6

.424—and Cardinals Manager

Hornsby’s remarriage was intended to be a secret, but it didn’t remain one for long. Because the city license clerk conveniently “forgot” to report issuing the marriage license, no notice appeared in the regular birth and marriage listings in the local newspapers. At Bradenton, Hornsby refused to discuss the subject, but soon all the St. Louis papers managed to get the story and the ballplayer had to “fess up,” in the slang of the time. In the end, all the secrecy proved of little consequence except for gossips in St. Louis. Baseball writers (as opposed to reporters on the regular news beats) cared about little besides baseball: What would the player do and what were the ballclub’s chances in the upcoming season?

By 1924 the rest of the United States had discovered Florida, where a frenzied real-estate boom was under way. Energetic promotional efforts by local chambers of commerce also lured nine of the sixteen major-league teams—six from the National League—to the Sunshine State. Like much of the rest of the U.S. coastline, Tampa Bay proved easy for rum runners; when Branch Rickey reached Bradenton, he discovered that, as happened a year earlier, some of the early Cardinals arrivals had been patronizing local bootleggers. Rickey filed charges against one S. Desiderio for selling whiskey to his players and sent a rookie pitcher packing.

At Bradenton, Rickey and Hornsby posed smilingly for photographers and again seemed on good terms. In general, the weeks passed pleasantly, with Hornsby and the other regulars rounding into shape against nearby major- and minor-league teams and Rickey carrying on in his usual bustling and ebullient manner. Following chalk talks before morning practice sessions, he worked closely with Bottomley and other products of his farm-system enterprise, such as infielder Lester Bell and outfielders Taylor Douthit, Ray Blades, and Charles “Chick” Hafey.

When the team arrived in St. Louis, Jeannette Pennington Hornsby met her new husband in their chauffeured Lincoln sedan, and they were driven to a new home whose purchase Frank Quinn had arranged while Hornsby was at Bradenton. Bought for a reported $15,000, it was a twelve-room house with circular drive and stables, located on two wooded acres off Midland Boulevard, a mile or so beyond the western boundary of the city itself. It was an imposing place, but one that required servants and lots of upkeep and, despite the acquisition of an Irish setter, made Jeannette Hornsby lonely during the long stretches when her husband was away on road trips. They wouldn’t live there long.

Only two games were scheduled in the annual preseason encounter with the Browns. The standing-room crowds at Sportsman’s Park on Saturday and Sunday appeared to have forgotten all about Hornsby’s well-known personal and professional foibles; mostly they wanted to check out George Sisler, who’d missed the entire previous season. With a triple and two singles in the first game, the Browns first baseman raised hopes for another year for himself and his team like 1922—maybe even better. (Browns partisans were in for a disappointment: Sisler would barely bat .300; the Browns, losing four more than they won, would finish a poor fourth.)

On April 15, opening day at Sportsman’s Park, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis threw out the first ball and stayed to see Hornsby single and double off Chicago’s Vic Aldridge, as the Cardinals scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to win 6–5. It was the beginning of the most remarkable season at bat Hornsby would ever have, even if it wasn’t the start of anything memorable for the ballclub.

With their team in seventh place by early June and again a noncontender, Rickey and Breadon sought to replace fading experience with promising youth. Doc Lavan drew his release three weeks into the season, and chronic holdout Milton Stock went to Brooklyn, as did “Spittin’ Bill” Doak, winner of 144 games for St. Louis since 1914. By season’s end, the Cardinals’ roster consisted largely of players brought up through Rickey’s farm system, which now included, besides Syracuse, Houston (Texas League) and Fort Smith (Western Association).

“Hustled on everything I hit” was the way Hornsby described that 1924 season.1 He appeared in 143 of his team’s 154 games (missing three in May with a jammed thumb and eight more in August with a sore back) and compiled the highest batting average at the major-league level since Willie Keeler’s .432 in 1897 with the Baltimore National Leaguers.2 In surpassing Napoleon Lajoie’s 1901 American League mark by two points, Hornsby hit with remarkable consistency. He batted a high of .480 against Boston’s pitchers, a low of .387 against Chicago’s staff. His average at Sportsman’s Park was .468; on opposing fields, .369. In the month of August, the hottest in St. Louis and the most wearing for ballplayers everywhere, he soared to .509. For the whole season, he failed to hit safely in only twenty-four games, with Boston’s Johnny Cooney holding him hitless three times.

Hornsby ended at .424—227 hits in 536 at bats. National League president John Heydler, who watched him make thirteen hits in fourteen times at bat in an August series versus the Giants at Sportsman’s Park, pronounced Hornsby “the greatest batsman of all time.”3 Such hyperbole might be expected from the league’s president, but in fact what Hornsby did that year commanded everybody’s attention—even in the American League, where Babe Ruth won his only batting title (at .378) and slammed forty-six home runs.

Hornsby himself hit twenty-five homers, second in the National League to Jacques Fournier’s twenty-seven. He also batted in ninety-five runs, led his league in runs scored (121) and bases on balls (eighty-nine), and reached base more than half the time. Yet while base hits rained like money from the Texan’s bat, the Cardinals finished in sixth place with a 65–89 record.

Branch Rickey’s standing as a manager wasn’t helped by the fact that in August—in his absence and under Burt Shotton’s direction—the Cardinals finally vacated the league cellar. Meanwhile St. Louis castoffs Fournier, Doak, and Stock aided Brooklyn to a strong second-place showing behind New York, which won its fourth National League championship in succession (before losing the World Series for the second year in a row, this time to Washington). Hinting that Hornsby might succeed Rickey, John E. Wray described the twenty-eight-year-old ballplayer as “a man of few words but mighty deeds. He may lack knowledge of the theory and mathematics of baseball so dear to the heart of Branch; but he can tell the player what to do … and show him how it’s done.” As such talk gathered over the winter, Hornsby’s only comment was that “every player hopes some day he’ll have a club to manage. But right now I wouldn’t want such a job. I want to be just a player until I feel that my best playing days are over.”4

Meanwhile a controversy flared over naming the league’s Most Valuable Player, a thankless task delegated to a committee chosen by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA).5 Besides a commemorative medallion, the player so named would receive 1,000 silver dollars. With one writer from each of the eight National League cities ranking players on a 1–10 scale, Brooklyn’s Arthur “Dazzy” Vance, who pitched twenty-eight victories and struck out 262 batters, received seventy-four votes to Hornsby’s sixty-two.

The St. Louis BBWAA members were initially puzzled by the vote, then outraged when they learned that Jack Ryder of Cincinnati left Hornsby off his ballot altogether. They formally protested such “bias or prejudice” to league president Heydler, and Sam Breadon angrily called Fred Lieb of New York, chairman of the BBWAA selection committee. In turn, Lieb contacted Ryder and asked why he hadn’t voted for Hornsby at all. “This contest supposedly is for a player who is most valuable to his team,” explained Ryder. “I will concede Hornsby is a most valuable player to himself, but not to his team. On that basis I couldn’t give him a solitary vote.”6

“If Hornsby is not the most valuable player in the National League,” declared Branch Rickey, “I must see things cross-eyed.” Said John McGraw, “Hornsby is a far more valuable player than Vance.” Hornsby himself was the epitome of gracious sportsmanship. “More power to Vance,” he told the press. “He’s a great pitcher. I certainly have no complaint to make.”7

As a professional athlete, Hornsby was far more interested in pay raises than awards. Having completed a three-year contract that paid him $18,500 per year, he wanted another three-year deal—for a lot more money. With Rickey left out of their talks, Breadon and Hornsby came to an understanding quickly and amiably. For 1925–27, Hornsby would receive a total of $100,000. Babe Ruth, in the middle of a five-year pact paying $52,000 a year, was still way above everybody else. Yet Hornsby’s $33,333 annual salary was not only the handsomest in his league but comparable to what player-managers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker earned in the other league.

By now lots of baseball people—club officials, managers, fellow players, longtime fans, sportswriters, and of course John Heydler—shared the opinion of John P. Sheridan, who’d watched and reported baseball for forty years and seen every outstanding player in that period. Nobody wrote more perceptively than Sheridan about the post-1920 hitting boom and particularly Hornsby’s batting prowess.

Hornsby, declared Sheridan in 1924, “probably is the greatest hitter of all time.”8 Pitching and fielding were better now, Sheridan thought; moreover, unlike batters before 1901, Hornsby had always played under the foul-strike rule, which counted the first two foul balls as strikes.9 Moreover, Hornsby, unlike Ruth, was mainly a straightaway, line-drive batter; most of his long hits went from left-center around to right-center.

Sheridan observed that Hornsby used a thin-handled bat with a big knob, held it at the end, and stood as far back and away from the plate as he could and still remain inside the batter’s box. He used his bat like a golf driver, its weight and thus its “driving power” concentrated in the end, and attacked the ball not as most men did—by stepping toward the pitcher—but by stepping toward the plate at right angles to the pitcher. Never bothered by anything over the outside of the plate, Hornsby was a superior curveball hitter, one who could “chase a curve to first base and hit it over the right field fence.”10

Sheridan granted that some great batters—Ty Cobb and Napoleon Lajoie, for example—moved around in the batter’s box, adjusting according to pitcher and circumstances. Hornsby, on the other hand, used what John McGraw had once called “the cigar sign pose”: nearly erect, bat well away from the body, feet always in the same position. Hornsby himself advised (as quoted in Athletic Journal) that “a batter should never at any time change his style of batting to meet just one certain condition. He should perfect his style, and stick to it in all details.”11

Hornsby rarely pulled the ball down the left-field line, and he once said that he never actually tried to hit a homer. “I just tried to meet the ball and didn’t try to get fancy.… The pitcher was my target. I would have liked to hit him each time.” His rules for good hitting were simple: (1) Don’t swing at pitches outside the strike zone (vertically defined in Hornsby’s day as knees to shoulders). (2) Hit the ball where it’s pitched instead of trying to pull it. (3) Never guess: “A batter who tries to guess what the pitcher is going to throw is never a good hitter.” (4) Be confident: “Never get the idea that you can’t hit a certain pitcher.” In sum, don’t think a lot, because “you do or you don’t.”12

“You must believe in yourself,” he avowed at the peak of his career. “I know I can hit the baseball.” Asked many years later whether he’d preferred to bat against left-handers or right-handers, he replied with a degree of irritation: “I didn’t care if the pitcher threw with his foot as long as the ball came in the strike zone.” How did he feel about the pitchers he faced? “The only emotion or thought I ever had for a pitcher was to feel sorry for him. Maybe that’s why I could hit.”13

Often, with Hornsby at bat, pitchers must have felt sorry for themselves. Whenever Grover Cleveland Alexander—by Hornsby’s estimation, the greatest of all pitchers—was asked about tough hitters, he always named Hornsby first. In 1926 he observed that Hornsby “has as much control of the bat, holding it at the end, as the old-time batter did when he choked the bat.” Moreover, Alexander reminisced shortly before his death in 1950, “it was impossible to get him to swing at anything but strikes.” He would take a pitch barely outside, then holler, “Come on, Alex, stop wastin’ time and get that damn ball over the plate.”14

In the spring of 1924, in a game with the Cardinals’ Syracuse farm club at Jacksonville, Florida, Hornsby walked four times in four at bats, never once swinging at the ball. Afterward, when it was pointed out to him that the local fans paid to see him hit, he repeated what had already become his maxim: “The best way to become a bad hitter is to hit at bad balls.”15

Clyde Sukeforth, a rookie catcher with Cincinnati in 1927, remembered that when Hornsby took pregame batting practice, “everything on the field stopped. Everybody turned to watch him swing. And that included the old-timers, the tough old pros.… when he had a bat in his hand, he had nothing but admirers.”16

However much they admired him as a hitter, few contemporaries had much to say about Hornsby’s other ballplaying qualities. He never stole more than seventeen bases in a season—which he did four times (1916, 1917, 1919, 1922)—and people rarely talked about his baserunning. Basestealing declined after 1920 with the arrival of “big-inning” baseball, but George Toporcer also remembered Hornsby as “slow getting away from the right side of the plate, due mainly to his vigorous follow-through swing, and therefore infield hits were a rarity with him.”17

Yet Al Lopez, who came up with Brooklyn in the late 1920s and was behind the plate in nearly 2,000 major-league games, recalled Hornsby’s beating out more than his share of infield rollers. In Lopez’s view, “he was one of the speediest men we ever had in baseball.” Harold “Pie” Traynor, Pittsburgh’s stellar third baseman in the 1920s and 1930s, once insisted that Hornsby would have beaten Mickey Mantle to first base from the right-hand batter’s box. And during the 1922 season—according to the recollection of a sporting-goods salesman at the scene—Hornsby’s old high-school teammate Bo McMillin, then playing professional football, came out to Sportsman’s Park, visited awhile, donned baseball shoes, challenged Hornsby to a foot race, and lost a 100-yard dash by a good margin.18

As for Hornsby afield, contemporary and later estimates have been mixed. He didn’t settle at second base until 1920; even after that he played a number of games at first, third, and the outfield. His .958 fielding average for his career isn’t impressive, especially compared with such premier second basemen as Eddie Collins (1906–30) at .970, Charlie Gehringer (1925–42) at .976, Bill Mazeroski (1956–72) at .983, or Joe Morgan (1963–84) at .981. Over the years Hornsby gained a particular reputation for having trouble with pop flies. Branch Rickey said flatly that “he did not like the fly ball in back of him,” and Travis Jackson, the New York Giants’ fine shortstop, recalled the time he was resting in the Polo Grounds clubhouse during the first game of a doubleheader, when John McGraw came bounding up the clubhouse steps exulting, “It finally happened! Hornsby got hit on the head by a pop fly!”19

That reputation resulted partly from the fact that with a runner on first base, Hornsby liked to position himself well in on the infield dirt and “cheat” toward second, in anticipation of a ground ball that could be turned into a double play. As a consequence, sometimes pop-ups that should have been caught fell between Hornsby and his right fielder.

Everybody agreed that Hornsby’s forte as an infielder was in turning the double play. He made himself into an absolute master at getting to and across the base, taking the throw from the shortstop or third baseman with only the instep of his left foot in contact with the bag, and delivering the ball to the first baseman with an almost unerringly accurate flip across his chest. (Occasionally, some insisted, he didn’t even bother to look to first when he got rid of the ball.)

Hornsby demanded perfect execution from his left-side infielders. “You throw that goddamn ball right at my chest,” he instructed Elwood “Woody” English, Chicago’s young shortstop, when Hornsby joined the Cubs in 1929. “Not above, not below.”20 Decades after he stopped playing, Hornsby couldn’t understand why present-day second basemen straddled the bag, pivoted incorrectly on the double play, and put themselves in the way of base runners intent on preventing an in-time throw to first.

Yet while he could discourse learnedly on fielding, as well as base-running and sliding, Hornsby knew that his greatness was strictly a matter of what he did with a bat. “You know,” he said about a year before he died, “I’d much rather talk about hitting. I think I’m on safer ground there.”21

Hornsby also had pronounced views on ballplayers’ personal habits. “Well, the most important thing in my schedule is sleep,” he told an interviewer in 1925. Typically retiring at 10:00 or 11:00 P.M., he tried to get twelve hours of rest. Rising early wasn’t advisable, because then a player would eat breakfast, have another meal at midday, and reach the ballpark “ready for a nap.” In fact, a player was just starting his workday at 3:00 P.M. (the usual starting time), and “you have to be wide awake to hit the ball and you can’t be wide awake if you get up early in the morning.”22

Spurning tobacco and liquor, Hornsby took up chewing gum with determination, and he went for food in a big way. He ate whatever and as much as he wanted, repeatedly attesting to the strength-building effects of “them juicy steaks.”23 Whatever meal he was eating, he usually drank whole milk with it, and he enjoyed almost any kind of dessert. His special fondness was ice cream, in which he regularly indulged himself after games, after meals, or as a snack before bedtime. As a young man expending lots of calories on the ballfield, Hornsby kept his weight at 175–185 pounds. But as he grew older, played less, and followed the same eating habits, the pounds started to add up.

One of his most frequently mentioned traits was an obsessive concern for baseball’s finest pair of eyes. “It is … bad business to do much reading,” he said in that same 1925 interview. Hitters shouldn’t read as they sat on swaying streetcars and trains; it was even worse for them to read in Pullman berths “until they fall asleep with a bright electric light shining in their eyes.… their eyes can’t be in shape for batting when they abuse them that way.”24 Except for an occasional glance at baseball standings and averages, Hornsby himself read almost nothing.

Motion pictures were to be shunned as well. Once, during spring training about 1920, he agreed to accompany Branch Rickey to a movie. “That’s all, Mr. Rickey,” he said afterward. “I’m not going to ruin my batting eyes watching them movies. These are my eyes, not yours. I need them.” (Many years later Hornsby admitted that he’d enjoyed the Wild West “shoot-’em-ups” of William S. Hart, “but only in the winter—never when I was with the ball club.”)25

Other efforts on Rickey’s part to broaden the Texan’s interests were equally unavailing. At Bradenton in the spring of 1924, Rickey talked him into playing nine holes of golf. Hornsby, who’d never been on a golf course in his life, scored thirty-nine to Rickey’s forty-eight—and never played again. A year later, during spring training at Stockton, California, Rickey persuaded him to attend a dance being given in the Cardinals’ honor by the local chamber of commerce. Hornsby showed up, shuffled through one set, and went back to the hotel and to bed.

Although he made lots of friendly acquaintances and a number of genuine friends over the years, he impressed many people as being distant and preoccupied, if not downright unfriendly. “As a player,” George Toporcer recalled, “Rog kept distinctly aloof from his teammates.… He usually insisted on rooming by himself.… Hard to approach, difficult to understand, he seemed to have nothing but contempt for the usual likes and dislikes of the average player.” After Ferdie Schupp came to the Cardinals from the Giants in 1919, a New York writer asked him what kind of guy Hornsby was. “I don’t know,” replied Schupp. “You never see him except on the ball field, and he never talks to anybody. After a [home] game he comes into the club house, takes his shower, dresses, and walks out without a word, and nobody knows where he goes.”26 On road trips, when he wasn’t at the local ballpark, Hornsby could usually be found sitting in the hotel lobby. He didn’t read; he just sat and watched people come and go or talked—rarely about anything besides baseball—with reporters, players, and even passersby. Over the years he came to be regarded as the champion lobby sitter in baseball history.

In March 1925 Hornsby sat in unfamiliar lobby surroundings at the Hotel Stockton, the principal hostelry in Stockton, California. That rapidly growing San Joaquin Valley city of about 30,000 had become the Cardinals’ new spring-training site, probably in the expectation that such an inland base might make for a liquor-free preseason. At $132 per person round-trip from St. Louis, the franchise could afford to have only thirty-three men in camp.

Although several players still paid the stiff fare for their wives, Jeannette Hornsby, expecting a child in about three months, remained in St. Louis. By then the Hornsbys had unloaded the mini-estate they bought a year earlier, had purchased an apartment house at 5308 Maple Avenue north of Forest Park, and occupied one of the building’s four residences themselves.

As Hornsby’s second marriage matured and took on new complexities, his first wife embarked upon a new life for herself and their son. In February 1925—some twenty months following her divorce—Sarah Martin Hornsby married Roy M. Finley of Denison, Texas. President of the Denison Railroaders when Hornsby played there and still Grayson County prosecuting attorney, Finley had known Sarah Martin for years before she married the ballplayer. “I wish a great store of happiness for them both,” said Hornsby. “I’m glad to know she’s happy.”27

At Stockton, manager Rickey named Hornsby team captain, which made official his position as first among peers. At Rickey’s request, he worked with rookie shortstop Tommy Thevenow and managed the regulars in exhibition games with the San Francisco and Sacramento clubs, while Rickey toured towns in the area with a second squad. Worried about rumors that Breadon wanted to get rid of him, Rickey also asked Hornsby to speak in his behalf with the club president.

Accompanied by his wife, Breadon arrived at Stockton on March 18 and soon sought his star player’s views on Rickey’s managerial abilities. Hornsby replied that, as far as he was concerned, Rickey was the smartest man in baseball. All right, said Breadon, but how would Hornsby like to manage the ballclub? Still not twenty-nine and just at his peak as a player, Hornsby demurred. When he encountered Rachel Breadon, he asked if she would say something to her husband in Rickey’s favor. That she did, and Breadon decided to keep Rickey in the dugout for the time being.

But a few days later, when the Cardinals moved into San Francisco for an exhibition series, Breadon summoned Hornsby to his hotel room and again offered him the manager’s job. “I told Breadon,” as Hornsby described the encounter decades later, “that if the Good Lord himself were to come down to California and manage this club, he couldn’t do any better. It was a lousy team.”28 Again Breadon let the matter drop—for the time being.

After a 2,000-mile Pullman journey that took them home by way of San Antonio and Dallas for games with local Texas League outfits, the Cardinals split a two-game city series with the Browns. Then they left for Cincinnati to begin Hornsby’s tenth full season as a big-leaguer. Whatever misgivings about the team’s prospects he’d expressed to Breadon at Stockton, with the press he was upbeat. “It’s the best Cardinal club I have played with since I came into the major leagues,” he said before the opener at Redland Field.29

An overflow of 31,888 Cincinnatians was on hand to see their favorites debut under Jack Hendricks, who, following another stretch in the upper minors, had been hired to manage the Reds. It was a successful beginning for Hornsby’s old foe, as Texan Pete Donohue shut out St. Louis on six hits.

Nine days later the Cardinals opened at home in impressive fashion, scoring eleven times in the first inning against Donohue and successors and beating Cincinnati 12–2 before about 14,000 people. The next day Adolfo Luque’s pitch hit Hornsby in the head and put the Cardinals captain out of action for four games. He singled twice when he returned on April 28, against Pittsburgh, but the team suffered its fifth straight defeat.

The Cardinals didn’t win again until the streak reached seven; as they’d often done in recent seasons, they left home looking up at the rest of the league. Whether the team won or lost never seemed to affect Hornsby’s batting fortunes; on May 16, at Brooklyn, he cracked his ninth home run and fourth in four games in a 6–4 loss—to which his own first-inning error contributed.

Thirteen days later, on Friday the twenty-ninth, the Cardinals lost a tough game at Pittsburgh. Facing a Memorial Day doubleheader with the hard-hitting Pirates on Saturday, they were in last place with only thirteen victories in thirty-six games. Still looking for ways to strengthen the ballclub, Rickey had recently pulled off what would prove one of his shrewdest deals, obtaining Bob O’Farrell, a first-rate catcher, from the Chicago Cubs for shortstop Howard Freigau and journeyman catcher Miguel “Mike” Gonzalez.

But in St. Louis, Sam Breadon was exasperated, especially after he checked on pregame sales for Sunday’s game at Sportsman’s Park and found that almost no tickets had been sold. “I couldn’t stand it any longer and I suppose the fans felt the same way,” Breadon later said.30 He caught a train to Pittsburgh, arrived by nightfall of the twenty-ninth, and called Hornsby in, again to offer him Rickey’s job. Again Hornsby demurred.

Next morning in the Schenley Hotel dining room, Hornsby was eating alone but unusually early, because the doubleheader was scheduled for separate morning and afternoon games. As he finished his eggs, bacon, and milk, traveling secretary Clarence Lloyd notified him that Breadon wanted to see him again, immediately. On his way out, he was intercepted by Rickey, who’d been sitting at a nearby table with Burt Shotton. While he knew he was being fired as manager, Rickey said, he wanted Hornsby to urge Breadon to give the job to Shotton.

Breadon wouldn’t hear of Shotton, spoke contemptuously of Rickey’s refusal to manage on Sunday, and still again insisted that Hornsby ought to manage his ballclub. “At least think it over, Rog,” urged Breadon. A little later, Hornsby reported what had happened to Rickey, who went into a considerable snit. “If I can’t manage, I don’t want to hold any stock,” he announced.31

Sensing the greatest financial opportunity of his life, Hornsby then told Breadon that he would take the job and continue under his player’s contract at the same salary—if Breadon would help him buy Rickey’s 1,167 shares, which amounted to 12.5 percent of total franchise stock. Breadon agreed, Rickey concurred in a taxi taking Breadon to the train station, and Hornsby walked into the visitors’ dressing room as a twenty-nine-year-old manager and soon-to-be major stockholder in a big-league baseball franchise.

Putting it about as gently as he could, Breadon told the press: “We have been disappointed over the showing of the team, and we felt that Rickey was trying to do too much.… Everything is friendly between Rickey and Hornsby, and Rickey and I remain on the best of terms.” Hornsby said of Rickey, “He’s a mighty fine fellow.… We are mighty good friends, and I hope the combination of Rickey as vice president and Hornsby as manager of the Cardinals will be a winning one.”32

More than anything else, Rickey suffered a blow to his pride. Long afterward he said that it wasn’t giving up the field manager’s job that hurt, but “the unnecessarily dramatic and clumsy way it was done.” As for his own record, “I don’t think I overmanaged.… It might be true … that I talked over the heads of the fellows at times. My fault as a manager, as I diagnose it, was due to my apparent zeal.”33 Rickey was out of the dugout and would never return, but he could console himself with his $25,000-per-year salary as vice president and, as his farm system began producing a superabundance of young talent, the small fortune he would accumulate from keeping 10 percent on all players’ sales.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s J. Roy Stockton subsequently attributed Rickey’s managerial shortcomings to his “lawyer’s instinct.” He thought too much—juggling his players, going over losses in dressing rooms, “always citing past plays.” Given his superior education, vocabulary, and intense manner, Rickey tended to intimidate his players, who resigned themselves to mediocrity.34

Hornsby threw out Rickey’s chalkboard, held one fifteen-minute meeting to review the opposition at the beginning of each series, and generally let his men show what they could do—on the presumption that if they’d made it to the major leagues, they ought to know how to play the game. “Managing a ball club is mainly using common sense,” he told an interviewer a year or so later. “There’s no black art about it. It’s hard work, getting players who can do a thing well and then letting them do it.… The less you meddle with players the better.… A baseball club is a machine. When you start the motor … let it run.”35

On Hornsby’s first day as Cardinals manager, May 30, 1925, his ballclub dropped two more games at Pittsburgh. After losing 4–1 in the morning, the Cardinals were overwhelmed 15–5 in the afternoon, despite Hornsby’s two home runs into the right-field stands.

Twelve thousand curious St. Louis fans bought tickets on Sunday to see the Cardinals in their home debut under player-manager Hornsby. After Mayor Victor J. Miller escorted Hornsby to home plate for ritualistic gifts of floral pieces, rookie Flint Rhem, a folksy right-hander from South Carolina who’d briefly attended Clemson College before Rickey signed him, pitched a 5–2 victory over Cincinnati. Local baseball writer Herman Wecke noted “a dash that had been missing for some time” in the Cardinals’ demeanor.36

On June 7, while Hornsby pushed his batting average to .401, his ballclub beat Brooklyn and climbed out of last place. Four days later, Breadon announced that Hornsby had purchased a “substantial block” of stock.37 Giving Rickey $5,000 in cash, Hornsby borrowed the rest of what he needed from a local bank, with Breadon endorsing his note. He paid Rickey $42.85 per share for 1,167 shares—a total of $49,920.25. Breadon retained an option to buy Hornsby’s stock at 6 percent interest, but a more visible factor in the arrangement was that Hornsby’s stock purchase entitled him to a seat on the Cardinals’ board of directors.

While all that high finance was going on, Hornsby became a father for the second time. On June 2, 1925, William Pennington Hornsby was born at St. John’s Hospital. Named for his father’s deceased older brother and for his mother’s family, “Billy” Hornsby inherited his mother’s oval face and dark eyes, hair, and complexion.

Rogers Hornsby performed no miracles with the 1925 Cardinals, but under his leadership the ballclub righted itself and finished respectably. At the end they’d climbed to fourth place, with a record of 77–76. Hornsby’s various personnel moves—such as bringing up Tommy Thevenow from Syracuse, abandoning Rickey’s outfield platoon and installing Chick Hafey and Ray Blades as everyday players, and putting left-hander Bill Sherdel, previously used mostly in relief, into the starting rotation—all worked out well.

Flint Rhem recalled that Hornsby laid down three hard-and-fast rules (two for pitchers, one for hitters): (1) With a count of two strikes and no balls, Hornsby’s pitcher had to knock down the batter with the next pitch. (2) If a batter hit a two-strikes-no-balls pitch, Hornsby’s pitcher was fined fifty dollars. (3) If Hornsby’s batter took a third strike with a runner on second or third base, it cost him fifty dollars. “If it’s close enough to call,” Hornsby preached, “it’s sure as hell close enough to hit.”38

Intensely competitive by nature, Hornsby as manager also took on a new combativeness. At Sportsman’s Park on June 16, his club was trailing Philadelphia 4–0 in the sixth inning, when Phillies pitcher Jimmy Ring called time and asked plate umpire Cy Pfirman if he could leave the field to change his sweat-soaked undershirt. When Pfirman refused, catcher Jimmy Wilson turned on the umpire and said enough to get himself thrown out of the game. Walter “Butch” Henline replaced Wilson and took up the argument; Pfirman also chased him. At that point manager Art Fletcher ran to home plate and began waving his arms and yelling. Tired of the stalling and wrangling, Hornsby joined the pair at the plate; when Fletcher directed his tirade at him, Hornsby landed a left hook on his counterpart’s jutting chin and sent him sprawling backward. Pfirman ordered Hornsby out of the game, but Ring (who took advantage of the commotion to change his shirt anyway) proceeded to yield three runs that inning and four the next, as the Cardinals completed a five-game sweep.

When league president Heydler received Pfirman’s report on the St. Louis fracas, he fined Hornsby $100 and Fletcher $50, and let it go at that. So “The Rajah,” as sportswriters had started calling him, remained in the lineup as the Cardinals, playing their best baseball in years, displaced the Browns as the city’s favorite team.

The following August 4, when Jim Sweeney called him out on strikes in his first two times at bat, Hornsby cursed the umpire, drew another ejection, and that night received notification from Heydler that he was suspended for three days. Two weeks after that, in Boston, Hornsby stormed at Ernie Quigley until his players pulled him away and prevented another banishment.

Although Hornsby missed eleven games in July after he pulled something in his rib area on a swinging strike, he stayed atop the league in batting average and home runs. During the third week in September, the Cardinals took an unshakable hold on fourth place by sweeping three games from Brooklyn at Ebbets Field. Then they went over to the Polo Grounds and, with Hornsby hitting three doubles and two singles, won a doubleheader from the Giants. That killed John McGraw’s hopes for a fifth-straight pennant and put Pittsburgh in the World Series for the first time in sixteen years.

On Sunday, September 27, in a doubleheader split with Boston at Sportsman’s Park, Hornsby hit his thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth homers, as well as a triple, double, and single, and pushed his batting average to .403. During batting practice the next day, he fouled a ball off his big toe and split a toenail. From the clubhouse he summoned writers for both St. Louis and Boston papers to show them the bloody toe, because, he said, “some of those in the East may say that I’m stallin’ because I want to save a .400 batting percentage.”39

With a lead over teammate Jim Bottomley of nearly forty points, Hornsby’s sixth consecutive batting title was secure, whether he played or not. He sat out the three remaining games on the schedule, as well as exhibitions before disappointed customers at Detroit, Cleveland, and Sandusky, Ohio.

Three players—Bottomley, Pittsburgh’s Hazen “Kiki” Cuyler, and Brooklyn’s Zack Wheat—surpassed Hornsby in base hits, but over 138 games and 502 times at the plate, he managed a .403 average. Along with that went thirty-nine homers, 143 runs batted in, and 381 total bases—all league-leading marks.

Late in October the Hornsbys traveled to Fort Worth to introduce their four-month-old son to his grandmother Hornsby, who was now almost constantly bedridden. It was a somber visit, particularly inasmuch as the previous summer, forty-year-old Emory Hornsby had died in Fort Worth following an appendectomy, leaving a wife and daughter. Of the seven Hornsbys who’d once lived together on the farm at Winters, only four remained. Everett, the oldest, had married, retired from baseball, and taken a job with an oil company at Tulsa; Margaret had married, divorced, remarried, and now had two children.

At twenty-nine, Rogers Hornsby had married, fathered a child, divorced, married again, and fathered another child. Life went on, though maybe somewhat more complexly and perplexedly for Mary Rogers Hornsby and her offspring than for most people. But if the Hornsbys wouldn’t have fit the mold of the ideal American family, at least their youngest member was whoppingly successful in his chosen profession. Ahead, moreover, was a season that would put him on top of the baseball world.