5

Troubles

On an open date midway through the 1922 baseball season, Hornsby went to the dog-racing track on the other side of the Mississippi at Collinsville, Illinois, in the company of Eddie Ainsmith, a native New Englander, twelve-year major-leaguer, and the Cardinals’ regular catcher that year. For some time—perhaps for the past three or four years—Hornsby had gambled regularly, never at cards or dice but occasionally on greyhounds and frequently on horses. He always said that he never really learned how to use a racing form, and that initially he depended on tips picked up from ballplayers, bookmakers, and other generally unreliable people. Eventually he would come to rely on professional handicappers, who studied daily racing entries and then advised Hornsby on how to make his bets.

At the Collinsville track that afternoon, Ainsmith introduced Hornsby to a shapely, strikingly pretty brunette who called herself Jeannette Pennington. Mutually attracted, she and Hornsby chatted awhile; then she went off with friends. On several occasions after that, he found her waiting at the Sportsman’s Park pass gate following games. Although he later denied taking her to restaurants or anywhere else in St. Louis, both of them acknowledged meeting in New York late in August at the Pennsylvania Hotel where the Cardinals were staying—albeit in the company of her mother and Flavia Foley, wife of St. Louis gambler and speakeasy operator Tony Foley.

She would almost certainly have been aware that Hornsby was married, but he claimed to have known her originally only as Jeannette Pennington. Her full name was Mary Jeannette Pennington Hine, and not only had she been married for more than two years—to a traveling automobile-supply salesman named John Hine—but she also had a reputation around St. Louis as a flapper who loved the nightlife and enjoyed friends of questionable propriety. Although she told Hornsby and everybody else that she was only twenty-three, George H. Williams, a prominent local attorney, subsequently reported to Branch Rickey that, according to his information, “she is much older than she claims to be—older than Hornsby, even, and is a tout for Tony Foley’s gambling place and has another married man on the string and is strictly a woman of the town and out for money.”1

Until Hornsby met Jeannette Pennington Hine, Sarah Hornsby was likely the only woman he’d known sexually. Though hardly the romantic type, he quickly fell in love with someone who seemed to be just about everything his less glamorous, down-to-earth Texas wife wasn’t. Hornsby, according to Sarah Hornsby’s ensuing petition for divorce, became quarrelsome, faultfinding, and “cold and indifferent … manifesting by his actions that he [had] little or no affections for her.” When she complained about living in furnished apartments and suggested they might be happier if they bought a place of their own, he suggested that “because of their apparent inability to get along together, he thought it best they should separate.”2

Hornsby took to stopping at the downtown millinery where Jeannette Pennington clerked and inventing other ways to see her, such as coming by the apartment she and her husband occupied on Goodfellow Avenue, on the pretext of leaving a dozen quail he’d shot in rural St. Louis County. Meanwhile the Hornsbys’ marriage disintegrated. Sarah Hornsby hired private detectives to confirm her suspicions, and late in December, following various angry and futile calls to the other woman, she and Rogers Jr. left for Los Angeles to live with her widowed mother. Hornsby moved into the Jefferson Hotel in downtown St. Louis and kept up as much contact with his lover as was possible, given the delicate nature of their legal situations.

Apparently John Hine remained ignorant of the affair until the end of 1922. At a New Year’s Eve party, Hine suddenly confronted his wife, slapped her face, and then got her to promise not to file for divorce. She filed anyway. Thus deceived (or so he claimed), Hine didn’t appear for the hearing in circuit court, where, on February 2, 1923, Mary Jeannette Pennington Hine received a speedy divorce decree that included the restoration of her maiden name.

Maybe because he wanted to put the best face on things (or because he was weary of the ongoing angst in St. Louis), Hornsby decided to leave for spring training earlier than usual. After a final tryst at the Melbourne Hotel, he boarded a train in zero-degree weather in the company of Ainsmith and pitcher Bill Pertica, en route to Bradenton, Florida, a rapidly growing town on the southern shore of Tampa Bay. Besides upgraded hotel accommodations, Bradenton afforded the Cardinals a ballpark with a covered grandstand and grassy infield. On February 26 Hornsby was the first man onto the diamond to start spring practice.

In an ill-considered letter dated March 7 (obviously part of an ongoing exchange), Hornsby wrote Jeannette Pennington: “You ask in my letter whether my wife will come back to St. Louis. I am not sure, but it will be better for us two if she don’t as you know the detectives were pretty hot on my trail.” After a paragraph of endearments, he signed it, “Your loving sweetheart, Rog.”3

Hine, who claimed that he repeatedly tried to reconcile with his wife, waited until she and her mother were absent from the apartment they shared at 1143 Union Boulevard, persuaded the janitor to let him in, went through her things, and found Hornsby’s March 7 letter. He typed a copy, then rushed to his attorney’s office to proclaim, “Rogers Hornsby has ruined my home.”4 Later, when Hine demanded an explanation from his ex-wife and ex-mother-in-law, they both scuffled with him in his automobile, and the original letter was torn to bits. Hine still retained his typewritten copy as principal evidence to support a motion he filed in circuit court on March 17, seeking to overturn Jeannette Pennington’s divorce decree.

With his wife on the other side of the continent and the woman he loved halfway in between, Hornsby tried to get ready for another season of doing what he did best. That spring of 1923 the Cardinals toured with the International League’s Rochester Rustlers, managed by George Stallings, who nine years earlier had led the Boston Braves to a world’s championship. When reporters asked Walter Hapgood, who promoted the tour, how he’d managed to find such places as Dothan and Thomasville, Georgia, and Andalusia and Eufaula, Alabama, Hapgood replied insouciantly that he had never realized so many people “were begging for a chance to see the great Rogers Hornsby.”5

Although the affable, hedonistic Babe Ruth had become the nation’s baseball idol, for many people—including Rogers Hornsby himself—the intense, volatile, self-denying Ty Cobb was still the greatest player who ever trod the diamond. Hornsby had gained his first look at Cobb in the fall of 1921 in the California State League, where the antics of the “Georgia Peach” had resulted in his ejection from several games. But Hornsby had never seen Cobb at his worst until the Cardinals met Cobb’s Detroit Tigers at Augusta, Georgia, their 1923 training site.

In the sixth inning, Cobb tried to steal second base and was tagged out by rookie shortstop Howard Freigau. In a fury, he cursed and threw dirt at umpire Cy Pfirman, who was touring with the Cardinals. Pfirman ordered him out of the game. When Cobb refused to leave, umpire in chief Harry “Steamboat” Johnson, employed by Detroit, drew his pocket watch, waited a minute, and, as Cobb stood his ground, declared the game forfeited to St. Louis. As people surged onto the field, the president of the Augusta baseball club and various civic leaders pleaded with fellow Augustan Cobb to leave, then with Johnson to let him stay, and finally with Branch Rickey to agree to resume play with Cobb on the field. Rickey absolutely refused, whereupon some 5,000 customers scrambled to the ticket windows to get their money back.

A short time later, Cobb stormed into the umpires’ dressing room and told Johnson he was fired, only to relent before the teams entrained for Chattanooga. Johnson and Pfirman worked the game there the next day, as well as subsequent games at Birmingham and elsewhere in Alabama and Tennessee, with Cobb behaving himself comparatively well.

The Cardinals’ annual spring matchup with the Browns consisted of only two games, both won by the American Leaguers. Conspicuously missing was George Sisler, who wouldn’t play at all in 1923 because a stubborn sinus infection had damaged his vision and necessitated off-season surgery. Jacques Fournier was also gone, traded to Brooklyn and thus deprived of his profitable off-season income as Hornsby’s coagent at Missouri State Life. “Sunny Jim” Bottomley, so called because he seemed always in good spirits, had come up from Syracuse late the previous season and taken over first base, the first important product of Rickey’s farm system.

Hornsby was batting close to .405 on May 8, when, at Philadelphia, he caught his spikes trying to make a throw from behind second base and tore something in his left knee. The next day he walked with a cane and watched from the grandstand, absent from a regular-season game for the first time since 1920. He was back in the starting lineup ten days later at Brooklyn, but the knee was badly swollen and he couldn’t run, cover his position adequately, or stride properly at bat. On May 26, at Pittsburgh, he limped to first after grounding a single through the infield, whereupon Rickey put in a pinch runner and sent Hornsby home to be examined by Robert F. Hyland, M.D., the Cardinals’ team physician.

Hyland kept Hornsby’s knee in a plaster cast for nearly two weeks, then removed it and gave him the okay to start working out. He returned to action on June 14 with a homer in a 3–2 victory over Boston at Sportsman’s Park, after which the Cardinals resided in fifth place, four games above .500. The very next night, Hornsby left for Fort Worth, again called home by news that his mother seemed near death. Five days later, with Mary Rogers Hornsby out of danger for the time being, he rejoined his teammates and went hitless in a loss to New York.

His injury, his mother’s crisis, his stressful love affair, and troubles with both his wife and his lover’s ex-husband combined to make June 1923 one of the worst periods in Hornsby’s life. Sarah Hornsby returned to St. Louis from California and filed for divorce; almost at the same time, John Hine’s attorney subpoenaed Hornsby as a witness in Hine’s suit in domestic relations court to overturn Jeannette Pennington’s divorce decree.

Inasmuch as Hine’s marriage was obviously finished, his action was probably an effort to lay the basis for a damage suit against Hornsby, on grounds of alienation of affections. According to an East St. Louis baker who testified in the hearing on Hine’s motion, Hine had bragged, “I’ll make a bunch of money out of a big ballplayer.”6

Hine’s lawyers decided not to call Hornsby to testify, but they did take his deposition, given on the evening of June 23 at the St. Louis Times building, following a loss to Chicago (the Cardinals’ fifth defeat in a row). Hornsby went over the history of his relationship with Jeannette Pennington, trying to make it innocent looking and even claiming that his March 7 letter—which he said carried the salutation “Dear Miss Pennington”—hadn’t been a love letter at all, in fact had been no more than a reply to a baseball fan! Asked about telephone conversations between Jeannette Pennington and Sarah Hornsby, he snapped, “I don’t want you to ask anything about my wife. Don’t ask a lot of foolish questions.”7

While Judge Hogan delayed rendering a decision on Hine’s motion, Hornsby became again a free man. He didn’t contest Sarah Hornsby’s divorce petition, neither appearing in person nor entering a formal denial. The hearing in circuit court before Judge Hogan, on June 12, lasted only fifteen minutes, most of which were taken up with testimony from two character witnesses for Sarah Hornsby. The decree stipulated that besides custody of Rogers Jr., she would receive a $25,000 lump-sum settlement.

That evening, at the new Chase Hotel, she met with reporters and handed out a typewritten statement denying that Rogers Hornsby was guilty of “any wrongdoing in the Hine matter.” That disclaimer, which people who’d been following the story would have found hard to swallow, was no doubt a condition of Hornsby’s agreement not to contest the divorce. Stopping from time to time to sob, she explained that because they’d usually lived in furnished apartments, their assets consisted of little more than cash and war bonds. Besides the $25,000 settlement, which she termed “more than generous,” Hornsby had “made provision for the support and education of our boy.”8 Within a few days Sarah and Rogers Hornsby Jr. were again bound for Los Angeles.

“The Cardinals are an entirely different team when Hornsby is out of the game,” remarked John McGraw on June 20, after his Giants had taken two of three at Sportsman’s Park and built their lead over Pittsburgh to six games.9 Yet even with Hornsby in the lineup, the 1923 Cardinals were a mediocre outfit. Jim Bottomley batted .371 in his first full season and justified the Fournier trade (even though Fournier also had a big year at Brooklyn), and Johnny Stuart, a rookie right-hander out of Ohio State University, pitched and won both games of a doubleheader at Boston—something that hadn’t been done in the majors since the early years of the century.10 But with the Cardinals clearly out of the running as early as July, it was generally an unmemorable season.

For Hornsby, the season was one he would mostly want to forget. Besides marital and extramarital muddles, he also fell into a bitter quarrel with the Cardinals management. It was all reminiscent of 1918, only much worse this time.

Late in August, at the Polo Grounds in New York, Hornsby reached third base and yelled for the batter to drive him in. With the count three balls and a strike, Rickey gave the “take” sign from the dugout. In plain sight, Hornsby threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration and disgust. He didn’t score, and the Cardinals lost the game and dropped deeper into fifth place, seventeen and one-half games behind the league-leading Giants. Afterward, in the visitors’ dressing room, Rickey sharply reminded Hornsby who was manager; the player replied with a barrage of what Rickey later described as “vile and unspeakable” language. Enraged, Rickey charged and swung at Hornsby, who simply pushed him away. Other players grabbed Rickey and held him until he regained his composure.

When the team returned to St. Louis a few days later, rumors again started to circulate that Hornsby would be traded. Rickey denied that any hard feelings remained; Breadon called the Rickey-Hornsby fracas “a closed incident.” “It all came about in the heat of battle,” said the Cardinals president. “Hornsby is not for sale or trade.” The affair upset the veteran St. Louis sports scribe John B. Sheridan, who scolded “warring Christian” Rickey for losing his self-control and asked, “What is the advantage of a college education, if our leading college men are to settle things as angry wolves settle them?”11

Publicly, Hornsby said nothing, and on September 8, playing first base for an ailing Bottomley, he registered four hits in nine at bats as the Cardinals swept a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park and crippled Cincinnati’s pennant chances. Pennant-bound for the third year in a row, the Giants took what proved to be an insurmountable lead over the Reds.

Shortly thereafter, Hornsby developed a severe skin rash on his chest and shoulders (conceivably a reaction to months of emotional stress) and, swathed in bandages and ointment under his clothing, sat in the grandstand during a series with Philadelphia. As the days passed, Hornsby still didn’t make himself available, despite team physician Hyland’s report that there was no reason he shouldn’t play. When the rash was gone, Hornsby complained of recurrent pain in the knee he had injured four months earlier; the Cardinals management now became convinced that their number-one player was “dogging it.”

Meanwhile Eddie Ainsmith went on a drunken spree, incurred the unforgiving wrath of Rickey and Breadon, and found himself sold to Brooklyn for the waiver price. Ainsmith announced that he wouldn’t leave St. Louis until the Cardinals paid him $4,000—what they owed him in lump sum after he agreed to a regimen of compulsory frugality, whereby he received $200 per month during the regular season and the balance of his contract at the end. For several days he sat in the stands with his pal Hornsby, until he finally left for Brooklyn. As Hornsby saw things, “Eddie behaved all right; the grudge they got against him is that he’s my friend. You oughta know that runnin’ around with me, he wouldn’t drink much; I never took a drink in my life.”12

As a generally unpleasant season neared its end, the word around town was that—in Rickey’s words—“a certain trouble-maker … who is associated with Hornsby in business and who has taken his baseball career in hand, seemingly” was giving the ballplayer bad advice—to wit, that he should force the Cardinals to trade him to an organization with greater appreciation of his talents. As many people in St. Louis were aware, Rickey was talking about Bob Newman of Missouri State Life. Queried by newsmen, Newman indignantly replied that he was far more interested in seeing a pennant winner in St. Louis than in Hornsby’s problems. “I am not his adviser,” said Newman. “I have no counsel to give him.”13

On September 27 Breadon announced that Hornsby was fined $500 and suspended for the remaining five games of the season. “Hornsby was able to play yesterday [against Brooklyn],” said Breadon, “and he should have played.” When the newspeople found Hornsby, he related that he went to the Cardinals’ clubhouse and told Rickey his knee was still bothering him, but that he was willing to play in two upcoming exhibition games. He then went upstairs to the grandstand, where Breadon spotted him, called him over, and told him he was fined and suspended. “He simply persisted in forcing discipline,” explained Rickey. “It was part of the plan.… But Hornsby will not be gratified by being traded.”14

Hornsby did play those September 28 and 29 exhibition dates against nearby semipro outfits. In view of his suspension and the fact that he was the principal gate attraction, he thought he was doing the club a big favor. Most big-league clubs made extra money playing in-season exhibition engagements, but Hornsby’s contract also allotted him a percentage of receipts from such games. What Hornsby didn’t make from those two games, when added to his $500 fine and season-ending five-game suspension, amounted to an approximate personal loss of $3,000.

The Hornsby-less Cardinals ended the season on Sunday, September 30, splitting a doubleheader with Chicago that left them in fifth place with a 79–74 record—the same position in the standings as the Sislerless Browns. Cardinals home attendance fell by more than 200,000; the organization ended up about $14,000 in the red.

Appearing in only 107 games, Hornsby slumped to .384 but still qualified for his fourth batting title. He hit seventeen home runs (twenty-four behind the league leader) and figured in none of the other major offensive categories except slugging percentage (.627).

Rickey and Breadon were convinced that John McGraw had again been “working on” Hornsby. Fearing that he might become the target of some kind of litigation undertaken by the Cardinals, Hornsby retained Frank J. Quinn, one of Jeannette Pennington’s lawyers, to represent his interests. As Quinn phrased it in legalese years later (in a suit to recover the fee Hornsby hadn’t paid him), the Cardinals officials believed “that said Hornsby had been incited to acts of insubordination by one John McGraw, of the New York Giants, for the purpose of causing such friction as would compel the said Cardinals to release said Hornsby from his contract with them, and thereby make him free to play ball with McGraw on the Giants.”15

At season’s end, Hornsby was unhappy about things in general. He said he didn’t want to play for Branch Rickey again, but he’d never been a troublemaker and had always given his best. But he’d rather play in St. Louis than anywhere, “because the people … have been wonderful to me.… I mean that as honestly and sincerely as anything I have ever said in my life.” If, though, his club wanted to trade him, “a baseball player has no hand in his affairs.… I will simply await developments.”16

Breadon, whose word was determining in Cardinals operations, held his own press conference. Whether Hornsby wanted to play for Rickey or not, Breadon told local reporters (making sure they wrote down his emphasis), “The Cardinals POSITIVELY will not trade him.… If he declines to play with St. Louis next year, he will not play ANY place in organized baseball.”17

Hornsby, having been in Organized Baseball nine years, knew how things worked. However antagonistic his relations with his employers might be, he would play for them in 1924—or he wouldn’t play. The off-season found him still as much at odds with himself and most things in his life as when the season started. He was divorced; Jeannette was divorced; they were in love; but they couldn’t do the right thing as long as a decision on her ex-husband’s suit was pending. That autumn, Hornsby aptly fitted the characterization penned some years earlier by the Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton: “Ball players are peculiar beings.… They are spoiled by overmuch praise if they make good, [and] they have about twenty-two hours a day to think about themselves and their troubles, to nurse grievances, and to develop peculiar turns of mind.”18

Rogers Hornsby had plenty of time to think about himself and his grievances, and to develop peculiar turns of mind. Rickey and Breadon had time to think, too. Both Rickey, a straitlaced Methodist who doted on his large family, and Breadon, happily married with two daughters himself, no doubt viewed Hornsby’s extramarital carryings-on with utmost distaste—but not so much that their baseball judgment was affected. Hornsby may have become a “bad actor,” but if they unloaded him, they would have to have comparable worth in return.

Whether or not John McGraw actively cultivated Hornsby’s discontents, the Giants leader wasn’t the only one scenting the possibility of a deal for Hornsby. Rickey acknowledged that during the last series of the season, Bill Killefer, now the Chicago Cubs’ manager, had inquired about the chances of acquiring the kid brother of his old Texas League batterymate. “Well, Bill,” as Rickey reported his reply, “I would not give you Hornsby for every Chicago player in uniform in the park today.”19

At the end of October, though, Rickey and Breadon met in Chicago for two hours with Killefer and William H. Veeck Sr., Cubs president. Since the purchase of the franchise by chewing-gum tycoon William K. Wrigley Jr. a few years earlier, the Cubs had become richer than ever—at least as rich as the Giants. Veeck told reporters afterward that the Cardinals wanted cash and several players, but not what the Cubs offered.

The day after the Cardinals leaders got back to St. Louis, Breadon went into conference at a downtown hotel with Dick Kinsella, ace scout for the Giants. Kinsella, according to Joseph Holland of the Post-Dispatch, arrived with a list of tradable players that included everybody but Frank Frisch and six others. A few days later, in New York, club secretary Jim Tierney cut the number of protected players to three; McGraw would trade anybody but Frisch, outfielder Ross Youngs, and shortstop Travis Jackson. The bidding for Hornsby, wrote Holland, “has developed into an open contest.”20

When the Cardinals’ brass met personally with McGraw, in New York just before he departed for Europe with wife and friends, Rickey still insisted that any deal must bring Frank Frisch to St. Louis. A .348 batter with 111 runs driven in and a majors-leading 223 hits in 1923, Frisch, at twenty-five, was faster and more sure-handed than Hornsby, and equally adept at either second or third base. As Giants captain, he was one of McGraw’s favorites and, some New Yorkers speculated, McGraw’s intended successor. Without Frisch, the Cardinals wouldn’t deal; for Frisch, the Giants wouldn’t deal.

“We told McGraw how we stood on the Hornsby [-Frisch] matter,” Breadon said back in St. Louis, “and it was dropped immediately.” Thoroughly frustrated after six years of intermittent dickering with Rickey, McGraw was in an ill temper when queried by reporters: “So far as I am concerned, the proposed deal for Hornsby is off for all time.… I wouldn’t trade Frisch for Hornsby or any player in baseball.” In a better mood when he alighted from the liner Leviathan in New York harbor six weeks later, McGraw was still adamant. Back in 1920, he said, the Giants had offered $300,000 in cash for Hornsby. “The Cardinals should have taken me then. I am not prepared to repeat it now.”21

At last, that appeared to be that. Speaking to the Peoria, Illinois, Optimist Club, Rickey left no doubt about it: “Hornsby is not for sale, has never been, and never will be for sale.” The Post-Dispatch’s John E. Wray showed some sympathy for Hornsby; after all, ballplayers were subject to a form of “peonage.” Overall, though, Wray had to acknowledge that Hornsby’s situation in St. Louis was favorable. Besides his handsome baseball salary, in past years his name had gained him big commissions on insurance sales. Hornsby had decided to give up that sideline, but now, Wray reported, he was using his name to market Christmas trees.22

That, it turned out, was a harebrained scheme whereby Hornsby bought up a great number of trees and flooded the local market—a strategy that only prompted established tree sellers to cut their prices, undersell him, and wipe out his entire investment. Poorer by an unknown amount from his Christmas-tree debacle, by $25,000 from his divorce settlement, and by steady losses on racing bets, Hornsby needed money—as he usually would for the rest of his life.

Late in the afternoon of February 21, 1924, Breadon and Rickey summoned sportswriters from the four St. Louis daily newspapers to disclose that Hornsby and his manager had talked at length the previous evening and again earlier that afternoon. They’d arrived at what—in uncharacteristically inarticulate fashion—Rickey termed “a settlement or whatever you call it.” Rickey then showed the newspeople Hornsby’s handwritten statement, attesting that “there is no longer any misunderstanding between us. I want to have the best year in baseball I have ever had and I want the Cardinal club to have the best year it has ever had.”23

Rickey didn’t convince anybody when he insisted that no discussion had taken place about the money Hornsby lost in fine, salary, and exhibition receipts the previous September. According to the common presumption, the Cardinals agreed to restitution, Hornsby to behave and play his best.

Five weeks earlier, Tony Foley, an old acquaintance of both Hornsby and Jeannette Pennington, was one of seventy-four people indicted by a federal grand jury investigating election fraud in St. Louis County. For not enforcing the laws, Boss Fred Essen and a number of county officials were charged with taking bribes from also-indicted gambling operators and liquor traffickers, including Foley.

If Hornsby and Jeannette Pennington commiserated over Foley’s troubles, at least they were finally free to marry. Late the previous October, Judge Hogan had decided to deny John Hine’s petition to set aside her divorce decree, which also undercut Hine’s likely plans for an alienation-of-affections suit against Hornsby.

With his differences with the Cardinals evidently patched up and departure for spring training imminent, Hornsby was in a hurry to get married. At the same time, he feared bad publicity, given the local press’s plentiful attention to his personal life over the past year. Frank Quinn came to his aid, “arranging … a lawful marriage under circumstances beyond the penetration of the forces of publicity.”24 On the afternoon of February 28, 1924, Hornsby and Jeannette Pennington went surreptitiously to the home of the city license clerk and purchased a marriage license. About five o’clock, Hornsby called the civil courts building to ask if Judge Hall were free; informed Hall was awaiting a jury’s verdict, Hornsby, his intended, and Quinn went to the judge’s courtroom, where, in the presence of the court reporter and several people also awaiting the verdict, Hornsby and Jeannette Pennington were married.

The next day, following a one-night honeymoon at Hornsby’s rooms at the Jefferson Hotel, he departed for Bradenton, Florida, to begin his ninth full major-league season. If baseball always came first with Hornsby, he was still no more immune to the effects of personal turmoil than anybody else. In nearly every respect, the last year and a half had been a tough time. All he could do was persevere and try to prevail—and that’s exactly what he did. The 1924 season would see him reach a level of batting excellence that, more than seventy years later, people would still talk about in awed tones.