$Unique_ID{BAS00164}
$Title{Baseball Lore}
$Author{
Cohen, Eliot}
$Subject{Baseball Lore Stengel Paige Berra DiMaggio Dean Veeck}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  The Highlights of the Game


Baseball Lore

Eliot Cohen


Throughout this volume you'll find plenty of baseball history, verified down
to the slightest nuance and the thousandth decimal place. But there is some
history that is as important to the game's life as any pennant race or hitting
streak, even though it may or may not be absolutely, positively, guaranteed
true. To that end, here's a by no means complete sampling of baseball's lore.
     When the Pope came to the United States, a small boy was impressed by the
abundant pageantry of the papal motorcade. He stared at the big cars, the
robes, the cheering throng lining the sidewalks for miles. After the pontiff
had passed, the boy asked his mother, "How'd he get to be Pope?"
     "The cardinals selected him," replied the mother.
     The boy pondered a moment, then mused, "You think the Giants would do
something like that for Willie Mays?"

Classic baseball tales come in several flavors. One variety is passed down
through generations, not only in the telling from parent to child, but in
character, from Walter Johnson to Nolan Ryan, Babe Herman to Marv Throneberry.
The measure of that story may be the number of characters it is (or could be)
told about. Other tales revolve around the historic events of the game. A
third type grows out of the outstanding personalities in the game. Certain
unique figures stand out, but the folklore mirrors the transcendental nature
of the game itself. If that prospect can't be the next Hank Aaron or Ty Cobb,
maybe he can be the next Mickey Rivers.

     "I only have trouble with fly balls." --Carmelo Martinez, outfielder

It didn't take long for baseball fact to spawn baseball legend. The poem
"Casey at the Bat" was written in 1888, and it became an instant classic. Its
subtitle, "A Ballad of the Republic," indicates that author Ernest Lawrence
Thayer was thinking big. The poem laid the foundation for much of baseball
folklore to come, not only because it captured the spirit of the game and its
fans, but because Casey failed to get that big hit. In baseball, failure is
much more common than success, and some of the best anecdotes and quips are
made in response to short-comings.
     Some fail by overreaching, such as erstwhile base stealer Ping Bodie. "He
had larceny in his heart, but his feet were honest," observed sportswriter
Bugs Baer. Some underachieve, like Commissioner Bowie Kuhn during the 1981
baseball strike. "If Bowie Kuhn were alive today, he'd do something about the
strike," wrote Red Smith.
     The great Honus Wagner had big hands to go with his bowed legs and didn't
always discriminate between ground balls and other loose objects in the
infield. He used to tell about when a rabbit ran past him about the same time
as a two-hopper. Wagner scooped up both and fired the rabbit to first. "I
got the runner by a hare," Wagner confided.
     Catcher Bob Uecker took issue with the theory that the knuckler's tough
to catch. "You just wait until it stops rolling, then pick it up." The
catcher/broadcaster/actor proclaimed that he was proudest of his role in the
Cardinals' 1964 pennant drive. His contribution? "I came down with
hepatitis." How'd he catch it? "I think the trainer injected me with it."
     But few players can joke about their foibles. During the 1910s, Ring
Lardner invented a ballplayer named Alibi Ike, honoring a tradition that
survives among players. Pitcher Billy Loes once explained missing a grounder
by saying, "I lost it in the sun." Loes also cautioned pitchers, "If you win
twenty games, they'll want you to do it every year," so he set a personal
limit of fourteen. During the 1980s, a member of the Pirates complained, "I
wish they wouldn't play that song. Every time they play it, we lose." He was
talking about "The Star Spangled Banner." Upon seeing the Astrodome, Gabe
Paul's first reaction was "It will revolutionize baseball. It will open a
whole new area of alibis for players."
     The game has a way of revealing character and exposing flaws.
     Leo Durocher told the story (but it could just as well have been Connie
Mack or Whitey Herzog) of a horse who asked him for a tryout after a spring
training workout. Durocher obliged, sent the nag into the batting cage, and
served up a fat pitch. Holding the bat between its teeth, the horse smacked
the offering over the fence. The horse hit the curve the other way, got
around on the hard stuff, handling the bat better than anyone Durocher had on
the club.
     So he sent the horse to the outfield and hit it fungos. The horse
caught the ball between its teeth and drop kicked it back to the infield. An
impressed Durocher began considering the steed's potential. He called the
horse in and said, "Okay, now I want to see you run."
     The horse said, "If I could run, would I be here looking for a job?"
     Chicago Cubs manager Charlie Grimm told about a kid who approached him at
a tryout camp during World War Two, when the military draft had strapped the
majors for talent. "I'm 4-F," the aspirant announced, meaning he'd been
rejected by the Army, "but I can hit like Ted Williams, throw as fast as Dizzy
Dean, and play the outfield like Joe DiMaggio."
     "You're nuts," Grimm grumbled.
     "Sure. That's why I'm 4-F."
     There's a surprising range of ways to fail in baseball. Aside from
imparting strategy, signs appear to be designed to give players a chance to
make mistakes, judging from all the talk of missed signs throughout history.
John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson were friends for three decades, and McGraw
hired Robinson as a coach for the Giants. Their relationship ended in
acrimony when McGraw accused Robinson of missing a sign and costing the Giants
a game. McGraw fined outfielder Red Murray for failing to obey a bunt sign
with a runner on second, even though Murray had taken a high and tight serving
that would have been nearly impossible to bunt and belted it for a homer.
     Durocher once took refuge in the press box after being tossed from a
game, then conspired with a sportswriter to give signs. The system worked
until the sportswriter wiped his forehead. "What did you do that for?"
Durocher blurted. "You just gave the steal sign."
     First baseman Rocky Nelson missed a squeeze sign with Pee Wee Reese on
third. Nelson swung away and nearly decapitated Reese. The livid shortstop
and team captain demanded, "Why'd you swing?"
     Nelson replied, "Why do you think they call me Rocky?"
     When Frank Howard was with the Dodgers, they used verbal signals. The
player's last name signaled a hit and run. So after the big man walked, first
base coach Pete Reiser began giving him encouragement, "Okay, Howard, be on
your toes. Be ready for anything, Howard."
     Howard called time and told Reiser, "We're good friends, Pete. Call me
Frank."
     After the Dodgers infield of Steve Garvey at first, Dave Lopes at second,
Bill Russell at short, and Ron Cey at third broke up after an unprecedented
run from 1974 through 1981, Tom Lasorda tried to make do with Pedro Guerrero,
whose best position is DH, at third base, revolving doors at short and first,
and second baseman Steve Sax, who sought help from a hypnotist to overcome a
chronic inability to make the throw to first. As only Lasorda can, he
cajoled, begged, and badgered Guerrero to make him a better infielder. After
one galling loss, Lasorda tried to get inside his star's head. "Okay, Pedro,"
Lasorda said, "the tying run's on, one out in the ninth. What are you
thinking?"
     Guerrero answered, "I'm thinking, don't hit the ball to me."
     "C'mon, Pete," Lasorda chided, "what else are you thinking?"
     "You really want to know?"
     "Yes."
     "I'm thinking," Guerrero said, "don't hit the ball to Sax either."
     Lasorda is generally considered a teddy-bear type manager, but other
skippers inspire fear in their players. Playing in Houston before the
Astrodome was built, Gene Mauch's fiery temper erupted at the Phillies'
constant complaints about the heat. "I'm sick and tired of you guys griping
about the climate," Mauch began. "The other guys have to play in it, too.
The next guy who complains about the heat gets fined a hundred bucks."
     After the Phils' next turn in the field, right fielder Johnny Callison
came back to the dugout and fell in a heap on the bench. "God, is it hot out
there," he moaned. Then he saw Mauch out of the corner of his eye and,
remembering the edict, quickly added, "Good and hot, just the way I like it."
     Even the great Lou Gehrig had trouble performing on cue. He was
scheduled to do a live radio spot for a cereal called Huskies. The announcer
asked the slugger, "To what do you owe your strength and condition?"
     "Wheaties," Gehrig told the listeners.
     The makers of Huskies insisted that Gehrig's error brought them more
publicity than the script would have. But Gehrig found endorsement offers
rare after that.
     The knuckleball can be equally elusive. Fluttering up to the plate at a
half to two-thirds the speed of a fastball, the knuckler is difficult to
master, an adventure to catch, and nearly impossible to hit.
     After his Brooklyn Dodgers lost on a ninth-inning homer, Casey Stengel
asked catcher Babe Phelps why he'd called for a fastball from famed
knuckleballer Dutch Leonard. "His knuckler's tough to catch," Phelps
explained.
     "If his knuckler's tough to catch, don't you think it might be a little
tough to hit, too?" Casey asked.
     Famed batting coach Charley Lau said, "There are two theories about
hitting the knuckleballer. Unfortunately, neither works." Bobby Murcer
observed that trying to hit flutterballer Phil Niekro was "like eating Jell-O
with chopsticks."

     "You can't hit what you can't see."--Joe Tinker reviews Rube Marquard

Fastball pitchers have been a staple of baseball legends since the overhand
delivery was legalized in 1884. Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Bob Feller,
Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan inherited the mantle of their respective
generations as the king of the radio ball--you heard it, but you couldn't see
it.
     After striking out on three Johnson fastballs, no less an authority than
Babe Ruth told the umpire, "You know, I didn't see any of them either, but the
last one sounded kind of high to me." Writer Bugs Baer believed that Grove
"could throw a lamb chop past a wolf." Manager Bucky Harris offered his
Senators these instructions for facing Feller: "Go up and hit what you see.
If you don't see it, come on back." Willie Stargell paid lefthander Steve
Carlton a high compliment when he admitted, "Sometimes I hit him like I used
to hit Koufax, and that's like drinking coffee with a fork." Reggie Jackson
labeled Ryan baseball's exorcist because "he scares the devil out of you."
     Walter Johnson didn't have the colorful personality to make himself a
legend, just his fastball, but that was enough. Ray Chapman walked away from
home plate after taking two strikes from Johnson. You've another strike
coming, the umpire called. "Keep it. I don't want it," Chapman said and kept
on walking.
     A figure of grandfatherly kindness even as a rookie, Johnson was said to
lay a fat pitch in for a needy hitter once a game was no longer in doubt.
"Ol' Barney" also feared hitting batters, although his career total of 206 hit
batsmen tops the all-time list.
     Feller, like Koufax and Ryan to follow, was nearly as wild as he was
fast. One overcast day, Yankee pitcher Lefty Gomez had to face Feller in the
gloaming. Gomez, who earned the nickname Goofy, brought a book of matches to
the plate, lit one, and held it over his head as he stepped into the batter's
box.
     "You think that match is going to help you see Feller's fast one?" the
umpire snarled.
     "You got it all wrong," Gomez explained. "I just want to make sure he
can see me."
     Gomez was quicker with this tongue than his fastball. Still, he won
nearly 65 percent of his decisions over fourteen seasons and went 6-0 in five
World Series, earning his ticket to Cooperstown in 1972, attributing his
success to "clean living and swift outfielders." Of the two components, only
one can be confirmed.
     On occasion, an outfielder, even a great one, might come up short. Rookie
Joe DiMaggio, who roomed with Gomez on the road for several seasons, bragged,
"I'm going to make 'em forget about Tris Speaker." He crept in to play a
shallow center field like the Gray Eagle behind Gomez, and in the late
innings, a drive to center outpaced DiMaggio for a triple, allowing the
deciding runs to score.
     At dinner with teammates after the game, DiMaggio was still saying that
he was going to make the fans forget about Speaker. Gomez had had enough.
"If you don't back up a little," he told the rookie, "you'll make 'em forget
about Gomez."
     Facing Jimmie Foxx in a tight game, Gomez shook off catcher Bill Dickey's
signs for a fastball, changeup, and curve. So Dickey called time and angrily
walked out to the mound. "You tell me what you want to throw," he snarled.
     "Well, to tell you truth," Gomez replied, "I don't want to throw the ball
at all."
     Yankee second baseman Tony Lazzeri had a reputation for heady play. So,
in a bases-loaded jam, Gomez snared a comebacker, whirled, and threw to
Lazzeri, who was stationed on the edge of the infield grass between first and
second. When Lazzeri recovered from the shock, he charged toward Gomez and
screamed, "Why in hell did you throw the ball to me?"
     "I'd been reading in the papers how smart you are, and how you always
know what to do with the ball," Gomez cooed. "Well, I wanted to see what
you'd do with that one."
     Gomez's antics often infuriated straitlaced Yankee skipper Joe McCarthy.
Gomez loved airplanes and would step off the mound to watch any plane passing
overhead. After one particularly long break for aerial observation, McCarthy
jumped all over Gomez at the end of the inning. "Keep your mind in the game,"
he scolded. "With you daydreaming like that, I'm surprised they didn't start
knocking the ball out of the park."
     "Izzatso?" Gomez replied. "I had ahold of the ball all the time I was
watching the plane, didn't I? How could they knock it out of the park?"
Gomez was always a firm believer in working slowly, "because as long as I have
it, they can't hit it." (Fast-working Grover Cleveland Alexander took the
opposite approach, reasoning, "What do you want me to do? Let 'em stand up
there and think on my time?") When asked if he ever threw the spitball, Gomez
demurred, "Not intentionally, but I sweat easily."
     McCarthy once saw a bright red biplane doing some death-defying stunts
above the ballfield and told Gomez about it over dinner. "You missed a real
crackpot flier," he said. "It would have taught you a lesson. I hope you saw
it."
     "Well, not exactly," Gomez told the skipper. "I was in it."
     McCarthy also found fault with Gomez's build, thinking he was too skinny
to be a consistent winner. "If you had another fifteen or twenty pounds of
meat on you, you'd make them forget every lefthander that ever tossed a ball."
     Gomez followed McCarthy's advice and did add twenty pounds, but he had an
uncharacteristically bad season on the mound. Near the end of the year, Gomez
spoke with his manager. "You told me if I put on some weight, I'd make 'em
forget every lefthander that ever pitched. Trouble is, when they start
forgetting lefthanders, they're going to start with Gomez."
     At the 1934 All-Star Game, catcher Gabby Hartnett reprimanded Gomez,
owner of a .147 career batting average. "Are you trying to insult Mister
Hubbell," Hartnett asked, "coming up here with a bat?" Gomez bragged that he
once broke a bat. "I ran it over in the driveway."
     Gomez inherited the flaky lefthander tradition from Rube Waddell, the
first oddball player of the twentieth century. Waddell made a show of his
trade, pouring water over his arm to cool it off and thus prevent his heat
from burning off his catcher's mitt. Waddell liked to fish and chase fire
engines, ready to spring off the mound in mid-game for either. (Fortunately
for his teammates, fish didn't roll past the ballpark with their alarms
blaring.)  At an Easter Sunday 1900 exhibition game, the lefty was pelted on
the head with an egg. In response, he called in his fielders and struck out
the side on nine pitches. Waddell wore out a number of managers until he
bounced back to the Pacific Coast League in 1902. Connie Mack wanted him for
his A's and dispatched two detectives to bring him back.
     A pair of Pinkertons were hardly enough to keep Waddell under control in
Philadelphia. On days when he wasn't pitching, and on some when he was
supposed to be, Waddell could be found at bars, firehouses, playgrounds, the
heads of parades, or under the stands shooting marbles with youngsters.
     Catcher Ossee Schreckengost was Waddell's roommate and fellow carouser.
The two were of similar mind on most issues, but one divisive item nearly
ended their friendship. (History is unclear on the offender, but here's the
better version of the story.)  After a typically successful season, Waddell
informed Connie Mack that he wouldn't sign his contract for the upcoming
season. Mack, whose creativity had been stretched to the limits, he thought,
to accommodate his southpaw, had already offered Waddell time off for fishing
if he'd complete both ends of a doubleheader, had allowed him liberal
visitation rights to local firehouses, and stood ready with bail money on
those not infrequent occasions when the lefty required it.
     So what was it Waddell wanted now? Well, in that era, players often
shared beds on the road. Waddell had no problem with splitting the mattress,
but objected to Schreckengost's habit of eating crackers on it. So Mack wrote
in a contract provision banning the practice, and Waddell was booked for
another season.
     Otherwise, the battery mates got along famously. The catcher was
hovering over Waddell's bandaged body when the pitcher awoke in a hospital
after a huge drunk with the boys the night before. "How'd I get here?"
Waddell asked.
     Schreckengost explained that Waddell insisted he could fly, and when his
teammates ridiculed the idea, the pitcher leaped out the second-story window,
flapping his arms.
     "Why didn't you stop me?" Waddell implored.
     "What? And lose the hundred bucks I bet on you?"
     Waddell had more success on the ground. While watching an alligator
wrestler, Waddell asked for a shot at the reptile. The alligator never had a
chance. In 1904, Waddell opened a five-game series against the Red Sox with a
one-hitter, allowing a bunt single to the leadoff man, then retiring the next
twenty-seven hitters. A cocky Waddell was scheduled to pitch the series
finale and warned his opponent, "I'm going to give you the same thing." The
opponent was a thirty-seven-year-old veteran named Cy Young, who responded to
the challenge by pitching a perfect game. Alligators were simpler foes.
     Satchel Paige copied Waddell's stunt of calling in the outfield. But
Paige had plenty of stories of his own to tell. The oldest rookie in major
league history, Paige claimed he was thirty-nine (he was at least forty-two,
probably closer to fifty) when he signed with the Indians in 1948. He
challenged the nation to find records of him pitching before 1927. When one
of his clippings from 1926 turned up, Paige explained that a billy goat had
eaten his birth certificate and asked, "How old would you be if you didn't
know how old you was?" Paige also noted, "Age is a question of mind over
matter; if you don't mind, it don't matter."
     Paige's routines included using a gum wrapper as his home plate, the
hesitation pitch, and his be-ball, so named because "it's always where I want
it to be." Paige also reminded white fans of his contemporaries in the Negro
Leagues. Lists of the greatest fastballers of all time were no longer
complete without Bullet Joe Rogan and Smokey Joe Williams. Testimony that
Josh Gibson hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium became more credible. Paige was
fond of telling about an offering that Gibson hit back between the pitcher's
legs that sailed over the fence. That was nothing compared to Cool Papa Bell,
who, according to Paige, "hit a line drive by me that hit him on the ass when
he was sliding into second."
     Paige also offered six rules for staying young, recorded by Richard
Donovan in Collier's in 1953. Considering that he last appeared in a major
league game in 1965, at age fifty-nine or more, they're worth repeating:

  -  Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
  -  If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool
     thoughts.
  -  Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
  -  Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The
     social ramble ain't restful.
  -  Avoid running at all times.
  -  Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.

     Dizzy Dean combined devastating stuff, a gift for malapropisms, and a
dose of braggadocio when he burst on the scene with the Cardinals in 1931.
"The good Lord was good to me," Dean conceded when inducted into the Hall of
Fame in 1953. "He gave me a strong body, a good right arm, and a weak mind."
In a doubleheader against the Dodgers, Dean pitched a three-hitter in the
first game. His brother Paul pitched a no-hitter in the nightcap. "I wished
I'd'a known Paul was goin' to pitch a no-hitter," Dizzy said. "I'd'a pitched
one, too."
     While the Deans were dominating the National League, Dizzy visited
Brooklyn Dodgers manager Casey Stengel between games of a doubleheader. Half
in jest, Stengel asked, "Are there any more at home like you and Paul?"
     "We got another brother, Elmer. He's down in Houston, burning up the
league," Dizzy told Casey. "You might get him cheap."
     Stengel couldn't contain his enthusiasm, and soon reporters were writing
about the third Dean brother bound for Brooklyn. They stopped writing and
started laughing when reports from the Texas League filtered back that Elmer
was a peanut vendor at the Houston ballpark.
     Dean once got caught out after curfew, along with three other Cardinals,
in the midst of a pennant race. Manager Frankie Frisch fined all
$200, except for Dean, whose fine was $400. When Dean complained to Frisch,
the manager replied, "Why, Diz, you're not the same as those guys. You're the
great Dizzy Dean. Everything about you has got to be bigger and better than
anybody else. And that goes for fines, too." Dean had to agree.
     Dean was fond of noting, "It ain't braggin' if you do it." Legend has it
that Dean promised at a hospital ward to strike out Bill Terry, then the
Giants' heavy hitter, with the bases loaded. So with runners on first and
second and two out, Dean walked second baseman Hugh Critz, hardly a threat, to
load the bases and bring up Terry. "I hate to do this, Bill," Dean told the
slugger, "but I done promised a bunch of kids I'd fan you with the bases
loaded." So Dean did, on three pitches.
     In the 1934 World Series, Dean won the first and seventh games, and got
beaned by a double-play relay throw while pinch-running in the fourth game.
He was carried from the field, but was not seriously hurt. "The doctors
X-rayed my head and found nothing," Dean proclaimed.
     However, Joe Medwick upstaged Dean's antics in the '34 Series. The
muscular left fielder was an exception to the happy-go-lucky Gashouse Gang
that featured Dean and Pepper Martin. Medwick later became the only man in
baseball history to knock out his own relief pitcher when hurler Ed Heusser
passed an impertinent remark about Medwick's fielding in the dugout. But in
the 1934 Series, Medwick reserved his ire for the Detroit Tigers, batting
.379. In the seventh game, he slid into Detroit third baseman Marv Owen with
his spikes high, business as usual for Medwick. The triple upped the Cards'
advantage of 8-0 and moments later Medwick scored. When he returned to his
post in left for the bottom of the sixth, Detroit fans added a barrage of
garbage to their torrents of verbal abuse. As the debris rained onto the
field, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis ordered Medwick off the field, the
first player ever tossed for his own protection.
     Dean understood public relations almost as well as pitching. When riding
to the ballpark with a writer, Dean claimed he was puzzled by the science of
locating gas stations. "Just how did these fellas know there was gas and oil
under there?" he asked. When a reporter challenged him because he told every
writer that he was born in a different place, Dean replied indignantly, "Them
ain't lies, they's scoops."
     A liner off the bat of Earl Averill struck Dean on the toe in the third
inning of the 1937 All-Star Game. Billy Herman got the rebound and threw out
Averill to end the inning, and Dean retired to the clubhouse with an aching
toe. A doctor examined it and said it was fractured. "Fractured, hell," Dean
moaned. "The damned thing's broke." The injury caused him to alter his
delivery and hurt his arm. After helping the Cubs to a pennant in 1938 with
an assortment of junk and hanging on for a couple more years, Dean had to
retire when he was just thirty years old.
     Dean stayed in the game as a broadcaster, to the exasperation of English
teachers. When chided for his ungrammatical calls, Dean reminded his critics,
"A lot of people who don't say "ain't' ain't eating." When the St. Louis
Board of Education circulated a petition against Dean's butchery of the
language, Dean replied, "You learn 'em English, and I'll learn 'em baseball."
With Dean at the mike, batters strode "confidentially" to the plate, players
returned to their "respectable" bases, runners "slud," fielders "throwed," and
"empires" made the calls. He urged listeners, "Don't fail to miss tomorrow's
game."
     While Dean was broadcasting for the St. Louis Browns in 1947, a team that
lost 95 games, he didn't sugarcoat the Browns' ineptitude. He'd suggested on
the radio that he could do better than some of the Brown hurlers. So club
president Bill DeWitt offered Dean a chance to start for the Browns, and Dean
couldn't resist. On September 28, 1947, more than six years after his last
major league action, Dean went to the hill for the Browns against the White
Sox. He held the Sox scoreless through four innings, but had to retire, for
good, with a pulled leg muscle, suffered when he singled.
     After the game, Dean beamed, "I said I could pitch as good as most of
these fellows and I can. But I'll be doggoned if I'm ever going to try this
stunt again. Talking's my game now, and I'm just glad that the muscle I
pulled wasn't in my throat."
     Catcher Moe Berg could speak a dozen languages, but couldn't hit in any
of them. He went on to stardom with the U.S. intelligence service in World
War Two. Dean's success as a broadcaster paved the way for other successful
ex-players, some of whom approached his gift for mangling the English
language. Jerry Coleman has had pitchers throwing up in the bullpen,
outfielders lining up fly balls under the warning track, infielders chasing
sun-blown pop-ups, runners sliding into second with stand-up doubles, and this
memorable call: "There's a fly ball deep to center. Winfield is going back,
back. He hits his head against the wall. It's rolling back toward second
base."
     Coleman's Yankee double-play partner Phil Rizzuto doesn't pay much
attention to the game on the field, but has been known to take a stab at
current events. When Curt Flood was holding out after his trade to
Philadelphia, Rizzuto noted that he'd heard the center fielder was in Spain.
"Maybe he's a matador," said Bill White, Scooter's partner in the booth. "Or
maybe he's a bullfighter," Rizzuto parried.
     Another Yankee teammate of Coleman's was Yogi Berra, who hit the Triple
Crown when it came to folklore. He was ugly ("So what? You don't hit with
your face."), he was good (a three-time MVP), and he had a gift for
self-expression. Berra didn't try to be funny, as when a player's wife
complimented him on looking cool on a sweltering afternoon. "Thanks, and you
don't look so hot yourself," Yogi replied. When a clubhouse man asked for his
cap size in spring training, Yogi shot back, "How should I know? I'm not in
shape yet." In appreciation for Yogi Berra Day, he announced, "I want to
thank everyone who made this day necessary." When his wife Carmen told him
she'd seen (the movie) Doctor Zhivago, Berra shrugged, "What's the matter with
you now?" When Berra played left field, he explained the shadows by saying,
"It gets late early out there." When asked about a hitting slump, Berra
asserted, "Slump? What slump? I just ain't hitting." Wary of the press, he
warned reporters, "If you ask me something I don't know, I'm not going to
answer." Berra contended, "It ain't over till it's over," and you can't argue
with that.
     Joe McCarthy tried to break Berra's habit of swinging at the first pitch,
urging his catcher "to think when you're up there." After taking three
strikes, Berra returned to the bench complaining, "How can a guy think and hit
at the same time?" Another time, after fanning on three pitches way out of
the strike zone, Berra wondered, "How can a pitcher that wild be in the big
leagues?"
     Some Yogi stories are less likely to be true, but no matter. When asked
if he wanted his whole pizza in four or eight pieces, he said, "Better make it
four. I don't think I can eat eight." When receiving a "Pay to Bearer"
check, Yogi protested, "That's not how you spell my name." Berra was
introduced to Ernest Hemingway and told he was a writer. "What paper are you
with, Ernie?" Berra asked. Talking about a restaurant, Berra said, "Nobody
goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Similarly, he said one of his
classmates in high school "was so popular, no one could stand him."
Commenting on Mickey Mantle, he said that the switch-hitting slugger had equal
power from both sides of the plate. "He's naturally amphibious." After
seeing a Steve McQueen movie, Berra reasoned, "He must've made that one before
he died."
     When Berra visited the Vatican, he was quoted as greeting the Pontiff,
"Hello, Pope." That follows the tradition of apocryphal greetings such as
Casey Stengel's "Nice to meet you, King," to England's George V, and Babe
Ruth's "Hot as hell, ain't it, Prez," to Warren Harding.
     Despite his clownish reputation, Berra was a wise investor who made a
great deal of money before ballplayers were millionaires. He also had a
reputation for stinginess and was an inveterate borrower of locker room
toiletries. Trouble came when Berra borrowed deodorant from Whitey Ford's
locker after a game. Ford had discovered that a roll-on bottle was the
perfect way to store a resin mixture that he used to get his fingers sticky.
So when Berra used the roll-on bottle, he cemented his arms to his sides. The
trainer had to cut the hair under his arms to free him.
     Almost every manager tells the story of going out to the mound after his
starter gives up six (give or take a couple) hits to start the game, all on
the first pitch. The manager asks the catcher, "How's his stuff?"
     "I'm not sure," the catcher replies. "I haven't caught any yet."
     (In another version, the manager asks the catcher what pitch the batter
hit for a home run. "I don't know," the catcher replies. "I haven't caught
it yet.")
     Cubs pitcher Bob Muncrief told about facing Ralph Kiner in 1949, when he
was the most-feared slugger in the National League. Kiner took Muncrief deep,
with a homer off the back wall of the Wrigley Field bleachers. Back in the
dugout, manager Frankie Frisch asked what Kiner had hit. "A curveball,"
Muncrief told him. "He hit a good pitch."
     "Well, forget about your curveball and just throw him fastballs next time
up," Frisch counseled. "He won't even get a loud foul off you."
     So when Kiner batted again with two mates aboard, Muncrief followed
Frisch's advice and threw him a fastball. Kiner slugged it over the fence,
over the bleachers, and out onto Waveland Avenue. When Muncrief got back to
bench, he shouted at Frisch, "Well, brains, he hit yours a whole lot farther
than he hit mine."
     New York Giants reliever Don Liddle served up Vic Wertz's 460-foot smash
to center in the 1954 World Series. Only Willie Mays' unbelievable catch and
the Polo Grounds' huge center field dimensions prevented Wertz's clout from
breaking the 2-2 tie wide open. Leo Durocher figured Liddle might not have
his best stuff, so he summoned Marv Grissom to face the next hitter. As
Grissom took the mound, Liddle told him, "Well, I got my guy."
     When manager Pat Corrales came to get Jim Kern after a rough outing for
the Ranger reliever, Kern complained, "I'm not tired."
     "Yeah," Corrales concurred, "but your outfielders are."
     Pitchers don't get much sympathy when they run into trouble, not even
within their fraternity. In the Seattle Pilots' bullpen during a game, Skip
Lockwood called to Jim Bouton to ask, "Bouton, how do you hold your doubles?"
When a young pitcher asked manager Lou Boudreau if pitching low to Ted
Williams made sense, Boudreau advised, "Yeah, you can pitch him low, but as
soon as you throw the ball, run and hide behind second base." Rudy May had
his own method for handling George Brett: "The only way to pitch him is
inside, so you force him to pull the ball. That way, the line drive won't hit
you."
     Carl Erskine wasn't shy about revealing his secret for handling Stan
Musial. "I just throw him my best stuff, then run over to back up third
base."
     Sudden Sam McDowell of the Indians warned batters, "Trying to think with
me is a mismatch. Hell, most of the time, I don't know where the pitch is
going."
     Sal "The Barber" Maglie earned his nickname for throwing at hitters he
felt were getting a bit too cozy with the plate. "I don't want to get to know
the other guys too well," Maglie said. "I might like them, and then I might
not want to throw at them." One writer remarked that Maglie would throw at
his mother if she crowded the plate. "You bet," the pitcher replied. "Mother
was a hell of a hitter."
     Mets pitcher Jerry Hinsley was a twenty-year-old rookie the first time he
faced Willie Mays. The veterans advised him to knock down the great man. The
righthander took their advice and decked Mays with his first pitch. Mays
dusted himself off and clubbed Hinsley's next offering for a triple. "The
problem was," Hinsley said, "they didn't tell me what to throw him on the
second pitch."
     Don Drysdale was another pitcher who believed in keeping batters loose.
"The secret with Drysdale," confided Orlando Cepeda, "is to hit him before he
hits you." Drysdale once apologized to Henry Aaron around the batting cage.
"I'm sorry I hit you in the back last night, Henry. I meant to hit you in the
neck."
     Bob Gibson was a lean, mean competitor who worked so fast, it seemed
there was a meter on the mound. He hated catchers' interruptions almost as
much as he despised opposing batters. When receiver Tim McCarver came out to
talk to Gibson in a tight spot, Bullet Bob stormed off the mound toward the
catcher. "The only thing you know about pitching is that it's hard to hit!"
Gibson screamed. "Now get out of here."
     McCarver offered this Yogi-ism in tribute to the Cardinal ace: "That Bob
Gibson is the luckiest pitcher ever. Whenever he pitches, the other team
doesn't score." He was also the toughest. Gibson suffered a broken leg in
1967 on a drive hit back through the box; he threw the batter out and
attempted to continue pitching. After his playing days, Gibson served as a
coach under Cardinal teammate Joe Torre, imparting to pitchers his attitude as
much as technique. "If there weren't fifteen thousand people watching," he
told one staff member during a mound visit, "I'd hit you in the head."
     Russ "Mad Monk" Meyer earned his nickname because of a one-in-a-million
shot in his first start in Philadelphia after the Phils had traded him to the
Brooklyn Dodgers. In the eighth inning of a tie game, Meyer and catcher Roy
Campanella thought they'd struck out Richie Ashburn to end the inning.
Campanella had rolled the ball to the mound, but umpire Augie Donatelli called
the pitch a ball. Meyer went crazy, charging off the mound toward the umpire
and calling him a "homer," preceded by several modifiers. So Donatelli gave
Meyer the thumb, but Meyer wasn't through. He refused to leave the mound,
even after manager Charlie Dressen came out to get him, stomping and shouting.
It wasn't until Donatelli threatened to fine him more money that Meyer decided
he'd had enough and stalked off the mound, only to discover that he still had
the resin bag clenched in his fist. So he whipped the bag into the air and
kept stomping toward the dugout. Sure enough, the bag landed right in the
middle of Meyer's cap and stuck there. Even Meyer had to laugh.
     But by the time he got to the dugout, Meyer was mad all over again and
wouldn't leave. He baited Donatelli into coming over to the dugout to get him
off the field. As a parting gesture, Meyer grabbed his crotch. He didn't
realize that he was a participant in one of the earliest nationally televised
games, and his obscene gesture had been beamed to millions of viewers across
the country. Commissioner Ford Frick was so disturbed by Meyer's display that
he forbid cameras from shooting into the dugout.
     When Hank Aguirre was a rookie with the Indians, his first assignment was
Ted Williams. Unfamiliarity gave Aguirre an advantage over the Splendid
Splinter, and he fanned Williams. After the game, Aguirre brought the
strikeout ball into the Red Sox clubhouse and asked Williams to autograph it.
Williams was probably too stunned to refuse.
     A couple of weeks later, the Indians were facing the Red Sox again, and
young Aguirre was called upon to face Williams. This time, the Thumper
walloped Aguirre's first offering off the foul pole for a homer. As he
rounded the bases, Williams yelled, "Get that ball, and I'll sign it, too."
     Aguirre went on to be a pretty fair pitcher for the Tigers and other
teams for sixteen years, but he had a career batting average of .085. But
every dog has his day, or at least his at-bat, and one afternoon at Yankee
Stadium, Aguirre teed off on an offering from Fritz Peterson for a triple.
Peterson was beside himself, giving up a hit to a man who went 2 for 72 in
1962, and wasn't paying baserunner Aguirre the slightest mind. So Aguirre
walked halfway down the line without drawing a look. On the second pitch, he
got another lead unnoticed. Emboldened, Aguirre turned to third base coach
Tony Cuccinello and whispered, "Hey, Tony, I think I can steal home."
     Cuccinello sighed and told Aguirre, "Hank, you got this far . . . don't
screw it up."
     Reliever Tug McGraw continued the line of flaky lefthanders during his
twenty-year career. McGraw is credited with creating the 1973 Mets' battle
cry, "You gotta believe." It all started when M. Donald Grant, the Mets'
stodgy chairman of the board, came down to the clubhouse to give a speech that
included the soon-to-be-famous war cry. Sitting in the back row like any good
class clown, McGraw repeated the line, then stood up and did it again. The
other players, inspired by this chance to cut Grant short, joined in.
     Originally a starter and the owner of the Mets' first victory over Sandy
Koufax, McGraw found his niche as a reliever. He had the perfect attitude for
the job: "Some days you tame the tiger. And other days the tiger has you for
lunch." McGraw, who pitched during an era of unprecedented salary escalation,
once commented on a contract, "Ninety percent, I'll spend on good times,
women, and Irish whiskey. The rest, I'll probably waste." When asked whether
he preferred grass or artificial turf during the more innocent decade of the
seventies, McGraw replied, "I don't know, I never smoked Astroturf." (Dick
Allen's spin on this question was, "If a horse can't eat it, I don't want to
play on it.")
     Bill Lee was another flaky lefty. Since the right hemisphere of the
brain controls the left side, Lee contended that "lefties are the only ones in
their right minds." Lee and a handful of other Red Sox players formed the
Loyal Order of Buffalo Heads, dedicated to ridiculing manager Don Zimmer. The
name was suggested by Ferguson Jenkins, who believed the buffalo was the
dumbest creature on earth.
     When Buffalo Head Bernie Carbo was sold to Cleveland for $15,000, Lee
walked away from the club for a day. He ripped the phone out of his wall at
home, so club president Haywood Sullivan had to summon his lefthander back to
the club by telegram. At the meeting, Lee agreed to rejoin the club, but
Sullivan said he'd have to dock him a day's pay. Lee asked how much that
amounted to, and Sullivan figured about $500. "Great," Lee said, "make it
fifteen hundred and I'll take the whole weekend."
     Warren Spahn was the winningest lefthander of all time, but he allowed
two memorable home runs. In 1951, the Giants promoted a nineteen-year-old
center fielder named Willie Mays. After batting .477 in Minneapolis over 35
games, Mays broke in 0 for 12 with the Giants and begged manager Leo Durocher
to send him back to the minors. But Mays got a homer off Spahn for his first
major league hit. "I'll never forgive myself," Spahn said. "We might have
gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out."
     Thirty years later, Spahn's assignment was Luke Appling in an old-timers'
All-Star Game in Washington, D.C. "Old Aches and Pains," who made his
reputation with bat control, fouling off boxes of balls to get even with teams
that denied free passes for his friends, collected only 45 homers among his
2,749 major league hits. But on that evening in 1981, seventy-four-year old
Appling knocked Spahn's offering out of the park. This time, Spahn didn't
take it quite so hard.
     In recent years the Dominican Republic has become a producer of
shortstops--and flaky righthanded pitchers. Joaquin Andujar billed himself as
"one tough Dominican." As a St. Louis Cardinal, he won 20 games in
back-to-back seasons following some lean years. After one win to end a
drought, Andujar declared, "God is back in the National League. In fact, he's
staying at my house. I'm having a barbecue for him." In addition to his
pitching prowess, Andujar fancied himself a dangerous hitter, lifetime .127
batting average notwithstanding. He switch hit, but sometimes hit right
against righthanded pitchers and left against lefties. Teammates speculated
Andujar grabbed a batting helmet and decided which way to hit based on what
side the flap was on. Asked how he'd pitch himself following one of his rare
offensive outbursts, Andujar answered, "Fastball right down the middle. What
do you think, I'd try to get myself out?" Andujar staged another offensive
outburst in Game 7 of the 1985 World Series. Steamed about not getting a start
after Game 3, despite 21 regular season wins, he was brought in with the
Cardinals trailing 8-0. Andujar berated home plate Don Denkinger, whose safe
call at first the night before had cost the Cardinals the world title.
Andujar's growling brought manager Whitey Herzog out of the dugout, hoping to
preserve his pitcher, only to be ejected for arguing with Denkinger. When
Andujar's final pitch was called Ball Four, he dashed off the mound toward
Denkinger. Teammates restrained Andujar and called him to the dugout. But
Andujar had his philosophical moments as well. "Baseball can be summed up in
one word," Andujar contended. "Youneverknow."
     Pascual Perez's career has been derailed by drug problems, one bust
landing him in a Dominican jail. Between suspensions, the frizzy-haired righty
gave ulcers to managers with his travel problems. As a rookie with the Atlanta
Braves, Perez missed a start because he couldn't find the stadium. Then every
spring, Perez, like many players from the Caribbean, experienced visa problems
delaying his arrival at training camp. Perez's antics, however, became famous,
and writers regularly ran a pool on his arrival date. Perez joined the Yankees
and brought a personal sobriety counselor with him, Doc Ellis, a former drug
user who claims he pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD. Perez's brother,
Melido, joined him in the majors in 1988, and the brothers bet which one would
win more games, with a cow to the winner. The wager ended in udder confusion,
with each brother collecting 12 wins.
     Animals remain important to Dominican hurlers. After a disappointing
first half of 1993, Cincinnati Reds righthander Jose Rijo returned to the
Dominican, sacrificed a couple of goats and had a stellar second half. He'd
better hope he doesn't follow Andujar's career path and get traded to Oakland;
A's manager Tony LaRussa is a noted antivivisectionist.

     "I'd have to go with the immoral Babe Ruth." --shortstop Johnny Logan
      selecting the greatest player ever

Babe Ruth's legend was a product of his performances on the field. That's not
to say that the Babe didn't go out of his way to foster the myths around him.
But his deeds were so awesome as to require neither embellishment nor wit.
When he was reported dead in 1925, he didn't say, "Reports of my death are
greatly exaggerated." He didn't have to.
     Ruth was instantly recognizable and awesomely successful. His
singularity and popularity ensured that fables would become attached to him.
He shattered home run records in a way no one has before or since. He was
purchased for the highest price ever paid for a player and became the highest
paid, worth every penny of it. When confronted with the fact that his
contract called for more money than the President of the U.S. was making, Ruth
retorted, "I had a better year than him."
     But the hard facts rendered Ruth legendary, hardly leaving room for
invention. Myths that have arisen are mere apocrypha to the actual record.
Ruth did spend his formative years chewing tobacco and stealing money from the
till at his parents' saloon until they committed their seven-year-old to St.
Mary's Industrial School, a combination reform school and vocational institute
run by the Xaverian Brothers, where young George learned shirt making and
baseball. Ruth really did start as a top-flight pitcher who twice defeated
Walter Johnson 1-0 and held the World Series record for consecutive scoreless
innings for longer than his home run marks. ("Ruth made a grave mistake when
he gave up pitching," Tris Speaker prematurely observed. "Working once a
week, he might have lasted a long time and become a great star.")  He did hit
a ball through a plate-glass window across the street from Sportsman's Park.
He owned a factory that manufactured Babe Ruth cigars with his mug on every
wrapper (but the candy bar had already been named for President Grover
Cleveland's daughter). He did play ball with kids on a sandlot after a World
Series game (on a day he didn't pitch for Boston). He really snacked on a
half dozen hot dogs and soda pops, drove fast cars, and signed autographs for
children tirelessly. He really broke a slump by staying out all night and
hitting two homers the next day. Japanese soldiers in World War Two really
did respond to Americans' taunts against the Emperor by screaming, "To hell
with Babe Ruth!" Don Mattingly says that before he came to the Yankees, he
thought Babe Ruth was a cartoon character. The guy Mattingly heard about
couldn't have been human.
     One of Ruth's favorite playmates was pitcher Waite Hoyt. When Hoyt
checked into a hospital to dry out, the image-conscious ballclub announced
that Hoyt was suffering from a case of amnesia. Ruth fired off a telegram to
Hoyt: "Read about your case of Amnesia. Must be a new brand." The 1927
Yankees had a thirty-year-old rookie pitcher named Wilcy Moore. Ruth bet him
$300 to $100 that Moore wouldn't get three hits in the season. Moore won the
bet (he managed five safeties) and invested the money in a pair of mules for
his cotton farm in Oklahoma. The appreciative pitcher named the beasts Babe
and Ruth.
     What really happened to Ruth in 1925 remains a mystery, but his malady
became known as the great American bellyache. That he overindulged his
passions for food and women is well documented, and some suspect that syphilis
was responsible for his illness, which eventually required abdominal surgery.
The illness and a suspension after his return to action fed suspicions that
Ruth was done at age thirty. His comeback in 1926 and subsequent seasons was
nothing short of mythic.
     The most famous legend about Babe Ruth involves the alleged called-shot
home run in the 1932 World Series versus the Chicago Cubs. Ruth was
thirty-seven, two seasons from the end of his career, appearing in his last
World Series. The vituperative level of the encounter was heightened by the
Cubs' decision to vote only a half share of postseason money to former Yankee
Mark Koenig, after the shortstop had been a key contributor in Chicago's
pennant drive. On the New York side stood manager Joe McCarthy, who'd been
fired by the Cubs after following a pennant in 1929 with a second place finish
in 1930.
     The Yankees had swept the first two games of the Series in New York. In
his first Wrigley Field at-bat, Ruth had smashed a three-run homer. But in
the fourth inning, Ruth missed a shoestring catch as the Cubs tied the game at
4-4. As he faced Charlie Root in the fifth inning, the crowd and the Chicago
dugout were all over the Bambino. Ruth held up his hand after taking the
first pitch for a called strike and again after a second called strike evened
the count. Then he pointed with his bat in the direction of the bleachers,
but he may have been pointing toward Root, or sweeping the club toward the Cub
dugout, or merely indicating that he still had one strike remaining. There
was no doubt that Ruth deposited Root's two-two offering into the center field
bleachers, giving the Yankees a 5-4 lead. Reporters decided Ruth had called
the shot, but only months after the fact. Ruth bragged of the feat as well,
on about the same schedule. Root denied the tale, claiming that he would have
knocked Ruth down if he thought the Babe was calling his shot. Lou Gehrig
followed with his second homer of the game as the Yankees powered toward a
four-game sweep.
     The Babe Ruth Story, a movie dismissed as maudlin and excessively
melodramatic upon its release, recorded Ruth's promise of a home run to a
bedridden boy. There really was a sick boy named Johnny Sylvester who lived
in New Jersey, and his father did wire Ruth with the boy's request for an
autographed ball during the 1926 World Series. Sylvester did receive
autographed balls from the Series rivals before Ruth's three-homer effort in
fourth game.
     The three-homer game was sensational enough on its own. Each shot
traveled farther than the one before, the first two clearing the right field
grandstand and the third landing in the center field bleachers at Sportsman's
Park. A radio announcer had heard about the sick boy and the baseballs, and
embellished the story into a Ruthian promise of a home run, delivered in
triplicate. The story grew into legend within weeks (Red Grange sent
Sylvester a football), so much so that the Babe was moved to make a surprise
visit to little Johnny during a barnstorming tour that fall. Sylvester's tale
gave rise to a second story that Ruth told later about a bedridden boy in
Tampa who rose to see him parade with the Yankees through town for an
exhibition game. True, false, or in between, neither story tops that
three-homer game.
     The Babe's reputation has outlived him by decades. When Montreal
reporters in the late 1970s questioned Dick Williams' unsuccessful strategy
of walking Bake McBride to pitch to Mike Schmidt, Williams snarled, "I don't
care if Jesus Christ was coming up, I was going to walk Bake McBride."
     "What if Babe Ruth was coming up?" asked one of the newsmen.
     Williams paused before admitting, "I don't know about Babe Ruth."
     Joe DiMaggio wasn't the larger-than-life figure that Babe Ruth was, but
he fulfilled a different baseball myth for a different era. Like Ruth, he
came from humble beginnings, but DiMaggio wasn't a wild youth from the wrong
side of the tracks. His success in the great American game became a parable
of assimilation into the American culture. Poppa DiMaggio, the San Francisco
fisherman from Sicily, learned to appreciate his son's exploits on the
ballfield and the money he earned from them. Lou Gehrig's background fit this
mold from the Teutonic side, but like most other things Gehrig did, it was
overshadowed. (Don Mattingly, who thought Ruth was a cartoon character, had
never heard of Gehrig.)  In addition to his success on the diamond, DiMaggio
himself ripened from a skinny, hatchet-faced kid, to a dashing figure who
married Marilyn Monroe, to a distinguished television pitchman in his golden
years. When DiMaggio was named baseball's greatest living player as part of
the centennial of professional baseball in 1969, baseball's graceful prince
accepted the accolade with modesty. "At my age, I'm just happy to be named
the greatest living anything."
     Legend says that DiMaggio was discovered peering through a knothole at
Seals Stadium at age seventeen in 1932. Scout Spike Hennessey, the story
goes, dropped this pearl of wisdom on the youngster: "Never stand on the
outside looking in, unless it's jail." Undoubtedly Hennessey had scouted
DiMaggio in the sandlots (brother Vince was already a member of the Seals) and
was aware of an offer made by the rival San Francisco Missions for Joe's
services. Hennessey hauled DiMaggio to the office of Seals president Charles
Graham, who offered the youngster passes to keep him away from the knothole
and a tryout after asking, "Does Vince do all the playing in the family?"
     In 1933, DiMaggio gained attention with a 61-game hitting streak in the
Pacific Coast League. He also had his first brush with reporters, who
generally found him aloof; in the prevailing climate, they chose to put him on
a pedestal rather than nail him to a cross. But DiMaggio admits, "I can
remember a reporter asking me for a quote, and I didn't know what a quote was.
I thought it was some kind of soft drink."
     But the most famous player in the minor leagues suffered the first of
many setbacks in 1934. He injured his left knee getting out of a car on the
way to Sunday dinner at his sister's house after a doubleheader. Injuries and
recoveries would become a recurring theme in the legend of DiMaggio. The bad
knee scared several clubs away, but the Yankees, at their minor league
meetings that fall in French Lick, Indiana, decided to risk $25,000 (plus five
players for the Seals) for the youngster on the recommendation of scout Bill
Essick, a neighbor of the DiMaggio family. An additional year of seasoning in
San Francisco, with Lefty O'Doul as his manager, readied Joltin' Joe for the
big time in 1936.
     The big time was ready for him. Ruth had been released at the end of the
1934 season, and the Yankees had not appeared in the World Series since 1932,
their only trip to the fall classic in the last seven seasons. Even before he
played in a major league game, Ruth's torch was passed to DiMaggio. He was to
be the superstar who'd put the Yankees over the top. A generation later, the
torch was passed relatively smoothly to Mickey Mantle. Rooting for the
Yankees really was, as Red Smith put it, like rooting for U.S. Steel. Only
by recognizing this history can the subsequent failures of Tom Tresh, Bobby
Murcer, and others to extend the line of Yankee heroes be fully appreciated.
     But even as a rookie, DiMaggio had to overcome an injury. He hurt his
left foot sliding into third in an exhibition game, then burned the foot by
overdoing heat therapy treatments. He wouldn't make his Yankee debut until
May 4, 1936. He led the Yankees to their first pennant in four years and
starred in the World Series, batting .346 and making a spectacular catch in
front of the clubhouse steps at the Polo Grounds to end the second game.
After watching DiMaggio in the Series, Giants manager Bill Terry said, "I've
always heard that one player could make the difference between a losing team
and a winner, and I never believed it. Now, I know it's true."
     The Yankees kept winning with DiMaggio aboard. They won the next three
World Series, losing but one postseason game. In the fourth game of the 1939
Series, DiMaggio started the play that would become known as "Schnozz's
Snooze." Catcher Ernie "Schnozz" Lombardi was the slowest man ever to win a
batting title, earning two hitting crowns even though he would get thrown out
from right field occasionally on apparent singles. But he's better remembered
for lying stunned during the tenth inning of the fourth and final game of the
Series as DiMaggio crossed the plate with the Yankees' third run of the
inning. The Reds had led 4-2 going into the ninth, but shortstop Billy Myers
booted Bill Dickey's double-play grounder making the score 4-3. DiMaggio, who
was on first before Myers's miscue, raced home from third on a grounder by Joe
Gordon, narrowly beating a throw by third baseman Billy Werber to score the
tying run.
     With runners on first and third and one out in the tenth, DiMaggio laced
a tie-breaking single to right. Ival Goodman couldn't handle the drive,
allowing Charlie "King Kong" Keller to attempt to score from first. Goodman's
one-hop throw hit Lombardi in the groin, and the onrushing Keller leveled the
catcher, allowing DiMaggio to score from first. Clearly Lombardi was less at
fault than his teammates for the incident, and, if the game had been played at
Yankee Stadium instead of Cincinnati, the first run would have ended the
contest. Instead, the Yankees had to shut down the Reds, who got their first
two men on in the bottom of the tenth before succumbing.
     In 1941, DiMaggio established one of the game's great records, a 56-game
hitting streak. According to Lefty Gomez, DiMaggio's roommate, the Yankee
Clipper remained calm throughout the streak, "But every day after forty-four
[the previous record, held by Willie Keeler], I threw up my breakfast."
     Myths grew around the streak. One was that Dom DiMaggio made a fantastic
catch to rob Joe of a hit, nearly ending the streak at 43 games. Boxscore
evidence doesn't support this story. DiMaggio denied rumors that Heinz was
prepared to make a big promotional deal with the Yankee Clipper if he could
extend the streak to 57, their corporate symbol.
     It is true that DiMaggio and Gomez rode to the fateful fifty-seventh game
in Cleveland together and their cab driver predicted the streak's end.
Versions differ as to whether the cabbie said flatly that the streak would end
or if he hedged a bit, saying the streak would end if DiMaggio didn't get a
hit his first time up. In any case, Gomez cursed him for giving Joltin' Joe
the jinx, but DiMaggio remained calm (although he may not have tipped
heavily). DiMaggio went 0-for-3 with a walk in that fifty-seventh game, the
first two outs recorded on brilliant plays by third baseman Ken Keltner.
DiMaggio could have bunted to extend the streak, since Keltner was playing him
in short left field, but DiMaggio's pride said he had to get a legitimate hit.
Some historians may pooh-pooh that notion, pointing to several tainted streak-
extending hits, but those blots were attributable to the official scorers, not
DiMaggio.
     Fans who saw him pointed to DiMaggio's effortless grace. His wide stance
made his batting stroke fluid, and he rarely seemed to run hard for balls in
the outfield, gliding to the spot. There's only one recorded instance of
DiMaggio showing emotion on the ballfield. In the sixth game of the 1947
World Series, DiMaggio hit a drive to deep left field, ticketed for the
bullpen. The two-on, two-out clout would have tied the game at eight, but Al
Gionfriddo went back (" . . . back, back . . . " as called by Red Barber) to
make a one hand stab over the low fence near the 415-foot sign. DiMaggio saw
the catch as he approached second base, and kicked at the dirt with his toe to
show his disappointment.
     The public's other glimpse of DiMaggio's inner self came with his
marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1954. They were divorced later that year,
leading raconteur Oscar Levant to remark, "It proves that no man can be a
success in two national pastimes." After a trip to entertain troops in the
Far East, Monroe returned beaming and told DiMaggio, "Oh, Joe, you've never
heard such cheering."
     "Yes, I have," DiMaggio answered.
     DiMaggio's most fabled comeback from injury was in 1949. The previous
November, he underwent surgery to remove bone spurs on his right heel. He was
still limping in spring training, missed the Yankees' opener, and was flown to
Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where the operation had been performed,
for further treatment. Speculation surfaced that the Yankee Clipper's playing
days might be at an end. It wasn't until the last week of May that he was
able to try out the heel in practice, not until a mid-June exhibition with the
Giants that he played in a game. He returned to the regular lineup for a
three-game series in Boston beginning June 28, against a hard-driving Red Sox
squad that had won ten of its last eleven and was challenging the Yankees for
the top spot.
     After missing the first sixty-six games of the season, DiMaggio singled
in his first at-bat and homered in his second. He broke up a potential double
play in the fifth inning and caught Ted Williams' long drive in the ninth for
the game's final out in a 5-4 Yankee win. The next day, the Yankees trailed
7-1 early when DiMaggio came up with two aboard. He slugged a three-run shot
to make the score 7-4, then broke a 7-7 tie with another homer. In the final
game of the series, with the Yankees clinging to a one-run lead, his three-run
homer in the seventh brought some welcome insurance. In his first three games
of the season, he'd gone five-for-eleven with four homers and nine RBIs. The
triumphant return had put the Yankees eight games ahead of the Red Sox.
     But the 1949 season wasn't over. The Yankees' rash of injuries continued
throughout the summer. With a dozen games to go, a viral infection felled
DiMaggio, who'd dropped fifteen pounds and weakened noticeably. The lead over
Boston stood at two and a half games when DiMaggio went out. By the time the
Red Sox came to New York for the season's final two games, Boston led the
Yankees by a game. The opener on October 1 had been scheduled as Joe DiMaggio
Day, and 69,551 fans turned out to honor their enervated hero. After the
hour-long ceremonies in which he received over $35,000 worth of gifts for
himself and his family, DiMaggio told manager Casey Stengel, "I'd like to give
it a try." He had two hits in the Yankees' victory that tied them with the
Red Sox, and tripled in the second game that brought the Yankees a pennant in
their first year under Stengel.

     "I had many years when I was not so successful as a ballplayer, as it is
      a game of skill."--Casey Stengel, testifying before the Senate
      Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly in 1958.

In 1923, Casey Stengel was immortalized by Damon Runyon's "This is the way old
Casey ran running his home run home" report of Stengel's game-winning
inside-the-park shot in the World Series opener. Two decades later, Stengel
was "The Ol' Perfesser," and two decades after that, still managing, he was
able to proclaim, "Most people my age are dead at the present time."
     Although he denigrated his skills as a player, Stengel batted .284 in his
fourteen-year career as a lefthanded-hitting outfielder. He explained, "I
broke in 4 for 4 and folks thought I was the next Ty Cobb. It took them about
four days to get over that." Stengel was frequently platooned, a strategy he
repopularized as a manager. In three World Series, he hit .393, with a pair
of game-winning homers in 1923, the first two fall classic round-trippers hit
at Yankee Stadium. As Stengel would say, "You could look it up."
     Exactly one month after his second homer, a seventh inning shot that
broke a scoreless tie, another Series first, he was traded to the lowly Boston
Braves, prompting Stengel to utter, "The paths of glory lead but to the
Braves."
     Stengel first became noted for his stunts on the field as a player, as
well as sharing the name of the character of the famous poem. "He's a dandy
ballplayer, but it's all from the neck down," observed one scout. Stengel
responded, "Being a clown wasn't safe in the minors. Some of them bush league
managers could hit you with a bat at fifty feet." If he somehow missed an
opportunity for a prank or quip, his reputation ensured that he'd gain credit
for it anyway.
     At one of his first spring training camps, Stengel discovered a small
hole with a metal cover buried under the lush outfield grass. Stengel could
squeeze himself into the hole, which contained utility pipes, and still see
the action on the field. When a fly ball came toward his position, teammates
wondered where Casey had gone. Suddenly, he popped out of the hole holding
the metal cover above his head and made the catch.
     Stengel was also involved in another famous spring training episode where
the catch wasn't made. In 1917, flying was still a novelty, and at the
Dodgers spring training site in Daytona Beach, a pioneer woman aviator named
Ruth Law flew a fragile biplane to generate publicity for the area. The
Dodger players frequently flew with Law, and one lazy afternoon talk turned to
the subject of how fast a ball would travel if dropped from the plane. A few
years earlier, Senators catcher Gabby Street had caught a ball dropped from
the Washington Monument, but the Dodgers were doubtful that a ball dropped
from the airplane could be caught. That was all Dodger manager Wilbert
Robinson, the catcher for the great original Orioles teams, needed to hear.
"I could catch one," the fifty-one-year-old skipper contended. Egged on by
doubting players, and probably fueled by some spirited wagering, it was agreed
that Robinson would attempt the stunt the next afternoon.
     Robinson strapped on his catcher's mitt and took his position by the
mound, prepared to snag the ball dropped from a plane traveling about
forty-five miles per hour, five hundred feet above the field. Some place
Stengel riding shotgun on the biplane's wing, seated on a kitchen chair, but
given the fragile state of aviation, that's not likely. Others say that the
designated dropper forgot to bring a baseball into the air. Whatever
happened, a sphere of some sort sped earthward with an overweight Robinson
circling unsteadily below. The old catcher got a glove on it, but it hit him
on the chest, splattered, and the impact knocked him to the ground. The
object wasn't a baseball, but a grapefruit.
     Feeling the juice, Robinson screamed, "Jesus, I'm killed!  I'm dead!  My
chest's split open!  I'm covered in blood!" Then he tasted the glop, realized
he'd been had, and immediately blamed Stengel, who eagerly accepted credit,
reasoning he'd been singled out because "I had a pretty good arm." Later,
lubricated with other juices, Robinson claimed, "If it had been a baseball,
I'd have caught it." In a more frank moment, Robinson admitted, "If that had
been a baseball, I probably would have been killed." Stengel delighted in
telling the story, claiming that he himself was in the biplane.
     The true measure of a baseball tale is in its adaptation. George
Plimpton used the grapefruit story as the basis for the opening of his 1987
novel, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch. To acclimate catcher Ronn Reynolds to
handling the 168-mile-per-hour stuff of pitcher Finch, the Mets dropped him
baseballs from a blimp at a thousand feet.
     After Stengel left the Dodgers as a player, there was no shortage of
clowns to take up the slack, although their antics were not necessarily by
design. The principal character of Uncle Robbie's Daffiness Boys became Babe
Herman, gifted with a thundering bat, a scattershot arm, and hands of steel.
     With two on and two out and the Dodgers ahead by a run, the apparent
third out of the ninth inning was a line drive toward Herman in right. But
the Babe tripped, the ball rolled to the wall, and two runs scored for another
Dodger defeat. As the team left the field, Robinson approached Herman and
asked compassionately, "What happened?"
     "When?" Herman innocently asked.
     Fly balls were an adventure, if not a constant danger, for Herman. He
denied the story that a fly ball had ever hit him on the head. "If a ball
ever hit me on the head, I'd just hang up my spikes and quit," Herman told a
reporter.
     "What about the shoulder?" asked the reporter.
     "Oh, no!" Herman exclaimed, sensing a trap. "The shoulder don't count,
only the head."
     In 1993, Jose Canseco fulfilled the Herman fantasy, advancing
unsteadily into the warning track in pursuit of a fly ball which
hit him square on the top of the cap and bounced over the fence.
Canseco had to laugh, even if his pitchers didn't; Herman would have
been positively gleeful.
     Herman was wary of newsmen trying to build up his reputation as a
character. He was not as careful on the basepaths, once attempting to steal
second with the bases loaded. "Why do you guys always harp on me?" Herman
complained. "Just because you got to have something to write about every day
in the papers, why do you always make me out like a clown? Fun's fun and all
that, but I'm a family man, and showing me up like a screwball don't help me
in the game, and I gotta make a living same as you guys." With that, Herman
reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a cigar.
     The reporter, his conscience troubling him, said, "Here, let me give you
a light."
     "Don't bother," replied Herman, turning away in a puff of smoke. "It's
already lit."
     To his death, Herman denied the famous story of the three men on third,
but this one was too good to have been made up. With the bases loaded, Herman
drove a ball off the wall in right. Pitcher Dazzy Vance, the runner at
second, turned third, but then retreated. The runner from first, Chick
Fewster, made a headfirst dive into third, and Herman, head down, slid into
third, meeting his two teammates. The third baseman tagged everyone in sight,
and when the dust cleared, Herman had doubled into a double play.
     A rookie observing the incident asked Uncle Robbie, "What kind of
baseball is that?"
     "Leave them be," Robinson replied. "It's the first time they've been
together all season."
     The incident led to the fable of the Brooklyn cabbie who picked up a fare
leaving Ebbets Field before the end of the game and asked how the Dodgers were
doing.
     "The Dodgers are ahead, and we got three men on base," the spectator
said.
     "Which base?" asked the cabbie.
     Robinson once called on Herman to bunt with a man on first and none out.
Herman would have none of it and bunted the first two offerings foul. Then he
belted the third delivery into the seats.
     Fed up with the goofy antics and mounting losses, Robinson announced that
the next dumb stunt would draw a fine, payable to what he called the Bonehead
Club. Robinson promptly fattened the club's coffers. At the pregame meeting
at home plate, Robinson submitted a laundry slip instead of a lineup card.
     Stengel, however, showed that you didn't have to be a Dodger to clown.
In spring training with the Phils, he put his uniform on backwards. Manager
Gavvy Cravath remarked, "You've done everything else backwards down here. You
might as well wear your pants that way, too." As the Phils barnstormed toward
opening day, they encountered a heckler who disparaged their abilities until
the players challenged him to take the field and see if he could do any
better. The heckler was Stengel, disguised in a straw hat, with overalls and
a red bandana, who proceeded to smack out loud hits to the astonishment of the
crowd.
     Many other Stengel stories became standards. Playing for Pittsburgh in
1918, Stengel was having a bad day. He muffed a shoestring catch in right,
kicking the ball toward second base but running in pursuit toward the foul
line, thinking the ball had gone in that direction. Later, he was tagged out
standing up on a play where the few fans in the stands thought he should have
slid, and they booed him lustily. So before taking a seat in the dugout,
Stengel addressed the crowd. "With the salary I'm getting, I'm so hollow and
starving that if I slide, I'm liable to explode like a light bulb." Alibis
for not sliding evolved through the years, but none were ever as good. In
exhibition contests, Babe Ruth couldn't slide because he was carrying a
fountain pen for signing autographs. Several players were accused of avoiding
the dirt to preserve hip flasks of liquor. Tim Raines perfected a technique
that allowed him to slide while toting vials of cocaine in his socks. Stengel
found a way to improve his baseball income in the wartime economy by getting a
job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and arranging games with sailors as soon as
their ships docked. "I wanted to play them before they got rid of their sea
legs," he confided.
     Back with the Pirates after the war, Stengel got into an argument with an
umpire over an out call at first, ripped off his own shirt, and offered it to
umpire, suggesting, "Why don't you play for our side for a change?" When the
league office informed him of his fine by telegram the next day, Stengel
pinned the yellow telegram to his uniform sleeve and wore it for the entire
game.
     Visiting Brooklyn, where he'd broken in, during 1919, the fans rode
Stengel hard as a lefthanded pitcher made him look bad. In addition, Stengel
had crashed into the wall in right center while failing to snare a
game-breaking double. Between innings, Stengel visited the Brooklyn bullpen
to chat with his former teammate Leon Cadore, a like-minded spirit who was a
fair amateur magician. That afternoon Cadore's sleight of hand had caught a
bird. Stengel knew what to do with it.
     Stengel concealed the bird in his cap just before his turn at the plate.
When the crowd greeted him with the expected jeers, Stengel turned, bowed, and
removed his cap. The sparrow sat on his head for a moment to get its
bearings, then flew away. Even the umpire laughed. A year later in
Philadelphia, he found another bird in the outfield, caught it in his cap, and
returned to his position. After catching a fly ball, he doffed his cap and
away flew the bird. Years later, an attempt to re-create the feat a third
time fell flat on its beak. The bird was spun by its tail to calm it before
being put in his hat. When Stengel took off his cap, the woozy bird dropped
to the ground at his feet.
     When traded to the Giants in 1921, Stengel learned much of his future
managerial skills from John J. McGraw, although Stengel exaggerated his
escapades off the field to avoid criticism that he was the manager's pet.
Stengel claimed that McGraw assigned one of his detectives to tail him and
outfielder Irish Meusel, who had been teammates on the Phils before joining
the Giants. After a couple of days, the detective reported that Meusel and
Stengel had stopped going out together. McGraw called Stengel into his office
to discover the reasons for the friends' falling out. Stengel explained there
was no problem between him and Meusel, but he had a beef with McGraw. "I
don't want to share a detective," Stengel insisted. "I want one of my own."
     Stengel began his managerial career in 1925 with Worcester, an Eastern
League farm club of the Boston Braves, serving as player-manager with the
added title of club president. At the end of the season, Stengel got an offer
to manage the Toledo Mud Hens of the American Association, a more prestigious
position. However, Stengel was still contractually obligated to the Braves'
organization as a player. So Stengel the club president released Stengel the
player, fired Stengel the manager, and then submitted his letter of
resignation as president, freeing himself to take the job in Toledo. As a
manager, Stengel became better known for his caustic wit, usually directed at
players, and his curious rambling discourse known as Stengelese.
     Stengel returned to the majors with the Dodgers in 1934, after Giants
manager Bill Terry asked, "Is Brooklyn still in the league?" Stengel's
Dodgers avenged the crack, knocking the Giants out of the pennant race in the
final weekend. But the rest of the season had not been nearly as satisfying,
as the Dodgers finished sixth. During a loss at Philadelphia, Stengel went
out to get his pitcher, Walter Beck. Beck was earning the nickname
"Boom-Boom" as the Phils had been tattooing the tin fence in right, exhausting
right fielder Hack Wilson, who was already handicapped by a hangover--gin was
his tonic, the pundits said. While Stengel visited the mound, Wilson took the
opportunity to lean over, shut his eyes, and rest his aching head. Instead of
handing Stengel the ball, Beck heaved it toward right field. The ball struck
the fence with a boom, startling Wilson. Properly conditioned by previous
shots, Wilson dashed back, retrieved the ball, and made his best throw of the
season to second base.
     Stengel concocted something called the precision play, a pick-off play to
third with a righthanded batter. The pitcher would throw at the hitter, but
yell "Look out," clearing the batter out of the box, attempting to freeze the
baserunner, and giving the catcher a clear shot to pick him off. "The runner
would freeze, but so would my man at third, and my left fielder would wear
himself out chasing the overthrows."
     Warren Spahn, a member of Stengel's Boston Braves in the 1940s and his
Mets in the 1960s, noted, "I played for Stengel before and after he was a
genius." Bad ballplayers with flair found their way to Stengel before and
after his glory years with the Yankees. The first such character was Frenchy
Bordagaray, an outfielder-third baseman who tried to bring back the gay
nineties mustache in the thirties. "Go shave it off," Stengel advised,
"before someone throws a ball at it and kills you." During pregame drills in
the midst of a losing streak, one of Bordagaray's batting practice throws hit
Stengel in the head. The Dodgers won that day, so Bordagaray suggested to his
manager, "Let me hit you in the head every day." Then there was the time
Bordagaray was standing on second base but the umpire called him out. Stengel
was eager to argue, but Bordagaray discouraged him. "I was tapping my foot,"
Bordagaray explained, "and I guess he got me between taps." Stengel listened
because Bordagaray wasn't in the habit of agreeing with umpires. He once spit
in an arbiter's eye and received a $500 fine and sixty-day suspension.
Bordagaray responded, "The penalty is a little more than I expectorated."
     Players like him sent Stengel to a postgame shave, instructing the
barber, "Don't cut my throat, I may want to do it myself later." Just before
the 1943 season, Stengel was hit by a car and suffered a broken leg.
Pittsburgh manager Frankie Frisch, a teammate of Stengel's under McGraw,
wired, "Your attempt at suicide fully understood. Deepest sympathy you didn't
succeed." When Stengel took a Pacific Coast League managing job in Oakland in
1946, he was pleased with the presence of bridges. "Every manager wants to
jump off a bridge sooner or later, and it's very nice for an old man to know
he doesn't have to walk fifty miles to find one."
     On an exhibition tour with the Boston Bees in Mexico, peasants lined the
streets to greet the Bees' bus in Monterrey, throwing flowers and cheering
wildly. Stengel, who owned a piece of the team, was already counting his
club's share of the take from the presumed sellout. "I didn't know you people
were so crazy about baseball," he told the guide assigned to the team.
     "It's not the team they're cheering," the embarrassed guide replied.
"They've never seen a Greyhound bus before."
     Many questioned the appointment of this clown who didn't finish out of
the second division as manager of the Yankees in 1949, but Stengel led the
Yankees to ten pennants in a dozen seasons. Appreciating the value of having
a good team to manage, Stengel summed up his good fortune, "There comes a time
in every man's life at least once, and I've had plenty of them." People began
to seek his opinions on managing. He suggested that the secret for success as
a manager was "to keep the twenty guys who hate you away from the five guys
who are undecided." He contended, "Most ballgames are lost, not won."
Moreover, Stengel knew why. "Good pitching always stops good hitting. And
vice versa."
     Stengel found a new audience when he testified before a Senate
subcommittee in July 1958 on baseball's antitrust exemption. Stengel gave
them nearly an hour of convoluted, hysterical, yet shrewd monologue on the
state of the game, the progress it had made, and the need for further
improvements. The main feature, however, was Stengelese meandering and quaint
phraseology which left the hearing room amused and bewildered. Mickey Mantle
followed Stengel to the witness table and told the senators, "My views are
just about the same as Casey's."
     At the start of the 1960 season, Stengel, sixty-nine years old, was
hospitalized for a couple of weeks after complaining of chest pains. Upon
release, he offered this medical report: "They examined all my organs. Some
of them are quite remarkable and others are not so good. A lot of museums are
bidding for them." The remarkable ones held up for the remainder of the
season, and Stengel even managed to get in a stunt on the way to his record
tenth pennant. In response to Bill Veeck's exploding scoreboard at Comiskey
Park, Yankee players stood in front of their dugout and lit sparklers after
one of their own homers.
     The Yankees lost the 1960 World Series to the Pirates in seven games on
Bill Mazeroski's homer leading off the bottom of the ninth in the final game.
The Pirates had overcome a three-run Yankee lead in the eighth inning with the
help of Bill Virdon's bad-hop grounder that hit Tony Kubek in the throat. But
Stengel's managing came under criticism. He didn't start his best pitcher,
Whitey Ford, until the third game. Ford threw a pair of shutouts in the third
and sixth games, the start of his consecutive scoreless World Series inning
streak that overtook Babe Ruth's record, but he wasn't available for a third
start or even a relief appearance in the deciding contest. Additionally,
Stengel failed to pinch-hit for pitcher Bobby Shantz in the top of the eighth
with runners on second and third and two out. A single would have put the
game out of reach, and Shantz had already pitched five innings in relief.
Less than a week later, the Yankees decided it was time to go with a younger
man, to which Stengel responded, "I'll never make the mistake of being seventy
again."
     A year later, during the 1961 World Series, Stengel accepted the
appointment as the first manager of the Mets. The job would require more of
his comedic skills than baseball acumen. Stengel showed he was equal to the
task when explaining the Mets' first selection in the expansion draft, catcher
Hobie Landrith, a veteran of twelve undistinguished years in the National
League. "You have to have a catcher or you'll have a lot of passed balls,"
Stengel explained. A reporter noted that his starting outfield of Gus Bell,
Frank Thomas, and Richie Ashburn had a total of twenty children. "If they
produce as well on the field as off the field, we'll win the pennant," Stengel
concluded wistfully.
     He proclaimed his team "the Amazin' Mets," and the tag stuck. Stengel
fully understood what was amazin' about the club: "I been in this game a
hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before." At
one particularly exasperating juncture in the Mets' 40-120 debut season, the
worst record of the twentieth century, Stengel wondered aloud, "Can't anybody
play this here game?" He would note after many home losses, "We trimmed the
attendance again," meaning that they'd defrauded the public.
     Even the rare victories came at a price. After sweeping a Sunday
doubleheader from the Braves in Milwaukee, plane trouble and fog conspired to
delay the team's arrival in Houston until eight the next morning. On his way
to a few hours of sleep before that day's game, the usually voluble Stengel
warned, "If any of the writers come looking for me, tell them I'm being
embalmed."
     On the 1962 Mets, the role of Frenchy Bordagaray was played by first
baseman Marv Throneberry, who featured good power, bad hands, and shaky
base-running skills. Writer Jimmy Breslin observed, "Having Marv Throneberry
play for your team is like having Willie Sutton work for your bank." After
clouting an apparent triple, Marvelous Marv was called out on appeal for
missing first base. Stengel ran out to argue, but the second base umpire came
over, hoping to chill Stengel's anger. "I hate to tell you this, Casey," the
arbiter began, "but he missed second base, too." When Throneberry celebrated
his twenty-ninth birthday on September 2, Stengel noted that there was no
cake. "We was going to get him a birthday cake, but we figured he'd drop it."
     Marvelous Marv became a folk hero. One inning, he had a particularly
rough time with Frank Thomas, who was playing third base like the outfielder
he was. Thomas heaved a throw past Throneberry for an error. Another
grounder to Thomas, another poor throw, another error. Getting the idea, a
third hitter smacked the ball to third and Thomas heaved it high above
Throneberry's head. But Marvelous Marv leaped, spun in midair, and came down
with the ball. Following the inning, Throneberry approached Thomas, who
expected a well-deserved reproach. "What are you trying to do," Throneberry
asked, "take away my fans?"
     The Mets had problems up the middle, too. Shortstop Elio Chacon didn't
speak English, so he didn't understand center fielder Richie Ashburn when he
called, "I got it." After several messed up pop flies, the resourceful
Ashburn enlisted the help of a Spanish-speaking teammate and learned to say
"Yo la tengo." A couple of days later, a fly ball was lifted into short left
center. As Chacon moved back, Ashburn raced in, yelling, "Yo la tengo. Yo la
tengo." Sure enough, Chacon moved off. As Ashburn prepared to squeeze the
ball, left fielder Frank Thomas ran him over. In the face of this adversity,
Ashburn batted .306 and was honored as the team's most valuable player. "MVP
on the worst team ever," Ashburn mused. "I wonder exactly what they mean by
that."
     Behind the plate, the Mets had Choo-Choo Coleman, who called everyone
"Bub." In spring training 1963, third baseman Charlie Neal struck up a
conversation with Coleman, who answered, "Yeah, Bub" and "No, Bub." Finally,
Neal said, "You don't even know who I am. I was your roommate last season."
Coleman considered the statement carefully before replying, "Yeah, Bub.
You're number nine."
     The Mets were the Siberia of baseball in those days, and some players
took unusual routes to get there, none more so than Pumpsie Green, the first
black player in the history of the Red Sox. Following a game at Yankee
Stadium, the Red Sox bus was stuck in a major-league traffic jam. Green and
Gene Conley, a six-foot-eight pitcher who also played basketball for the
Boston Celtics, decided they could make better time on foot and left the bus.
Some time later, they checked into a hotel without luggage, except for a
couple of brown bags acquired at the local liquor store while the Red Sox
initiated a search for them. They tired of New York after a couple of days,
so Conley suggested they go to Israel. The inspiration for this idea may have
been Green's real first name, Elijah. At the airport, some sharp airline
employee recognized that this odd couple, traveling without passports or
baggage, might be the missing pair of Red Sox. Both were fined, and Green was
further punished with a trade to the Mets. He played only 17 games for the
Amazin's before he was farmed out for good.
     Stengel managed the Mets until the middle of the 1965 season, when a
broken hip, suffered in falling off a barstool at an old-timers' celebration,
forced his retirement. Many had urged Stengel to quit before that, chiding
him for sleeping on the bench and failing to improve the team's dismal record.
As the Yankee skipper, Stengel's skill was denigrated by those who felt anyone
could have done as well; with the Mets, it was more true that anyone would
have finished last, and Stengel never lost sight of how awful his clubs were.
At an exhibition at West Point in early 1965, he slipped and broke his wrist.
"I got this broken arm watching my team," he moaned. "All they gave me last
year was a head cold." Discussing a pair of twenty-year-old prospects one
spring morning, he said, "That there's Ed Kranepool. In ten years, he has a
chance to be a star in this game. And over there's Greg Goossen. In ten
years, he has a chance to be thirty."
     After his retirement from the Mets, Stengel continued to make the rounds
at spring training, Hall of Fame inductions (his election to Cooperstown in
1966 was a highlight of his life), and other baseball events. He observed,
"Old-timers' weekends are like airplane landings. If you can walk away from
them, they're successful."
     There's a story that ought to be true concerning his final days in 1975.
He was in his hospital bed watching a ballgame on television when the national
anthem was played. He got out of bed and stood at attention one last time, an
imaginary cap over his heart. When he died, his funeral was delayed a week,
until an off-day in the playoffs, to allow baseball people to attend, a bit of
ironic humor that Stengel would've appreciated.

     "The toughest thing about the major leagues is explaining to your wife
      why she needs a penicillin shot for your kidney infection." --Mike Hegan

Stengel warned his players, "You gotta learn that if you don't get it by
midnight, chances are you ain't gonna get it; and if you do, it ain't gonna be
worth it." Stengel noted, "Being with a woman all night never hurt no
professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman
that does 'em in."
     Jim Bouton revealed a lot of players' tricks in his 1970 book, Ball Four,
including the obsession with looking as well as touching. Beaver shooting was
practiced in ballparks, bullpens, and through pilgrimages under bleacher
grandstands and on the roof of the L-shaped Shoreham Hotel in Washington,
baseball's greatest loss when the Senators left the nation's capital. Bouton
also stated that a favorite player pastime was recording a session with a
conquest, then playing it back on the team bus.
     Bouton's book told the tale of Jim Gosger, who'd been secreted in a
closet by a roommate anticipating a romp with a prime example of the so-called
local talent. The thoughtful roommate even provided Gosger with a towel to
chew on in the event of laughing. During the session, the woman cried, "I've
never done it like that before."
     Gosger stuck his head out, opined, "Yeah, sure," and returned to the
closet.
     As a member of the Yankees last dynasty teams of the early 1960s, Bouton
played with Joe Pepitone, a dedicated prankster and victim as well as a highly
successful womanizer. Pepitone, a devotee of toupees, is credited with
legitimizing the presence of hair dryers in the clubhouse. Players enjoyed
filling his dryer with powder so that it spewed all over his head and rug.
Pepitone's best gag came at the expense of team trainers. He'd insert a piece
of popcorn in his foreskin, then go to the trainer, saying he thought it might
be cancer.
     Pepitone's antics ran him afoul of many curfews, but avoiding bed checks
has always been a part of the game. Even Stengel admitted covering for
roommates. When the coach called his name from outside the door, Stengel
would respond in his natural voice. If his roommate had gone out, Stengel
would answer for him, doing his best to imitate the voice.
     Then there's the autographed-ball story that has come down through the
ages. Management places a plainclothes security guard in the hotel lobby with
a baseball, and the guard asks all the players who arrive after curfew to
autograph the ball. The next morning, the signers are fined.
     Of course, these tricks haven't stopped the determined carouser. Ping
Bodie, an outfielder best known for his quips, bragged that he roomed with
Babe Ruth's valises. Pitcher Bob Veale was never bothered by bed checks. "My
bed was always there." Many managers have lamented that the problem with bed
checks is that "they disturb your best players."
     Stengel had strong feelings about drinking. The team's hotel bar was
off-limits to players. "That's where I do my drinking," he declared. When
Stengel confronted pitcher Mickey McDermott in a freight elevator at four
A.M., the manager shook his head in disgust and said, "Drunk again."
     The pitcher grinned. "Me too."
     Stengel managed Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Billy Martin, three
well-known "whiskey slicks," as the Ol' Perfesser called his drinkers.
"Everybody who roomed with Mickey said he took five years off their careers,"
Ford reported. Upon turning forty-six, Mantle declared, "If I'd known I was
going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself." Stengel
believed, "The ones who drink milkshakes don't win many ballgames."
     They don't get fooled like Johnny Mize did, either. When the Big Cat
went into the shower after a spring workout, Giants trainer Frank Bowman
soaked Mize's sweatshirt in alcohol. When Mize came out of the shower, Bowman
urged Mize to lay off hard liquor.
     "What are you talking about, Frank?" Mize retorted. "I was in at curfew
last night, and all I had was a couple of beers."
     "Don't try to kid me, John," the trainer said, striking a match and
dropping it on the shirt. The shirt burst into flames. "That's alcohol you
sweated out."
     Mize stamped out the fire and pleaded with Bowman, "Don't say anything
about this to anyone."
     Cap Anson is credited with starting formal spring training by bringing
his players to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Anson's purpose: "To boil out the
alcohol microbes." John McGraw once locked pitcher Bugs Raymond in the
clubhouse to keep him in shape to start the second game of a doubleheader. So
Raymond lowered an empty bucket out of a clubhouse window, and an associate
below filled it with beer.
     Mike "King" Kelly, the first great star of the game back in the 1880s,
continued the tradition of drinking. When asked if he drank during games,
Kelly replied, "It depends on the length of the game." After his retirement,
he offered advice to the struggling Reds: "When you see three balls, swing at
the middle one."
     Grover Cleveland Alexander, the only pitcher named for a former President
and portrayed in the movies by a future one, was renowned for his drinking.
It was assumed that "Ol' Pete" Alexander was badly hung over when he struck
out Tony Lazzeri with two on and two out in the seventh inning of the seventh
game of the 1926 World Series. After all, Alexander had worked nine innings
the day before and presumably celebrated his second complete game victory of
the Series hard that night. However, after the game six victory, manager
Rogers Hornsby warned Alexander that he might call on him in the finale.
     Don Larsen may have been celebrating his perfect game in the 1956 World
Series the night before he pitched it. The righthander had a reputation for
"mailing letters at three A.M.," as Stengel called it. Unable to find a
convenient mailbox on foot during spring training in the retirement haven of
St. Petersburg, Florida, Larsen wrapped his car around a telephone pole at
five o'clock one morning. Larsen wasn't hurt, but he and the press corps
wondered what kind of disciplinary action Stengel would order. The manager
ended the mystery by proclaiming, "Anybody who can find something to do in St.
Petersburg at five in the morning deserves a medal, not a fine."

     "Say it ain't so, Joe."--Young fan to Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was
     banned from baseball for life with seven White Sox teammates by
     Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis for allegedly throwing the 1919
     World Series.

The Baltimore Orioles won three straight National League titles starting in
1894. Manager Ned Hanlon's lineup included Hall of Famers John McGraw, Wee
Willie Keeler, Wilbert Robinson, Hugh Jennings, Joe Kelley, and Dan Brouthers.
One key to their success was their hustling style of scientific baseball. The
original Orioles were credited with inventing the hit-and-run, the relay, and
the backing up of throws. Less to their credit, the Orioles also refined
techniques such as holding enemy baserunners up by the belt, cutting across
the infield to take an extra base, and substituting mushy balls for the more
dangerous variety when the opponents batted.
     The Orioles' most famous play, one later attributed to Ty Cobb as well,
involved spare balls which would be strategically placed in the high outfield
grass in case a batted ball eluded the outfielders. The trickery kept a
number of startled baserunners from advancing past first on what appeared to
be sure extra-base hits. The system worked until one afternoon when a gapper
was returned to second base by both the left fielder and center fielder. Upon
seeing the two balls, the umpire figured out the gambit and forfeited the game
to the Oriole's opponents.
     Ty Cobb's father told him, when he left home to play ball, "Don't come
home a failure." Cobb stories revolve around his toughness and readiness to
beat you with his bat or his spikes or his fists. While Pete Rose was chasing
Cobb's all-time hit record, one reporter asked Rose's opinion on what Cobb
might be thinking if he was looking down on the chase. "From what I know
about him," Rose answered, pointing skyward, "he's probably not up there."
     There's hardly a baseball man who hasn't been credited with the "What
would Ty Cobb hit today?" story--from Cobb himself to Yogi Berra. The
response, no matter who gets the credit, is "Oh, about .350."
     "That's not so great," says the surprised questioner. "It might not even
lead the league."
     "That's true, but you have to take into consideration he'd be
seventy-three years old now."
     Before an encounter with the Tigers, Red Sox catcher Lou Criger made the
mistake of telling a reporter, "This Cobb is one of those ginks with a lot of
flash, but he doesn't fool me. Watch him wilt when the going gets tough. I'll
cut him down to size." Unfortunately for Criger, Cobb (unlike Rogers Hornsby,
who eschewed the printed word and movies as harmful to the batting eye) read
the paper. After singling his first time up, Cobb told Criger he'd be running
on every pitch. And he did, stealing second, third, and home.
     They say you can't steal first base, but Germany Schaefer did it in 1911.
With two out in the ninth inning of a tie game between the Senators and White
Sox, Schaefer was on first with speedy Clyde Milan on third. With a weak
hitter at the dish, Schaefer tried to steal a run for his Senators by dashing
toward second base in hopes of drawing a throw that would allow Milan to sneak
home. But the White Sox were having none of it, and let Schaefer take second
unchallenged. Undaunted, Schaefer had another plan. He took off for first,
finishing his dash with a theatrical hook slide. The White Sox protested
Schaefer's play, but the rule book didn't cover that situation so the play
stood. (A rule was added to keep players from making a "travesty of the
game," which prevented Jimmy Piersall from running the bases in reverse order
on his hundredth career homer; he had to settle for running backwards.)
Schaefer, back on first, lit out for second again. This time, the Sox hoped
to end the sham and pegged to second. Schaefer beat the throw, and Milan
waltzed home with the winning run.
     Schaefer had a number of other stunts. During a wet afternoon, with his
team down 5-1 in the top of the fifth, he pleaded for the game to be called,
but the umpires let the contest continue. So in the sixth he took his
position at second base wearing a raincoat. The umpires let him patrol the
keystone in his long coat. Pee Wee Reese recreated the sentiment years later
when he carried an open umbrella to the on-deck circle during a misty fifth
inning with the Dodgers trailing. Several decades had fouled the temper of
arbiters worse than the weather. Reese was tossed, but the game went on.
     Reese was also part of another famous stall. A Dodger laugher had
suddenly turned tight, and manager Charlie Dressen hastily summoned Clyde King
to relieve. When he got to the mound, King said he wasn't warm and asked
Reese to buy him some time. So when King completed his allotted warmups,
Reese called for time. He put his hand over his eye, in apparent agony, and
went over to third baseman Billy Cox to help him get this imaginary speck out
of his eye. Reese's act was a little too good; King came over to see if he
could help his shortstop.
     Managers often put in a rule for their pitching staff: never throw a
strike on a no ball-two strike count. As the Giants manager in the forties,
Mel Ott was a fervent believer in this rule. He once fined pitcher Bill
Voiselle $500 for breaking the rule, and from then on, the rest of the staff
toed the line.
     A rookie reliever took the hill for the Giants with two runners on and a
tough hitter at the plate. He got ahead on the count 0-2 and tried to waste
one outside. But the ball curved over the plate, and the umpire rang up
strike three. The rookie went into a panic, screaming, "No. That was a ball.
What're you tryin' to do, ruin me?"
     Players have been raging at umpires from the dawn of the game. Bill Klem
was the first great umpire in the game, a small figure who declared, "I never
missed one in my heart." He resigned in 1941 after thirty-six years in the
majors because he found himself doubting a call he'd made in the game. When
he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953, he told the crowd in Cooperstown,
"To me, baseball was not just a sport; it was a religion." Many of the
stories about the men in blue became attached to Klem over the years, just as
stories about players stuck to Babe Ruth.
     He was a short man with big ears and lips that spit when he made a call.
The ballplayers called him "Catfish," but never to his face. He would brook
no disrespect. But the Pirates pushed him to the limit in a critical 1913
series against the Giants. Klem threatened to clear the Pirate bench if he
heard another peep.
     In those days, the umpire announced pinch hitters to the crowd. So when
the Pirates sent up a rookie pinch hitter, Klem asked for his name. The
rookie mumbled, and Klem asked him for a repeat. "Boo," the rookie said.
That was all Klem needed to hear. He threw out the hitter and the rest of the
Pirates.
     But Pirate manager Fred Clarke approached the red-hot arbiter with an
explanation. The rookie wasn't trying to be fresh; his name was Everitt Booe.
     A long drive down the line had Klem considering his decision carefully.
The anxious batter questioned the Old Arbiter, "Well, was it fair or foul?"
     An indignant Klem replied, "It ain't nothing until I call it."
     A Klem call once infuriated Frankie Frisch, then manager of the
Cardinals, who flew into a white rage and charged the umpire, spewing
invective. Suddenly, Frisch collapsed. A crowd gathered around him, and a
doctor came on the field to treat him. Klem didn't let sympathy cloud his
judgment. "Frisch," he announced, "dead or alive, you're out of this game."
     Klem accomplished what many considered impossible when he ejected Pie
Traynor from a game. Traynor never cursed and was the most polite player
around. There'd been no display of acrimony before the ejection, so a
reporter asked Klem why Traynor had been tossed. Klem said he'd ejected
Traynor because he wasn't feeling well. The reporter said he didn't see any
sign of Traynor's illness.
     "That's what he told me," Klem replied. "He came up to me like the
perfect gentleman he is and said, 'Mr. Klem, I'm sick and tired of your
stupid decisions.'" When a rookie pitcher complained about Klem's ball calls
on his first three pitches to Rogers Hornsby, Klem chided the hurler, "Young
man, when you pitch a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know."
     A Klem contemporary, Bill Guthrie, is credited with creating another
classic of the umpiring trade. When a batter called out on strikes launched
his bat into the air in disgust, Guthrie eyed the bat and calmly announced to
the batter, "Son, if that bat comes down, you're out of the game."
     Umpire George Moriarty once got taken to the cleaners by a rookie. After
taking two called strikes, the batter stepped out and asked, "Just for my
information, sir, how do you spell your name?"
     Moriarty was so surprised that he spelled out his name.
     "That's what I thought, sir," the rookie said as he set himself back in
the box. "Moriarty, with only one "i.' "
     Red Ormsby, another umpire during the twenties, was getting heckled from
a female fan behind first base. "You blind bum," she shouted, "If you were my
husband, I'd give you poison."
     Ormsby walked toward the rail, removed his hat, and bowed to the woman,
then roared, "If you were my wife, I'd take it."
     George Magerkurth, one of the biggest umpires in the National League, got
into an argument with Pee Wee Reese, one of league's smallest players. As the
disputants went toe to toe, Magerkurth looked down at Reese and threatened,
"Get out of here or I'll bite your head off."
     "If you do," the shortstop answered, "you'll have more brains in your
stomach than in your head."
     When huge Frank Howard broke into the majors, umpires joined pitchers in
increasing their insurance policies. Although Howard was a gentle giant, at
6"7', 255 pounds, no one wanted to be caught at the limits of his temperament.
In his first at-bat with Marty Springstead behind the plate, Howard glowered
at the umpire's call of strike one on a pitch around the knees. The next
pitch came in at about the same spot. "That's two," Springstead announced.
     "Two what?" Howard sneered.
     "Too low, Frank, much too low," Springstead replied.
     Nestor Chylak complained, "This is the only job in the world where they
expect you to be perfect on opening day and improve as the season goes on."
     The torrent of abuse hasn't let up on the umpires over the years. Billy
Martin (like baseball and malaria, according to Gene Mauch) kept coming back
for four decades as a player, coach and especially New York Yankee manager.
Martin claimed that Gaylord Perry, the legendary greaseballer, "smelled like a
drugstore," and that even his doctored balls had a medicinal air. Bill Kunkel
was umpiring when Martin brought him a ball that he thought reeked of
tampering. Kunkel deferred, claiming, "I have allergies and a deviated
septum."
     Martin seethed, "I got an umpire who can't see or smell."
     The Mets and Braves played a nineteen-inning game at Atlanta on
Independence Day 1985. The contest finished 16-13 in favor of the Mets and
lasted until almost four in the morning, followed by fireworks as scheduled.
In the seventeenth inning, home plate umpire Terry Tata ejected Darryl
Strawberry for arguing a called third strike. "The strike zone changes at
three A.M.," Tata told Strawberry.
     Tom Gorman was keenly aware that umpires are paid by the game, not by the
hour. "Anytime I got those bang-bang plays at first, I called 'em out. It
made the game shorter."
     In his effort to move the game along, Gorman once called Henry Aaron out
on strikes as Bad Henry slugged a home run. There were two strikes on
Hammerin' Hank when Gorman saw strike three heading for the low, outside
corner. He called it, but Aaron's quick wrists smacked the pitch into the
seats as Gorman bellowed, "Strike three." As Aaron ran rounded the bases, the
catcher asked Gorman what was going on. "Just practicing," Gorman murmured.
     Gorman, a former pitcher, may have been partial to his previous craft.
When Bob Gibson fanned a record 17 Tigers in the opener of the 1968 World
Series, Gorman contended, "Gibson only struck out ten. I struck out seven."

     "I won't play for a penny less than fifteen hundred."
      --Honus Wagner refusing a $2,000 salary offer.

The advent of professional baseball was no doubt followed closely by the first
salary dispute. Until players escaped the reserve clause noose in 1976,
management held all the cards.
     Branch Rickey was as famous for penny-pinching when it came to players'
salaries as anything else he did in the game. Rickey had his share of
idiosyncrasies. Religious convictions kept him from attending most Sunday
ballgames, but he had no qualms about collecting the Sunday gate. They called
him the Mahatma for his canny and sometimes inscrutable ways, but he was years
ahead of the baseball establishment in creating the farm system, not only to
supply his Cardinals with a fresh stream of talent, but to generate income by
selling players to other clubs. Rickey got a piece of the selling price for
players in his early days and became a wealthy man. Rickey's also credited
with coining the phrase "Baseball is a game of inches." Later, Rickey
integrated the game by selecting Jackie Robinson as the first black major
leaguer.
     If Brooks Robinson played third base as if he came down from a higher
league, Rickey was the fellow who negotiated salaries up there. "We were like
kids going to war with a popgun," Pee Wee Reese recalled. Eddie Stanky
reported, "I got a million dollars worth of advice and a very small increase."
Chuck Connors said, "He had the players and the money and just didn't like to
see the two of them mix." When Rickey took over Pittsburgh, Rickey told
slugger Ralph Kiner, "We could have finished last without you." Rickey
announced, "I don't want to sell Ralph, but if something overwhelming comes
along, I'm willing to be overwhelmed."
     Enos Slaughter said that Rickey "would go into the vault to get change
for a nickel." The talk was that Rickey's ideal team would lose a tough
battle for the pennant in the final week of the season. That way, the team
would draw well for the entire season, but players couldn't seek raises for
winning the pennant. "I don't know if that was true," said slugger Johnny
Mize, who began his career with Rickey's Cardinals in the 1930s, "but that was
the talk."
     Preacher Roe went into contract talks with Rickey, and, as usual, the
player was demanding a sum that the general manager found unreasonable. After
negotiations narrowed the gap a bit, Rickey gave Roe a contract with the
Dodgers' final offer. He suggested that Roe think it over at home, and added,
"I've got two hunting dogs I'd like you to have. I know how much you like to
hunt."
     So Roe accepted the dogs and took them home. The dogs turned out to be
fine hunters, and they softened Roe's attitude toward Rickey considerably.
"So I went back home and signed the contract, and put it in the mail. A few
hours later, those two dogs took off across the field, and I haven't seen 'em
since."
     A player once returned a contract to Hank Greenberg, then general manager
of the Indians. Greenberg fired off a telegram, "In your haste to accept the
terms, you forgot to sign the contract."
     The player wired back, "In your haste to give me a raise, you put in the
wrong figure."
     Bill Veeck was a great innovator on the public side of the game. Veeck,
who planted the ivy in Wrigley Field while his father was president of the
Cubs, saw baseball as entertainment, and his clubs always had a carnival
element. (Veeck tried to buy the Ringling Brothers circus in the 1950s.)
Veeck was a kindly huckster, not unlike the Wizard of Oz. When he staged
morning games during World War Two for workers coming off the graveyard shift,
Veeck helped serve coffee and doughnuts in the stands. He let fans decide
strategy with voting cards.
     But Veeck wanted to win, too. He rigged fences so that they could be
moved in and out to his team's advantage. His grounds crew would hose down
the infield until it was muddy to slow down opposing baserunners. He sold
mirrors to fans in the bleachers to shine in enemy batters' eyes. But Veeck's
most famous coup was hiring Eddie Gaedel to play for the St. Louis Browns in
1951.
     Veeck's stunt came in the second game of a doubleheader between the
Browns and Tigers on August 19. Between games, Veeck staged an elaborate
fiftieth-anniversary celebration for the American League, attended by
Commissioner "Happy" Chandler. The celebration featured acrobats, antique
cars, a band made up of Browns players, and for the finale, an anniversary
cake. The three-foot-seven-inch Gaedel jumped out of the cake, wearing number
1/8 on a Browns uniform originally made for the son of former owner Bill
DeWitt.
     Folks thought they'd seen the last of Gaedel, but in the bottom of the
first, the midget was announced as a pinch hitter for leadoff batter Frank
Saucier. Gaedel came out of the dugout swinging a miniature bat. Gaedel had
been signed to a legal contract days before, but Veeck held off mailing the
papers to the league office until the Friday before the big day. He wired the
league office that morning to add Gaedel to the roster, and St. Louis manager
Zack Taylor had copies of both documents to show to stern plate umpire Ed
Hurley that Gaedel was a legitimate member of the Browns.
     Over the objections of Detroit manager Red Rolfe, Hurley allowed Gaedel
to face lefthander Bob Cain. Hurley saw to it that the Tigers held to the
letter of the law, forbidding catcher Bob Swift from sitting on the ground to
provide a lower target. Gaedel, stationed in the righthanders' box, took a
wide stance and crouched, leaving a miniscule strike zone. Hurley called all
four of Cain's deliveries high. Before the at-bat, Veeck had warned Gaedel,
"I've got a man up in the stands with a high-powered rifle, and if you swing
at any pitch, he'll fire." (In James Thurber's story "You Could Look It Up,"
which Veeck claimed he'd never read, a midget was sent up to walk but, enticed
by a fat pitch, grounded out.)
     Gaedel trotted to first, where he was replaced by pinch runner Jim
Delsing. Gaedel patted his caddy on the rump and trotted to the dugout
accompanied by wild applause. "For a minute, I felt like Babe Ruth," Gaedel
said in a postgame interview. Although Commissioner Chandler found the
incident entertaining, American League president Will Harridge was not amused.
He expunged Gaedel's name from the official records, and banned any further
appearances by midgets.
     "Fine," Veeck wrote back. "Let's establish what a midget is in fact. Is
it three-feet-six inches? Eddie's height? Is it four-feet-six? If it's
five-feet-six, that's great. We can get rid of Rizzuto."
     If any owner could rival Rickey for parsimony and Veeck for showmanship,
it was Charles O. Finley, who purchased the Kansas City Athletics in 1960 and
held the franchise for two decades. Finley expanded ballpark giveaways,
introduced colorful uniforms, installed a mechanical rabbit in a hole behind
home plate that popped out to supply the umpire with baseballs, and cajoled
his fellow owners into adopting the designated hitter rule and playing World
Series games at night. He singlehandedly brought mustaches back into the
majors when he offered players $300 to grow them in connection with a
promotion. Finley also popularized mascots, hiring a mule that he named
"Charlie O." after his favorite owner, and letting the mule defecate all over
the press room, preferably on reporters.
     But as a businessman, Finley squeezed his players and landlords to get
the most out of his franchise. He moved the A's to Oakland in 1968, prompting
one Kansas City observer to remark, "Oakland is the luckiest city since
Hiroshima." When third baseman Sal Bando escaped from Oakland as a free
agent, someone wondered if it was difficult to leave the A's. "Was it hard to
leave the Titanic?" Bando answered.
     Finley probably became best known to the national audience when he
attempted to put second baseman Mike Andrews on the disabled list during the
1973 World Series. Andrews had made a pair of errors in the eleventh inning
of the second game of the Series to help the Mets to a win over the A's.
After the game, Finley arranged for a doctor to examine Andrews and declare
him physically unfit to play, allegedly because of a shoulder injury. Finley
badgered Andrews into signing the doctor's report, then tried to substitute
Manny Trillo, a much better fielder, on the A's roster. The Mets cried foul,
and Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ruled that Andrews had to stay on the roster.
When the Series moved to New York, Met fans gave Andrews a standing ovation.
     "When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and join the
circus," recalled third baseman Graig Nettles. "With the Yankees, I've
accomplished both." The focus of the reinvigorated Yankee franchise of the
1970s was principal owner George Steinbrenner, whose syndicate purchased the
team in 1973. In the words of Jim Bouton, "Steinbrenner was born on third
base and thinks he hit a triple."
     Nettles once observed a fat man waddling past the team bus in spring
training and yelled out the window, "Hurry up, George, or we'll leave without
you." Nettles added, "There are two things George doesn't know about,
baseball and weight control." He figured, "It's a good thing Babe Ruth isn't
here. If he was, George would have him bat seventh and tell him he's
overweight." When the Yanks got off to a slow start one season, Nettles saw a
good side of his boss' trips to observe the club. "The more we lose, the
more he flies in. And the more he flies, the better the chance that his plane
will crash."
     Nettles earned the nickname of "Poof" because he'd instigate trouble in
the clubhouse, then, poof, he'd disappear. On a team flight, Nettles
announced, "We've got a problem. Luis Tiant wants to use the bathroom, and it
says 'no foreign objects in the toilet.'  "When a flight made an unscheduled
stop, Nettles asked, "What are we doing, getting new light bulbs for Bob
Lemon's nose?" Lemon got that nose on the way to a successful career as a
pitcher and manager. "I never took a tough loss home with me," he said. "I
left it at a bar along the way."
     Early in his reign, Steinbrenner ordered his troops to get rid of long
hair. Lou Piniella objected, saying if long hair was good enough for Jesus
Christ, why couldn't Steinbrenner allow it on his ballplayers. So
Steinbrenner called Piniella up to his office and pointed off in the distance.
"You see that swimming pool, Lou?"
     "Yes."
     "Well, the day you can go over there and walk across that pool, you can
wear your hair any way you like."
     Reggie Jackson, signed to a record free agent contract in 1977, made
himself unwelcome to his Yankee teammates even before his arrival when he
announced, "I'm the straw that stirs the drink." He'd also bragged that if he
played in New York they'd name a candy bar after him. Sure enough, the Reggie
bar, a clump of chocolate and nuts that bore an unfortunate resemblance to a
cow chip, was born. Catfish Hunter thought the bar was unique, "I unwrapped
it, and it told me how good it was." Hunter, who played with Jackson in both
Oakland and New York, said that Reggie "would give you the shirt off his back.
Of course, he'd call a press conference to announce it." Darold Knowles, a
reliever with the A's in their glory days, said, "There isn't enough mustard
in the world to cover Reggie."
     Jackson was a bad outfielder by the time he got to the Yankees, but he
made light of it. "Fielding? There are lots of guys who can catch a
baseball. I make a million dollars with my bat."
     Jackson's Yankee foil was Mickey Rivers, a bizarre character in his own
right. Rivers was speedy, but you could time his walk from the on-deck circle
to the plate with a sundial. He proclaimed that his goals for one season were
"to hit .300, score a hundred runs, and stay injury prone." Rivers once
asked, "What was the name of the dog on "Rin-Tin-Tin'?" He referred to
bewildered players as "Lost Mohicans." Rivers said a key to playing center
field was sticking his finger in the air "to get the wind-chill factor."
While a member of the Texas Rangers, Rivers predicted, "We'll do all right if
we can capitalize on our mistakes."
     But Rivers knew how to get Jackson's goat. When Jackson bragged that he
had an IQ of 160, Rivers asked, "Out of what, a thousand?" Rivers offered
this succinct (sanitized) analysis of Reginald Martinez Jackson's personality
problem: "No wonder you is messed up. You got a white man's first name, a
Spanish middle name, and a black man's last name."
     Jackson retorted, "Why do I listen to you? You can't even read or
write."
     "You better stop reading and start hitting," Rivers warned.
     When Rivers was shipped off to Texas, he expected to return to the
Yankees someday. "Oh, George understands me," Rivers said of the Yanks'
principal owner. "Me and him and Billy, we're two of a kind."
     Billy Martin saw it about the same way with Steinbrenner and Jackson.
"One's a born liar and the other's convicted," Martin said, referring to
Steinbrenner's conviction for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's
presidential campaign in 1972. That remark got Martin fired from his first of
five stints as manager of the New York Yankees.
     Steinbrenner was fond of disparaging his players. He fell in love with
Jackson, but only after Reggie was gone. When he got Dave Winfield, who
suffered through a miserable World Series slump in 1981, Steinbrenner
complained, "I got rid of Mr. October and got Mr. May." When Winfield set
an American League record for RBIs in April 1988, he told reporters, "Now it's
on to May, and you know about me and May."
     Steinbrenner didn't confine his barbs to players. He called Chicago
White Sox owners Eddie Einhorn and Jerry Reinsdorf, "Abbott and Costello."
Reinsdorf retaliated by asking, "How can you tell when George Steinbrenner is
lying? You see his lips move."
     The antics of Steinbrenner and Finley emboldened other owners. When Ray
Kroc bought the San Diego Padres, he took the microphone and announced to his
opening day crowd, "The good news is that we've outdrawn the Dodgers. The bad
news is that I've never seen such stupid ball playing in my life." Kroc had
plenty of blame to distribute in his early days as the Padres' owner. He
noted, "I signed Oscar Gamble on advice of my attorney. I no longer have
Oscar Gamble, and I no longer have my attorney."
     The current era of sophisticated financial arrangements between
ballplayers and teams, and between team owners in limited partnerships and the
like, have not taken all the oddballs out of the boardroom. Witness Cincinnati
Reds owner Marge Schott. Asked who would challenge the Reds in the NL West one
year, she mentioned the Mets. Then when the questioner asked about divisional
rivals, she offered the American League Kansas City Royals. She recommended
firing scouts, "because all they do is watch ballgames," and her close
scrutiny of their laundry and mileage expense submissions led many to quit on
their own. When star pitcher Jose Rijo's marriage (to Juan Marichal's
daughter) was going through a rough patch, Schott found a divorce attorney...
for Mrs. Rijo. A widow, Schott was devoted to her St. Bernard Schottzie, and
let it loose on the field at Riverfront Stadium, free to defecate wherever it
chose. Schott unsuccessfully fought a 1993 suspension for making racist
remarks in a conference call with other owners, accidentally overheard by a
black employee but apparently not troubling to her lodge brothers. She
appointed Tony Perez as manager, partly because he was a Cincinnati legend,
and partly because his brown skin might show her broad mind. Unable to
comprehend she might have offended anyone, or perhaps believing Reds fans
shared her distrust of African-Americans and Jews, Schott insisted on leading
the Reds' opening day parade, saying her suspension didn't take effect until
the first pitch, and had black crepe placed on her empty seat in the front row
along the first base line. With her suspension looming, Schott selected
thirty-one-year old Jim Bowden to serve as the Reds' general manager, figuring
he couldn't do much harm. But Bowden, who admitted to kicking in a television
set during a Reds loss, quickly fired Perez. Reds pitcher Tom Browning summed
up the Reds' circus atmosphere. He got busted for marijuana possession, and,
after a drug test showed negative, claimed he'd been framed, perhaps by Reds
management, then said he let a friend leave the stuff in his car. Then, during
a Reds-Cubs game, Browning turned up on the roof of the building across the
street, joining in on a barbecue to watch the game. The 1993 Reds illustrated
how leadership trickles down from the top.