3

Toward Stardom

While Branch Rickey hustled Cardinals stock to as many St. Louisians as he could persuade to invest in the franchise (and bought 200 shares at five dollars each for himself), Miller Huggins traveled to Texas to prepare for another spring training. Still unable to afford the comforts of San Antonio, the Cardinals again trained at Hot Wells.

Worry about a war with Mexico had passed by the time the earliest arrivals began throwing baseballs around; late in January 1917 General Pershing’s “punitive expedition” began its withdrawal, having failed to come within shooting distance of Pancho Villa but having shot at—and been shot at by—plenty of other Mexicans.

Now a much bigger international crisis was at hand: the Wilson administration’s dogged insistence on respect for U.S. neutral rights by the belligerents in the war convulsing Europe since 1914 had failed to preserve peace. Since January, when the Imperial German high command resumed unlimited submarine warfare in the north Atlantic, American shipping had been under attack and a growing number of American citizens had lost their lives. With U.S.-German diplomatic relations officially broken, events moved the two countries steadily toward war.

That spring, at the behest of league president Ban Johnson, American League players performed military drills at their training sites under the direction of army officers detailed from nearby posts. President John Tener of the National League apparently thought such a show of “preparedness” unnecessary for his league, so the Cardinals and other teams in the “senior circuit” were spared the daily regimen of shouldering their bats and marching to and fro across the diamond.

With the May–September player limit raised to twenty-two per club, Rickey worked to trim salary fat. As he sought to dispose of Bob Bescher and the $4,500 salary Bescher had received since the Federal League war, Rickey told Cincinnati president August “Garry” Herrmann that he was “positive the St. Louis club will not be a contender for the pennant this year.” The Cardinals were trying to “rebuil[d] along economic lines, and therefore with young material.”1

The principal figure in Rickey’s reconstruction wasn’t cooperating with his efforts to do things “along economic lines.” Although Rogers Hornsby possessed only seven months of big-league experience, he knew he was the top player on a poor ballclub. He wanted $4,000, twice his rookie pay, and at the beginning of spring practice he remained unsigned. Huggins thought he’d settled matters by telephone, only to learn, when Hornsby arrived at Hot Wells on March 5, that the young man still wasn’t happy.

A couple of days around the ballfield, though, worked the same effect on Hornsby it usually did on recalcitrants. On the seventh he agreed to a one-year salary of $3,000. It wasn’t a lot of money compared to the $15,000–$20,000 commanded by such reigning stars as Ty Cobb, Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker, and Walter Johnson (all American Leaguers), but for a second-year player who still hadn’t attained legal manhood, a 50 percent raise wasn’t bad.

When the Cardinals left Hot Wells and started north on the spring exhibition trail, Hornsby accompanied the second team to Denison, where he was honored at home plate by local people who remembered his Denison Railroader exploits and his stopover as an unproven rookie a year earlier. They greeted him now as an established star. After rejoining Huggins and the regulars for a game at Fort Worth, he was again honored, this time as a native son who brought pride and recognition to his hometown.

Back in St. Louis, the Cardinals discovered that Robison Field’s seating capacity had shrunk by about 1,500 because the city building commissioner decided that the top part of the left-field bleachers was unsafe and ordered several rows sawed off. Although the lost space wasn’t missed, more of the remaining seats would be filled in the coming season than had been in several years; by the end of June some 168,000 fans had paid to see the Cardinals at home. Huggins’s 1917 squad didn’t come close to a pennant, but they offered local National League fans a surprisingly good brand of team baseball, as well as the opportunity to watch the ripening of one of the sport’s greatest individual talents.

On April 12, ten days after President Wilson addressed a joint session of the Congress and asked for a declaration of formal hostilities against Imperial Germany, the Cardinals opened the National League schedule by losing at Cincinnati before a near-capacity crowd of 24,000. Eight days later, a standing-room-only turnout greeted them when they opened at Robison Field with a 5–1 victory over the Reds, behind Bill Doak.

Actually the war affected baseball relatively little in 1917. Total major-league attendance—though still a couple million below the figure for 1913 (the last season before the Federal League war)—about equaled that for 1916. Mobilization of people and resources went forward deliberately; the Congress took a month to establish a military conscription system, registration for the draft didn’t commence until June 6, and it was December before the first round of call-ups took place. For more than a year, the United States’ participation in the war was of little direct military significance. Great Britain and France continued to expend huge numbers of men in an effort to break the stalemate on the western front, while Imperial Germany used the time to prepare a victory offensive before American power could alter the strategic balance.

Boston catcher Hank Gowdy, star of the Braves’ four-game sweep of the heavily favored Philadelphia Athletics in the 1914 World Series, became another kind of hero as the first major-leaguer to enlist for military service. But the great majority of others throughout Organized Baseball, wanting nothing more than to proceed with their professional and personal lives, showed little enthusiasm for rushing into a war that had already killed several million Europeans.

Other matters besides the prospect of military service intruded on young Rogers Hornsby’s efforts to concentrate on baseball. On Tuesday evening, May 29, his family wired that thirty-year-old William W. Hornsby had been shot and killed in an argument with a bartender in a Fort Worth saloon. The teetotaling younger brother caught a night train, arrived home the next day, attended the funeral on June 1, hurried to another train as soon as the interment services concluded, and was back in the lineup at Robison Field against the New York Giants on June 3. Eleven days later he broke out of a mild slump with a single, double, and bases-loaded home run in an 8–7 victory over Boston.

Two weeks after that, the Cardinals closed their home stand and began a road trip in Chicago. While they were away, the century’s worst race riot up to then erupted across the river in East St. Louis, Illinois. That city had absorbed a heavy influx of mostly southern black people, attracted by the St. Louis area’s booming wartime economy and seeking affordable (and permissible) places to live. On July 2, 1917, mutual anger and resentment erupted into pitched battles in which at least eight whites and thirty-nine blacks died before fifteen companies of the Illinois National Guard occupied the city. For days, smoke from burning black-occupied residences and businesses rose above East St. Louis.

Bob Connery—who was probably as little interested in the East St. Louis horrors as was Rogers Hornsby—now spoke proudly of his “discovery”: “That kid is playing short[stop] in a manner far beyond our wildest dreams.”2 Connery’s encomiums aside, Hornsby was far from being a polished infielder. Spending the entire season at shortstop, he participated in eighty-two double plays (second best in the major leagues), but he also committed the third-highest number of errors (fifty-two).

Most of the customers at Robison Field liked Hornsby and usually overlooked his inconsistent efforts afield, but in mid-August, when he dropped a pop fly that center fielder Jack Smith could have caught, the outfield bleacherites gave out with a barrage of catcalls. One foghorn-voiced occupant of the right-field stands was so abusive that, as one witness put it, “the milkfed young man got sore … and called the police.”3 (What Hornsby actually did was call time and ask a park policeman to quiet the heckler—a tactic that only encouraged more jeers.)

If Hornsby appeared a bit thin-skinned that day, maybe it was because he was worrying about his mother, whose poor state of health had recently caused him to be away from the team for some thirty-six hectic, sleepless hours en route to and from Fort Worth. It was the beginning of nine years of chronic illness for Mary Rogers Hornsby—as well as nine years of periodic trips to her bedside by her favorite offspring.

Yet however troubled he may have been by matters at home, the young Texan remained on top of his game when he took a bat in his hands. In 145 of his team’s 152 games (with two rain-outs), Hornsby improved over his previous year’s batting mark by fourteen points (to .327), besides hitting eight home runs (only four fewer than the league’s best), driving in sixty-six runs, and again stealing seventeen bases. As evidence of his status as a hard hitter, he led the National League with 253 total bases.

The Cardinals finished the season in third place—three games above the .500 mark and sixteen games behind the pennant-winning New York Giants. Home attendance held up well for most of the season, so that Rickey was able to declare a $20,000 profit and a small dividend for the franchise’s stockholders.

The National Leaguers won four of six decisions in the postseason series with the Browns (seventh-place finishers in the American League) and gained an extra $109 per man. “Pep” Hornsby, as some of his teammates still called him, drove home to Fort Worth in his first automobile, a new Buick roadster, stopping in Denison to see Sarah Elizabeth Martin, whom he’d known since his stay with the Railroaders. Still in her teens, a brown-haired, sweet-faced young woman, Sarah was no doubt much taken by the courtship of somebody who almost overnight, it seemed, had become a famous baseball player.

But baseball came first for Hornsby—as it always would. That October, while the Giants fell to the Chicago White Sox six games to two in the World Series, he toured the middle part of the country with a group of major-leaguers that included the Browns’ George Sisler as well as Walter Johnson, the American League’s best pitcher, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, fresh from his third-straight thirty-win season for the Philadelphia Phillies. War or no war, the touring ballplayers drew good crowds and nicely supplemented their regular-season salaries.

Meanwhile Miller Huggins decided to seek greener fields. Unhappy since the sale of the Cardinals franchise and Rickey’s elevation over him in player-disposition matters (at a bigger salary), Huggins turned down a $10,000 offer and went over to the American League, signing a two-year contract with the lackluster New York Yankees for $12,500 per year and taking ace scout Bob Connery with him. Rickey quickly offered the manager’s job to Jack Hendricks, who in 1917 managed Indianapolis to both a pennant in the American Association and a postseason “Little World Series” victory over Toronto of the International League.

Over the winter Chicago Cubs owner Charles Weeghman renewed his efforts to buy Hornsby. After paying Philadelphia $60,000 for the illustrious battery of Alexander and Bill Killefer, Weeghman came to St. Louis, lunched with Rickey, and offered a flat $75,000 for Hornsby. Sorely tempted, Rickey finally decided that he wouldn’t be “the goat of Mr. Weeghman’s publicity game.” It wasn’t a game, as well-publicized overtures from the New York Giants and various other clubs confirmed. “Rogers Hornsby,” said a local sportswriter, “is now enjoying the … glory of being … the most sought after player in the National League.”4 For reasons of his own, the shrewd Rickey thought better of giving up his best player solely for cash.

In January, Hornsby wrote Rickey the good news that his local draft board in Fort Worth had placed him in Class 3—deferment status—because he provided sole support for his mother and his sister, Margaret, who put off marriage to remain at home and care for Mary Hornsby. Three weeks later Rickey received a less-agreeable communication: Hornsby had received his contract for 1918 and didn’t like it. He wanted $7,000, a demand that prompted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s John E. Wray to remark upon the young man’s “elephantiasis of the cranium.”5

Although he made the usual front-office claim that fans turned out to see a winning team regardless of particular performers, Rickey knew he had to deal with the young man. While manager Hendricks made a futile trip to Fort Worth to try to talk Hornsby into signing, Wray (who like most sportswriters tended to side with management in contract disputes) suggested that “[Hornsby] sit on the bench until he wakes up to a realization that the European war is on and the Federal war is off.”6

Finally Rickey himself went to Fort Worth and spent two days talking with Hornsby and his mother. In the end Hornsby agreed to a two-year contract at $4,000 per year—the salary he sought and failed to get a year earlier—and Rickey consented to a clause that prohibited Hornsby’s sale or trade without his concurrence. The player was signed, Rickey wired back to St. Louis, and “mighty glad he was not traded to Chicago.”7

Fearing losses of players to military service and the effects of unsettled wartime conditions, American and National League presidents and club owners decided to save a few thousand dollars apiece by halving the time spent at spring training—at the same time that they scheduled the standard 154-game season. So on March 20 Hornsby arrived at Hot Wells to start his third full big-league season weighing a robust 183 pounds (about eight more than his usual midseason weight), claiming to be fully satisfied with his contract, and saying nice things about club president Rickey.

When the Cardinals stopped at Fort Worth, on their way north, for a game with the Panthers, Hornsby was again called to home plate before the game and lauded and applauded. The ballclub proceeded to Kansas City, while Hornsby received Rickey’s permission to stay behind for a few days because his mother had suffered another relapse. He arrived in St. Louis in time for the preseason series with the Browns, but he might as well have lingered in Texas; the weather was foul, the teams played only four of seven scheduled games (all won by the American Leaguers), and Hornsby failed to hit at all. It was a dreary preview to what became an unhappy season for Hornsby, the St. Louis Cardinals, and all baseball.

Only 8,000 were on hand for the season opener at what was now called Cardinal Field. A year earlier the war in Europe had still seemed far away, but now the setting was decidedly martial. One difference was that, while the starting time for local home games remained at 3:15, the sun would set an hour later under wartime daylight-savings time. Before the game the crowd was serenaded by the Great Lakes Naval Training Station band, exhorted by Liberty Loan speakers, and entertained by a pantomime at home plate called “Swatting the Kaiser,” in which “Uncle Sam” pummeled a spike-helmeted representation of the German monarch.

When the game finally got under way, Grover Cleveland Alexander pitched for the first time as a Chicago Cub, yielding a triple to Hornsby and eight other hits, and losing to Lee Meadows, 4–2. Ten days later, at Chicago, Alexander again faced St. Louis in his last game before entering the army. The Cubs won a 3–2 thriller in the ninth inning.

Although Hornsby made two hits in Alexander’s farewell appearance, for most of the year he struggled both at bat and afield in the worst full-season performance of his major-league career. Partly Hornsby’s poor showing was a matter of injuries: a groin pull sustained in mid-May, later a sore shoulder and a spike wound in his right thumb. Mostly, though, it had to do with his acute personal dislike for manager Jack Hendricks.

A high-school dropout, Hornsby generally had no use for “college boys.” He made an exception for Miller Huggins—a graduate of the University of Cincinnati law school and a licensed attorney—not only because Huggins had given the youngster a fair chance to prove himself but also because Huggins was an honest, plainspoken, down-to-earth fellow who wore his formal learning lightly.

Hendricks, on the other hand, never gained Hornsby’s trust. That Hendricks was a graduate of Northwestern University may have appealed to Rickey, who enjoyed the company of educated people, but he impressed Hornsby only as an incompetent “bush leaguer.”8 Lacking confidence in whatever Hendricks might be trying to do with the ball-club, Hornsby generally played for himself. For his part, Hendricks resented the way Hornsby had practically brushed him off in February when he visited Fort Worth to talk contract terms, and he became convinced that Hornsby was a “malingerer” whose groin pull and other physical complaints were excuses for not playing as hard and as often as he should.

Of course it didn’t help poor Hendricks that, as the 1918 season wore along, he lost player after player either to the military draft or to some kind of civilian employment deemed an “essential occupation,” which usually meant signing on with shipyards, munitions plants, or steel mills and playing for company baseball teams in highly competitive semipro leagues. By June 19, when the Cardinals returned home, only Hornsby and three others from the opening-day lineup were still with the club, and forty-four-year-old Bobby Wallace, an outstanding shortstop for many years who joined the Cardinals as a coach in 1917, had been pressed into service.

Ten new players—replacements assembled from wherever Rickey could find them in the collapsing minor leagues—were waiting in St. Louis. (Of the ten minor leagues starting the 1918 season, only one—the Class AA International League—completed a full schedule.)9 Among the newcomers were Austin McHenry, a tough-looking, hard-hitting outfielder from southern Ohio, acquired from Milwaukee of the American Association, and Charlie Grimm, a St. Louis native who’d been playing first base for Little Rock in the Southern Association.

Early in July, Hornsby received notification from his draft board in Fort Worth that he was now in Class 1, subject to the draft. Shortly after that, his board ordered him either to “engage in an essential wartime occupation” or prepare to enter military service.10 He thus became the first major-league player to be so ordered under the War Department’s recently issued “Work or Fight” directive, which now became an added woe for ballclubs struggling to keep competent players on the field—in front of the smallest crowds so far in the century.

Meanwhile rumblings of friction between Hornsby and Hendricks became increasingly audible in the St. Louis press. Some local writers went so far as to suggest that in view of Hornsby’s lackluster showing, Branch Rickey might be sorry he hadn’t taken one of Charles Weeghman’s offers.

On July 8 Hornsby departed for Fort Worth, amid speculations that he was on the outs with Hendricks and his teammates, that his mother was ill again, or that he wanted to talk with his local draft board. In fact he did seek reclassification as “the sole support of an invalid mother and a sister.”11 After his board reaffirmed his Class 1 status and gave him until August 1 to obtain a war-essential job, Hornsby returned to St. Louis and told Rickey he intended to go to work in a shipyards, either at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or Wilmington, Delaware. Both places had sought his skills—not for making ships, of course, but for sparking their companies’ baseball teams.

Rickey now publicly acknowledged that, while he and Hornsby remained “the best of friends,” the Texan wasn’t on speaking terms with Hendricks or several teammates. Loquacious as always, Rickey couldn’t resist expanding on what the trouble was. Hornsby possessed “a peculiar character,” said Rickey, and one couldn’t understand him “unless one is intimately associated with him.” An “egotistical” young man, Hornsby not only thought of himself as baseball’s greatest player but “must be made to believe it if his club is to realize to the maximum of his ability.” That was the way he had to be “handled.” No, Rickey had no regrets about refusing offers for Hornsby; in fact, he said, “I continue to bless that day.” And once the war ended and Hornsby came back to baseball, “he’ll be able to show his former admirers who apparently have deserted him that he still is one of the greatest players who ever wore a uniform. I know he can do that.”12

Even at that early date, as Rickey described him, Hornsby was basically a loner. At the boardinghouse where he lived with other players, he had little to say on any subject except baseball. He didn’t take part in after-dinner card games, didn’t go out with teammates for a couple of beers, and was in bed by ten or eleven o’clock. Generally he kept to himself, as well as kept his mind on the business at hand: the next baseball game.

As things turned out, Hornsby was able to remain with the Cardinals until the end of the season, under a dispensation granted by the War Department whereby what remained of Organized Baseball was allowed to carry on through the traditional Labor Day doubleheaders and play the World Series immediately thereafter. Club presidents officially notified their players and managers that salaries would stop as of September 2. Meanwhile Rickey secured a major’s commission in the U.S. Army and showed up at his office in uniform.

By batting .342 (twenty-four hits for seventy at bats) during an eighteen-game road trip, Hornsby raised his average to a respectable level, but the team stayed in last place. A three-game series with Cincinnati in mid-August didn’t sell enough tickets to cover the Reds’ hotel bills from the visitors’ share of the receipts.

On August 26, after New York swept a doubleheader at Cardinal Field, Hendricks went to Rickey and asked that Hornsby be fined fifty dollars for taking a called third strike early in the first game and then wrangling at such length with umpire Pete Harrison that Harrison ejected him. Convinced that Hornsby deliberately got himself kicked out, Hendricks complained to Rickey that all season long Hornsby had been a “bad actor” (in baseball parlance, a player hard to deal with). A few days earlier, when he failed to slide and was tagged out at home plate, Hornsby told his teammates, “I’m too good a ball player to be sliding for a tailend team.”13

When Rickey notified Hornsby of the fifty-dollar fine, the angry ballplayer invited Sid Keener, a young sportswriter for the St. Louis Star, to have dinner with him. Later that evening, related Keener many years later, the two went to a gambling joint outside the city on Easton Avenue owned by an ex-convict named Tony Foley. There Hornsby exchanged fifty dollars in Federal Reserve notes for the same amount in silver dollars, which he carried home in a cloth sack. The next afternoon he walked into the Cardinals dressing room, went over to Hendricks, said “Here!” and threw the sackful of silver at the manager’s feet. “He just thought it would be funny to pay Jack off that way,” explained Keener.14

Hornsby also sounded off publicly, describing Hendricks as “a boob manager” and his teammates as “stool pigeons.”15 In Pittsburgh a few days later, no doubt at Rickey’s urging, Hendricks sought out the young malcontent and agreed to remit the fifty-dollar fine.

Nothing more was said on the matter for what remained of the shortest professional baseball season since the 1880s. For the Cardinals it ended at Cincinnati, where they lost both Labor Day games to finish last at 51–78, thirty-three games behind first-place Chicago. Hornsby batted only .281 and made forty-six errors in 115 games, all but two of which he played at shortstop.

As soon as he got back to St. Louis, he announced to any and all concerned that he would never again play for Jack Hendricks. Then he made preparations to leave for Wilmington, Delaware, where he would work for the Harlan Shipyards as a steel plate-setter at $400 per month—and play for the shipyards’ baseball team.

Hendricks, himself about to depart for overseas work in the Knights of Columbus athletic program, exhibited a petition of support signed by sixteen Cardinals, and reminded everybody that his contract still had a year to run. Rickey, complained Hendricks, gave in to Hornsby before the season on salary, during the season when he left the team and spent a leisurely period in Texas, and then later when Hornsby’s fine was rescinded.

Major Rickey, also bound for Europe, lamented the whole business. “Each [man],” he said, “had a poor opinion of the other and the result was disastrous.” Yet Rickey remained convinced that Hornsby, “under handling that will humor his own notion that he is one of the greatest diamond stars that ever put on a spiked shoe, and at the same time keep the proper reign [sic] on him,” would become “one of the game’s wonders.”16

So while Hornsby went to Harlan Shipyards and Rickey, Hendricks, and a number of other baseball notables (including Miller Huggins, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, and Christy Mathewson) went to France, James C. Jones acknowledged that the franchise had lost upwards of $30,000 during the past season and worried about how to meet the $210,000 balance on its indebtedness.

As soon as he was settled at Wilmington, Hornsby sent for Sarah Martin, his fiancée since the previous summer. After two days aboard a train, she arrived in Philadelphia, where Hornsby was waiting with a wedding ring. They married in a civil ceremony on September 23 and honeymooned for a couple days in Philadelphia and Wilmington before Hornsby returned to work—nominally as a plate-setter, mostly as a ballplayer.

The war ended much more quickly than anybody had anticipated. The arrival in France of the American Expeditionary Force in ever-increasing numbers finally turned the battle against the Germans. Early in November, with his armies in retreat, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to the neutral Netherlands, and the leadership of the new German republic asked for an armistice, which went into effect on November 11.

Meanwhile the newlyweds stayed on at Wilmington only long enough for Hornsby to play a couple more chilly ball games and collect his last paycheck at the end of November. He could look forward to more agreeable off-season employment at his first white-collar job: traveling from town to town and using his baseball name and connections to arrange a string of Texas automobile dealerships.

When Hornsby and his bride stopped over in St. Louis on their way home, Cardinals secretary-treasurer Hiram W. Mason cautioned him against talking with newsmen, but Hornsby was more than willing to air his discontents. “I’m not trying to stir up trouble on the club,” he said. “But it might as well be understood that Jack Hendricks and I cannot be friends.” When teammates had asked him to sign the pro-Hendricks petition, he couldn’t “bring myself to do it.” Yes, he had a poor season, “but after Hendricks ‘got on’ me I just lost heart.” If Hendricks returned for 1919, he wanted to be traded; but if Rickey took over the team, “I’ll be out there giving the best that’s in me.”17

Asked about Hornsby upon his return from France at the end of the year, Hendricks was conciliatory: “I’m sorry he says he doesn’t like me. I have no personal dislike for him.”18 Obviously trying to save his job, Hendricks went on to say that nobody on his ballclub had tried any harder in 1918 than Hornsby and Doug Baird, an infielder who also publicly criticized the manager. (Within three weeks Baird was gone, traded to Philadelphia with two third-rate pitchers for infielder Milton Stock, another pitcher, and a third-rate catcher.)

On January 26, 1919, the Cardinals’ board of directors met at chairman Jones’s office and voted to pay off Hendricks for an undisclosed portion of the balance of his contract. Rickey, just home from the wars, was invited to become Cardinals manager. Jones convinced the other directors that combining the positions of president and field manager would save $10,000 a year, as well as make it easier for Rickey to find and develop young players. With genuine reluctance, Rickey agreed to take on both jobs—at the same $15,000 salary but with a three-year contract extension and a share of whatever profits the franchise might make.

Trying to operate in a wartime season that was abbreviated by a full month, every major-league franchise—even the pennant-winning Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox—lost money in 1918. Bewailing their financial reverses, the club owners voted for a twenty-one-player June–September roster and a 140-game regular season—two weeks shorter than the schedule in place since 1903. Thus spring training for 1919 wouldn’t commence until the last week in March. As things turned out, the money the owners saved on two weeks’ worth of salaries didn’t equal what they lost in two weeks’ lost gate receipts, as crowds returned to the National Pastime in numbers equaling or exceeding prewar days.

The St. Louis Cardinals, one of the neediest franchises to begin with, came out of the war in particularly bad shape. Seeking to save wherever he could, Rickey decided not to order new uniforms for 1919 but to have last year’s repaired and saved for the season’s opener. During spring practice the players would wear spare uniform parts gathered from wherever they could be had, even from high school and semipro teams. Moreover, the Cardinals wouldn’t train at Hot Wells, Texas, or anywhere warmer than St. Louis. Rickey arranged with Washington University for the use of Francis Field, the facility that served both football and baseball teams. If it was too wet and cold outside, the players would move into the university’s field house. With as many as four players sharing a room, they would lodge at the Hamilton Hotel in the western part of the city.

Hornsby stayed at the hotel with the other players, although once the season began, Sarah joined him in a furnished apartment at 5455 Delmar Boulevard, in the western part of the St. Louis city limits, near Forest Park. (They still listed their home address as 1304 Commerce Street, North Fort Worth.)

Spring training for the 1919 Cardinals commenced at 9:30 on the morning of March 26, when some twenty-five men alighted from a streetcar and strolled onto Francis Field, an unfenced expanse of tall, dead grass except for a skinned diamond. It soon began to rain, so the first day’s workout consisted of playing catch indoors and attending the first of countless blackboard-diagrammed strategy lectures Rickey would give his Cardinals teams over the next six years.

Manager Rickey was all over the place that spring, instructing, exhorting, and encouraging everybody. He drilled his men in complicated signals and insisted that they look sharp and do what he told them. “We had more signals than a freight yard,” one Cardinal recalled. “Some of the boys thought they had to raise their hands to go to first base.”19

Over the winter Rickey had picked up two American League castoffs, each for the $2,500 waiver price: Burt Shotton, a ten-year veteran outfielder, and shortstop John Lavan (called “Doc” because he was a medical student at the University of Michigan). Shotton became Rickey’s “Sunday manager” and close personal friend; Lavan, Rickey was convinced, could be a first-class shortstop.

So the Cardinals’ resourceful manager decided to make Hornsby into a second baseman. Patiently and at length, Rickey drilled Hornsby on play around the “keystone,” concentrating on the intricacies of the double play from the right side of the infield: coming across the base, taking the throw from the shortstop while hitting the bag with the instep of his left foot, and then snapping the ball across his chest to first. Although Hornsby had played only one major-league game at second (in 1916), he respected Rickey’s baseball knowledge and, after some preliminary grumbling, took readily to his coaching.

Following a minimal exhibition schedule—games with Kansas City and Indianapolis of the American Association and Evansville of the Three-I League—the Cardinals met the Browns in the spring city series. Physically trim and still not needing eyeglasses (as opposed to the portly, bespectacled baseball mogul familiar to a later generation), Rickey was in uniform to meet at home plate with Browns manager Jimmy Burke and the two umpires before the opening game at Sportsman’s Park. In exceptionally agreeable weather, the teams drew good turnouts in both ballparks for a projected five-of-nine-games set, which the Browns won in eight.

On April 23 an overflow opening-day crowd at Redland Field, Cincinnati, saw the Reds beat the Cardinals 6–2 behind Adolfo Luque, a clever Cuban right-hander and one of the earliest Caribbean-area players in the majors. In the next day’s game (also won by the Reds, 3–1), Hornsby smashed a long drive and dashed around first base, only to be called out for passing rookie Cliff Heathcote, who, fooled by the second baseman’s pantomime catch, had headed back to first. Rickey allowed that although he wasn’t a swearing man, he could see the satisfactions one could sometimes get from it.

Had he been so inclined, Rickey would have sworn plentifully that season—it was another unhappy year for St. Louis National League fans. After losing twenty-two of their first thirty-two games, the Cardinals won the next seven straight, but it took another small spurt in September to keep them out of the league cellar. They finished seventh with a record of 54–83.

Baseball’s general attendance recovery helped the Cardinals in terms of their portion of receipts on the road, but at home they could attract only 173,604 paying spectators. With his ballclub going nowhere in the pennant race and the franchise constantly short of funds, Rickey irked Cardinals loyalists when he sent Walton Cruise, one of his more consistent hitters, to Boston for cash and traded Lee Meadows and Frank Snyder, two of the club’s mainstays. For Meadows, Philadelphia returned Doug Baird plus two nobodies; for Snyder, New York exchanged sore-armed left-hander Ferdie Schupp and an estimated $15,000.

For all the time Rickey spent coaching him in the spring, Hornsby was at second base in only twenty-seven of the 138 games in which he appeared. He played third base most of the time, although he also handled first and shortstop. At bat he got off to a slow start, but by June he was pushing his average up week by week. He finished at .318, with eight home runs (the league’s fourth best) and seventy-one runs batted in (tied for second). Although some unofficial tabulations listed Hornsby as the National League’s batting leader, official statistics released early in December certified that Edd Roush, Cincinnati’s superb center fielder, had beaten him out by three percentage points.

Hornsby intended to spend the whole off-season at Fort Worth, but he ended up traveling back and forth to St. Louis several times, as the defendant in the first of a long succession of legal controversies that would plague him over the decades.

On the morning of the previous June 17, Hornsby had driven his Buick roadster out of the driveway on Clara Avenue, turned west onto Delmar Boulevard, and struck and knocked over an elderly local citizen named Frank G. Rowe. Five weeks later, claiming to be suffering from a variety of serious injuries, including a permanently crippled right arm, Rowe brought suit against Hornsby in city circuit court, seeking $15,000 in damages. Hornsby, according to Rowe’s petition, “was driving carelessly and negligently operating … his said automobile at a careless and reckless rate of speed: to-wit, in excess of fifteen miles per hour and with a reckless disregard of the life and limb of the plaintiff.”20

In a deposition given at the end of September, at the office of Rowe’s attorney, Hornsby maintained that he blew his horn at the intersection (as required by local traffic law) and Rowe suddenly stepped out in front of him. Rowe himself was to blame; he simply walked out into traffic.

Nearly five months later, after Rowe’s attorney filed various amended petitions and Hornsby’s filed various answers, Hornsby and Rowe agreed on a settlement. On March 20, 1920, Rowe and his attorney and Hornsby’s two attorneys (signing in behalf of “Roger Hornsby”) agreed to a stipulation for dismissal, “all of the matters and things in controversy … having been adjusted, compromised and finally settled.” Besides assuming all court costs, as ordered by the judge, Hornsby undoubtedly made some kind of cash payment to Rowe, although the amount wasn’t indicated in the records of the case.21

While the suit against Hornsby drifted along, Branch Rickey met with the Cardinals’ board of directors and received another three-year extension on his contract as president and manager. Then, in January 1920, Sam Breadon, hitherto an obscure stockholder, loaned the Cardinals $18,000 on condition that he be elected president of the franchise. Chairman of the board Jones and the other directors complied with Breadon’s terms, and Rickey suddenly found himself demoted to vice president yet also expected to continue managing the ballclub—a job he always claimed he hadn’t wanted in the first place.

Forty-three years old, Breadon was a native of New York City who never finished grade school. He migrated to St. Louis in 1900 to take advantage of “more opportunity in the West,” as he put it.22 An early automobile entrepreneur (in partnership with Marion Lambert of Lambert Pharmaceuticals), he built a thriving business selling White Steamers and Pierce-Arrows. In 1917 James C. Jones talked him into buying fifty shares of Cardinals stock, and over the next two years he picked up others’ shares as they became available. When he became president of the Cardinals franchise, he was just about to purchase what proved to be a highly profitable Ford agency; in the decade-long automobile boom just getting under way, he became one of the richest men in the city.

The relationship between Rickey and Breadon would be one of mutual respect but never affection; Rickey soon discovered that his new boss was an even tighter man with a dollar than he was. He had to plead with Breadon for $10,000 with which to purchase a right-handed pitcher named Jesse Haines, who won twenty-one games at Kansas City in 1919. And he had to convince Breadon that it was in the long-term interests of the ballclub to continue to resist offers for Rogers Hornsby, however enticing they might be.

Rumors that John McGraw’s New York Giants were again in quest of Hornsby’s services surfaced as early as December. “McGraw wanted Rogers Hornsby,” Rickey recalled, “and I couldn’t blame him, because I wanted to keep him just as badly.”23 Soon it became known that Jack Hendricks, Hornsby’s onetime nemesis, was acting as agent for New York in negotiations for the Cardinals’ star and was to receive a $10,000 commission. Hendricks acknowledged as much, adding that the Giants would give St. Louis $70,000 plus first baseman George Kelly, second baseman Larry Doyle, a substitute outfielder, and the pick of the Giants’ catchers. Hendricks even offered to sweeten the deal with half of his commission, boosting the cash involved to $75,000. Breadon, according to Hendricks, was inclined to take the offer but deferred to Rickey’s judgment.

Many years later, Rickey related how, in a meeting in New York City, John McGraw and Giants president Charles Stoneham pressured him hard, with McGraw going so far as to show him how he could use each new player in his lineup. Exasperated by Rickey’s failure to do what was obviously in his own best interest, Stoneham starting talking straight cash: the Cardinals could have $300,000, keep Hornsby until the end of the 1920 season, and then receive another $50,000 if the Giants happened to win the pennant.

Rickey still wouldn’t deal, although he did indicate an interest in some kind of arrangement if it included Frank Frisch, a twenty-one-year-old infielder who’d joined the Giants during the 1919 season out of Fordham University. As yet, few people had taken notice of Frisch, but both Rickey and McGraw, shrewd judges of baseball flesh, knew he was a great prospect. McGraw rejected Rickey’s ploy out of hand, and the remarkable encounter broke up with the Cardinals vice president–manager trembling with apprehension at having turned down far more money than had ever been offered for a ballplayer.

“It is pleasing,” Rickey told St. Louis newsmen, “that all the puffing and big offers for Hornsby cannot affect his playing.… All this talk about offers ranging upward to in the neighborhood of $100,000 have [sic] reached his ears, but he has no inflated ideas as to his value.”24 Apparently not, because at the end of January, on one of his various trips into St. Louis to confer with his attorneys about the Rowe suit, Hornsby met Rickey at his little downtown office, listened patiently to his lecture about the club’s financial ills, and signed a one-year contract for $5,000, a raise of only $1,000.

In the years ahead, the young man wouldn’t have to inflate his own sense of value as a baseball property, because others would do that for him. Already one of the National League’s top players, he was about to emerge as its most renowned and highest paid as well—in a period when batting prowess surpassed pitching skills for the first time since the 1890s and attendance for baseball games reached unprecedented levels. Ahead lay what commentators were soon calling “the golden age of American sports.”