7

The Summit

Shortly after the conclusion of the 1925 season, Sam Breadon and Phil Ball ended years of squabbling over how much rent the Cardinals would pay the Browns if Ball enlarged Sportsman’s Park, and Ball awarded contracts for the work. Completed by the following March at a cost of $600,000, the new edition featured a double-deck grandstand extending down both foul lines and a new bleachers in straightaway center field. Ball also had a roof put on the right-field bleachers, which now became a “pavilion.” (Four years later the pavilion would be screened.) With a seating capacity of 32,000, the rebuilt ballpark also lengthened the foul-line distances from 340 to 355 feet in left, and from 315 to 320 in right.

In December 1925, the vote for the league’s Most Valuable Player finally went Hornsby’s way. With Tom Swope replacing Jack Ryder as Cincinnati’s Baseball Writers Association representative, the panel gave Hornsby seventy-three of a possible eighty votes. That was one thing that made the 1925–26 off-season possibly the most pleasant of Hornsby’s career. Although Rickey stayed busy with evaluations of Cardinals-controlled minor-leaguers and planned additional farm-system tieups, his name was rarely mentioned. Hornsby enjoyed a free hand to hire the coaches he wanted and get rid of those he didn’t. Burt Shotton was assigned to manage Syracuse, and, when Joe Sugden left to join Art Fletcher at Philadelphia, Bill Killefer, just fired after a last-place finish at Chicago, was hired to assist Hornsby.1

Over the winter the major-league joint rules committee made a concession to the struggling pitchers but also gave something more to the hitters. To help hurlers get a drier grip on the ball, the home team would have to place a resin bag at the mound before the start of each game. Batters, in turn, would gain a few extra points on their averages as a consequence of the liberalization of the sacrifice-fly rule; henceforth a time at bat wouldn’t be charged if a fly ball advanced a runner to second or third base, as well as home plate.

About the only lamentable news for the Hornsbys that winter concerned the accumulating legal troubles of their friend Tony Foley. Having beaten the election-fraud charge on which he was indicted two years earlier, Foley was hit by another indictment for participating in an interstate theft ring that pirated 31,000 gallons of whiskey impounded in U.S. government warehouses, then sold the illegal liquor across the Midwest for more than $1.2 million. Late in December, a federal jury in Indianapolis convicted Foley and twenty-three others, including a Missouri state senator, a former federal circuit court clerk, and a former U.S. customs collector. Foley received a fifteen-month prison sentence; others got up to two years.

Neither Breadon nor anybody else publicly questioned whether Hornsby and his wife ought to have such friends as the Foleys. When, with hammers and drills pounding outside, Hornsby and Breadon met local baseball writers at Sportsman’s Park, one scribe asked Breadon whether he was satisfied with Hornsby as manager. “Well, are you, Sam?” laughed Hornsby. Breadon beamed and said, “Well, I’ll tell the world I’m satisfied.”2

Hornsby’s standing as a major stockholder became official early in February, when he succeeded Hiram W. Mason (who’d recently resigned as franchise secretary-treasurer) on the Cardinals’ seven-person board of directors. Young Bill DeWitt, originally Rickey’s office boy with the Browns and his personal secretary since 1917, became the new club treasurer, with Clarence Lloyd moving up from traveling secretary to franchise secretary.

Yielding to their manager’s insistence that Texas was the best place in the world for spring training, Breadon and Rickey arranged for the Cardinals’ return to the San Antonio area. Flashing newly capped front teeth and a couple of gold fillings, Hornsby left St. Louis with pitchers, catchers, coaches, and scouts on Saturday evening, February 20, bound for Hot Wells. Twenty-six hours later they pulled into the San Antonio train station, having traveled through Texas with window shades drawn to conceal their card playing, which was prohibited on the Sabbath under state law. Although it was nighttime when they arrived, various local dignitaries and a brass band were on hand to greet them, and automobiles conveyed them the five miles to the Terrell Hotel at Hot Wells.

They endured the spartan accommodations at Hot Wells only a week; when the rest of the players arrived, the Cardinals company moved into the elegant and historic Hotel Menger, in the heart of San Antonio near the Alamo chapel ruin, and shifted practices to Block’s Stadium, home of the Texas League Bears. Abandoning Rickey’s schedule of two-a-day practice sessions, with sandwiches served at the field, Hornsby held one daily workout—11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.—which forced the players to follow his own two-meals-per-day eating routine.

During each batting practice, he stood behind the cage and advised hitters on what they might be doing wrong. He wanted no “second division ball players,” he also told them, and there would be no “pets” on his team. If, to win, he had to use “some egg that I think is dumber than four humpty dumpties,” then he would. He wouldn’t need “snitches” to spy on his players, either, because “if somebody begins to slip,” the manager would know it. “A ballplayer owes it to the club … to deliver the goods”; if he doesn’t, “he’s either gotta shake his habits or we’ll shake him outta the league.”3

Despite Hornsby’s enthusiasm for Texas weather, it rained much of the time that March; early in April, in Dallas, the Cardinals even encountered light snow. Their manager was impatient to play every preseason game—and determined to win them all. Trailing by two runs when rain halted a game at Houston, Hornsby argued the umpires into resuming play. After the Cardinals rallied to win, Breadon asked why he’d been so anxious to complete the game. “The big thing is to get them into the habit of winning,” Hornsby explained. “No game is unimportant.… the more of ’em you win, the better, regardless of the conditions.”4

Besides getting his men in shape and into the winning habit, he found himself repeatedly called upon to attend banquets, luncheons, and other civic functions. Whereas previously Hornsby had been “of a retiring disposition,” observed Bill McGoogan of the Post-Dispatch, now he had to socialize and at least pretend to enjoy it.5

He also spent a considerable amount of his off-field time with his wife and their new friends, the Frank L. Moores of Fort Thomas, Kentucky. Moore, a bookmaker who mostly took bets on horses running at the Latonia Track near Covington (but would cover the “action” almost anywhere in the country), had made Hornsby’s acquaintance the previous summer, when the Cardinals were in Cincinnati. At San Antonio the Hornsbys picked up the Moores’ hotel expenses, as they would again the following summer, when the Moores stayed several days at the Coronado Hotel during a Cardinals home stand.

As the Cardinals started north on their way out of Texas, they stopped in Austin to play the University of Texas Longhorns. Hornsby hurriedly arranged the game after learning that his mother, in the care of relatives at Austin for the past several months, had been hospitalized. When he visited her, as he recalled it, they talked some about the upcoming baseball season. His team would win the pennant and World Series, she believed, but she went on to say, “I don’t think you will ever see me alive again.” When he tried to cheer her up with assurances that they would see each other again next fall, she shook her head and said, “If I can live until the Cardinals win the pennant, I’ll be happy.”6

After beating the collegians and playing all but two of the rest of their games against minor-league competition, the Cardinals returned to St. Louis with a spring record of 22–1, their sole loss coming at the hands of the Chicago White Sox at Shreveport. Then, despite Hornsby’s home run, they dropped the only game with the Browns permitted by weather. Nearly 23,000 braved cold and wet to get a look at the new version of Sportsman’s Park.

Before the season opener at Sportsman’s Park on April 13, Hornsby received the inevitable floral gratuities, plus a silver trophy donated by the Cleveland Press, which had held an off-season essay contest among its readers to choose the most popular American and National League players. (Babe Ruth, of course, was the choice for his league.) Then Jim Bottomley homered and singled, Hornsby doubled and singled twice, and Flint Rhem survived Pittsburgh’s late-innings assault for a 7–6 victory. By the time the Cardinals won for the third time in the four-game series with the defending world’s champions, St. Louis fans were already talking pennant.

Their team lost seven games in ten tries on the road. Even worse, on May 6, in a game with Cincinnati at Sportsman’s Park, Hornsby collided at second base with Reds catcher Val Picinich and (as X rays eventually revealed) displaced two vertebrae. Although he was back in the lineup three days later, he struggled with his back from then on; that injury and a subsequent protracted bout with carbuncles on his neck, ears, and thighs would keep him in almost daily pain.

Saturday, May 22, was Rogers Hornsby Day—so designated by Mayor Miller, who urged St. Louisians to “show by their presence that they appreciate the splendid work that has been performed by this ballplayer.”7 Civic groups, Boy Scouts, and old St. Louis ballplayers paraded from Fair Grounds Park to Sportsman’s Park, where James M. Gould, president of the St. Louis BBWAA chapter, presented the Most Valuable Player medallion and $1,000 in silver. Commissioner Landis, league president Heydler, and Sam Breadon were at home plate to congratulate Hornsby. The Phillies then obligingly lost 9–2, and for the first time in more than a month, the Cardinals’ wins equaled their losses.

In mid-June, John McGraw made one of his worst trades when he sent Billy Southworth, a dependable outfielder who was batting .328 at the time, to St. Louis for Clarence “Heinie” Mueller, a local boy who’d put in four seasons of part-time duty. Southworth took over right field for the Cardinals, with Taylor Douthit as Hornsby’s regular center fielder and Ray Blades and Chick Hafey sharing left. Hard-hitting Lester Bell found his place at third base; Tommy Thevenow ousted George Toporcer at shortstop; Jim Bottomley was the league’s most productive first baseman; and Bob O’Farrell was both a steadying influence behind the plate and a timely hitter.

Hornsby’s starting pitchers—Flint Rhem, lefties Bill Sherdel and Art Reinhart, off-season acquisition Vic Keen, and the veteran Jesse Haines—were less than formidable. But on the morning of June 23, the Cardinals claimed Grover Cleveland Alexander on waivers from Chicago. More than anything else, Alexander’s arrival would prove the difference in the fortunes of the 1926 Cardinals.

Coming to Hornsby’s club for only $4,000, Alexander brought sixteen years of big-league experience and 317 career victories, despite having pitched for only one pennant winner. “Pete” (as many players called him) or “Alex” (as he was known to Hornsby and others) was thirty-nine years old, 6' 1", and still a sinewy 185 pounds. He combined a good fastball, an outstanding curve, a seemingly effortless delivery, masterful control, and an uncanny knowledge of batters’ weaknesses. Yet so far in 1926, his record was only 3–3, and he’d yielded fifty-six hits in fifty-two innings.

Alexander was an epileptic (long before anticonvulsant medications), and he drank heavily—by some accounts, because he thought that helped control his condition. With Bill Killefer, late manager of the Cubs and now Hornsby’s aide, he’d gotten along fine; but Joe McCarthy, who succeeded Killefer after winning a pennant at Louisville, wouldn’t tolerate Alexander’s drinking and generally undependable behavior, and suspended him and then put him on waivers. In turn, Alexander took the same attitude toward career minor-leaguer McCarthy that Hornsby had taken toward Jack Hendricks. Big-leaguers of that era usually showed little regard for managers who hadn’t played in the big time themselves; outstanding big-leaguers, moreover, often became player-managers—as had Hornsby and, for the 1926 season, six others.

Over the telephone from Chicago, Alexander told Killefer, “I’m in condition and ready to pitch now.” When he arrived in St. Louis, he assured reporters that his arm still had some good games left in it, and he was “tickled to be with the team and Hornsby and Killefer. All Rog has to do is nod his head and I’ll jump through a hoop for him.”8

That afternoon Hornsby hit a bases-loaded homer—his 2,000th major-league hit—to beat Pittsburgh 6–2 and keep the Cardinals even in wins-losses. Three days later, on Sunday, June 27, Alexander made his debut for St. Louis before 37,196 seated and standing customers, the biggest baseball crowd in the city’s history. He threw a four-hitter at Joe McCarthy’s Cubs and, on Southworth’s homer, gained what must have been an exceptionally satisfying victory.

Two days after that, team physician Robert Hyland ordered Hornsby admitted to St. John’s Hospital for the removal of a badly infected carbuncle on his thigh. Killefer was in charge of the team and Toporcer filled in at second base until July 9, when Hornsby disregarded Hyland’s advice and put himself back in the lineup. By then the Cardinals had moved into contention, jockeying with Pittsburgh for second place and trailing Cincinnati by a few games. Weakened by infection and hampered by pain and stiffness in his back, Hornsby batted consistently but with little power. “He has no more in his swing than a girl would have,” observed J. Roy Stockton.9

After another week’s absence, Hornsby returned to action early in August at Brooklyn, where the Cardinals won six straight games to tighten up a pennant race that, for the first time in eight years, didn’t include the New York Giants. Hornsby played the Brooklyn series with a bandage covering the boil on his left thigh, another bandage on a boil on his left ear, and a bandaged spike wound on his right hand. Yet he still felt well enough to climb the railing behind the Cardinals’ third-base dugout in an effort to reach a particularly abusive Brooklynite. Before he could land any blows, several Cardinals pulled him back onto the field.

Two weeks later, by beating the Giants three straight in St. Louis, the Cardinals briefly occupied the league lead; from then on, first place changed hands almost daily. Five games with Pittsburgh at the end of August and the beginning of September (one a rain-interrupted tie) drew 113,113 into Sportsman’s Park, with the Sunday tie attracting thousands who arrived by excursion trains from as far away as Indiana, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Alexander, usually starting but sometimes relieving, pitched superbly, beating the Cubs in Chicago and then, with two days’ rest, stopping Cincinnati. But then Hornsby’s error on a pop fly—he fell on the back of his head and was briefly knocked unconscious—led to four first-inning runs as the Reds edged back on top by percentage points.

After a Labor Day doubleheader split at Pittsburgh that put St. Louis one game up on Cincinnati and three and one-half on Pittsburgh, Hornsby traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, to see James “Bonesetter” Reese, in the hope of getting some relief for his aching back. Hornsby was only one of many ballplayers who visited Reese, an elderly, totally unschooled former Welsh coal miner whose skills at skeletal manipulation were so renowned that the Ohio legislature gave him special medical certification.

Bonesetter Reese’s efforts made Hornsby feel better physically, but on the late-night train back to Pittsburgh, he worried about his mother, now again in critical condition in Texas, and also seethed over difficulties he was having with both Branch Rickey and Sam Breadon. Besides dropping by the clubhouse or leaning over the railing near the Cardinals’ dugout to offer unsolicited advice to Hornsby’s players, Rickey also arranged for a federal prohibition agent to snoop after Alexander and other tipplers on road trips. In a lengthy tirade during the recent home stand, Hornsby had warned Breadon that he wouldn’t manage or play for the Cardinals in 1927 if Rickey were still around. Afterward he told local baseball writer Herman Wecke that he was fed up with “that Ohio Wesleyan bastard.”10

And earlier that Labor Day, between games at Pittsburgh, Breadon had come into the dressing room to tell Hornsby that, contrary to what they supposedly had agreed upon earlier, he wanted the team to keep exhibition dates in Syracuse and Buffalo on its way from Pittsburgh to Boston. Hornsby replied that his players were tired, and that for the sake of a couple of thousand dollars in receipts from “those silly exhibition games,” Breadon was taking the chance of getting men injured and throwing away half a million in World Series money. Breadon persisted, until finally Hornsby stormed, “All right, but I won’t send the first team! Now get the hell out of my clubhouse!”11

While Killefer took a couple of spare pitchers and mostly substitutes to Boston by way of Syracuse and Buffalo, Hornsby and most of the regulars and pitchers traveled by way of New York. There they rested and took in a game at Yankee Stadium, in the well-founded expectation that Miller Huggins’s powerful club would be their World Series opponent. Hornsby, in street clothes, posed with Babe Ruth sitting atop the home team’s dugout.

After splitting four games with the Boston Braves, the Cardinals were tied with Cincinnati, two and one-half ahead of Pittsburgh. Hornsby acknowledged that his team’s errors had given away two games in Boston, but “don’t worry about us crackin’.”12 Nor did they. They scored sixty-two runs in sweeping a six-game series at Philadelphia to pull ahead of Cincinnati and eliminate Pittsburgh from the race. Splitting two games at Brooklyn while Jack Hendricks’s Reds lost their fifth game in a row, the Cardinals then moved into the Polo Grounds to face the Giants, who were playing out the season in the strange surroundings of fifth place.

On Friday, September 24—with the ballplayers and much of the country still buzzing over Gene Tunney’s wresting of the heavyweight championship from Jack Dempsey the night before—Billy Southworth homered to beat his former teammates, and Hornsby and his men found themselves three games ahead of Cincinnati with only two to play. Losses to the Giants on Saturday and Sunday made the final margin two games over the Reds, five over Pittsburgh. For the first time since the American Association Browns in the 1880s—after thirty-five seasons in the National League and twenty-five in the American—the city of St. Louis finally had a pennant winner.

Loudspeakers positioned at strategic points in downtown St. Louis carried a telegraphed play-by-play account of the pennant-clinching game, and people went into the streets to celebrate when it ended. They saved most of their energy, though, for their favorites’ return after two World Series games in New York, the first of which wouldn’t be played until Saturday, October 2.

Meanwhile baseball writers and Hornsby himself attributed the Cardinals’ success to Alexander (who won nine games, lost seven, and pitched two shutouts after coming to St. Louis), to Southworth, and finally to Hornsby’s policy of simplification—of signals, pitching instructions, things in general. As Bob O’Farrell put it long afterward, “Hornsby was a great manager as far as I’m concerned. That year in St. Louis he was tops. He never bothered any of us. Just let you play your own game.”13

J. Roy Stockton, fast becoming St. Louis’s foremost baseball reporter, offered a contemporary appraisal: From being “a colorless ballplayer,” Hornsby had emerged as “a dynamic leader, a chief for whom his warriors would go to any limit to win.” True, he would rather sit in a hotel lobby alone than be entertained at a governor’s mansion, and “he swears like a trooper, a Texas trooper.” Yet his outstanding characteristics were “courage, honesty, bluntness and determination … and you learn about the bluntness first.” Stockton quoted an unnamed New York writer who remarked that Hornsby “is one of the most delightful characters I have ever met. He is the squarest, bluntest, cussingest and most convincing man I ever met in baseball.” Concluded Stockton, “He’s stubborn and bull-headed, he uses very bad language and he has some peculiar aversions. He can’t mention a college without a few decorative adjectives.… But you can’t help liking Hornsby.… He’s just an honest-to-goodness person without guile or subterfuge. People trust Hornsby.”14

At bat, Hornsby contributed much less to his team’s championship season than he might have had he been healthy. Missing twenty games, he made only 167 base hits, homered eleven times, drove home ninety-three runs, and ended with a .317 batting average (thirty-six points below the league leader). It was his least-productive year since 1919, when he was still batting the dead ball. In the course of the season, moreover, he lost fifteen pounds, so that going into the World Series, he weighed less than he had since 1915.

On September 27, which was a Monday, the Cardinals practiced at Yankee Stadium. When Hornsby returned to the Alamac Hotel late that afternoon, a telegram was waiting from his wife, who simply passed along the contents of a wire from his mother’s relatives. That morning, at age sixty-two, Mary Dallas Rogers Hornsby had died in Austin, Texas, where she’d been under relatives’ care for the past year. The wire read: “Stay with Rogers. He needs you. All is done here. The Folks.”15

According to contemporary reports and what Hornsby later said, his mother had insisted that her youngest offspring remain in New York to get ready for the World Series. At any rate, as his players trooped into his hotel room to offer half-articulated condolences, that’s what he decided to do, reasoning that there wasn’t a great deal he could accomplish by rushing off to Texas. He wired Austin that he would be there as soon as the Series ended, then called his wife to tell her to join him in New York.

Making their fourth appearance in six years, the Yankees were strong favorites with the bookmakers when the World Series—unrivaled as an annual American sports spectacle—began on Saturday at three-year-old Yankee Stadium. Before 61,658, left-handers Bill Sherdel and Herb Pennock each allowed a first-inning run, then pitched scorelessly until the sixth, when young Lou Gehrig, just completing his first full season, singled home Ruth with the game winner.

On Sunday, a couple thousand more people paid to watch Alexander even the Series with what was possibly his finest outing so far as a Cardinal. He struck out ten Yankees and allowed four singles; South-worth’s three-run homer and a bases-empty drive by Thevenow powered the Cardinals to a 6–2 victory.

After the game, the Cardinals dressed quickly, jumped into waiting automobiles, and, with motorcycle police leading the way, raced to make their train at Penn Station. At 3:50 P.M. the next day, they pulled into the Washington Avenue station under the Eads Bridge, where a crush of people were gathered for what was intended as a full-blown, official pennant celebration.

The jammed scene quickly became a wild one as well. Mayor Miller and his police escort pushed and punched their way through the crowd to get to the Hornsbys and the rest of the Cardinals contingent, and managed to present a bouquet of roses to the couple before they were enveloped by admirers. Women mussed Hornsby’s hair, men pounded his back, and Jeannette Hornsby’s hat was knocked askew. Separated from her husband in the crowd and genuinely frightened, she began to cry. In the Hornsbys’ waiting Lincoln, little Billy Hornsby, in the care of his nurse, also cried for his mother.

Finally the police cleared an opening to a line of closed automobiles, and the Hornsbys and the other Cardinals players and wives proceeded down Washington Avenue to tumultuous cheers from tens of thousands of people lining the streets. Miller and Sam Breadon rode in the lead car, John Heydler in the next, and players and wives in following vehicles. The Hornsbys’ Lincoln brought up the rear, a fact that wasn’t apparent to parade watchers for several blocks. When they were finally identified, people crowded in to press their faces against the car windows; shouting boys stood on the rear bumper and running boards.

With red on display everywhere—banners, bunting, sashes, men’s neckties, women’s dresses—the line of automobiles proceeded through the biggest public demonstration St. Louis had seen since the Armistice eight years earlier. It took an hour to travel the thirteen blocks to Twelfth Street and over to Market Square, where, after speeches and more cheers, the celebration broke up and the Cardinals scattered to their homes. (Meanwhile the Yankees, arriving at Union Station a few minutes before the Cardinals got in, reached the Buckingham Hotel almost unnoticed.)

The Series resumed on Tuesday, October 5, before a record-breaking 37,708 at Sportsman’s Park. A twenty-one-station midwestern radio hookup, anchored by the Post-Dispatch–owned KSD, carried a live play-by-play, with Graham McNamee at the microphone. On the field, Jesse Haines was nearly the whole show, pitching a five-hit shutout and making two hits, including a two-run homer.

But on Wednesday, before an even bigger St. Louis throng, Babe Ruth hit three home runs—the first time that had happened in Series play—as the Yankees piled up fourteen hits and ten runs and Hornsby followed twenty-game winner Rhem with four other pitchers. Thirty-five years later, the South Carolinian related that Hornsby had come to the mound in the first inning and instructed him not to throw Ruth anything fast, after which the Babe hit one of Rhem’s slow ones onto the right-field pavilion roof. In the fourth, with Ruth again up, Hornsby came in with the same advice: pitch him slow; Ruth had just been lucky the time before. Rhem again followed his manager’s instructions, only to watch the ball clear the pavilion roof and (so he later learned) break a Chevrolet dealer’s show window across Grand Avenue. (That did it for Rhem; Ruth’s third homer came off Herman Bell.)16

Thursday’s game, the last to be played in St. Louis, drew the biggest crowd yet, nearly 40,000. Both Sherdel and Pennock again pitched splendidly, until, in the tenth inning, Tony Lazzeri, New York’s rookie second baseman, lifted a sacrfice fly to score the go-ahead run. Pennock then set down the Cardinals without difficulty to put the Yankees ahead three games to two.

Back at Yankee Stadium before a disappointing turnout of less than 50,000, Alexander was again the master. Lester Bell’s single and two-run homer keyed first- and seventh-inning rallies that gave Alexander ten runs, seven more than he needed in pitching his second complete-game win and pulling the Series even. Alexander scattered eight hits, struck out Ruth twice, and threw only twenty-nine called balls in his 104 pitches. Afterward he assured Hornsby that, if needed tomorrow, “I can throw four or five of the damndest balls they ever saw. Maybe a couple of innings. But I won’t warm up.”17

The deciding game, played on Sunday afternoon, October 10, in an intermittent drizzle that held the attendance to 38,000, would become part of baseball fable and folklore—a golden moment in World Series history. Haines and Waite Hoyt both pitched well, until Yankees errors led to three unearned runs in the fourth inning, at which point Pennock relieved Hoyt. New York scored in the sixth to make it 3–2, then, in the bottom of the seventh, loaded the bases when Haines walked Gehrig with two out. In snapping off his curveball, Haines had raised and then burst a blister on the index finger of his right hand, and every pitch hurt. Hornsby came in from second, looked at the bloody finger, and, despite Haines’s claim that he could keep going, signaled to the bull pen in the far left-field corner.

Rhem and Alexander were sitting in the bull pen; neither had been warming up. Alexander had celebrated in his usual fashion the previous night and, by Rhem’s account, was dozing with a pint of whiskey in his pocket. Seeing Hornsby’s signal, Alexander grinned, “staggered a little, handed me the pint, hitched up his britches and walked straight as he could to the mound.” Hornsby walked out beyond the infield to meet Alexander and explain the situation: two out, bases loaded, Lazzeri up. “Do you feel all right?” Hornsby asked. “Sure, I feel fine,” said Alexander. “Three on, eh. Well, there’s no place to put Lazzeri, is there? I’ll just have to give him nothin’ but a lot of hell, won’t I?”18

Alexander took off his red sweater, threw three or four warm-up pitches, and indicated that he was ready. In stepped Lazzeri (who, by a supreme irony, also suffered from epilepsy). O’Farrell squatted and faked giving a sign, but, as Alexander later explained, “he don’t pay no attention to me and I don’t pay no attention to him.… I just pitch whatever I happen to want to pitch and I know Bob will get ’em all.”19

The first delivery was a curve that stayed too far inside—ball one. Another pitch caught the inside corner—strike one. Then another curveball, on which Lazzeri whipped his bat slightly too soon; the ball shot on a line toward the left-field corner and veered into the grandstand about ten feet foul. Alexander’s next pitch was a fastball, low and outside; Lazzeri lunged for it but didn’t come close. “How did I feel?” said Alexander afterward. “Go and ask Lazzeri how he felt. I felt fine.… The strain naturally was on Lazzeri.”20

The score remained 3–2, Cardinals, but they still needed six more outs. Alexander retired the Yankees without incident in the eighth inning, but Pennock also held St. Louis scoreless, so that in the bottom of the ninth, Alexander found himself protecting a one-run lead and facing the top of the explosive New York batting order.

Earle Combs and then Mark Koenig were retired easily, each on groundouts. At that point, Alexander had retired twenty-four Yankees in succession, going back to the third inning of the previous day’s game. Working with extreme care, he ran the count to 3–2 on Ruth, then walked him. With the slugging Bob Meusel and then Lou Gehrig coming up, the Babe might have been expected to stay put. But on the first pitch to Meusel, Ruth bolted for second base, trying, he later said, to get himself into scoring position. O’Farrell pegged perfectly to Hornsby, who had the ball waiting well ahead of the sliding Ruth.

On the long train ride back to St. Louis, Alexander imbibed freely and spoke glowingly of almost everybody, especially of his manager. “There’s a great fellow if there ever was one,” he told reporters. “Who couldn’t pitch for Rog?… He makes this a great ball club. I’ve been in baseball a long time. But I was never treated as squarely as I have been treated by Rog and the St. Louis players and the St. Louis fans. But Rog is the man.”21

Still experiencing back pain on almost every swing, Hornsby hadn’t been much of a factor offensively. In twenty-eight times at bat, he batted only .250—six singles and a double. He did manage to drive in four runs, and he also played errorlessly throughout the Series, but his own subpar performance seemed to matter little in the aftermath of the greatest thing that could happen to any group of professional baseball players. Not at all inconsequential was the immediate cash payoff: $5,594.50 to each Cardinal—more than most of them were paid for the whole season. The Yankees had to content themselves with hefty losers’ shares of $3,723 apiece.

Big things were again planned in St. Louis to honor the world’s champions. Hornsby wired from New York that his players would participate in the city’s celebrations but “[I] hope the fans will excuse me.”22 This time, with a reception committee waiting at Union Station (the main terminal), he slipped off at the Washington Avenue station. Together with Jeannette and Billy, he caught a later train for Dallas, with a connection to Austin.

On Tuesday night, October 12, 30,000 people gathered at Sportsman’s Park to sit in darkness except for lights arranged around home plate, as ten Cardinals players (all that were still in town) received congratulations and various favors from Mayor Miller and other civic leaders. Inasmuch as another nine years would pass before Sportsman’s Park had a loudspeaker system, not many could hear what was being said down on the field. The players stayed for an hour or so, tired of being lionized, and then left. Most of the crowd remained to frolic in the darkness of grandstand and bleachers; remarkably, nobody fell out of the upper deck.

The next day, in Texas, funeral services were held for Mary Rogers Hornsby at her sister’s spacious house in Austin, where she had died. The pastor of Austin’s First Southern Presbyterian Church preached the sermon, following which a letter from her ailing brother in Florida was read, hymns were sung, and prayers were offered. The big crowd—scores of relatives and family acquaintances—formed a motorized cortege that wound east over the nine-mile route to the cemetery at Hornsby’s Bend, where the casket was reopened for those who hadn’t attended the services in Austin.

The Associated Press account of the funeral was done in a vein of high-Victorian sentimentalism with southern touches, down to the ninety-year-old “Negro Mammy” who’d wet-nursed the baby Mary Dallas Rogers, and who now walked with a cane and relatives’ support as she came for a last look at “Miss Mary Dallas.” Onlookers marveled at “the naturalness of Mrs. Hornsby’s appearance.” Hornsby sat at the tent-covered gravesite with brother Everett and sister Margaret, and “tears streamed down his face and the hands which … swung the most feared bat in the National League trembled. His drawn cheeks clearly showed the ravages of his grief.”23

Following the service, Hornsby greeted numerous aunts, uncles, and first, second, and third cousins, some of whom he hadn’t seen since childhood. Then he walked around the cemetery, looking at the graves of the generations of Hornsbys, and finally returned to the automobile that would take him back to Austin. Jeannette and Billy weren’t present, because on the way to the cemetery Ernest Jarmon, a cousin who was driving the Hornsbys, slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting the car ahead, threw Billy against the front windshield, and inflicted a wound that necessitated a flying trip back to Austin to have three stitches sewn in the toddler’s forehead.

It was a sad (and unexpectedly hectic) anticlimax to what otherwise had been the greatest year in Rogers Hornsby’s life. As he stood looking over the graves of his parents, brothers, and many other kin, he must have realized that, at the age of thirty, he’d already gained a kind of fame and fortune that could never be imagined by the vast majority of human beings. Although he couldn’t have known it then, he’d already reached the summit of his career—the eminence of a life that would last another thirty-six years.