11

Vagabond Years

Hornsby’s big winnings on Quince King at Collinsville and the $7,500 buyout by the Browns provided a temporary financial cushion, but he had little to show for a salaried baseball income that, over twenty-three years, approached $500,000.1 Given past bad investments, persistent profligacy with the horses, and the affluent lifestyle the Hornsbys took for granted, he had to have a job—some kind of baseball job. Again he turned to Branch Rickey, but this time Rickey had to tell him, what with Dizzy Dean out of commission and the Cardinals floundering, “I’ve got troubles of my own.” There was just no way he could help.2

Hornsby never officially retired as a player; his name had appeared on the active roster of every team he managed. In 1937, in fact, he was at second base in seventeen of the seventy-seven games the Browns played up to his firing. He wielded his bat with effect, too, hitting .321 in fifty-six trips to the plate, with a home run and eleven runs batted in. Forty years later, some American League ballclub would doubtless have taken him on as a designated hitter; but in an era when all nine players had to field a position as well as swing a bat, nobody wanted a widegirthed, sore-legged, forty-one-year-old, regardless of what glories he’d known in younger days.

So Hornsby had played his last big-league baseball. At the end, only Ty Cobb (at .367) surpassed his .358 lifetime batting average, and he was ahead of all National Leaguers in home runs (297), runs batted in (1,549), and extra-base hits (1,765).3 In the National League’s records, he trailed only Honus Wagner in runs scored and base hits. Besides the highest season’s batting average for either league since 1897, he also held the National League record for most bases-loaded home runs (12) and the “modern” league record for consecutive games with safe hits (33). On several occasions during his last spring training with the Browns, Hornsby had mentioned that he would like to reach 3,000 base hits (although as yet that figure hadn’t acquired the magical connotation it would have for later generations of ballplayers, fans, and Hall of Fame electors). Had he remained the St. Louis Browns’ player-manager for another season or so, he might have made it; as it was, he ended up seventy hits short.

If nobody in the majors wanted Hornsby that summer of 1937, others elsewhere did—at least on a short-term basis. The Denver Post’s annual semipro baseball tournament had acquired considerable national stature in the 1930s, because many ballplayers who would have been full-time professionals if not for the Depression-driven contraction of the minor leagues now picked up money performing for hundreds of business-sponsored teams across the county. Once Hornsby became available, the Bay Refiners, based in Denver, sought to strengthen their chances in the sixteen-team Post tournament by hiring him for $500 per game. It was a considerable comedown, but Hornsby could use the money and, for the moment, had no better prospects.

Grover Cleveland Alexander, in considerably worse circumstances, managed the Springfield, Illinois, Empires; an oil-company outfit from Pampa, Texas, featured third baseman Sammy Baugh, better known as a football All-American at Texas Christian University. A group of Negro leaguers who’d just won the Dominican Republic championship for dictator Rafael Trujillo, led by Satchel Paige and featuring such notables as Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell, entered the Post tournament as the Ciudad Trujillo team.

Paige, Gibson, Bell, and company—some of the best ballplayers in the world—swept through the tournament and claimed the $14,000 prize money. Hornsby, experiencing his first nighttime baseball, earned the $1,500 the Bay Refiners paid him, homering in a 25–0 massacre of a team from Worland, Wyoming, then singling and doubling twice in a ten-inning victory over Alexander’s club. In the semifinal game, Bob Griffith of Ciudad Trujillo struck him out three times, as the black stars pounded the Bay Refiners 12–0. After that, Hornsby did what most Americans in 1937 would have considered a daring thing—he took a commercial airliner from Denver back to St. Louis.4

While Jim Bottomley managed the Browns to a 21–56 record for the balance of 1937 and then received his notice after the ballclub’s worst season in twenty-six years, Hornsby sought some kind of long-term employment.5 Nothing turned up at the National Association convention in Milwaukee early in December or at the annual major-league gathering in Chicago a week later. Informed that Commissioner Landis wanted to see him (presumably about the circumstances of his dismissal by the Browns), Hornsby dutifully went to Landis’s Chicago office suite, where he was met by Leslie O’Connor, the commissioner’s secretary. The judge, said O’Connor, had instructed him to take Hornsby’s statement. Nothing doing, Hornsby told O’Connor; he’d talk to Landis or nobody. “The Judge didn’t send back no word to me,” as Hornsby later told it, “so after a few minutes I left his office, and from that day on I never talked to him.”6

“Why are they always pickin’ on me?” Hornsby asked his longtime confidant Sid Keener, now sports editor of the St. Louis Star-Times. “I get tips on the horses,” he pointed out, “and yet club owners pass out tips on stocks listed on Wall Street.” “My gambling,” he continued, “has never interfered with my playing on the ball field or in managing a ball club.… I’ve won many games with a base hit in the pinch on days when I lost a chunk of money with a bookmaker.”7

Perhaps so, but for the present the only thing Hornsby had going was Ray Doan’s baseball school at Hot Springs, where he again tried to teach enthusiastic youngsters how to play the game—and again took his percentage of the school’s receipts. When it was over, he picked up a few dollars in Chicago as guest speaker before the annual convention of the American Society of Bakery Engineers. Young players weren’t as strong as they used to be, he told his unlikely audience, because they “smoke, drink and carouse much more than they used to.”8

From Chicago he drove to Daytona Beach, Florida, where owner Mike Kelley of the Minneapolis Millers, of the Class AA American Association, hired him as a spring-training batting coach, although Hornsby also hoped to hire on as manager Donie Bush’s adjutant for the full season. Dick Hackenberry, then covering the Millers for a Minneapolis newspaper, remembered Hornsby’s arriving in a rumpled suit, with the heels of his socks worn through. Over the next couple of weeks, Hackenberry drove him several times to a local bookie joint. Hornsby’s presence made Bush thoroughly uncomfortable; at one point the Millers’ manager told Hackenberry, “I don’t need this guy. If he stays another day, it’s between me and him who Mike wants to run this club. I’m fed up with him here.”9

Hornsby, generally conceded to be the greatest right-hand hitter of all time, made little impression on a tall, spindly, left-hand-batting nineteen-year-old named Ted Williams, who, by many later estimates, became baseball’s greatest hitter—period. A half century later, Williams remembered nothing Hornsby had told him, except the commonplace wisdom to get the pitch he could hit best, not the pitcher’s best. About to start a 1938 season in which he pummeled American Association pitchers for a .366 average, forty-three home runs, and 142 runs batted in, Williams neither needed nor wanted Hornsby’s coaching.

Finally something came through for Hornsby—a job as player-coach with the Baltimore Orioles of the International League at $5,000 for the coming season. Baltimore business manager John Ogden, who’d pitched against Hornsby in the National League, held no illusions about Hornsby’s intentions. “Rog will be with us until a better job presents itself,” he said.10

Since the doldrums of 1933, when only fourteen leagues completed the season, the minors had undergone a renaissance; thirty-seven circuits would complete their schedules in 1938, and that year Jersey City set a new International League attendance record, drawing 337,000 despite finishing seventh. Part of the reason for the minors’ comeback was the shift to night baseball, in Baltimore and nearly everywhere else. For the rest of his life, most of the baseball Hornsby saw would be played under the lights.

Although he held active-player status, Hornsby found himself with little to do if he didn’t want to interfere with catcher-manager Clyde “Bucky” Crouse. He appeared in sixteen games—mostly as a pinch hitter—and hit safely only twice. Most International Leaguers viewed Hornsby with indifference, if they even knew him. After he struck out Hornsby with the bases loaded, Montreal’s Dick Porter was asked if he realized who that was. “Sure,” said Porter. “He’s Baltimore’s third base coach.”11

Early in June, Hornsby decided he’d had enough of Baltimore and signed to manage the remainder of the 1938 season for the Southern Association’s Chattanooga Lookouts—now classified by the National Association as being one and one-half rungs below the majors at Class IA—for the same salary he’d been receiving with the Orioles.12

In joining Chattanooga, Hornsby had to accommodate to the whatever-sells-tickets ethic of his new boss, the zany, flamboyant Joe Engel. A forty-five-year-old former big-league pitcher, Engel headed a syndicate that had purchased the Chattanooga franchise from Washington owner Clark Griffith. Operating independently, Engel attracted crowds by such productions as a “wild elephant hunt,” which featured local black youths wearing loincloths, carrying spears, dancing to tom-toms, and herding six canvas-bedecked “elephants” into a circle, where six “hunters” shot them with blank pellets. After that extravaganza, a costumed ostrich laid an egg on second base; Engel then led a costumed duck to the spot to deposit an egg twice as large.

Clearly, Hornsby’s days with such a man would be limited. On June 27 he arrived in Chattanooga and signed a contract with Engel, who candidly acknowledged that he wanted Hornsby for his box-office appeal. Hornsby went along with Engel to a certain extent, such as accompanying the Lookouts’ president to the city jail to be photographed presenting a birthday cake to inmate Virginia Winston in her cell, as well as accepting a “gift” at home plate of a swaybacked mule that supposedly signified Hornsby’s “old gray mare” status. Yet Hornsby hadn’t lost any of his renowned bluntness. Named honorary mayor by the Chattanooga city council in still another home-plate ceremony, Hornsby told the crowd (and his assembled players), “I’m in favor of floating a bond issue to buy a couple of pitchers.”13

Neither the bond issue nor much help otherwise was forthcoming, although Pat Malone, just released by Baltimore, joined his old Chicago boss and pitched effectively for the rest of the season. At the end of the schedule, Chattanooga was in sixth place with a 66–85 record. Hornsby twice put himself on display in pinch-hitting roles, homering at Lookout Field before 5,000 on one of Engel’s numerous promotional nights, then singling in the season finale at Atlanta.

From Chattanooga, Hornsby returned to Baltimore, where John Ogden hired him to replace Bucky Crouse as Orioles manager for 1939. Some estimated his salary at $10,000, which was probably at least $2,000 more than it really was. Kiki Cuyler, Hornsby’s onetime teammate, succeeded him as Chattanooga manager.14

A few weeks later, Hornsby wrangled a press pass for the first two Yankees-Cubs World Series games at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but when Landis heard about that, he immediately ordered the pass withdrawn. “Maybe the Judge thought I was trying to chisel my way in,” remarked Hornsby, “but he’s wrong.… I don’t know if Landis was trying to block me because I bet on horse races.”15 After the second game (of a Yankees sweep), he returned to St. Louis.

That December the Sporting News published Hornsby’s reflections on his experiences in baseball, as set down by Dick Farrington. He didn’t want “to sound like a squawk,” he said, “because everybody knows I can take it. Besides, I don’t like a cry-baby.” Yet in fact he squawked at some length, especially over accusations that he couldn’t get along with anybody, that he’d undermined various managers, and that his betting got in the way of his baseball. Although critics depicted him “as a hard guy, a bull-dozer and a self-centered mug,” he’d actually saved Branch Rickey’s managing job in the spring of 1925, and when he agreed to manage teams had often done so reluctantly. As for his troubles with club executives, “if some of the fellows who think they know it all, would keep their noses out of the managerial end, which they know nothing about, baseball would be a lots better off.” On his horseplaying: “Never—get that—never has my wagering in any way interfered with my affairs on the diamond.… The races have cost me a lot of money, it is true, but it’s my dough and as a free-born American citizen, I can do what I want with it.… It’s the only real fun I get—betting on the horses.”16

That winter the Sporting News also carried weekly advertisements for the Rogers Hornsby Baseball College, which would be held at Hot Springs from February 15 to March 3. Ray Doan and Hornsby had parted ways, Doan inaugurating a new baseball school at Jackson, Mississippi, and Hornsby taking over Hot Springs as his exclusive operation. Soon the two camps were issuing rival claims about size, cost, duration, and quality of instruction. Ray Doan’s Original All-Star Baseball School, founded on “six years of successful operation,” charged only forty dollars for six weeks, claimed to have enrolled 250, and featured Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Gabby Street, and Burleigh Grimes. Although Hornsby’s full tuition was fifty dollars, he also advertised a special four-week course for thirty-five dollars, plus instruction by himself and, among others, Lon Warneke, Earle Mack, and former National and Federal Leaguer Benny Meyer. An added attraction at Hornsby’s camp was the presence of seventeen members of his Baltimore team, who in effect did their spring training at Hot Springs. While his school (which enrolled about 100) wasn’t “a haven for autograph-seekers,” his people, said Hornsby, knew how to teach fundamentals and get along with boys.17

Once the baseball-school war ended, Hornsby could gather his forces in Baltimore to start the International League season. Going against the trend throughout the minors toward major-league tie-ups, Baltimore continued to operate as an independent franchise under John Ogden’s front-office direction and the ownership of the Dunn family. Again Baltimore would find it hard to compete with the league’s farm clubs, especially the Newark Bears and Rochester Red Wings, owned outright by the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals, respectively.

For 1939 Hornsby decided to stay on the sidelines altogether and do the best he could with weak pitching and a shaky infield. After playing at around the .500 mark over the first third of the season, the Orioles slumped to sixth place and remained there, finishing ahead of Toronto and Montreal (also both independents). It was perhaps the least-interesting season of baseball Hornsby had ever been part of.

Hornsby’s future at Baltimore was in doubt as early as August, when Ogden announced that he was leaving the Orioles at the end of the year to become the Philadelphia Phillies’ business manager. Informed by the Dunn family that he wouldn’t be needed next season, Hornsby talked with club officials at Syracuse and also at Montreal, where Branch Rickey put in a word for him with Royals president Hector Racine. But the Syracuse job went to somebody else, and Racine, whose franchise had recently come under the control of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had to comply with the preference of Dodgers’ front-office boss Larry MacPhail for Clyde Sukeforth. At the annual National Association and major-league meetings late in 1939, Hornsby’s job search was equally unproductive, so as he traveled to Hot Springs to reopen his baseball school, he lacked employment prospects in Organized Baseball for the first time since he was eighteen years old.

After the school ended, Hornsby covered expenses for rent and food, gave his instructors what they were due, pocketed the $500 or so that was left, and effectively joined the approximately nine million Americans still jobless after a decade of the Great Depression and seven years of the New Deal’s multifaceted recovery efforts. Then, early in June, he received a telephone call from John Holland, president of the Oklahoma City Indians of the Class IA Texas League, asking him to succeed manager–first baseman Jim Keesey. Hornsby didn’t have to think it over; he packed quickly, said good-bye to his wife and son, and drove into Oklahoma City early Sunday morning, June 9. A couple of hours later he met with Holland and business manager Jimmy Humphries, and signed a contract specifying $1,000 per month for what remained of the season.

That afternoon 3,000 fans came out to see Hornsby and cheer the Indians as they swept a doubleheader from Dallas and vacated last place. Given a standing ovation as he left the field, Hornsby then had to push his way through massed admirers to get into the clubhouse.

Although Holland and Humphries received players on assignment from major-league clubs, Oklahoma City, like Baltimore and Chattanooga, was still trying to compete as an independent. Hornsby’s mainstays were second baseman Don Kolloway and outfielder Thurman Tucker (who both belonged to the Chicago White Sox); shortstop Millard “Dixie” Howell (former University of Alabama football All-American); catcher George Dickey (younger brother of the Yankees’ Bill); and pitchers Dewey Adkins (subsequently purchased by Cleveland) and Orval Grove (on option from the White Sox).

Sparked mostly by those men, Hornsby’s Indians spurted to sixth place and, after a brief slump, put on another spurt to move up to fourth. Hornsby, wrote the Sporting News Oklahoma City correspondent, “prowls the coaching box like a caged bear.… Skillful handling of moundsmen and inspirational leadership to the hitters are the Rajah’s strong points.”18

In July, at Fort Worth, he managed the North team to an eleven-inning, 7–6 victory in the league’s annual All-Star Game. Eddie Dyer—once Hornsby’s teammate on the Cardinals and now managing first-place Houston—had charge of the South All-Stars. Tulsa’s Dizzy Dean, who was trying to throw enough sore-armed junk to get back to the majors, pitched an inning for the North team.

On the last day of the regular season, with a playoff berth locked up, Hornsby came up as a pinch hitter at Tulsa, hit the ball against the center-field fence, and essayed no farther than first base—in his only appearance as a player in two years. By losing that game, his team finished at 82–78, a solid fourth place.

Although guiding Oklahoma City from last place into the playoffs added considerable luster to his managerial reputation, Hornsby said frankly that he didn’t like the playoff system because it cheapened the pennant race (which Houston had won by sixteen games). Yet whatever his objections to the first-through-fourth tournament that had become standard postseason fare across the minors, Hornsby wouldn’t have been unhappy upsetting the odds. The Indians didn’t accommodate him, falling to Houston in the opening round three games to one (in a best three-of-five series).

With a few thousand dollars in his possession that he didn’t have back in the spring and with hopes of finding something better, Hornsby put off Holland and Humphries about his plans for next year. After he again came up empty-handed at the winter meetings, he finally signed for another season at Oklahoma City. The contract—which the Indians officials personally brought to St. Louis for his approval and signature—was a month-by-month agreement specifying $1,000 per month. At the end of each month, in other words, Hornsby would be free to leave. He joined the Indians at Atlanta, Texas, their spring-training site, eleven days late—only after his baseball school closed.

Inasmuch as most teams lost money during the 1940 Houston runaway, Texas League owners and presidents agreed to prune the per-team roster limit from eighteen to seventeen men and the aggregate salary limit from $5,200 to $4,750 per month. Oklahoma City went even further, abandoning train travel—despite the league’s great distances—and relying on rickety buses to get the Indians to their away-from-home schedule commitments.

Nothing much worked for Hornsby, Holland, and Humphries. Houston, loaded with young Cardinals-system talent, again left everybody behind and discouraged attendance around the league. After an exhausting road trip that left Oklahoma City tied for fourth place but, at 32–37, far out of the running, Hornsby had seen enough. On June 23, at the local hotel where he’d been living, he called Humphries to report that he was leaving for St. Louis. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he said when he got home. “But I wasn’t doing Oklahoma City much good, and they’re having a little trouble at the gate. I didn’t expect them to pay me that kind of dough when they’re not taking it in. Holland and Humphries are good fellows and I didn’t want to work a hardship on them.”19

All of that sounded quite magnanimous, but Hornsby wouldn’t have given up a $1,000-per-month job if something better hadn’t been in the offing. In fact, the ownership of the Fort Worth Texas League franchise had already contacted him about assuming dual authority as business and field manager of the local Cats. On November 18 Hornsby arrived in Fort Worth to sign a one-year contract with the franchise’s new owners—president Stanley A. Thompson, an oilman, and vice president Tom J. Brown, a Coca-Cola executive—who each had put up $13,000 to cover the Cats’ existing deficit. The reason he was willing to take the job, said Hornsby, was that all authority would be “in one man’s hands. That eliminates indecision, buck passing and alibi-ing. I’ll be able to second-guess myself from now on,” he joked.20 Hornsby’s salary would be $9,000, plus a percentage of whatever profits might be generated.

Although none of his immediate family still resided in Fort Worth, other relatives as well as a large number of acquaintances lived in the area, so that, even for such a confirmed nonsentimentalist as Hornsby, taking the job with the Cats was like coming home. While sixteen-year-old Billy remained in Missouri as a student and star athlete at Mexico Military Academy, Hornsby and his wife rented a house in Fort Worth. Early in December he left for the National Association meeting at Jacksonville, Florida, where, reported the Sporting News, he was “one of the busiest men at the convention.”21

Two days after the Jacksonville meeting ended, swarms of carrier-launched Japanese aircraft crippled the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, triggering U.S. entry into the wars raging in Asia since 1937 and Europe since 1939. Hornsby noted that most of the players on Fort Worth’s reserve list held 3-A (dependent-deferred) draft status, but “if Uncle Sam wants some of our players, he’s more than welcome to them. I’d be proud to know they’re serving their country in this fight against the most despicable tyrants who ever tried to conquer the world.”22 That was about as close as he ever came to a political statement—at least for public consumption.

On the evening of January 19, 1942, Hornsby received several calls and telegrams from writers in the East and Middle West, all reporting that they’d heard the results from the Baseball Writers Association’s annual Hall of Fame poll—Hornsby had made it. In his first year of eligibility (under rules adopted in 1939 whereby one’s active major-league playing career must have ended at least five years earlier), he received 182 of 233 votes. Nobody else came near the required three-fourths majority.

Officially notified by a local BBWAA member the next morning while he was getting a shave and haircut, Hornsby said he would meet reporters later at the ballpark. “Mighty nice honor,” he said as he sat behind his desk in his LaGrave Field office, “and I certainly appreciate the honor. But baseball in 1942 is the thing with me now and … my thoughts are on a successful season for the Cats.” They would have to excuse him, because he had to try to sell season boxes to local businesses. At the end of the day, having received not “a single turndown,” he went to a nearby café and celebrated both that success and his Hall of Fame election with a double serving of vanilla ice cream.23

Asked how she felt, Jeannette Hornsby described herself as “thrilled,” and she went on to say that it had been “a thrill to me to see how Rog is tackling his new job here. He’s as enthusiastic as a boy fresh out of school embarking on a career.” Whenever something about him appeared in the local papers (as happened almost daily), she sent a clipping to Billy in Missouri.24

Again the Hornsbys’ affairs seemed on the upswing. In Dallas, at the annual Texas League meeting, the club presidents adopted a resolution honoring his Hall of Fame admission; in Fort Worth, some 300 Junior Chamber of Commerce members feted him at a Welcome Home luncheon at the Hotel Blackstone; and Thompson and Brown readily approved his holding that spring’s baseball school at LaGrave Field. Zeke Handler, the Cats’ year-round publicity agent as well as ballpark announcer during the season, thought Hornsby was generally satisfied with his situation in Fort Worth, and remembered that he took particular delight in lunching at Carshon’s Café, a local kosher restaurant. As Hornsby liked to say, “Can’t beat Jew soup.”25

The Texas League was one of thirty-two minor circuits completing that first wartime season. Although a considerable number of players had been called to military service before Pearl Harbor, the initial exemption of married men and those under twenty-one still left sufficient manpower to stock rosters throughout Organized Baseball. As a rule, farm clubs, usually consisting of younger, unmarried players, ran into trouble earlier than did independents, which tended to employ older men with families.

Fort Worth’s opening-day pitcher, for example, was thirty-seven-year-old Earl Caldwell, who’d worked for Hornsby on the St. Louis Browns. The Cats got off to a good start, Caldwell surviving Oklahoma City’s ten hits and hanging on for a 9–7 victory. Listed on the roster, the forty-six-year-old Hornsby appeared as a player only once—on May 3, 1942, in the second game of a doubleheader at Houston. He put himself at second base and, in what were to be his last times at bat in Organized Baseball, lined out and struck out twice before singling in the two runs that won it for his Cats.

It was a generally good year for Hornsby and the Fort Worth franchise. He received strong mound work from Caldwell and minor-league veterans Ed “Beartracks” Greer, Claude Horton, and Hank Oana (a Hawaiian-born outfielder whom Hornsby installed in his pitching rotation). Besides making some key infield additions, Hornsby again enjoyed stellar center-field and leadoff play from speedy Thurman Tucker (returned to the Texas League by the White Sox), and Fort Worth also featured the league’s home-run and runs-batted-in leader in first baseman Mervyn Connors. The Cats drew their largest crowds in a decade and more than doubled their previous year’s attendance of 46,000.

A nine-game winning streak late in the season hoisted the Cats into third place, where they finished with an 84–68 record—behind Shreveport (an independent) and pennant winner Beaumont (a Detroit farm). When a crowd estimated at 4,000 came to LaGrave Field on September 4 for Rogers Hornsby Night, Hornsby seemed less uncomfortable than he usually was on such occasions. Besides gift certificates from local civic boosters, he received a hand-tooled belt from his players. Wrote Zeke Handler (who also happened to be one of the Sporting News’s Texas League correspondents), “Frankly, how does the Rajah stay in the minors?”26

As field manager, business manager, and profit sharer, Hornsby stood to benefit all around from a good showing by his ballclub in the Texas League playoffs; but the red-hot Shreveport Sports eliminated Fort Worth, four games to three. (The Sports—thirteen of whose members had been with the team the previous year—then beat pennant winner Beaumont for the right to play Nashville in the annual Texas League–Southern Association Dixie Series, which Nashville won in six games.) Despite the Cats’ playoff failure, the Fort Worth owners were generally happy, as was Hornsby, who took a few hundred dollars out of franchise profits. Early in October, he signed a contract for another season as front-office and field boss of the Cats.

Yet a general air of uncertainty hung over the Texas League that autumn. Selective service call-ups increased; problems created by gas rationing and railroad-transportation priorities seemed unmanageable; and Houston, San Antonio, and Tulsa—the league’s remaining farm-club members after Detroit dropped Beaumont at season’s end—were pessimistic about fielding teams for the coming season. Whatever prospects the Texas League may have had for 1943 went down the drain when Shreveport owner Bonneau Peters sold his entire roster to St. Paul of the American Association and announced that he was shutting down operations. Late in February, league president J. Alvin Gardner conducted a telephone poll and disclosed that a majority of the seven remaining franchises had agreed to suspend play “for the duration”—in the common phrase of the war years.

Only independents Fort Worth and Oklahoma City wanted to carry on. Hornsby, whose livelihood was directly involved, tried to convince his colleagues that with sports of all kinds (and of any caliber of performance) booming under the full-employment wartime economy, they should stay in business. “You fellows are afraid to take a chance,” he protested. “You think more of a dollar than you do of baseball.” “No one offered a refutation,” wrote an Oklahoma City newsman; another, from Tulsa, thought that “two or three more determined, daring fighters like Rogers Hornsby … could have swayed the league into starting.”27

Draft call-ups and war-imposed restrictions on civilian travel made it impossible for Hornsby to run his annual baseball school. For 1943 he continued to draw a salary (albeit in reduced form) to look after the affairs of the Fort Worth franchise in its wartime dormancy. Per the owners’ instructions, he sold everybody on the Cats’ reserve list to Milwaukee of the American Association.

By the end of 1943, Hornsby was just about broke. “If” had become pretty much the story of his professional life: if, for example, he hadn’t alienated Sam Breadon and then Charles Stoneham; if William Wrigley or Phil Ball hadn’t died; if John Ogden hadn’t decided to leave Baltimore; and if (most grandiosely) World War II hadn’t happened at all. At least he no longer bore the expense of educating and otherwise maintaining his son Bill (as the youth now preferred to be called). Early in 1943 the top athlete at Mexico Military Academy decided to pass up the remainder of his senior year and enlist in the Marine Corps.

If he had to, Hornsby was willing to take a baseball job in another country, namely the Federal Republic of Mexico. Jorge Pasquel, who with his brothers had built a fortune in liquor distributorships and other enterprises, dreamed of promoting La Liga Mexicana into an authentic rival to Las Ligas Grandes to the north. In January, Hornsby flew from Dallas to Mexico City to discuss a job as player-manager of the Vera Cruz Blues in Pasquel’s six-team circuit. Although Pasquel offered him as much as a five-year contract, Hornsby decided on one year. “Mr. Pasquel is a very enthusiastic baseball man,” he told reporters in Mexico City, “and we could make a winning combination.” Back home, he was more candid: “It’s baseball, ain’t it? I don’t know any other business and I don’t want to. There’s no place left for me in the game here. United States baseball has forgotten me.”28

That’s the way it looked to plenty of people, who were as puzzled as Zeke Handler why nobody in the big leagues—or anywhere else in his own country, it seemed—wanted Hornsby’s services. A widely shared view in baseball circles held that once the Browns fired him, Kenesaw Mountain Landis put out the word that Hornsby wasn’t to be employed again in the major leagues. Though never documented, the notion that Hornsby had been blacklisted was at least plausible.

So Hornsby signed for $1,500 per month to manage in Pasquel’s Mexican League—for however long his employment lasted. Though consisting mostly of Mexican- and Cuban-born players, the league also featured such Negro-league standouts as pitchers Chet Brewer, Theolic Smith, and Ferris McDuffie; infielder Ray Dandridge; and catcher Quincey Trouppe—all of whom had cast their lot with Pasquel for $400–$500 per month (the league maximum). Scheduling games only on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, Pasquel’s circuit operated with teams in Monterrey, Torreón, Tampico, Puebla, and Mexico City, where both the Mexico City Reds and Hornsby’s Vera Cruz Blues (named for Pasquel’s home city but also based in the capital) played their home games.

Hornsby’s team included Dandridge, as well as former Philadelphia Phillies’ and Washington Senators’ infielder Chile Gomez (who’d played against Hornsby in the 1935 Mexican games), former Syracuse infielder Antonio “Chico” Rodriquez, and catcher Salvador Hernandez, who’d spent the past two seasons with the Chicago Cubs. Inasmuch as only those four players spoke English, Hornsby recalled, “I had to give my team pep ‘talks’ by waving my arms and making all kinds of odd gestures.”29

On opening day, some 20,000 people showed up at the Mexico City ballpark, pushed down the right-field fence, crowded around the infield, pelted police and opposing players with fruit, and, when the game was over, threw dirt on wealthy women patrons as they left the grounds. Although most of his players were used to such disorderly scenes, for Hornsby it was a strange environment in which to try to play baseball. He stuck it out through eight games over three weeks, riding buses hundreds of miles at a stretch, sleeping in shabby hotels, and eating food that was usually to his liking but often didn’t agree with the non-Mexicans on the team. At the end of the month, the Blues came home and won the first of a three-game set with Puebla.

On Saturday, March 31, his club trailed 14–13 in the bottom of the ninth inning, when, with the bases full, Hornsby put himself in as a pinch hitter. As he recounted it a few weeks later, “I got hold of one. The air is pretty thin down there and the ball carries. It went out of the park for four runs and we won again, 17–14. The peons carried me off the field and threw fruit at the other team.”30

The next morning Pasquel called Hornsby into his ballpark office. “Mr. Hornsby,” said Pasquel, “that was a nice hit yesterday, but it would have been better if we hadn’t won the game.” Although Hornsby knew that Pasquel owned a piece of all six teams in the league, he was astonished to learn that the Mexican mogul actually wanted his Blues to lose, so they could draw a bigger Sunday crowd for what would have been the deciding game of the series. “Now,” Pasquel complained, “we have already won the series.” Shaking his head in disbelief, Hornsby suggested that maybe it would be better for everybody concerned if he and Pasquel parted company. “I finally decided that I’d rather be a lamp-post in America than a general down there,” Hornsby said when he got back to St. Louis, “so I quit.” Yet he remained enthusiastic about the future of baseball in Mexico, which “can be made into a baseball paradise.”31

Shortly after his return, radio station WTMV, across the river in East St. Louis, hired him to do a fifteen-minute baseball report and commentary, airing six nights a week. The station paid him $150 per month through the baseball season—$900 in all. Awkward and stiff early on, Hornsby eventually learned to read his copy clearly and ad lib effectively. Having lived most of his life in midwestern and eastern U.S. cities, he no longer spoke with a pronounced Texas accent; now he sounded much like a typical lower Middle Westerner.

That winter, the Hornsbys’ twenty-year marriage effectively came to an end. Although neither filed for divorce, they lived apart from then on. Jeannette continued to reside in St. Louis; in the absence of a formal separation agreement, Rogers sent her a monthly check.

Early in 1945 he moved to Chicago, rented an apartment at 1260 North Dearborn, and went to work year-round as director of a citywide youth baseball program called Diamond Schools for Boys sponsored by the Chicago Daily News and the city recreation commission. The program offered free clinics for boys between the ages of ten and sixteen, with instruction to take place on the recreation commission’s seventy baseball diamonds. Assisted by Tom Sheehan, a former big-league pitcher, Hornsby would visit all the diamonds, do some teaching himself, and oversee several dozen neighborhood instructors.

In August, Hornsby, Sheehan, Jack Ryan, and University of Illinois baseball coach Wally Roettger traveled by station wagon to Galesburg, Peoria, Springfield, Decatur, Danville, and Champaign for baseball clinics, radio and newspaper interviews, and luncheons with local civic groups. Hornsby also sold (for twenty-five cents apiece) five instructional booklets he’d put together in the late 1930s on batting and pitching. “I liked every minute of it,” he said at the end of the 600-mile trip. “The boys are attentive and punctual. They’re interested.” In turn, “We give ’em a chance to play and don’t bore ’em with talk. They find out we sincerely seek to help them.”32

By the end of that summer of 1945, the war had ended and professional baseball was entering a period of unprecedented and previously unimagined popularity and profits. If in fact Commissioner Landis had blacklisted Hornsby, the judge was no longer around to interfere with his professional life; in November 1944, after nearly a quarter century as baseball czar, Landis died at age seventy-eight. Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, the new commissioner, found too much else to worry about—such as players’ salary and pension demands, impending racial integration, and Jorge Pasquel’s designs on major-league rosters—to concern himself with Rogers Hornsby’s past imbroglios.

As yet nobody in either the majors or the minors had called Hornsby about a job, but for now he wasn’t doing badly. Reestablished in a city where he knew a lot of people, he could count on a steady twelvemonths income of about $6,000—some of which he actually saved. Half the year he was out on baseball fields working with kids, something he clearly enjoyed.

He also wasn’t long without female companionship. Sometime in 1945 he met a divorcée named Bernadette Ann Harris. Little would ever be known of her life before she met Hornsby, except that she was born in Rose Creek, Minnesota, in 1898, that she was a former nurse who married a Milwaukee physician named Robert Harris, and that they were divorced in 1940. Hornsby later said that she became his “personal good friend and secretary.”33 Bernadette Harris obviously was (or became) more than friend and secretary; when, in 1948, Hornsby bought a six-unit apartment building at 1249 West Thorndale Avenue, they moved in together on the first floor.

Early in 1946, after more than two years with the Marine Corps in the South Pacific, Bill Hornsby received his discharge and came to see his father in Chicago. Now nineteen and a muscular six-foot-one and 194 pounds, he aimed for a career in professional baseball, even though, he told reporters, he knew he couldn’t hit “like Dad.” About to “go home to St. Louis” to see his mother, he intended to rejoin Hornsby later and help out in the Daily News baseball school.34

In the meantime, Hornsby finally gained major-league reemployment, albeit only briefly. Manager Jimmy Dykes of the Chicago White Sox contacted him about coming out to Pasadena, California, and working with his hitters for a week in spring training; shortly thereafter Charlie Grimm put aside his dislike for Hornsby long enough to invite him to do the same thing for the Cubs on Catalina Island.

Bill Hornsby accompanied his father as far as Pasadena, where Rogers Hornsby Jr. was working for an engineering firm. A graduate of Denison (Texas) High School, at age sixteen, Hornsby’s older son had always been more interested in fly-fishing and electricity than competitive sports; as a teenager he built his own crystal radio sets.35 After studying electrical engineering at Texas A & M College, he married, worked in Pasadena, then, in 1942, enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Following training stints in Texas, he joined a bomber group in Britain and flew fifty missions as a navigator.

That March in Pasadena, after many years, Hornsby renewed his acquaintance with his son by his first marriage, and also met Wanda Grace Hornsby and little Ann, his two-year-old granddaughter. It was the first and only meeting for the Hornsby half brothers; within another year and a half, Rogers Jr. would have rejoined the air force and lost contact with Rogers and Bill Hornsby.

In April, while Hornsby again got the Daily News’s clinics under way, a Boston Red Sox scout looked over Bill Hornsby and signed him to a minor-league contract with Lynn, Massachusetts, of the Class B New England League. Bill found the company too fast at that level; by July he was with the Red Sox farm at Oneonta, New York, in the Canadian-American League, one classification lower. There he proved himself a capable infielder who hit with occasional power, but he had trouble with anything besides a straight fastball. For 1947 he was elevated to Lynn, but he would never be more than a journeyman minor-leaguer.

Meanwhile his father put in another year as administrator and pedagogue for the Daily News. At South Bend, Indiana, after he finished speaking at a service clubs luncheon, the master of ceremonies presented a certificate of appreciation for his work in youth baseball. Hornsby looked at it, scowled, and handed it back. “This isn’t for me,” he said crossly. “My name is Rogers Hornsby. This is made out to Roger Hornsby.” Jack Ryan jumped up to grab the microphone and smooth things over. “Now, Rog,” Ryan laughed, “take it easy, old boy. They didn’t take a basehit away from you. They just dropped a letter from your name.”36

Hornsby might be excused for showing irritation when people still got his name wrong, because, for all his renown, a full-time post in Organized Baseball hadn’t materialized. Sam Breadon, for one, wouldn’t hear of reemploying Hornsby. That October, in Breadon’s hotel suite in Boston (where the Cardinals opened the World Series versus the Red Sox), the venerable sports journalist Grantland Rice asked Breadon why he didn’t hire Hornsby to work with young players in the Cardinals’ farm system. Hornsby knew more about hitting and how to teach it than anybody, Breadon granted that, but “I couldn’t look those fathers and mothers in the eye and say we’d look after their boys’ welfare, their health and their morals, if Hornsby was going to be one of their teachers.”37

Another temporary instructorship did come along for Hornsby early in 1947, when William H. Veeck Jr., the brash young showman who headed a syndicate that had acquired the Cleveland franchise, invited him to come to Tucson, Arizona, and work in the midwinter sunshine with players from the Indians’ organization. Hornsby again brought along his ballplaying son, who donned an old Cleveland uniform and practiced with several minor-league prospects under the scrutiny of Tris Speaker, Bill McKechnie, and Al Lopez—all full-time coaches for player-manager Lou Boudreau. Hornsby’s particular assignment was to try to help catcher Jim Hegan and outfielder Pat Seerey, who’d both been with the team for several years. Tall and lanky, Hegan hit for neither power nor average; Seerey, stocky and perpetually overweight, had slammed twenty-six homers in 1946 but batted only .225. For the past three seasons he’d led the American League in strikeouts.

By now, Hornsby himself—fifty years old and almost completely gray—tipped the scales at about 225 pounds. But when he picked up a bat, he could still scorch line drives to all parts of the ballpark, which in itself may have worked a discouraging effect on his subjects. At any rate, neither Hegan nor Seerey profited from their sessions at Tucson. By midsummer Hegan’s hitting had improved, but only after he abandoned Hornsby’s advice to stand virtually upright and away from the plate. Battling an awful slump as well as his waistline, Seerey went back to his old crouching stance; yet, he moaned, “it’s still no hits.… Aw, hell, I’m still striking out. Right now I don’t know what the hell [Hornsby] tried to tell me. I musta forgot it.”38

At Tucson, as the Cleveland News’s Ed McAuley remembered him, Hornsby was “tireless, patient and hard-working.” He stood for hours behind the batting cage, making suggestions, giving encouragement, being, McAuley thought, “more constantly interested in baseball than anyone else I’ve met”—except possibly Joe McCarthy. At night Hornsby sat in the lobby of the Santa Rita Hotel, waiting for his pupils to join him and talk baseball. “Some of them did, but not enough for the Rajah,” wrote McAuley. “Mac, I can’t understand it,” he recalled Hornsby’s saying. “I’ve been around a long time and I have something to contribute. Yet very few of the youngsters are interested enough to talk with me.”39

Like other managers in the past, Lou Boudreau found Hornsby’s presence discomforting. Whereas Tris Speaker readily deferred to the twenty-nine-year-old Boudreau, Hornsby put in his two cents’ worth about everything. It soon became apparent, McAuley felt, that “Hornsby was the ‘outsider’ of the brain trust—that the sooner he left camp, the better Boudreau would like it.”40 Finally Bill Veeck called with orders that Hornsby was to visit Cleveland’s Oklahoma City farm club at Jacksonville, Florida. Hornsby lingered in Tucson and, when Veeck arrived a few days later, made an unsuccessful effort to talk the Indians’ president into letting him stay on.

After spending a week at Jacksonville looking over Oklahoma City’s personnel, Hornsby returned to Chicago to start the Daily News schools, no doubt disappointed that he hadn’t turned up something long-term with the Indians. The following fall he decided to supplement his annual salary by reestablishing his Hot Springs baseball school, which he’d last operated in 1942. Proclaiming “Rogers Hornsby Reopening His Great Baseball School” over a photo of a jowly Hornsby, advertisements stipulated charges of $100 plus room and board for six weeks from mid-February to the end of March. Hornsby also succeeded in getting his school certified with the Veterans Administration for GI Bill educational benefits.41

In January 1948, with what must have been mixed feelings, he traveled to St. Louis for a dinner at the Hotel Jefferson in honor of Sam Breadon, who’d sold the Cardinals the previous November. When his turn at the microphone came, Hornsby made a few nice remarks, after which Breadon beamed as he posed with Hornsby, Gabby Street, Frank Frisch, Billy Southworth, and Eddie Dyer—five of the six managers of his nine Cardinals pennant winners.42

Breadon’s death in May 1949 from cancer followed Babe Ruth’s the previous August (also from cancer) and Hack Wilson’s in November (from drink). All three men affected Hornsby’s life in important ways: Breadon, by putting the Cardinals on their feet financially so they could build upon Hornsby’s talents as player and manager; Ruth, by popularizing power-oriented baseball and establishing a standard for judging not only Hornsby’s batting prowess but his salaries; and Wilson, by doing much to make possible Hornsby’s second World Series, then helping him lose it, and finally, in 1931, performing so badly on and off the field that Hornsby couldn’t win with the most-talented ballclub he ever managed.

In 1948 Hornsby conducted both his baseball school at Hot Springs and the Daily News clinics in the summer months in Chicago. Of the 132 young players at Hot Springs the next year, sixty-four signed professional contracts, including fourteen taken en masse by the independent Centralia, Illinois, franchise of the Class D Mississippi–Ohio Valley League. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Hornsby was credited with overseeing a program that, over four summers, had taught baseball to some 100,000 boys.

Hornsby’s association with the Chicago Daily News baseball program ended in 1949, when WENR-TV made him what he termed “a very attractive offer” to do play-by-play for the Chicago Cubs’ home games.43 As yet, in that nascent period in television sports, such qualities as grammar, diction, and hyperbolic embellishment seemed less important than having an authoritative voice in the broadcast booth; if nothing else, Hornsby’s voice would be authoritative. So he gained the opportunity to work closely with the Cubs franchise (which, ironically, dismissed Charlie Grimm and hired Frank Frisch during that same season); he also reinforced his presence both within baseball circles and with a new generation of fans. By the end of the year, feelers for managing jobs had started to come in.

About midnight on December 23, 1949, Hornsby received a call from a wire-service reporter, who told him that a couple of hours earlier, his son Rogers Jr. had been killed in a plane crash. By dawn he knew the particulars: A B-50 bomber (a B-29 modified for in-flight refueling) had left Chatham Air Force Base at Savannah, Georgia, on a routine training mission. Five minutes after lifting off to the northeast, the huge aircraft lost power and plunged into a swamp on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River—within sight of U.S. Highway 17 but virtually inaccessible. As described the next day, the crash site was “a crater of marshy ooze,” with nothing visible but “bits of metal and dirty water.”44 All eleven crew members (all married men) were killed, including First Lieutenant Hornsby, the navigator. It took several days for searchers, working in shoulder-deep mud, to recover the bodies.

Barely twenty-nine years old, Rogers Hornsby Jr. left a wife, a five-year-old daughter, and a two-year-old son (whom his grandfather had never seen). When Hornsby called his son’s mother to share her grief, she told him that under no circumstances was he to attend the funeral services. So, in deference to her wishes, he ordered a huge floral spray “from Rogers and Bill” sent to Denison, where services were held before burial in the military cemetery at San Antonio. When Sarah Finley saw the spray, recalled her granddaughter, “she threw a fit.”45

If the year ended in sadness, hurt feelings, and no doubt considerable regret on the part of both Hornsby and his onetime wife, at least his professional prospects had brightened. He’d spent the past twelve years as something of a baseball vagabond, always hopeful of returning to the big leagues but with little more than hope to go on. Now, at last, he was about to get his chance to make it back.