8

Touring the National League

If joy reigned among the Cardinals’ fandom, people close to the ballclub sensed that, as J. Roy Stockton put it, “the atmosphere around Breadon and Hornsby and the players [is] surcharged with friction and chill.”1 Although Breadon, Hornsby, and their wives posed together before the first World Series game at Yankee Stadium, Breadon remained indignant over being ordered out of the dressing room at Pittsburgh and then profiting little from those Buffalo and Syracuse exhibitions dates—a consequence of Hornsby’s refusal to include himself or most of his regulars. A devotee of golf with a pronounced distaste for horseplaying, Breadon also couldn’t reconcile his own and Hornsby’s notions of appropriate off-field enjoyments.

For the Series games in St. Louis, the Cardinals owner allowed the players only two guest tickets apiece (presumably to spite his manager) and, after the seventh-game victory in New York, declined to come to the visitors’ dressing room to congratulate his employees. On the long train ride back to St. Louis, Breadon summoned Bill Killefer to his compartment and asked whether he would be interested in managing the Cardinals next year, but Killefer remained loyal to the longtime friend who’d given him a job after his firing at Chicago. “I told [Breadon],” said Killefer two months later, “that I would not take the position under any circumstances or for any salary. I would not take Rogers Hornsby’s job for any money.”2

As for Hornsby, he was still unhappy over the run-in with Breadon in Pittsburgh and Rickey’s meddling in on-field matters, as well as the $25,000 bonus Breadon had just paid Rickey—in accordance with a clause in Rickey’s contract providing for such a bonus whenever the Cardinals won a pennant.

After burying his mother, Hornsby returned to St. Louis with his wife and young son, determined to change his circumstances. True, he owned the second-largest amount of stock in the Cardinals franchise and stood to realize a tidy dividend from a record home attendance of 681,535, and he was the second-highest-paid ballplayer in the majors, making more than $33,000 per year on a three-year contract that still had another year to run. But he hadn’t received a salary increase in 1925 for taking over the manager’s job, nor any kind of bonus for winning a world’s championship sixteen months later. What he had received was quite a lot of front-office interference. If he had to put up with that, he wanted what he thought he’d earned—a three-year manager’s contract paying $50,000 per season. And by J. Roy Stockton’s report, Hornsby also sought to become the Cardinals’ first vice president, superior to Rickey, “so that if anything happened to Breadon, Hornsby would be protected.”3

Breadon and Hornsby went into conference on December 2, 1926, talked for an hour, and settled nothing, although Breadon announced that their meeting had been “very pleasant.” Four days later, they met for two hours, talking entirely, Breadon reported, about the length of Hornsby’s new contract. Yes, Hornsby wanted $150,000 over three years, but that was “more than the club’s earning power for the past eight years justified.” One year at $50,000 was “as far as I could reasonably see my way to sign.” Said Hornsby, “I realize this is a business proposition and he has his side to consider. I must also think of my own.”4

Not long before he died, Breadon looked back on his dealings with Hornsby and recalled, “I was so determined to get rid of Hornsby that I was afraid he might accept my one-year offer.” At the annual gathering of major-league executives and managers in New York, starting December 12, 1926, Rickey conferred with John McGraw. If things didn’t work out between Breadon and Hornsby, Rickey advised, then Hornsby would be on the market, and what would the Giants be willing to offer? McGraw, who’d had a bitter falling-out with Frank Frisch in St. Louis the previous August, said he would give up Frisch and a pitcher if St. Louis wanted to trade. “Then,” Rickey recalled, “I asked him if he was aware of Hornsby’s natural desire to take charge and manage.” McGraw, always supremely self-confident, brushed that aside—he ran the Giants; it was Hornsby the player he wanted.5

So, in effect, the trade for Hornsby was already set when Breadon met with Hornsby for the last time on Monday, December 20, at Sportsman’s Park. From his little office nearby, Rickey could hear angry, interrupted voices. Breadon, Hornsby later disclosed, again offered him a one-year, $50,000 contract, and also insisted that he must never again bet on horse races, go to tracks, or even associate with horseracing people. His horseplaying was “nobody’s damn business,” shouted Hornsby, and Breadon could take his ballclub and (as Breadon delicately paraphrased it to Stockton later) “perform an utterly impossible act.”6

After Hornsby stomped out of the office, Breadon called in Rickey, poured himself a drink of bootleg Scotch, tried to get Giants’ owner Charles Stoneham on the telephone, received no answer, and left “visibly depressed.” At his home he called Stoneham again, finally made contact with him through Giants’ club secretary Jim Tierney, and asked whether Stoneham was still interested in a trade. Assured the Giants were, Breadon said, “Well, you’ve got Hornsby.”7 But, Breadon added, St. Louis had to have not only Frisch but a quality pitcher; Stoneham agreed to include right-hander Jimmy Ring (the same pitcher whose desire to change his shirt had precipitated the Hornsby-Fletcher rumpus in 1925). John McGraw, long hailed as baseball’s Little Napoleon and supposedly the deciding influence in Giants affairs, didn’t even know about the deal until Stoneham told him. But if the Hornsby trade signified the passing of power in the Giants organization from the renowned manager to the obese club owner, McGraw could at least exult in finally getting the player he’d sought for ten years.

By a totally unpredictable conjunction of events, Hornsby’s trade was announced in time for the late editions of the afternoon newspapers, which also carried Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s disclosure of evidence in his possession that Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, two of baseball’s brightest and most venerated performers, had been implicated in a scheme to fix a Detroit-Cleveland game back in 1919. Landis subsequently cleared those two men and also dismissed recent allegations by Charles “Swede” Risberg and Charles “Chick” Gandil, two of the Chicago “Black Sox” banished from baseball, that in 1917 the Chicago team had bribed other Detroit players to throw games. Although the new scandals blew over quickly, the extensive off-season publicity given to two more highly questionable episodes in the sport’s past strengthened Breadon’s case against such an unregenerate gambler as Rogers Hornsby—at least in some quarters.

For several days following the announcement of Hornsby’s trade, he and Breadon gave out interviews and issued written statements, each going over the particulars of their dealings and justifying himself. Inasmuch as Hornsby had gone through “a bad playing season” in 1926 and “might be finished as a player,” Breadon couldn’t go before more than 400 stockholders and defend a commitment of $150,000 for three years. “I expect to catch hell for the next few months,” Breadon added, “but there is no ball player living, nor manager for that matter, who is going to run the club while I am president.” Said Hornsby: “I gave the Cardinals all I had and I asked for a contract that I believed I was entitled to. Just tell the fans of St. Louis that I hate to leave.” Thirty-five years later he termed the trade “the biggest disappointment I had in my life.”8

No player-for-player deal until then surpassed Hornsby-Frisch for controversy. Although he’d never been a colorful, crowd-pleasing personality, Hornsby was, by general agreement, the foremost figure in St. Louis baseball history, and many local citizens took his departure as a devastating civic loss. For a while, Sam Breadon did catch hell.

Mark Steinberg, a member of the Cardinals’ board of directors and Hornsby’s stockbroker, called the trade “an insult to the fans of St. Louis” and resigned from the board; James M. Gould of the Post-Dispatch vowed never to cover another Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park (and didn’t for nearly ten years); and officials of the local chamber of commerce asked Commissioner Landis to block the transaction, whereupon Breadon withdrew his membership in that organization.9 At his downtown auto dealership, Breadon discovered crepe hanging above his office door; so many abusive calls were made to his home that he disconnected his telephone. At Broadway and Olive, a hoodlum jumped onto the running board of the Breadons’ Pierce-Arrow and shouted insults until a traffic policeman chased him away. But Breadon, as stubborn (and stingy) as his Scots heritage was supposed to make him, rode out the storm. A week after the Hornsby trade, he named Bob O’Farrell, recently chosen the National League’s Most Valuable Player for 1926, as his new manager. The loyal but luckless Bill Killefer joined the Browns as a coach.

On January 8, 1927, Hornsby arrived in New York to meet with John McGraw and sign a two-year contract for $36,500 per year, plus $500 for serving as team captain. Whereas he’d earlier lamented leaving St. Louis, now he implicitly denigrated not only the Cardinals’ front-office management but the city itself. “Sure, I’m tickled to death,” enthused Hornsby. “I’m glad to play ball in the greatest baseball town in the country for the greatest manager in the world.” McGraw handled things “the way I like to do it—yes or no, without any hagglin’ or moanin’—no small town stuff.”10

Everything seemed in order—except that some things clearly weren’t. From National League headquarters in New York, John Heydler had already announced that Hornsby couldn’t play for the Giants while still owning stock in the Cardinals. On January 31, however, the Cardinals’ board of directors held its annual meeting and elected Breadon president, Rickey vice president, Bill DeWitt treasurer, Clarence Lloyd secretary, William Walsingham as a board member to replace Mark Steinberg, and Rogers Hornsby to succeed himself on the board. A 10 percent dividend on 1926 profits was declared, which meant that Hornsby’s stock earned him $2,916.

Asked about the anomaly of his being a ballplayer on one team while owning stock in another, Hornsby professed to be unconcerned. “I’m not worried about all this mess,” he told St. Louis reporters. “It doesn’t bother me a bit. Every time I meet a friend—I still have a few friends in St. Louis—I’m told to buck up and not let ’em get me down.”11 Actually, Hornsby and William Fahey, his attorney, knew they held the upper hand over Breadon, Heydler, and the entire National League. Unless Landis himself intervened, Hornsby would get something very close to his price—and Breadon or somebody else would have to pay it. Hornsby wanted $105 for each of his 1,167 shares, reasoning that in view of the Cardinals’ success since he bought the stock—success for which he felt largely responsible—he was entitled to make a big profit.

Early in February, when Hornsby, Fahey, Breadon, and the largely forgotten Branch Rickey attended the annual Baseball Writers Association dinner in New York, all concerned denied discussions with either Landis or Giants officials about Hornsby’s stock. But Hornsby did meet privately with Landis and, according to reports that leaked out, received a stern lecture on the need to curb his gambling habits. It was the first in a series of such admonitions, each of which would have the same negligible effect.

So Hornsby readied for spring training 1927 as both a big-time baseball stockholder and a big-time, handsomely paid ballplayer. With Jeannette and Billy, he left St. Louis bound for Sarasota, Florida, where, for the third spring in succession, McGraw’s Giants would be based. Hornsby reported that his weight, which had fallen dramatically in the last half of the previous season, was now back to a normal 175 pounds. In fact he gained about twenty-five pounds over the winter, so that he arrived at Sarasota weighing at least 185 to 190.

Both little Billy and Jeannette (still pretty but now plumper than when she’d first gained Hornsby’s attention) enjoyed what, in those days, must have seemed truly a tropical paradise. When, following a couple of weeks of conditioning, the Giants were ready to start traveling to various exhibition sites, Hornsby’s wife and son returned to St. Louis. From then on, while the rest of the players ate in groups, Hornsby sat alone in hotel dining rooms.

McGraw—late getting to Florida following his annual sabbatical at Havana’s racetracks and casinos and then, once arrived, busy trying to straighten out his failed Sarasota real-estate schemes—left the early work to captain Hornsby. “Rog,” remembered Frank Graham of the New York Evening Sun, “being a very literal person, took the captaincy very literally.”12

Among the Giants regulars, Hornsby clashed particularly with third baseman Fred Lindstrom, who, at the age of twenty-one, was already a four-year major-leaguer. When Hornsby, from second base, called down Lindstrom on a particular play in practice, the brash young Chicagoan replied that “the old man [McGraw] always told me differently.” Hornsby shouted that, in McGraw’s absence, he was in charge, to which Lindstrom shot back, “You and your ideas. Once you lay aside your bat, you’re a detriment to any club.”13

Meanwhile the stock situation festered; Giants president Stoneham said flatly that Hornsby had to sell his St. Louis holdings, because “there must be no cry of syndicate ball.” Yet Hornsby still went about his spring-training routine seemingly unruffled, and on March 8, 1927, he appeared in his first official game as a New York Giant, hitting two doubles and a single in a 13–1 pounding of the Browns. As Richards Vidmer of the New York Times described him, he performed “full of fire and fury … eager and enthusiastic, carefree but not careless.”14

As usual, Hornsby was prepared to speak out on almost any baseball subject. At Venice, Florida, local civic dignitaries arranged a dinner to commemorate McGraw’s twenty-fifth season as Giants manager. Hornsby and thirty or so other baseball people were on hand; afterward he walked in the hotel gardens with the Sun’s Frank Graham. Strictly not for publication, asked Graham, what did Hornsby think about the Giants’ prospects? “Before I tell you,” replied Hornsby, “I want to say this. I don’t talk ‘not for publication.’ Anything I say you can put in the paper, and if anybody don’t like it, he can lump it.” Over the winter, New York had acquired Edd Roush in a trade with Cincinnati, but the two-time batting titlist and far-ranging center fielder despised McGraw and still hadn’t signed a contract. “Now I’ll tell you what I think of the outfield,” said Hornsby. “I think it stinks. They got to get Roush in here to keep those clowns from knockin’ their heads together.”15

The next day, while Hornsby managed and played against the Cardinals’ Frank Frisch (for the first time since the trade) and the Philadelphia Athletics’ Ty Cobb (for what proved to be the last time), John McGraw hurried to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he signed Roush to a three-year contract—at what sportswriters calculated to be $23,000–$25,000 per year.

In announcing Roush’s signing, McGraw took the occasion to blast league president Heydler for interfering with Hornsby’s property rights and making up league rules as he went along. Yet Heydler remained determined, informing the National League’s board of directors that, failing all else, “Hornsby will be stopped by me from playing on or after April 12 [opening day].” While Heydler privately described Hornsby’s position as “most unjustifiable and unfair,” he was also impatient with Sam Breadon, who, as he said in a circular to the other National League club presidents, could buy up all of Hornsby’s stock anytime he wanted.16

On April 6 Heydler finally contacted Hornsby personally. Speaking by telephone from the Richmond Hotel at Augusta, Georgia, the ballplayer was generally uncooperative, repeatedly referring Heydler to Fahey, his attorney in St. Louis. He did suggest that he might be willing to exchange his stock for a majority interest in the Houston Texas League franchise, which the Cardinals controlled. When Heydler called Fahey in St. Louis, the attorney’s response was “Let Landis decide it.” Heydler, jealous of his prerogatives as National League president, proposed that the whole thing might be resolved at a meeting of National League club representatives that he intended to convene on April 8 at the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh. He wanted Fahey and Hornsby to attend as well.17

On the morning of the eighth, Leo J. Bondy, the Giants’ attorney and Stoneham’s official representative, went to Hornsby’s room at the William Penn and found the ballplayer, who’d arrived from Washington the previous night, lying on his bed, propped up on an elbow, and obviously resentful at having missed his usual sleep. When Bondy started to talk about what Hornsby ought to do, the response was “Why don’t you mind your own business?”18

In accordance with official league practice, Hornsby and Fahey weren’t allowed to be physically present but sat in another room and kept in telephone contact as Heydler and the club executives debated the issue for eight hours. “The theory of the meeting,” as Heydler later put it, “was, first, that good sportsmanship and fair dealing must prevail ahead of either the interest of the player or club; second, that the interests of the National League should prevail ahead of any individual.”19

Heydler finally persuaded Breadon to agree to a price of $100,000 for Hornsby’s holdings, which came out to a little more than $95 per share. That wouldn’t do, said Hornsby, speaking through Bondy (who shuttled between rooms) and by telephone through Fahey; he had to get $105 per share, or it was no deal. By a seven-to-one vote, with Bondy the lone dissenter, the group endorsed Heydler’s offer and adjourned at 7:00 P.M.

While Fahey returned to St. Louis, Heydler, Bondy, and Hornsby all took the same train to New York. Arriving late the next morning, they went directly to the Giants’ offices in the Hart Building (at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street) and into conference with Stoneham and McGraw. Bondy emerged to tell waiting reporters that Hornsby had agreed to sell for $100,000, plus another $12,000 to cover his legal costs. Of the total of $112,000, Breadon would pay $86,000, with the other seven clubs contributing $2,000 each and the Giants picking up the extra $12,000.

“All’s settled and that’s another worry off my mind,” said a smiling Hornsby as he headed up to the Polo Grounds for that afternoon’s preseason game with Washington. Reported Heydler to Landis, “It was a high price to pay for a principle.” “What looked like a mole-hill proposition at the start,” Heydler wrote J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the Sporting News, “grew into a mountain, and I feel we were lucky to escape an unpleasant ending.”20

What with getting more than twice as much for his stock as he paid for it, as well as tidy profits from the sale of the Maple Avenue apartment building and another at 6647 Kingsbury Boulevard he and Jeannette had purchased the previous year, Hornsby appeared to be in the chips. But he still owed the bank about $22,000 plus interest on what he’d borrowed to purchase Cardinals stock in 1925, and he was being sued by Frank Quinn, his wife’s former attorney, for $5,250 in unpaid fees, dating back to 1923.

Quinn’s suit turned out to be more of a long-running nuisance than anything else, but another civil action proved a far more serious matter. Brought by Hornsby’s erstwhile bookmaker friend Frank L. Moore and coming in the midst of the stock-ownership controversy, it became both a public embarrassment and a threat to whatever financial stability Rogers and Jeannette Hornsby may have been trying to achieve.

In mid-January 1927 Moore, accompanied by his Kentucky attorney, arrived in St. Louis and retained seventy-three-year-old Thomas Rowe to represent him under Missouri law. The three met vainly with William Fahey and then, on the twenty-fourth, filed suit in St. Louis City circuit court for $92,000, the sum Moore said Hornsby owed him in gambling and other debts.

During January and February 1926, Moore alleged, he’d bet $70,000 in Hornsby’s behalf—in amounts ranging from $400 to $4,300—on races at the Latonia track in northern Kentucky and at tracks in various other states. Hornsby had also hit Moore for a variety of loans: $7,500, which became the down payment on the Kingsbury Boulevard apartment building; $4,000 for Hornsby to invest in a dog track at Jacksonville, Florida; $4,930, which went to pay off a New York City bookmaker; and various sums in ninety- and sixty-day notes Hornsby signed during 1925 and 1926, involving loans to both Hornsby and his wife.

“I don’t owe Moore a dime,” insisted Hornsby. “I did borrow $7,500 from him to help pay for my apartment [building] here, but every cent of that debt has been paid.” That much Moore and his attorney eventually agreed to; by late February they’d amended their petition on that and other claims, so that they now claimed Hornsby owned Moore $70,075. Fahey described Moore as a “hero-worshipper” who sought Hornsby’s friendship by including him in bets Hornsby knew nothing about; in fact, declared Fahey, Hornsby “never made a sizable bet on a horse race until he met Moore.”21 People familiar with Hornsby’s gambling habits well before his association with Moore simply found that impossible to believe.

With Hornsby about to leave for spring training, the proceedings couldn’t go forward without his being present to defend himself. Judge McElhinney ordered the suit carried over to the fall term of his court, and the Hornsbys were off to Sarasota.

So with two lawsuits pending in St. Louis, the victorious manager in the most-recent World Series wore a New York Giants’ uniform for his twelfth major-league opening day. The Giants began robustly at Philadelphia, battering the perennially “Phutile” Phillies 15–7 before a capacity crowd of about 22,000 in intimate, shabby Baker Bowl. Batting fourth, Hornsby doubled and hit a two-run homer over the scoreboard in right-center field—where marks on the short, high wall made by hard-hit balls in previous seasons remained unpainted.

The Giants had to start the season without Travis Jackson, disabled by an emergency appendectomy shortly before the season opened; Eddie “Doc” Farrell, a University of Pennsylvania dental school graduate, took over at shortstop. A few days into the season, Hornsby shared a dining-room table in the Copley Square Hotel in Boston with Farrell and the Times’s Vidmer. When Vidmer inquired how the team looked, Hornsby seemed oblivious to Farrell’s presence: “This team can’t win with Farrell at shortstop. He can’t make the double play.”22

Of course Hornsby was the acknowledged best at that particular play, and Wilson Sporting Goods had recently paid him a fee to market a Rogers Hornsby Glove. Advertised as “ready broke,” expensively priced (at nine dollars), and specially designed for middle infielders, it featured a “Hornsby tunnel loop web” between thumb and index finger and a three-finger design, with the third and fourth fingers combined to deepen the glove pocket. (Within a few months the Spalding company, capitalizing on the presumed rivalry between Hornsby and Frank Frisch, would bring out a rival glove designed to Frisch’s specifications).23

On May 10, 1927, in New York, Frisch’s and Hornsby’s ballclubs met for the first time in regular-season play, Frisch going hitless and Hornsby doubling, homering, and batting in five runs as the Giants walloped St. Louis 10–1. McGraw, who the previous season had complained that he couldn’t rely on Frisch as his captain, relied heavily on Hornsby; later that month, with McGraw already suffering from the chronic sinusitis that made his summers miserable, Hornsby was in charge of the team when it returned to Boston.

There Hornsby benched Farrell (even though the little shortstop was batting close to .400), installed a barely recovered Jackson at shortstop, and thereby constituted a unique infield, all of whose members—Hornsby, Jackson, Bill Terry, and Fred Lindstrom—would eventually be named to baseball’s Hall of Fame. Though handicapped by mediocre catching and pitching, the 1927 New York Giants were still the most talented group of men with whom Hornsby had played thus far.

After a good start, the high-powered Giants went into a slump and, week after week, barely won more than they lost. In June, McGraw (no doubt with Hornsby’s counsel) sought to bolster his pitching in a six-player swap that sent Farrell to Boston and brought right-hander Larry Benton, hitherto the Braves’s ace, to New York.

On their first trip into St. Louis, the Giants split four games before big crowds, Frisch making six hits and Hornsby a like number, including a two-run homer. Before the first game, Mayor Victor Miller presented a wristwatch to Hornsby “from the fans of St. Louis,” and the next day the Giants captain was the luncheon guest of the Exchange Club at the Chase Hotel.24

On Saturday, June 18, Charles A. Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis monoplane at Lambert Field, from which, thirty-five days earlier, he’d departed for New York to undertake his epochal nonstop flight to Paris. With more than 33,000 on hand at Sportsman’s Park, Lindbergh led players and dignitaries to the flagpole in center field for the hoisting of the 1926 championship pennant. Then, as Sam Breadon stood by uncomfortably, Commissioner Landis awarded the World Series rings; Breadon’s former manager, in his gray visitors’ uniform, received the first one.

McGraw started something of a controversy when he was quoted in St. Louis as saying, “it has been agreed Hornsby will become the active manager of the team next year.” The story quickly went out over the wire services; in New York, Charles Stoneham hastened to reassure everybody that McGraw wasn’t about to step down, that he could manage the Giants as long as he liked. McGraw himself hurriedly qualified what he’d said; he only meant that if he ever did quit, he would like Hornsby to be his successor. Whereupon Hornsby added that he was satisfied to be “just a player in the ranks.”25 Still, suspicions persisted that Hornsby was the heir apparent to baseball’s choicest managerial post.

On July 19 the Polo Grounds was the scene of a John McGraw Silver Jubilee, marking a quarter century in which his teams had won ten pennants and three World Series. Mayor Jimmie Walker, Commissioner Landis, league president Heydler, six club presidents, a number of former Giants players, and assorted celebrities were on hand for protracted pregame ceremonies, then for an 8–5 loss to the Chicago Cubs. That put the Giants’ record at 47–43—fourth place in the standings behind Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh—and prompted boos from the 25,000 or so customers, many of them directed at Hornsby. At that point Hornsby, batting in the .330s, trailed Pittsburgh’s Paul Waner by fifty or sixty points and Frisch by a good margin as well. Although he drove in runners and pounded out home runs with regularity, the horseshoe-shaped Polo Grounds, with its uniquely short distances down the foul lines but vast terrain from right-center around to left-center, cut down on his power output at home.

With McGraw again in upper-respiratory misery, Hornsby took the team west, won four of seven games from St. Louis and Chicago, and moved to within seven games of the first-place Cubs. Returning to New York after an 8–3 road trip, the Giants then won ten straight and seventeen of twenty at the Polo Grounds, with McGraw remaining at his Pelham, New York, home much of the time. When, with Hornsby in charge, they left on their final western swing, New York was bunched with Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis—four teams separated by only three games.

Assuming the full prerogatives of manager, Hornsby drove the Giants toward a pennant. Besides enforcing a midnight curfew, he banned smoking, card playing, and even reading in the visitors’ dressing quarters. The Giants grumbled, but they kept on winning. After splitting a four-game series at Chicago and taking seven of twelve games (played over seven days) in the dense St. Louis and Cincinnati heat, Hornsby, twelve pounds lighter than when he left New York, had his team established in second place, although they still trailed red-hot Pittsburgh by four and one-half games.

On Thursday, September 22, before a capacity crowd of some 37,000 at Forbes Field, the Pirates and Giants split a doubleheader; Pittsburgh won the first game 5–2, while Hornsby’s two-run homer (his twenty-sixth) accounted for all the runs Fred Fitzsimmons needed in the nightcap. The Pirates scored their first run that afternoon when a line drive (recorded as a base hit) ricocheted off Larry Benton’s and then Travis Jackson’s gloves. That evening, as Hornsby prepared to go down to dinner at the Schenley Hotel, club secretary Jim Tierney came by his room to complain that the Giants might have won both games if Jackson hadn’t played out of position and let in that run in the opener. Hornsby exploded: Tierney didn’t know a goddamn thing about baseball; all he was expected to do was “take care of the cabs and the hotel rooms and the tickets and we’ll take care of playing ball.”26

That night McGraw and Stoneham arrived from New York; when Tierney reported his encounter with Hornsby, the Giants owner was furious. Stoneham, who owned racehorses and gambled quite a lot himself, had never liked the idea of Hornsby’s welching on his gambling debts, and now Hornsby had bawled out a club official who also happened to be Stoneham’s close friend. Hornsby might be the best ballplayer in the National League, but he was still, in Stoneham’s view, no more than a ballplayer. As of that night, Hornsby’s future with the New York Giants was in doubt.

Yet everything seemed all right the next afternoon, when McGraw sat with Stoneham behind the visitors’ dugout and roundly praised Hornsby. Asked if he would resume direction of the team, McGraw replied, “I don’t think so. No one possibly could run the club any better than it is being run right now.”27 After victories on Friday and Saturday, the Giants left town only one and one-half games out of first place.

McGraw returned to the dugout at Brooklyn on the twenty-fifth. A seven-inning tie there and a dreary 9–2 defeat at Philadelphia (only the fiftieth time the Phillies had won all season) shoved the Giants three and one-half games back and into third place, with only five to play. They won the two remaining games at Baker Bowl, while Pittsburgh and St. Louis took a game apiece at Chicago and Cincinnati, respectively.

On the twenty-ninth, as a tornado devastated St. Louis’s west side, killing about 100 people and narrowly missing Sportsman’s Park, the Cardinals lost in Cincinnati; Pittsburgh and New York were idle. The Reds also beat Pittsburgh the next day, but at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Dazzy Vance outlasted three Giants pitchers, and that evening New York stood three games out of first place with only two games remaining. Pittsburgh’s victory over Cincinnati on Saturday, together with St. Louis’s rain-out, clinched the Pirates’ second pennant in three years. After the meaningless season-closing games on Sunday, the standings were: Pittsburgh (94–60), St. Louis (92–61), New York (92–62).

Hornsby could hardly be accused of doing anything short of his utmost for McGraw, Stoneham, and everyone else connected with the New York Giants. He played in all 155 games (which included one tie), hit twenty-six home runs and drove in 125 runs (third in the league in both categories), led the league with 133 runs, and batted .361, second to Paul Waner, Pittsburgh’s spray-hitting second-year outfielder. In addition, he managed the Giants in roughly half their games, and he was in charge nearly all the time during the 45–12 surge that brought them within two games of a pennant.

Frank Frisch captained the Cardinals, batted .337, and led both majors with forty-eight stolen bases. Frisch also topped second basemen in both leagues in assists, double plays, and fielding percentage. Although he didn’t make St. Louis fans forget Hornsby, he played a dashing style of baseball that won over nearly all of them. Moreover, they turned out in record numbers—763,715 for the season. Said Sam Breadon shortly before he died, “I never will forget Frankie Frisch for saving my life.”28

While Pittsburgh, a good ballclub, fell in four games to the Yankees powerhouse, Hornsby settled his bill at the small residential hotel near the Polo Grounds where he’d lived half of the past season, and headed back to St. Louis and his nominal home. Since the early part of the year, the Hornsbys’ residence had been the Forest Park Hotel, where Jeannette and Billy lived full-time and Hornsby stayed when the Giants were in town. From there the Hornsbys entrained for Texas to visit relatives in the Fort Worth and Austin areas.

Rogers Hornsby and John McGraw genuinely and greatly admired each other. “They were like two peas from one pod,” said Giants outfielder Heinie Mueller. “They went together all the time, went to the races together, and we all thought Rog would be manager some day.”29 Under different circumstances, Hornsby and McGraw might have experienced a close and productive relationship for the next few years, until McGraw decided to retire and leave the ballclub in Hornsby’s hands. That outcome had been generally predicted, almost from the time Hornsby joined the Giants.

But if he really wanted to remain a New York Giant, Hornsby did himself no good by saying publicly in Philadelphia (and subsequently in St. Louis, Fort Worth, and elsewhere) that “there would have to be a new ownership of the Giants before I would consent to being manager. There are too many people attempting to dictate the club’s policy. I had a taste of that in St. Louis, with Breadon and Rickey each having a finger in the pie. As manager I would want complete authority in the playing end.”30 For Charles Stoneham, already unhappy with his prickly and high-priced ballplayer, that may have decided the issue.

What undoubtedly sealed it, though, was Hornsby’s conduct in the matter of Moore vs. Hornsby, the litigious history of which resumed in December 1927. In New York, Joe Vila, the veteran baseball reporter for the Evening Sun, predicted that Hornsby wouldn’t “hide behind [Missouri’s] anti-gambling laws.… Men who don’t make good [their] gambling debts here, especially at the race track, soon lose caste.”31 But that was exactly the strategy Hornsby and attorney William Fahey decided upon.

By the time the case came to trial—now in St. Louis County circuit court, with Judge McElhinney still presiding—Frank L. Moore had again reduced his claims against Hornsby, which now totaled $45,075. The trial on his suit opened in Clayton, Missouri, on December 19. In constituting the all-male jury, both Fahey and Thomas Rowe, Moore’s Missouri attorney, asked pointedly whether Hornsby’s trade to New York eleven months earlier would influence their judgment—a voir dire that may have been unique in legal annals.

On December 19, as Hornsby, incessantly chewing gum, sat at a table with his wife and Fahey, Frank Moore took the stand. He testified that when he was introduced to Hornsby in 1925 at the Cincinnati baseball park, “the first thing Hornsby asked me after the usual ‘pleased to meet you’ was, ‘have you any tips on the horses?’” Moore provided a few tips; Hornsby gave him ten dollars to bet for each race Moore mentioned. After that, Hornsby started calling his Fort Thomas, Kentucky, home from New York, Philadelphia, and other cities to get tips on that day’s action and have Moore make bets. For a period of more than a year, “I was supplying Hornsby with tips on the races and placing bets for him.” When Rowe asked why Moore hadn’t been willing to make an out-of-court settlement, the Kentuckian declared, “I won’t let Hornsby get out of this. It’s not the money, but the principle.”32

Hornsby and Fahey contested Moore’s claims on the general grounds that inasmuch as the debts Moore insisted he was due were all gambling debts, then Hornsby, a citizen of Missouri—where any gambling was illegal—couldn’t be held liable. They also entered demurrers to two counts in Moore’s petition, both having to do with money loaned to Jeannette Hornsby to bet (and lose) for her husband. Ruling that Hornsby couldn’t be held liable for his wife’s debts, McElhinney reduced the remaining value of Moore’s suit to $36,320.

After that, Hornsby himself—“clean cut of limb and bronze of face,” in a navy blue suit with well-matched accessories, vigorously working over his wad of gum—gave his testimony, which proved to be the only other in the trial. He’d been told, he said, that Moore was the best racing handicapper in the country, and he acknowledged that in 1925 and 1926 he bet almost daily on Moore’s advisories—often $1,000 at a time, sometimes $1,500, once $2,400. But, he insisted, he paid for all his losses. When Rowe, on cross-examination, asked whether Hornsby was a professional gambler, he quickly said no. Then was he an amateur gambler? “I’ll leave that for you to decide, Mr. Rowe,” he answered. “Rogers,” exclaimed Jeannette Hornsby when he stepped down, “you were wonderful!”33

On December 21 McElhinney instructed the jury that while Hornsby’s gambling debts were inadmissible under Missouri law, they could still rule that he owed money to Moore for gambling loans or whatever purpose. Early that afternoon, the jurors reported back their 10–2 verdict (only a three-fourths majority being needed in civil cases), opting for McElhinney’s first instruction and finding Hornsby liableless. Both Hornsbys were absent from the courtroom because Jeannette had become ill, but Moore bitterly told reporters, “I’m through with this case and with St. Louis.”34

Twenty days later, early in the evening of January 10, 1928, Hornsby telephoned J. Roy Stockton in a futile effort to obtain John McGraw’s address in Havana, Cuba, for which destination (Hornsby learned after calling New York) McGraw had just departed. Hornsby was trying to help Kirby Samuels, just fired from his job as Cardinals trainer, and he figured McGraw might be able to find something for Samuels.

Three hours later Hornsby again called Stockton. “Remember I wanted to get Kirby a job with the Giants?” Hornsby said. “Well, I’m out of a job now. Not exactly out of a job. But I’ve been traded to the Boston Braves.” He then read a telegram just received from Boston president Emil Fuchs.35

For the second time in thirteen months, Hornsby was the subject of front-page news, but this time the story wasn’t just sensational; it seemed incomprehensible. In what was announced as a straight player exchange, Hornsby went to the Boston Braves for Jimmie Welsh, a run-of-the-mill outfielder, and James “Shanty” Hogan, a promising but chronically overweight young catcher. Jim Tierney made the deal public at 9:45 P.M. (New York time) in the form of a typewritten statement, signed by Charles Stoneham and John McGraw, copies of which were handed out to the local press at the Giants’ offices in the Hart Building. Undertaken “after due deliberation” between club president and manager and involving no cash, the deal was made with “the best interests of the New York Giants” in mind. As reporters shouted questions, Tierney replied that the statement would have to speak for itself.36

The New York Daily Mirror (rarely the most reliable source) claimed that at the end of the season, eight Giants, including stalwarts Lindstrom, Terry, Jackson, and Roush, had told Stoneham they wouldn’t play again if Hornsby continued to do any managing. So Stoneham “decided that the players … were far greater assets to the Giants than Hornsby.” Nobody ever confirmed that story, but when he was asked about possible friction with various Giants players, Hornsby spoke freely and harshly of Fred Lindstrom: “He’s just a cry-baby. He always has something wrong with him in a tight series, especially if he’s near the .300 mark in batting.” If a tough pitcher started warming up, “Lindstrom started to sob. He’ll always cry, whether I’m on the club or not.”37

When reporters caught up with John McGraw at Savannah, Georgia, the Giants manager would only say, “There is nothing to add to the original announcement. The trade has been made and there’s all there is to it.” Back in New York, Stoneham talked vaguely about possible conflicts in authority; in St. Louis, Hornsby seemed genuinely nonplussed. No, there was never any friction between himself and McGraw; no, he never tried to undermine McGraw, “a great manager, the best I ever knew”; no, there couldn’t be any “horse-race betting angle to this.”38

Yet in fact the “betting angle”—what Stoneham perceived as Hornsby’s welching on honest bets—did much to speed his departure. Tierney acknowledged as much a few days later; eventually even Hornsby came to realize that offenses against “that drunken bum,” as he referred to Stoneham, decided his fate with the New York Giants.39

How determined Stoneham had been to rid himself of Hornsby became evident in subsequent weeks, when McGraw in Havana and other National League club officials confirmed that before the deal with Boston, Hornsby had been unsuccessfully shopped around: to Brooklyn for fastballer Dazzy Vance; to Chicago for outfielder Hazen “Kiki” Cuyler (recently obtained from Pittsburgh); and to Cincinnati, where Jack Hendricks, still carrying a grudge from his stint as the Cardinals manager, vetoed an exchange for second baseman Hughie Critz and catcher Eugene “Bubbles” Hargrave. Only after those three clubs had turned down the Giants was Boston brought into the picture.

That publicity may have chagrined Hornsby, but his comment was typical: “It don’t matter to me whether I’m with the Braves or any other club.” As for the Giants’ prospects without him, “How the hell should I know anything about the Giants? I’m with Boston now.” But he added that he wouldn’t believe McGraw had approved the trade “until he tells me with his own lips.”40

That never happened. In fact the trade was wholly Stoneham’s idea, and McGraw—owing money to Stoneham and now struggling to square things with investors in his Florida land fiasco—could do nothing but acquiesce. The Little Napoleon was no longer Napoleonic, at least not when it came to crossing Charles Stoneham.

While rumors circulated that Commissioner Landis might investigate the circumstances of the trade, Emil Fuchs announced that Landis knew all about it beforehand and gave his approval. Therefore, said Fuchs, “it would not be good sportsmanship or fairness to reflect further on Mr. Hornsby’s integrity, fidelity, loyalty and honor.”41

“Judge” Fuchs (so called because he’d once been a minor magistrate in New York City) was fifty years old, portly, dark complexioned, and, by all accounts, an exceptionally likable man. What he lacked in baseball savvy and financial resources, he tried to make up for with optimism and enthusiasm. As president of the Boston National Leaguers, he needed plenty of both, because the Boston franchise had fallen on sad times since the “Miracle Braves” won everything back in 1914. Since 1921, except for a fifth-place showing in 1925, the Braves had finished either last or next to last every year. Although they occupied the newest ballpark in the league (opened in 1915), the Braves couldn’t play home games on Sundays under Massachusetts law and usually trailed everybody in attendance. But with the addition of Hornsby, bubbled Fuchs, the Braves would be “the greatest since 1914.”42 They might even be able to pay their bills.

Although Frank Moore’s suit was out of the way, Hornsby’s legal complications persisted. Frank Quinn’s suit for unpaid legal fees was still pending (as it would be for the next eight years), and yet another civil action, brought by John H. Barto, M.D., the previous summer, alleged that Hornsby owed him $387 dating back to January–March 1925. During that period, as the Hornsbys’ itemized account showed, Barto visited the Maple Avenue apartment almost daily to treat Jeannette Hornsby, then pregnant.43 Although Barto obtained a judgment in justice of the peace court early in March 1928, William Fahey managed to secure a reversal in city circuit court on a technicality. Otherwise, as Hornsby said good-bye to his wife and little boy and left for St. Petersburg, Florida, to start spring training with his third team in three years, his personal affairs seemed to be in better order than for some time.

Both the Braves and the Yankees trained at St. Petersburg, the Yankees at Crescent Lake Park at Thirteenth Avenue and Fifth Street, on the north side of the little city, the Braves at Coffee Pot Park, located at the head of the bayou of the same name that ran into Tampa Bay.44 Hornsby arrived on February 21 and was met by Fuchs and Jack Slattery, the Braves’ new manager. Until Fuchs hired him the previous fall, the fifty-two-year-old Slattery, a onetime second-string big-league catcher, had been coaching the Boston College baseball team.

Hornsby and Slattery shared a room at the Vinoy Park Hotel on the bay and, to all outward appearances, got along fine. Fuchs met with his prize acquisition and offered him a three-year contract to supersede his two-year pact at New York. Hornsby would receive $40,600 per year (including $600 annually for serving as team captain), an arrangement that sustained Hornsby’s status as the second-best-paid player in the majors. It was also about four times as much as Fuchs paid Slattery. Hornsby said he looked forward to batting at Braves Field, where the late-afternoon shadows from the single-deck grandstand bothered him less than the shadows at the double-deck Polo Grounds. Moreover, bleachers in front of the left-field fence (originally installed for the Boston College–Holy Cross College football game the previous fall) shortened the 403-foot home-run distance by more than eighty feet.

Carrying an aggregate .361 major-league batting average, Hornsby began a season that turned out to be no more than an interlude in his career as both player and manager. The Boston Braves were a deplorable outfit that had won only fifty-one times in 1927 and finished dead last. Early on, Hornsby may actually have entertained some notion that his presence—as well as that of Lester Bell, obtained late in March from St. Louis at Hornsby’s urging—might make the Braves at least respectable. But while Hornsby would play up to form, so, unfortunately, would most of the rest of the team.

Hornsby didn’t hit well in the games in Florida and on the trip north, and started the season in a slump. At the Polo Grounds, where the Braves opened with the Giants, he posed with rookie Andy Cohen, his replacement, and John McGraw, who appeared in a uniform for the first time in nearly seven years. While Hornsby managed only an infield single, Cohen drove in three runs on a double and two singles, scored twice, and made a nice stop and throw on Hornsby’s hard-hit grounder to clinch the Giants’ 5–2 victory. The heavily Jewish crowd of 30,000 cheered Cohen’s every move; after the final out, he was hoisted on admirers’ shoulders and carried around the field.

For the next couple of weeks, Cohen continued to bat torridly and field deftly, and wags in New York were asking “Who’s Hornsby?” Sick with flu for a couple of days, Hornsby suggested that “it ain’t fair to the kid. As soon as I get goin’, I’ll lose him.”45

A month into the season, Cohen was hitting about .270 and Hornsby was leading the league at .410, but the Braves lost nineteen of their first thirty games and remained out of last place only because the Phillies proved even more inept. On the evening of May 23, Fuchs announced that Slattery had resigned and that, “after much persuasion,” he’d obtained “the consent of Rogers Hornsby to accept the management of the Braves.”46

Again some people were ready to suspect Hornsby of undermining his field boss and maneuvering himself toward the manager’s job. Walter “Doc” Gautreau, a five-foot-four Boston native and Holy Cross graduate and a part-time second baseman for the Braves since 1925, later described how Hornsby sat by himself and made critical remarks when Slattery held pregame strategy sessions and then, during games, sneered at “that dumb collegiate coach out there.”47

Gautreau also remembered an occasion when, with the Braves losing badly at Chicago going into the top of the ninth inning, Hornsby, assuming he wouldn’t come to bat, “was already in the dressing room before we had been retired.” By Gautreau’s account, Hornsby cared for nothing but his batting average. In a game with Pittsburgh, Eddie Farrell didn’t tag up at first base on Hornsby’s long fly to right field, and, according to Gautreau, “he bawled the life out of … Farrell.… We were seven runs behind at the time. Hornsby was looking for a sacrifice fly.”48

Gautreau was among four players released within a week after Hornsby succeeded Slattery. The question of whether Gautreau and at least two others were let go because they were Roman Catholics would arise indirectly the following January, as a consequence of hearings conducted by the Boston city finance commission on allegations that William G. Lynch, a city councilman, sought payoffs for himself and other councilmen in exchange for approving a local ordinance authorizing Sunday baseball. In the course of the hearings, Lynch’s lawyer asked Emil Fuchs whether, the previous summer, Fuchs hadn’t complained to Lynch that both Hornsby and Bruce Whitmore, who sat on the Braves’ board of directors, were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and that the absence of Catholic players was hurting attendance at Braves Field. Although Fuchs denied saying anything of the kind, the suggestion that Hornsby might be a Klan member—when combined with similar suspicions Jim Tierney had encouraged in 1927—raised disturbing implications about Hornsby both personally and professionally.

It’s quite possible, though unprovable, that several years earlier, when the post–World War I Klan movement was at the peak of its membership and influence, Hornsby may have joined the secret organization in Fort Worth (a Klan stronghold) or possibly St. Louis. Local Klan units assiduously sought to recruit prominent figures in politics, business, the ministry, as well as sports—provided they met the basic requirements of being native-born, white, and at least nominally Protestant. Fred Lieb, who reported on baseball for fifty years for various New York newspapers, claimed that both Hornsby and fellow Texan Tris Speaker told him “they were members of the Ku Klux Klan.”49

How does one square such suspicions with Hornsby’s obvious fondness for John McGraw, a practicing Catholic, or his friendship with Mark Steinberg, his Jewish stockbroker and ardent champion in St. Louis? One thing seems fairly certain: if Hornsby actually belonged to the Klan, his membership, like that of hundreds of thousands of other Americans who joined the secret fraternal order, was never more than semiactive. By 1927–28, moreover, most people who’d ever been Klan members had dropped out; that seems a safe assumption as well where Hornsby is concerned.

In any case, it’s doubtful that Hornsby really wanted Jack Slattery’s job, however scornful he may have been of the “dumb collegiate coach.” As when he took over at St. Louis from Branch Rickey, Hornsby received no boost in pay for managing the Braves. Trying to win games with a pitching staff that yielded close to 900 runs would have been a trial for anybody. “If our pitchers could deliver,” he complained shortly after succeeding Slattery, “we would hold our own with the best.… there the trouble lies.”50

On May 27 George Sisler cleared waivers in the American League and joined the Braves in exchange for the $7,500 waiver price, paid to Washington. Sisler could still swing the bat, as he proved by hitting .340 in 118 games over the remainder of the season. Yet neither the addition of Sisler nor Hornsby’s efforts to fire up his team by getting himself thrown out of a game and suspended for three days did much good.

It turned out that the left-field bleachers helped the Braves’ opponents more than the home team. Most of Hornsby’s home runs at Braves Field cleared the fence in right center; of forty-eight homers landing in the new bleachers during the Braves’ first fifteen home games, two-thirds resounded off visitors’ bats. Fuchs first ordered the erection of a screen in front of the bleachers, then, in July, decided to dismantle them altogether. For the rest of the 1928 season (and until 1930, when the fence itself was moved in) the distance down the left-field line remained a respectable 353 feet.

Despite a bad stone bruise on his right heel incurred in July and then a pulled leg muscle suffered in August, Hornsby stayed in the lineup nearly every day. His seventeenth and eighteenth homers at Cincinnati on August 18 pushed his batting average to .377, several points better than Paul Waner’s.

In September the Braves struggled through nine doubleheaders in sixteen days and lost thirteen of their last fifteen games, ending with a 50–103 record (39–83 under Hornsby). Their late-season woes coincided with a hot streak for their manager that clinched his seventh batting championship. In 140 games Hornsby averaged .387, seventeen points better than Paul Waner, and banged twenty-one homers and drove in ninety-four runs. Opposing pitchers often worked around him, so that he drew 107 walks, more than anybody in the majors besides Babe Ruth.

As bad as the Braves were, they weren’t bad enough to land in last place, because Philadelphia finished at 43–109. Meanwhile the Cardinals, under Bill McKechnie’s low-keyed direction, won for the second time in three years, beating out New York by two games and Chicago by four.

About six weeks before the season closed, Hornsby signed a new three-year contract to manage the Braves. Although Fuchs made the resigning into quite a show, hardly anyone expected that the spring of 1929 would find Hornsby still with Boston. The Braves’ financial circumstances were expected to improve if Massachusetts voters approved a Sunday baseball referendum on November 8 (as in fact they did), but in the present season, said a Sporting News observer, the Braves had “lost almost everything but the players’ shirts.”51

In fact, Hornsby was actively working to get himself traded to the Chicago Cubs. The Braves couldn’t really afford his salary, he told Fuchs, so it would be the smart thing to trade him while he still had some good years left. The new contract Hornsby signed in August was actually a matter of ensuring that he would receive the same $40,000 salary wherever he played during the coming three seasons.

Early in September, when the National League presidents met in New York to discuss World Series arrangements, Chicago president William H. Veeck found Fuchs receptive to a deal for Hornsby. Veeck then traveled to Boston, where the Cubs were in town for a three-game set at Braves Field. During pregame practice, as Veeck and manager Joe McCarthy chatted beside the visitors’ dugout, Hornsby walked over, shook hands, and said he hoped the Cubs could arrange a trade for him.

At the World Series (which the Yankees again swept), Hornsby sat in the Yankee Stadium press box and told reporters he expected to be traded; twenty feet away Fuchs was denying that such a deal was in the offing. According to one Chicago writer, Hornsby offered to bet $20,000 that with his bat in the lineup, the Cubs would win a pennant.

The widely anticipated deal was finally announced on November 7, 1928. The Cubs acquired Hornsby for $200,000—the most cash involved in any player transaction up to that time—plus five nondescript players. Backed by William K. Wrigley Jr.’s enormous fortune and further enriched by record National League attendance totals for the past two seasons, the Chicago franchise had become the league’s richest. Wrigley, it was generally agreed, had just bought a pennant for the Cubs.

Describing Joe McCarthy as “the slickest manager I ever encountered,” Hornsby said nobody need worry about whether he would get along with his new field boss. “My troubles at St. Louis and New York were personal matters,” he added. “If people take a dislike to you or you to them, it’s something that can’t be avoided. Nothing of that kind will occur at Chicago because it’s not that kind of organization.”52

A week later, Hornsby arrived in Chicago, beamed with Wrigley and Veeck as he signed his contract at the Wrigley Building, then donned a Cubs uniform and posed some more. His contract called for $40,000 for each of the next three seasons, but inasmuch as first baseman Charlie Grimm would continue as Cubs captain, Hornsby actually took a $600-per-year pay cut.

Then it was back to St. Louis to spend the off-season at the fourth residence Rogers and Jeannette Hornsby had shared in the past four years. After various apartments and hotel suites and a handsome suburban residence, they became farm folks. Since his childhood, Hornsby had resided on a farm for only about five months, but like many other Americans of his day, he nurtured both a sentimental attachment to rural living and a notion that somehow owning a farm spelled long-term security. The previous summer he’d paid $18,600 for a place at Robertson, Missouri, a rural community located a couple of miles north of Lambert Field and some fifteen miles from Sportsman’s Park. Once owned by a horse breeder named Barney Schreiber, the farm consisted of ninety-three mostly uncleared acres, a fourteen-room house, and pens, paddocks, stables, and various other outbuildings.

That December, the Sporting News carried a feature piece on the Hornsbys on the farm, with Rogers, Jeannette, and Billy pictured in various outdoor settings. Wearing an old leather jacket and battered hat, Hornsby climbed down from his tractor to explain that he was out every morning by eight o’clock to tend his chickens, pigs, and cows and calves. The farm’s animal population also included hunting dogs, geese, turkeys, and even a couple of pheasants. Hornsby intended to make the farm pay by marketing milk-fed broilers and bluegrass turf, which he touted as ideal for baseball fields and golf courses. Late the previous summer, he’d hired “a couple of darkies” to come up from Texas and cultivate his bluegrass. Concluded the Sporting News’s visitor, “He’s contented, busy and was never in any better physical condition.”53

After two and one-half years filled with controversy on the ballfield and in club and league officials’ offices and the courts, it appeared that Hornsby might have arrived at some kind of professional and personal stability. The thriving Chicago Cubs, the latest stop on his tour of the National League, might even prove to be the last he would have to make.