
If this sounds queer, remember that queerer things happen in Brooklyn every day.
“How do we write this one up?” asked the Herald. “We can’t put just ‘a horse’ in the box score.”
That was when the horse got his name. We named him Jones, after Jones, the caretaker who had left the gate open so he could wander onto the field. We wrote about “Horse” Jones.
Next day we all chuckled at a banner headline in one of the metropolitan papers. It read: JONES PUTS NEW KICK IN BROOKLYN.
Look in the old box scores. Jones got two hits off Rube Waddell of Philadelphia and three off Cy Young of Boston. He pounded Eddie Plank and Iron Man McGinnity and Wild Bill Donovan. He robbed Honus Wagner of a hit that would have been a double against any other third baseman in the league. On the base paths he was a bullet.
Our papers began to wire us, WHERE DOES JONES COME FROM? SEND BACKGROUND, HUMAN INTEREST, INTERVIEW. That was a harder assignment than New York knew. We decided by a gentlemen’s agreement that Jones must have come from Kentucky and got his first experience in a Blue Grass league. That sounded reasonable enough. We said he was long-faced, long-legged, dark, a vegetarian, and a nonsmoker. That was true. We said he was a horse for work and ate like a horse. That was self-evident. Interviewing was a little harder.
Poor Pop O’Donnell for 10 years had wanted a third baseman who could hit hard enough to dent a cream puff. Now that he had one, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Purple-cow trouble. “Poiple,” Pop would have said.
One of his first worries was paying for Jones. A strapping big farmer appeared at the clubhouse, saying he wanted either his horse or $50,000.
Pop excused himself, checked the team’s bank balance, and then came back.
“What color is your horse?” he asked.
The farmer thought a minute. “Dapple gray,” he said.
“Good afternoon, my man,” Pop boomed unctuously, holding open the door. “That’s a horse of another color.” Jones was brown.
There were some audience incidents, too. Jonathan Daniels of Raleigh, North Carolina, told me that as a small boy that season he saw a whole row of elderly ladies bustle into their box seats, take one look toward third base, look questioningly at one another, twitter about the sun being hot, and walk out. Georgia police records show at least five people, cold sober, came to the ballpark and were afraid to drive their own cars home. The American medical journals of that year discovered a new psychoneurosis that they said was doubtless caused by a feeling of insecurity resulting from the replacement of the horse by the horseless carriage. It usually took the form of hallucination—the sensation of seeing a horse sitting in a baseball players’ bench.
Perhaps that was the reason a famous pitcher, who shall here go nameless, came to town with his team, took one incredulous look at the Brooklyn fielding practice, and went to his manager, offering to pay a fine.
But the real trouble was about whether horses should be allowed to play base-ball. After the first shock, teams were generally amused at the idea of playing against a horse. But after Jones had batted their star pitchers out of the box, they said the Humane Society ought to protect the poor Brooklyn horse.
The storm that brewed in the South that spring was like nothing except the storm that gathered in 1860. Every hotel that housed baseball players housed a potential civil war. The better orators argued that the right to play baseball should not be separated from the right to vote or the responsibility of fighting for one’s country. The more practical ones said a few more horses like Jones and they wouldn’t have any jobs left. Still others said that this was probably just another bureaucratic trick on the part of the Administration.
Even the Brooklyn players protested. A committee of them came to see ol’ Pop O’Donnell. They said wasn’t baseball a game for human beings? Pop said he had always had doubts as to whether some major-league players were human or not. They said touché, and this is all right so long as it is a one-horse business, so to speak. But if it goes on, before long won’t a man have to grow two more legs and a tail before he can get in? They asked Pop how he would like to manage the Brooklyn Percherons, instead of the Brooklyn Superbas? They said, what would happen to baseball if it became a game for animals—say giraffes on one team, trained seals on a second, and monkeys on a third? They pointed out that monkeys had already got a foot in the door by being used to dodge baseballs in carnivals. How would Pop like to manage a team of monkeys called the Brooklyn Dodgers, they asked.
Pop said heaven help anyone who has to manage a team called the Brooklyn Dodgers. Then he pointed out that Brooklyn hadn’t lost an exhibition game and that the horse was leading the league in batting with a solid .516. He asked whether they would rather have a World Series or a two-legged third baseman. They went on muttering.
But his chief worry was Jones himself.
“That horse hasn’t got his mind on the game,” he told us one night on the hotel veranda.
“Ah, Pop, it’s just horseplay,” said the World, winking.
“Nope, he hasn’t got his heart in it,” said Pop, his voice echoing lightly off the distant mountains. “He comes just in time for practice and runs the minute it’s over. There’s something on that horse’s mind.”
We laughed but had to admit that Jones was about the saddest horse we had ever seen. His eyes were just brown pools of liquid sorrow. His ears drooped. And still he hit well over .500 and covered third base like a rug.
One day he missed the game entirely. It was the day the Giants were in town, and 15,000 people were there to watch Jones bat against the great Matty. Brooklyn lost the game, and Pop O’Donnell almost lost his hair at the hands of the disappointed crowd.
“Who would have thought,” Pop mused, in the clubhouse after the game, “that that (here some words are omitted) horse would turn out to be a prima donna? It’s all right for a major-league ballplayer to act like a horse, but that horse is trying to act like a major-league ballplayer.”
It was almost by accident that Tim and I found out what was really bothering Jones. We followed him one day when he left the ballpark. We followed him nearly two miles to a racetrack.
Jones stood beside the fence a long time, turning his head to watch the thoroughbreds gallop by on exercise runs and time trials. Then a little stable boy opened the gate for him.
“Po’ ol’ hoss,” the boy said. “Yo’ wants a little runnin’?”
“Happens every day,” a groom explained to us. “This horse wanders here from God knows where and acts like he wants to run, and some boy rides him a while, bareback, pretending he’s a racehorse.”
Jones was like a different horse out there on the track; not drooping any more—ears up, eyes bright, tail like a plume. It was pitiful how much he wanted to look like a racehorse.
“That horse,” Tim asked the groom, “is he any good for racing?”
“Not here, anyway,” the groom said. “Might win a county-fair race or two.”
He asked us whether we had any idea who owned the horse.
“Sir,” said Tim, like Edwin M. Stanton, “that horse belongs to the ages.”
“Well, mister,” said the groom, “the ages had better get some different shoes on that horse. Why, you could hold a baseball in those shoes he has there.”
“It’s very clear,” I said as we walked back, “what we have here is a badly frustrated horse.”
“It’s clear as beer,” Tim said sadly.
That afternoon Jones hit a home run and absentmindedly trotted around the bases. As soon as the game was over, he disappeared in the direction of the racetrack. Tim looked at me and shook his head. Pop O’Donnell held his chin in his hands.
“I’ll be boiled in oil,” he said. “Berled in erl.” Nothing cheered up poor Pop until someone came in with a story about the absentee owner of a big-league baseball club who had inherited the club along with the family fortune. This individual had just fired the manager of his baseball farm system because the farms had not turned out horses like Jones. “What are farms for if they don’t raise horses?” the absentee owner had asked indignantly.
Jones was becoming a national problem second only to the Panama Canal and considerably more important than whether Mr. Taft got to be president. There were rumors that the Highlanders—people were just beginning to call them the Yankees—would withdraw and form a new league if Jones were allowed to play.
It was reported that a team of kangaroos from Australia was on its way to play a series of exhibition games in America, and Pres. Ban Johnson of the American League was quoted as saying that he would never have kangaroos in the American League because they were too likely to jump their contracts. There was talk of a constitutional amendment concerning horses in baseball.
The thing that impressed me, down there in the South, was that all this was putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. Jones simply didn’t want to play baseball. He wanted to be a racehorse. I don’t know why life is that way.
Jones made an unassisted triple play, and Ty Cobb accused Brooklyn of fur nishing fire ladders to its infielders. He said that no third baseman could have caught the drive that started the play. At the end of the training season, Jones was batting .538 and fielding .997, had stolen 20 bases, and hit seven home runs. He was the greatest third baseman in the history of baseball and didn’t want to be!
Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Arthur Brisbane, and the rest of the bigshots got together and decided that if anyone didn’t know by this time that Jones was a horse, the newspapers wouldn’t tell him. He could find it out.
Folks seemed to find it out. People began gathering from all parts of the country to see Brooklyn open against the Giants—Matty against Jones. Even a tribe of Sioux Indians camped beside the Gowanus and had war dances on Flatbush Avenue, waiting for the park to open. And Pop O’Donnell kept his squad in the South as long as he could, laying plans to arrive in Brooklyn only on the morning of the opening game.
The wire said that night that 200,000 people had come to Brooklyn for the game, and 190,000 of them were in an ugly mood over the report that the League might not let Jones play. The governor of New York sent two regiments of the National Guard. The Giants were said to be caucusing to decide whether they would play against Jones. By game time, people were packed for six blocks, fighting to get into the park. The Sioux sent a young buck after their tomahawks, just in case.
Telephone poles a quarter of a mile from the field were selling for $100. Every baseball writer in the country was in the Brooklyn press box; the other teams played before cub reporters and society editors. Just before game time, I managed to push into Pop O’Donnell’s little editorial office with the presidents of the two major leagues, the mayor of New York, a half dozen other reporters, and a delegation from the Giants.
“There’s just one thing we want to know,” the spokesman for the Giants was asking Pop, “Are you going to play Jones?”
“Gentlemen,” said Pop in that soft-spoken, firm way of his that rattled window blinds, “our duty is to give the public what it wants. And the public wants Jones.”
Like an echo, a chant began to rise from the bleachers; “We want Jones!”
“There is one other little thing,” said Pop. “Jones has disappeared.”
There were about 10 seconds of the awful silence that comes when your nerves are paralyzed but your mind keeps on thrashing.
“He got out of his boxcar somewhere between Georgia and Brooklyn,” Pop said. “We don’t know where. We’re looking.”
A Western Union boy dashed in. “Hold on!” said Pop. “This may be news!”
He tore open the envelope with a shaky hand. This message was from Norfolk, Virginia: HAVE FOUND ELEPHANT THAT CAN BALANCE MEDICINE BALL ON TRUNK, it read. WILL HE DO? If Pop had said what he said then into a telephone, it would have burned out all the insulators in New York.
Down at the field, the President of the United States himself was poised to throw out the first ball. “Is this Jones?” he asked. He was a little nearsighted.
“This is the mayor of New York,” Pop said patiently. “Jones has gone. Run away.”
The President’s biographers disagree as to whether he said at that moment, “Oh, well, who would stay in Brooklyn if he could run?” or “I sympathize with you for having to change horses in midstream.”
That was the saddest game ever covered by the entire press corps of the nation. Brooklyn was all thumbs in the field, all windmills at bat. There was no Jones to whistle hits into the outfield and make sensational stops at third. By the sixth inning, when they had to call the game with the score 18–1, the field was ankle deep in pop bottles, and the Sioux were waving their tomahawks and singing the scalp song.
You know the rest of the story. Brooklyn didn’t win a game until the third week of the season, and no team ever tried a horse again, except a few dark horses every season. Pittsburgh, I believe, tried trained seals in the outfield. They were deadly at catching the ball but couldn’t cover enough ground. San Francisco has an entire team of Seals, but I have never seen them play. Boston tried an octopus at second base but had to give him up. What happened to two rookies who disappeared trying to steal second base against Boston that spring is another subject baseball doesn’t talk about.
There has been considerable speculation as to what happened to Jones.
Most of us believed the report that the Brooklyn players had unfastened the latch on the door of his boxcar, until Pop O’Donnell’s Confidential Memoirs came out, admitting that he himself had taken the hinges off the door of his boxcar because he couldn’t face the blame for making baseball a game for horses. But I have been a little confused since Tim McGuire came to me once and said he might as well confess. He couldn’t stand to think of that horse standing wistfully beside the track, waiting for someone to let him pretend he was a racehorse. That haunted Tim. When he went down to the boxcar, he found the door unlatched and the hinges off, so he gave the door a little push outward. He judged it was the will of the majority.
And that is why baseball is played by men today instead of by horses. But don’t think that the shadow of Jones doesn’t still lie heavy on the game. Have you ever noticed how retiring, silent, and hangdog major-league ballplayers are, how they cringe before the umpire? They never know when another Jones may break away from a beer wagon, circus, or plow, wander through an unlocked gate, and begin batting .538 to their .290. The worry is terrible. You can see it in the crowds, too. That is why Brooklyn fans are so aloof and disinterested, why they never raise their voices above a whisper at Ebbets Field. They know perfectly well that this is only minor-league ball they are seeing, that horses could play it twice as well if they had a chance.
That is the secret we sportswriters have kept all these years: that is why we have never written about Jones. And the Brooklyn fans still try to keep it secret, but every once in a while the sorrow eats like lye into one of them until he can hold it back no longer, and then he sobs quietly and says, “Dem bums, if dey only had a little horse sense.”