Prologue

Beaumont, Texas, Summer 1950

At the bottom half of each inning, the stout, silver-haired manager of the Beaumont Roughnecks would emerge from the first-base dugout, trundle across the diamond, take his place in the third-base coaching box, and ritually clap his hands to exhort the leadoff Roughneck batter. Of course I knew who he was. The name Rogers Hornsby was a familiar one for anybody who followed baseball closely; as a fourteen-year-old who scanned box scores in the local daily newspapers, absorbed the weekly contents of the Sporting News, and studied how-to-play books in an effort to improve my own decidedly limited skills, I knew about all the sport’s great men. I could quote career and season statistics for contemporaries such as DiMaggio, Musial, Williams, Kiner, and Feller, as well as for Cobb, Ruth, Young, Johnson, Wagner, Gehrig, and other past heroes.

Rogers Hornsby’s achievements were among the most familiar and imposing: a .358 lifetime batting average (second only to Cobb’s) in twenty-three major-league seasons (1915–37); a .424 average in 1924 (highest for the twentieth century); two other .400-plus seasons; seven National League batting titles; player-manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1926 when they defeated Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees in a legendary World Series. By nearly everybody’s estimation, Hornsby was the foremost right-handed hitter over the first century of American baseball.

Studying him from the grandstand behind third base, where I sat with my parents through something like twenty-five games that summer, I couldn’t figure why this famous person had ended up back in his native Texas, managing at Beaumont, of all places. With a population of about 100,000, Beaumont was the smallest city in the Texas League—a Class AA circuit two levels below the majors. After all the glory Hornsby had gained and all the money he must have earned in baseball, what circumstances could possibly have led him to Beaumont?

Not that we weren’t delighted to have Hornsby managing the local team. After last-place finishes for three straight seasons, we’d come to expect little from the players the New York Yankees assigned to their Beaumont farm club. Yet in August and early September, Hornsby’s Roughnecks astonished everyone by surging into first place and staying there, finishing in front of the Fort Worth Cats—a perennial powerhouse stocked with talented youngsters from the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system. It was enough to make the summer of 1950 one of the best times of my life.

When the pennant was almost clinched, local business and civic leaders organized a Rogers Hornsby Day, with appropriate ceremonies to take place before that night’s game. A crowd of 6,259, close to capacity, was present at Beaumont’s Stuart Stadium as Mayor Otho Plummer thanked Hornsby on behalf of the city and then presented a Texas Stetson and the keys to a new black Cadillac sedan. Hornsby took the hat (but wouldn’t put it on), glanced at the Cadillac, and then grunted into the microphone, “It’s nice. Now get it outta here so we can start the game.”1

A barely audible reaction—a mixture of surprise, disappointment, and dismay—moved through the crowd. My parents, who always put considerable store in appearances, simply didn’t know what to make of Hornsby’s graceless response to a genuine, openhanded expression of civic gratitude.

Apart from what could be learned in official baseball records, we knew little about Hornsby—little about the succession of trades and dismissals that marked his career and what in effect was a thirteen-year exile from the major leagues. Had we known Hornsby as many people in the little universe of Organized Baseball knew him, we might have expected just about what we all got that night in Beaumont.

More than twenty years earlier, the venerable St. Louis sportswriter John B. Sheridan observed that Hornsby “is, as the French say, deficient in the social relation.… Hornsby can be cold, indifferent, even rude.” “As cold as tempered steel” was the way another acquaintance described him. “He cares little for what anyone says, and still less for what they think.” Travis Jackson, Hornsby’s teammate on the 1927 New York Giants, remembered that “he had a good way of making everybody irritated,” while Les Tietje, who pitched briefly for the St. Louis Browns when Hornsby managed them in the mid-1930s, was rather more explicit: “Rogers Hornsby. Now there was a real p-r-i-c-k.”2

Cold, gruff, aloof, loner—such adjectives show up with remarkable frequency in contemporary recollections of Hornsby. Acquaintances also noted his extraordinarily clear, blue eyes: “steel blue,” said most people; “large tawny eyes, not unlike a mountain lion’s,” recalled a former teammate; “go to hell eyes,” in the journalist Westbrook Pegler’s phrase.3 Hornsby was also, by his own admission and nearly everybody else’s account, bluntly honest and utterly lacking in tact.

“I have never been a yes man,” he declared during spring training with his 1950 Beaumont team. “When a man asks me a question I believe he wants me to give him an honest answer no matter who it hurts. But some of the owners don’t want that. They want the answer that they want to hear. But that’s not the way I was brought up.” “More than all my honors in 48 years of baseball,” he insisted less than a year before he died, “I’m proudest of the fact that I am not a baseball hypocrite.… I’ve never taken back anything I ever said and I’ve never failed to say exactly—and I mean exactly—what I was thinking. To everybody—from the owner to the bat boy.” Hornsby, a longtime friend believed, “was as addicted to the truth as a drunk was to his bottle.”4

Plenty of people—especially teammates, players on teams he managed, club owners who employed him, and no doubt his first two wives—found his tactlessness insufferable. But for baseball writers covering his career over the decades, his candor was his most attractive feature. Usually a good interview subject, Hornsby boasted of never saying anything off the record. “The most personable thing about Hornsby,” enthused Bozeman Bulger of the New York World in 1927, “is his frankness. He says what he thinks without any thought of what effect his words will have.… If he believes a thing, he says it.”5 Bulger might have added that whatever Hornsby had to say was usually punctuated with profanity and scatology.

When Hornsby talked, moreover, he rarely talked anything but baseball. Not only was baseball his professional livelihood; it was central to his understanding of American society as well as the only organized athletic competition worth doing. Although he played a little football before he dropped out of high school, later on he had no use for that or any other sport besides baseball. In 1953, on the eve of the annual preseason game at Chicago’s Soldier Field between the College All-Stars and the reigning professional champions, he remarked to a group of visiting sportswriters, “You fellers are up here for the football game—that’s a goddamn lousy sport.” And when he asked his grandson about his favorite sport and the boy replied that he preferred football, Hornsby professed to be “flabbergasted.”6

Hornsby sometimes went bird hunting in late autumn, but unlike many ballplayers, he never took up golf and dismissed card playing as a waste of time. He read little and, at least during the baseball season, avoided motion pictures, convinced that both activities were bad for a hitter’s precious eyesight. That he’d never tasted liquor or tobacco was one of the best-known facts about him.

J. Roy Stockton of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch once contrasted Hornsby’s personality and habits to those of Frank Frisch, the brilliant second baseman for whom Hornsby was traded in 1926, in what was probably the most sensational player exchange in baseball history up to then. Frisch, a Fordham University graduate, smoked, danced, liked to read and garden, and could play the guitar. He kept a decent stock of wine, enjoyed travel, and went in for photography and amateur moviemaking. “Hornsby,” Stockton said, “never read a book in his life and doesn’t even read the daily newspaper, except perhaps the headlines and the baseball columns.” Hornsby had never held a camera or a musical instrument, never spaded a flower garden, never smoked or chewed tobacco. For Hornsby, the chief value of travel was “to get from one baseball town to another.” He didn’t dance, “and his comment on music was ‘How the devil can a fellow talk baseball with those fellers makin’ all that racket with them instruments.’”7

Stockton exaggerated, though not by much. It’s notable that Hornsby never took issue with Stockton’s less-than-flattering characterization; the two remained on good terms for the half century they knew each other.

One who likes to judge people by stereotypes might explain Hornsby as basically a Texan—born in 1896 on the state’s semiarid plains, raised mostly in Fort Worth, and buried in the family plot in a cemetery near Austin. Although he lived outside the state most of his adult life, he started out in professional baseball in Texas, kept up his contacts with a considerable number of Texan relatives and acquaintances, and managed teams in two Texas cities.

Hornsby might fit the image of the Texas plainsman—laconic, hard-bitten, no-nonsense, straight-from-the-shoulder—except for the fact that from the age of six he lived in an urban industrial environment. Besides, the gallery of American stereotypes offers an equally familiar Texan: the swaggering, loud-mouthed braggart and bullshitter.

If stereotypes rarely explain much of anything, caricatures, particularly self-caricatures, sometimes reveal more. Over the years Hornsby created a kind of self-caricature, which his contemporaries in the press and baseball came to accept as representing the whole truth. When he was a boy, Hornsby often said, his mother taught him not only to shun alcohol and tobacco but “above everything to always tell the truth.”8

Of course Hornsby didn’t always do so. Like the rest of us, he sometimes dissembled, backtracked, contradicted himself—and outright lied. Contrary to what he let people believe, he didn’t always get along with umpires; he was ejected from games on a number of occasions and drew several fines and suspensions. While he possessed the finest batting eye in the game, sometimes he swung at pitches outside the strike zone; sometimes he even looked at called third strikes. Despite his reputation for never praising his players when they did well—“Why should I? That’s what they’re being paid to do,” he said repeatedly—he often spoke warmly of men he managed.9

Hornsby insisted that he always gave his best on the ballfield, and as a manager he demanded the same from his players. They owed that not to him but to the club that paid their salaries, to the fans who paid to see them play, and most of all to themselves as professionals. Yet at least twice during his own playing career—in episodes that were well publicized at the time but subsequently overlooked by Hornsby and everybody else—he deliberately slacked off because he was unhappy with his team’s management.

Although Hornsby had little contact with his older son after the breakup of his first marriage, he seems to have been a reasonably good father to his son by his second wife—at least while the boy was growing up. He generally enjoyed the company of young people, and in the many baseball schools and clinics with which he was associated, beginning in 1933, he worked to teach tens of thousands of boys the basics of the game.

Regarding the one nonbaseball activity that held his attention—betting on horse races—Hornsby was particularly plainspoken. While other kinds of gambling failed to interest him, he belonged to the legion of ballplayers who liked to bet on horses. Hornsby, unlike most of his peers, bet excessively and often profligately; although he won big on a few occasions, his losses kept him in financial straits for much of his life. Especially in the 1920s and 1930s, with the cloud of the 1919 World Series scandal still hanging over professional baseball, Hornsby’s gambling habits vexed the sport’s officialdom and repeatedly put him at odds with the people he worked for.

Hornsby never tried to conceal his fondness for putting money on a horse’s nose. Over and over he insisted that betting on a race was his only real enjoyment away from baseball, that what he did with his own money hurt nobody but himself, and that what financiers did with other people’s money in the stock market was much worse.

Yet Hornsby refused to recognize that those who employed him as player and manager and those responsible for trying to keep baseball honest might plausibly object to his piling up gambling debts and possibly making himself vulnerable to pressure from big-time operators seeking a sure thing. Nor would Hornsby concede that his gambling took a toll on his finances and family life, although that was obvious to people who knew him well.

Limited in formal education and outlook, Rogers Hornsby seemed a simple person. In a sense, baseball was his whole life, both on and off the playing field. It was a life full of conflict, complications, and frustration. Hornsby’s is the story of a determined, difficult man who, for all his fabled franknesss, wouldn’t acknowledge his own conspicuous shortcomings. Hornsby never seemed to understand that by itself brilliance in his chosen field just wasn’t enough. To survive, prosper, and keep others’ respect, he would also have to accommodate himself to what others thought and felt.

“You gotta go along to get along” goes an old Texas saying, but Hornsby more nearly fit John Dos Passos’s characterization of Thorstein Veblen, who “couldn’t get his mouth round the essential yes.”10 Although it’s improbable that Hornsby ever heard of Veblen (or vice versa), both men paid a heavy price for being independent in ways that really didn’t make them independent.

In his fine biography of Babe Ruth, the late Marshall Smelser noted that, unlike writers, politicians, warriors, and saints, people who are “known mostly for performance”—such as actors, musicians, and athletes—usually leave little in the way of written materials bearing on their lives. Late in his life Hornsby collaborated with journalists on two books about himself that, while useful for events in his career and his opinions on baseball matters, reveal little about his nonbaseball existence. A person who lived by deeds, not words, he left behind no collection of letters, no diary or journal.

To piece together Hornsby’s life, I’ve had to rely mostly on contemporary press coverage, surviving anecdotes and yarns, recollections of people who knew him, and of course the precise records of his prowess as a ballplayer. “The job of writing the life of such a person,” observed biographer Smelser, “is to try to combine these hard-to-mix parts into a narrative which makes sense.”11

That I’ve tried to do with Rogers Hornsby—not just the baseball man but the fellow human being.