OCTOBER 10, 2003
GOING IT ALONE
It was early 1921. The grand jury material had vanished. Without that evidence, the indictments against the players and gamblers were dropped. There was now a good chance that there would be no trial. Ban Johnson goes to the recently-installed rookie Commish, Judge Landis. He asks, politely, if Landis intends to do anything about the situation. Landis replies that he does not. He must have been seething, but Johnson controls himself and asks if Landis would mind if Johnson, on behalf of the AL, pursued the matter. The Judge does not object.
Johnson was free to go ahead. Ban flew into motion, traveling great distances, "a two-month odyssey," to "reassemble the evidence and rebuild the case" (Murdock). In Johnson's memoirs, he gives the project the title, "Going It Alone."
The snippet above is from my book. Eugene Murdock's reference to Johnson's "memoirs" puzzled me for some time. I found them nowhere. So I went back to Murdock's biography, and there, he mentioned two series of articles done on or by Ban Johnson in 1929, as he was in poor health and preparing to retire.
One of those series came into my possession recently, and is the feature of this issue. I'm hoping to see soon the other series from 1929, as well as another from 1928. "Whoever would want to understand the 'Black Sox Scandal' will do well to learn about Ban Johnson"; he is every bit as central a figure as Charles Comiskey, and much more deeply involved than Landis.
Since writing "Ban Johnson's Own Story" (below), I ran across a Sporting News feature on Ed Wray (who came up last issue) from July 20, 1939, in which Wray tells the story behind the St Louis Post-Dispatch series. In a few sentences: Wray & Stockton had worked with Johnson for a year, and had received an advance of $3,500 cash from a Philadelphia syndicate; with a percentage of the syndicate sales, they figured to make about $25,000 for their work. But -- Ban Johnson visits Chicago (from St Louis, where he spent his last years) and Irving Vaughan of the Tribune nabs him, and "extracted the same story we were shaping up." The syndication deal breaks down, the cash is returned. The series run, but "not at syndicate prices." The only consolation is, the St Louis series starts first.
I also learned a little more about "The Tip That Went Astray" -- so read the postscript after Ban's Own Story.
Also here, the final chapter of Dear Patrick -- the epilogue will be next time.
Oh yes -- almost forgot. The title of this issue has a second meaning. In my own series, I am most definitely, Ray, not "going it alone." I've had 'way more than a little help from my friends, and I cannot thank them enough, or too often. Making the project a collaboration has made it so much more fun. It occurred to me today what a devastating research combination is created when you put together the internet with the national library system, and the network of baseball and B-Sox experts that are out there, mostly (but not all) connected to SABR. How expensive and time-consuming this project would have been, a decade ago!
Finally, I must note how enjoyable it has been -- no, really -- watching so many former Pirates play this October. Next issue I will reprint "Curse, Schmurse" no matter what the Cubs or BoSox do in the playoffs the coming week. Wow -- a Series in Wrigley and Fenway -- should be all day games, right? Where is Judge Landis when we need him? Remember this one:
A LESSER-KNOWN RULING OF JUDGE KENESAW MOUNTAIN LANDIS
"Regardless of the verdict of juries, no owner that cancels a World Series, or permits the games to be played too late at night, no owner that entertains proposals or promises or threatens to cancel a World Series, no owner that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked TV executives or union-busting experts where the ways and means of screwing up the World Series are discussed, and does not promptly tell the Commissioner about it, will be allowed to remain in professional baseball.
"Of course, I do not know if any of these owners will apply for reinstatement, but if they do the above are at least a few of the rules that will be enforced. Just keep in mind that regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is entirely competent to protect itself against the crooks both inside and outside the game."
BAN JOHNSON'S OWN STORY
More than once in my research, I have come across references regarding Ban Johnson, the AL founder and longtime president, that stem from 1929. It was "Ten Years Later" -- Comiskey wrote a piece for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Comiskey Tells His Story of Black Sox and Feud with Ban," in a letter that appeared January 13, 1929. But Ban Johnson was stepping down after "34 Years in Baseball" (that was the title of Chicago Tribune three-parter by Irving Vaughan, 2/24, 3/3, and 3/10/29 -- I haven't seen it yet), and that's why the St Louis Post-Dispatch carried the series. It ran in 18 installments, between February 10 and March 3, 1929, under the title, "Ban Johnson's Own Story."
The by-line on the P-D series reads John E. Wray and J. Roy Stockton. (Yes, that's the same Ed Wray I mentioned last issue.) It goes on: "Substantially as told by [Johnson] in interviews extending over a period of a year, reported stenographically in many instances, and compiled in the present form."
Thanks to Tim Newman of Austin, TX, who shared his copies of the Post-Dispatch issues relevant to the events of 1919-21, I was able to read Johnson's account of things.
Why this series has not found its way into a book, or at least into an appendices in a Johnson biography, puzzles me. And it really should show up in many more books on the 1919 Series.
In Comiskey's letter to the Plain Dealer, he disagreed with Ban Johnson's assertion that their feud stemmed from the Jack Quinn dispute (Johnson's ruling made Quinn a Yankee; had he been with the Sox, the Fix might never have worked). Commy said he'd had problems with Johnson prior to Quinn. Johnson could think of just one -- they clashed in 1918 when Johnson urged the AL owners to close down their ballparks voluntarily, due to the war. They did not, until the War Department made them, which Johnson took as "very humiliating" to the game.
"The most sensational happening to occur during my tenure of office as president of the AL was the successful attempt of eight members of the Chicago White Sox team to 'throw' the world series of 1919 in the interest of a group, or rather of two groups of professional gamblers." That's Johnson, leading off Chapter VI, "Scandal Begins to Brew." This must have been a tough one to write, given what was revealed in 1920 and after.
Johnson admits that October 1919 did not mark the loss of baseball's virginity to gamblers. "Looking back, one can see that repeated warnings had been given us." Johnson had tried to clean up at least his league, several years before, consulting with the Pinkertons; he claimed the AL was 33-for-33 in arrests (at AL parks) & convictions. But he was not getting much support, from the NL, and especially not from the Boston owners. I love this line: "Convicting evidence naturally was hard to obtain and perhaps we indulged a doubt, or at any rate encouraged the hope that such reports [of thrown games] were canards."
Johnson mention the Hal Chase case (14 affidavits, 0 conviction), and then discusses the 1918 Series fix attempt. "A report came to me well authenticated that a St Louis professional gambler (since deceased) had laid his plans to fix the world series of 1918." David Pietrusza, in Rothstein, identifies the prime fixer as St Louis' "King of Gamblers," 36-year-old Henry "Kid" Becker. But the war had closed race tracks, shortened the baseball season, and everyone was cash-strapped, so the fix was off, and Johnson lacked the funding to investigate it better. Becker was shot dead in April 1919. But he had friends, and what better way to honor a fallen comrade, than to make his dream come true? Carl Zork, to Abe Attell, to Rothstein? Who knows?
Since reading the DeValerias' of Honus Wagner, I thought that the Pirates were spared when the fledgling AL of Ban Johnson was raiding the NL in 1900-01, because the AL wanted to create a comparative NL juggernaut, a team that would run away with the pennant and cause interest to drop in the other seven cities. (The 1902 Pirates finished 103-36, 27.5 games ahead of second-place Brooklyn.) But Johnson said that the AL teams refrained from raids on Pittsburgh because they wanted Barney Dreyfuss, the team owner, to join the AL. "As a matter of fact, [Dreyfuss] was all ready to make the shift, which would have been a great move for us, but at the last minute his league president talked him out of the idea."
In the chapter "Throwing the Games," Johnson reveals nothing new or original about how the fix was executed. It appears that the official version of things -- eight men in, eight men out -- was rooted in his memory, as it was in America's collective mind. Interestingly, he denies having been told about the suspicions that others had, before Game One and certainly after. "If there was any gossip of a questionable nature at this time [after Game One] I do not recall it. Nor was there any brought to our attention after the second game." Johnson's biographer, Eugene Murdock, doubted Johnson on this point, accepting as credible the word of Hugh Fullerton, Taylor Spink, and John Heydler (if not Comiskey and Grabiner).
Regarding Cicotte's glaring muff which cost the Sox Game Four, Johnson describes the play ("Jackson made a perfect peg") and then adds "Collins and Schalk later told me that Cicotte disobeyed orders in deflecting the ball, thereby indicating to them that something was wrong." But by Game Four, "that something was wrong" was fairly common knowledge, and Gleason had already spoken to his team, and Cicotte, about it. I believe Collins and Schalk -- company men, who would eventually rise to management positions with the Sox and elsewhere -- had told Ban Johnson the company version of the fix. In Gandil's 1956 version, he said he called to Cicotte to cut the ball off. In any case, it seems possible that Cicotte heard conflicting orders, in a noisy and tension-packed moment, so no matter what he did, he would be accused of disobeying orders. His ambivalence could have produced the horrendous play he finally made, deflecting Jackson's peg.
Not much else from Johnson on the series. He was told (but he gives no source) that catcher Ray Schalk "shed tears when he guessed what was going on, but was powerless to stop it." After describing a game for which he blames Happy Felsch ("Felsch deserved the entire pot that day"), he concludes with "Poor Ray Schalk!" If Johnson knew more, he wasn't telling.
Chapter VIII, "The Tip That Went Astray," follows on the heels of his take on the Series. Here Johnson again continues dueling with Comiskey about what happened, or more specifically, who knew what, when did they know it, and what did they do about it -- "they" being Commy & Ban. Johnson recalls Hugh Fullerton charging that the series was crooked (but has Hugh writing for a Texas paper). Johnson understood that Fullerton overheard conversations between gamblers Maharg & Burns and others on a train between Chicago and Cincinnati. (Testifying in Milwaukee in 1924, Fullerton said that he heard of the Fix before Game One from Sleepy Bill Burns -- but did not tell Comiskey.) Johnson also said Fullerton heard remarks made by Burns to Cincinnati's Mayor Galvin (finally a politician in this mess).
"[Fullerton's] direct charge woke up the National Commission. A copy of the story was sent to Comiskey and we awaited his report. None came. Comiskey never replied." Of course in Commy's version, he had informed the Commission of his suspicions already. The ball was in their court. They never got back to him.
Then both Commy and Ban started investigations. In my book, I call them "dueling investigations" -- Commy collecting info and burying it, Ban collecting and saving it for that day when he could use it to torpedo Comiskey. Initially, the rumors lead to St Louis. In Commy's version, by the time the Sox got to Harry Redmon, Johnson had already reached him. But in Johnson's story, the Sox met with him first. "All that came of this, I believe, was a threat by Gleason to whip one of the parties."
The "tip that went astray" is one that was supposed to have been delivered by phone to Johnson after Game One -- but wasn't. Thomas M. Kearney, a St Louis betting commissioner, had reports of the fix several days before the Series started, and then when he saw the way the betting went -- men who usually bet small were wagering thousands -- he decided to tell Johnson. He went to Browns stockholder Otto Stifel. "'Get Ban Johnson on the phone at once,' Kearney told him. 'Tell him the first game was thrown and the players have sold out the entire series.'" But Stifel just laughed, and told Kearney he was dreaming, and forgot about it.
To me, this story told by Johnson is his way of off-setting Comiskey's better-known "whelp of a beaten cur" story. Commy has Johnson hearing the bad news early on, and dismissing it as whining from an owner whose team was looking awful. "The tip" story underlines Johnson's blissful ignorance. He will go on to say, of course, that had he received the tip -- or any info at all about suspicious play -- he'd have halted the Series dead in its tracks until the charges were investigated. Maybe the Series would not have been resumed. But it seems unlikely that Johnson could have been so blind, deaf and dumb to what everyone else seemed to smell. I believe Johnson was just following standard procedure, pretending not to see or hear. The Sox wins in Games 3, 6 and 7 must have felt mighty good to Commy and Ban; if the Sox had caved in, five straight times, the gambling world would have raised a much greater uproar. The gambling world was, of course, most of America.
Chapters IX and X were fascinating to me. I had read Murdock's account of how Johnson consulted with the judge who eventually took the matter of the August 31, 1920, Cubs-Phils fix to the Cook County grand jury. In 1929, Johnson remembered getting a telegram from MacDonald on Sunday, after the Chicago papers carried Veeck's charges that the August 31 game was thrown. Johnson meets the judge at a golf course, and gives him the green light. That's all Johnson wants to say. Nothing about the politics of making MacDonald the new boss of baseball, or about how quickly the August 31 fix took back seat to the 1919 Series.
Johnson recalls Maharg's Philadelphia story causing "the players' nerves to crack and they rushed before the grand jury with confessions." No mention of Alfred Austrian. This is a terrific omission and simplification. "Cicotte and Jackson were the first to blurt it out. These two confessing players were arrested. [Huh?] Williams and Felsch also confessed." Johnson recalls only how this event hurt the Sox' pennant chances; he makes no mention of Jackson's statements that he played to win. Nor does he ever deal with Buck Weaver's case. Of course, Judge Landis was on the throne in 1929, and Johnson had to measure his words, if his exit from baseball was to go smoothly.
Johnson was sure that Rothstein was "the prime mover" behind the fix (that phrase is Allen Pinkerton's), and Arnold had been gunned down the previous November, so Johnson could write freely about A.R.'s role. Johnson blames Rothstein for stealing the evidence from the 1920 grand jury, and then turning over what he did not need to a NY editor for syndication. When the Chicago Tribune was contacted about publishing them, the Trib was told that they would be prosecuted, so the records were never published or used to prosecute a single player or gambler.
In chapter X, "Going It Alone," Johnson tells how he went about gathering enough evidence to enable the prosecution to take the "Black Sox" case to trial. Judge Landis was not interested enough to pursue it; they players were banned, no matter what. (Johnson makes it clear that he thought Landis should have taken the lead, instead of the American League.) All the evidence stolen, the case could easily have been dropped. But MacDonald grants Johnson an extension, to re-collect evidence, and he goes on a whirlwind crusade doing just that. Jimmy Isaminger, his Philly friend, hooks him up with Maharg. Then Maharg is hired to track down Bill Burns in Texas (an adventure all by itself), and Johnson goes to Texas to get his story, and to induce Burns to return to Chicago with him for the trial.
Johnson deals more with Rothstein in Chapter Xi, "Who Got the Money?" He recounts he meetings with Rothstein in detail. He includes the little anecdote that I've seen before, in Johnson's correspondence, that when Rothstein learned of the Fix, one of the first things he did was to go to his friend John McGraw, urging Muggsy to tell Kid Gleason -- but McGraw refuses to "meddle, not while Gleason was concentrating on the Series." Johnson adds that McGraw, on hearing Rothstein's story, "said that Rothstein was several kinds of a liar." Still, I think the story could be true -- Rothstein's motives being to either screw up the Fix (which is not his, not yet), and/or to test the rumors with McGraw, who was closer to baseball's grapevine.
Again, Johnson takes the conventional understanding when he describes how the players received $110,000 and carved it up. His picture is as neat as any you'll see anywhere, and perhaps the only neat picture you will see anywhere. In Johnson's account, the players received $40,000 before the Series and $60,000 after, ultimately from Rothstein. Attell chipped in $10,000 when things started to fall apart after Game One or Two. Most sources have the double-crossing players being double-crossed, and receiving about 75,000, depending on Gandil's take.
The last story Johnson tacks on to Chapter XI tells how he was so sure Attell was involved, that there was a plan to abduct him from the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, July 2, 1921 (right before the trial). Attempts to extradict had been unsuccessful, thanks to Rothstein's lawyer Fallon. So lawmen got the necessary papers and set out from Chicago, intending to nab Attell at a train station near Jersey City, NJ, before or after the "fight of the century." But "some one got to an official and he sold out for $5,000 and the plan failed." I love Johnson's punchline: "Corruption and the lure of easy gain runs all through this sordid story."
Naturally, the verdict in the trial was bitterly disappointing to Johnson, who had been dethroned the year before as baseball czar by Judge Landis. He had been confident that they had enough evidence to convict -- the gamblers' statements, and the records of confessions (which were repudiated). Johnson notes that he had received no help at all from his old friend, Commy. "Before the trial opened, Judge Barrett of our counsel talked to an official of the White Sox and said, 'We have been working on this case for three solid months and we have not had an iota of assistance from the Chicago club. I want you to understand that we feel you have not rendered us the slightest assistance in the preparatory work." The White Sox, of course, had no interest in helping the prosecution; they were hoping that the players would be cleared and back in uniform ASAP. Johnson seems not to know that, nor does he wonder about who paid for the players' defense team of lawyers.
There is more, this is a great series -- the St Louis Post-Dispatch's I mean. I thank Tim Newman again for sharing it with me. My copy is going to Ban Johnson's file in the National Baseball Library, where others can access it any time. (Most of the articles I've used in my research are now in the NBL, along with back issues of Notes.) I like to think that anyone who tries to give a simple explanation of the events of 1919-21 regarding the Big Fix, will be unable to do so, if they check the files in Cooperstown. And that any simple explanation shall no longer be believed. Because the events defy simple explanations.
Since Watergate, many people believe the cover-up is worse than the crime, and it sure turned out that way for Nixon and all the President's men. I'm not sure the same is true for the Fix of the 1919 Series, and its cover-up. Ban Johnson had crusaded against gambling for years before the 1919 Fix came along, and apparently he wanted to investigate a year sooner. Baseball's owners had been covering up for years; the 1919 Fix could easily have been just the next item swept under the rug, in the wake of the Hal Chase case. A fuse had been lit long ago, it happened to go off in 1920 and sink the White Sox team -- coincidentally (?) the team of Ban Johnson's arch-enemy, Charles Comiskey. Baseball was leaderless, the old National Commission was not working, and Judge Landis had not yet arrived.
After thirteen months, I have more respect for Ban Johnson than when I started my research, but in the end, he seems to have been part of the problem in October 1919. While he seems to have redeemed himself by pressing forward with his investigation, and then with his efforts to bring the case to trial -- his motives may not have been entirely pure. Did he want to wreck to Sox, so he could buy them cheap and rule Chicago all by himself? No hint of that in the St Louis stories of 1929. But I no longer regard everything in Harry Grabiner's diary as factual, either.
I see no pure heroes and no purely evil characters in the story of the Fix and cover-up. Not even Rothstein or Attell. No player's case is simple, not even Cicotte or Gandil. Looking back from a fan's point of view, we might sympathize with Buck Weaver or Joe Jackson, but this story is not only about players who were wronged, by gamblers or by the system. Countless American who rooted for the teams that October were wronged, and not just because they had bets riding on their favorites. Baseball had been committing a crime on the American public, turning a blind eye to a growing cancer. In the end, no gambler, no official of baseball, no owner was found guilty of anything. Eight men in, eight men out -- not fair, and not a fair reading of history.
POSTSCRIPT on "The Tip That Went Astray"
Otto F. Stifel was a beer baron. He owned part of the St Louis Terriers (Federal League), then invested in the Browns. Whether he forgot to tell Johnson the fix really was in, or whether Johnson forgot to remember, is not important -- plenty of others were informing the powers that were.
Angry over prohibition, in debt to gamblers, and saddled with other problems, Stifel committed suicide in August 1920. Enough brewery owners did the same (including a Busch), that "the Dutch Act" was coined to describe the event.
Today, in what used to be the Union Brewery -- Otto's cash cow before prohibition -- is a restaurant (King Louie's?), in which there is a room named after Otto F. Stifel.
[In issue #294, I began running DEAR PATRICK: HOT STOVE DELIVERIES FROM A FATHER TO A SON, a book I started writing in 1989 and continued for a few years, till I set it aside. Some of DEAR PATRICK has found its way into NOTES before, but never the whole thing, beginning to end -- until now. Here is Chapter 17. It's the last chapter -- and an Epilogue follows.]
CHAPTER 17
ROOTING
April 9, 1990
Dear Patrick;
Opening Day! A week late, but in another week the time lost will be forgotten as the new season unfolds. Play ball!
For many years, I have believed the sports fan is best understood through an Old Testament image. In Exodus 17, Moses sends out his people's army to do battle with the enemy, while he himself stands on a hilltop, observing. As long as Moses' hands are raised, his side has the better of the fight; when he tires and lowers his arms, the enemy takes the lead. (That battle finally ends with Moses seated, his right and left hand men, literally, holding up his arms for him, until sunset and victory.)
I am reminded of this image when I see replays of Maz' Homer -- an event I've viewed countless times since 1960. Many of the films show Maz swing, then there's a cut to the crowd, where everyone rises to their feet. Prominent among the devotees is a bespectacled lady in one of the upper decks, about my mother's age at that time -- it's not your grandma, but she was there, and I bet she was doing the same thing: she holds her hands up over her head, palms facing forward and tilting slightly heavenward, fingers trembling as she follows the flight of the ball, holding her breath, with nothing but prayer in her eyes. Then it's back to the field, Yogi watching the pill sail over the ivy, and the delirious crowd pouring onto the field.
In another famous Series game, fifteen years later, the Red Sox' Carlton Fisk was caught by a camera as he coaxed and body-Englished his hit over the Fenway Monster to win a grand battle over the Reds. A great image, too, but I'll take the anonymous woman in the red hat.
Whether at the game, or watching on TV, or listening on radio, there is something in us that feels that our caring, our "rooting," is important for the outcome. If we stop caring, the battle will go to the other side. It's absolutely irrational except in the sense that fans ultimately do support professional sports and, theoretically, could withdraw their support of the whole enterprise.
I recall writing, somewhere in the heat of July or August of 1988, a letter to the Pirate manager, Jim Leyland. I'd never done anything like that before. (It shrewdly advised him to beat the Mets a few times, if he wanted a Pennant.)
That letter was nothing more or less than the long-distance rooting of a kid from 1958. A Pittsburgher exiled in New York, pleading for a kind of deliverance. Someone who wanted to believe -- as all fans want to believe -- that their private, unique rooting makes a difference.
The game is magnetic, it pulls us, and causes us to pull. It is hard for me to not pull for one team in a game I'm watching, once I'm hooked. I can't be "non-partisan" -- my support is subject to a mysterious gravity, and will fall on one side, and then it's "us against them." Sometimes I tell myself I'll watch just for the enjoyment of seeing the game played. But once underway, I inevitably find myself drawn to one side or the other. Last season provided some good examples.
In 1989, you saw your first major league game, on a July visit to Pittsburgh. You saw Kevin Mitchell's 28th home run (he finished far ahead of all others, with 47), and a three-run pinch round-tripper by Barry Bonds in the ninth, which still wasn't enough for a Buc win. For the first time in your life you were part of a crowd of over 20,000, most of whom rooted hard for the Pirates. But it wasn't their year, any more than '59 was.
The season was over almost before it began, when Jim Gott's saving arm was lost. By the time a new stopper was found (Bill Landrum, whose microscopic ERA seemed to shrink all summer, until the very end, when it inflated back to human size), the race was over. Injuries to Bream, Van Slyke and LaValliere cut down the offense and the defense. Much good pitching was wasted in close losses. It was a year to mull over the hidden value of depth, on the roster and in the farm system, as an important ingredient in success.
So I found myself, with the Pirates frozen out, rooting for the Chicago Cubs. It's been longer between Series for Chicago than it ever was for Pittsburgh, and their underdog struggle was something to which I could relate.
When the Cubs did beat the Mets to the finish line and went up against the Giants, I didn't know who I was rooting for until the games began. Because I liked Roger Craig, Don Robinson and Rick Reuschel. Will Clark, batting ahead of Mitchell, was pure joy to watch. But so was Mark Grace, the Cubbies' answer to Clark, almost swing for swing. When my feelings are so mixed, I wind up rooting most of all for Seven Games.
Again in the Series, I liked both California teams. Oakland was favored, but I went for the Giants, after all, not because they had become underdogs, but because the Athletics were looking good enough to sweep -- to prevent Seven Games.
Of course, they did sweep, but not before baseball had been shaken back into perspective by The Earthquake.
How rude of Nature to interrupt a Series. But, after ten days of no ball, how difficult to return to the game at all. The mood was broken, like the Bay area's roads and buildings, and rebuilding could not be done that quickly.
Some may argue that baseball is essentially an outdoor game, meant to be played on ground and grass, under open skies -- or skies open to the elements. Roofs and domes only raise the noise level and make for more lost fly balls. I don't know.
These same folks may argue that rainouts are important events, causing managers to cope with their pitching rotations -- that is, they are useful disruptions, adding hazards that must be dealt with as the season unwinds. Like water and sand on a golf course, they make things a bit more interesting, challenging, complicated.
A line from Bull Durham comes to mind: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains. So sometimes you don't have to dress for them, after all! Like the wonderful, glorious, miraculous "snow day" that is announced at six or seven in the morning -- no school (or work)! A gift from heaven, or at least from the heavens. Dropped on us all, Shakespeare might go on, deserving and undeserving, of the blessed event.
I think that rainouts do, in their tiny ways, what The Earthquake did in its enormous and powerful way: they tap baseball on the shoulder and say, "Wait. You're only a game. You are a world within a much larger world that permits you to live. But you should not go on strictly according to the plans of merchandisers or the schedules of the media. Wait. Think about it."
I suffered through a few rainouts at old Forbes Field. At one, I remember leaning over from the right-field upper-deck to see St. Louis' Curt Flood smoking a cigarette, standing in the doorway to the field from the locker room, in what seemed to be boxer shorts. Through my binoculars, his eyes seemed impatient. Rain, rain, go away -- let us play! In 1970, Flood turned baseball upside down, in the courts, starting the chain-reaction that led to the first general baseball strike (1972) and to free-agency, a year later, for better and for worse. Did the courage to challenge a century of tradition of "player slavery" build up in the meditations forced by rainy days?
I sympathized with Flood when he stood up for the right to work where and for whom he chose to work. I've been at that crossroads a few times myself, having to decide about where I wanted to put down roots -- and to me, that was at least as important as what work I'd be doing. To move to another city or to change careers -- those are the kind of choices that really matter in life, and I'm glad that I, and not some general manager, made mine. Some people, I know, prefer to treat others and to be treated themselves like pieces of property, like suitcases that can be packed up and shipped off at a moment's notice. It's true: not everyone enjoys freedom. But I do, and so did Curt Flood, and I hope you do, too!
At another rain delay, a night game versus the Phillies, the soaking faithful remaining fans at Forbes were rewarded with a news bulletin: Vinegar Bend Mizell, a winning southpaw, had been obtained in a trade with the Cardinals for Julian Javier. We cheered in the downpour because our side had been made stronger. (That was in 1960, and acquiring Mizell really was a kind of turning point. But we didn't know that when we cheered, we just hoped it would turn out that way.) It was all we could cheer about that evening -- the competition was called off.
Something to cheer about -- no matter who you are rooting for, it's hard to imagine a game without this. Inside the lines as a player, or outside as a fan, baseball brims with chances for amazement. In an otherwise dull Atlanta Braves game on TV last season, I was stunned to see "the old hidden ball trick" -- the secondbaseman concealing the ball in his glove after a break in the action, then tagging out the runner at second after he'd taken a lead. This was right out of Tennis Court days, a sandlot stunt, in the majors. Who cares if it's "bush league?" It woke everyone up!
How many players and announcers and others connected with the sport have said, in one way or another, that no matter how many times they watch a game, there is always something they haven't seen before. We take in games, and it seems that something of each one is memorable, and stays with us, perhaps to be echoed in another game years later, or perhaps never to be seen again. The more intensely we care, the deeper the remembrance.
I used to think that the "wonder years" for baseball fans were when they were about eight or nine years old -- when their eyes are at their widest for life and heroes. Now I'm not so sure. Baseball might instead draw out the nine-year-old in all of us, and so extend wonder into all of our years.
I believe that we all do a lot of rooting in our lives. Teachers root for their students to learn. Parents for their kids to succeed, or for co-workers, or if we are in the helping professions, we root a lot for those we service. Those hearing, feeling us root, are encouraged -- given some strength, to go on, to try harder to achieve a goal.
From time to time our arms inevitably tire -- to return to my Biblical image -- and we become someone in need of the rooting of others. Of those we call friends, those who pull for us.
Such is just one dynamic of baseball. The fans cheer the long hit, the clutch strikeout, the leaping stab of the ball in flight. The outcome of the game, the Series. All we ask for in return is a tip of the cap, a thank-you from the player on behalf of the sport, because we make it possible.
We, the people. Familiar words to keep in mind, while the National Anthem leads off each game. Sometimes I wonder about why it precedes every game, and not just each series or each season. But I guess that it's good to be reminded that past wars also made it possible for baseball to thrive as a profession in this land.
When we stand side by side, Pat, for the Anthem, let's be thankful, as we check which way and how hard the wind is blowing. That the banner yet waves o'er a land of free fathers and sons.