Infinite Inning 342: To Kill a Baseball Team

An obscure umpire-punching incident by a Washington Senators outfielder helps cement the death of the franchise, the slowness of catchers is recalled when a famously leadfooted example steals a base, a sad manager and a sadder junior high school history test recalled.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?  Crowd and field noise before and during homerun hit at MLB baseball stadium by bmadore

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Episode three forty two. Can we do it? I believe
we can, But must we? I suppose that's up to you.
Over In this week's reissue episode, I used a recent
Yankees broadcast as my springboard. With the Washington Nationals in
Town Yankees radio team Dave Sims and Susan Waldman were

(00:20):
debating the decline and fall of the Washington Senators nineteen
oh one to nineteen sixty Rest in peace? Why did
that happen? They wondered, and I shouted, ask me, And
as I said during the other episode, there was a
time in my life when I work closely with Yankees broadcasting,
and I could have reached out and told them. And

(00:41):
I guess the information is out there if they're curious enough,
which is sort of the point. I don't mean to
criticize them, but one thing I was taught way back
when I was a tight about writing is don't ask
open ended questions because someone may supply the answer. And
in the case of broadcasting, if you're just sitting there

(01:03):
on the radio saying it's raining, why did that happen?
Then there's almost certainly a few dozen meteorologists out in
the audience. Those who haven't been defunded, saying, come on,
how can you not know that? And I find myself
saying that about baseball history a lot. There was also
a time. I'm not trying to blow my own horn here,

(01:25):
so forgive me. I'm just talking about the way that
I choose to go about things compared to the way
other people might. And I'm not saying that my method
is the best. And certainly as someone who's really never
had sort of a solid long term contract to work with,
you know, when you're number two, you do have to
try harder. But there was a time when the Baseball

(01:45):
Network would call me the MLB Network, I mean to
show up and do a spot on occasion, and they'd
have a pre show meeting and they'd say, Hey, these
are the topics we're going to touch on on the
show that we're going to do in about two three hours,
and Steve, would you mind shy coming in on these subjects?
And I would say yes, because that's what I was
there for, even if I didn't feel super confident that

(02:07):
I had anything brilliant to say on those topics. And
so during the interim between when we had that meeting
and they sent me to makeup and then they sent
us to the studio and we did the show. I
frantically sat there with a laptop looking up everything, even
the things that I thought I knew. I do that
for this show too. There's a lot I can say

(02:28):
off the top of my head about the characters that
we encounter during our time travel trips on this show,
but I double check everything. Now. If I happen to
be so fortunate as to meet you and you say
Steve and you're not just clearing your throat or you
hadn't meant to say, hey, muttonhead, can we go grab

(02:48):
a cup of coffee somewhere and we can just chat
about some of the subjects of your time travel trips,
of our time travel trips together, then sure, I'll wing it,
because there's nothing more tedious than watching a guy sit
with his phone googling things. I'll just tell you as
many stories as I can tell you, as best I
can recall them, because, unlike Joe Peshi's character and Goodfellas,

(03:10):
I am here to entertain you, to amuse you. But
in a formal setting, a radio or a TV setting,
when someone has engaged me to act like I know
what I'm talking about I try very hard to know
what I'm talking about, and so it's surprising to me
that broadcasters would know that you're going to get onto
Washington baseball subjects and not prep an answer for that.

(03:34):
And I know that AI is much derided, and I
deride it too. Some of my work has been hoovered
up without compensation to educate some of these machines as well,
and I'm very unthrilled about that. And I really do
believe that people will lose or suffer atrophy of skills
that they turn over to AI to do for them.

(03:56):
Every time you watch an Old Star Trek episode and
Spock says, computer explained to me one thing or another,
and Michel Barrett says working and all that that means
that Captain Kirk no longer knew how to do whatever
it was that he was asking the computer to do.
But in terms of using AI as a better search
engine to say, hey, can you summarize, say I haven't

(04:18):
tried this, I should maybe the decline and fall of
the Washington Senators. For me, that's probably the work of
three seconds. You can just read a couple of paragraphs
and yeah, your knowledge will be puddled deep. But that'll
get you through three minutes in a blowout baseball game
that you're trying to fill out, and then you can
go back and do the real reading later, which takes

(04:38):
up about half a shelf over here to my left.
There aren't many good books about the old Washington Senators,
but there are a few, and I'm going to mention one.
I mentioned it on the reissue episode. Also, I believe
that was reissue number thirteen for those keeping score at home.
Of course, not everyone is as excited as I am
to figure out the why of certain things, and they

(05:00):
may be less scared than I am of being caught
out in public not knowing things. I'm already well off
the track of what I intended to talk about, but
let me digress this much more. When I was in
seventh grade, which makes me what at that time, twelve
or thirteen, I had a history course, and you'd think,
since that's the area that my life is devoted to,
I would do well. But I really struggled. And I

(05:20):
wasn't alone in that, to the point that parents called
and there was a formal review done of this man's activities.
And it wasn't that he was a bad person or
you couldn't talk to him, or he was angry or
a pervert of some kind. We've seen variants on all
these things in our educational careers. But rather that he
was teaching a course that was essentially intro to Western

(05:43):
civ in a way that was kind of nuts, where
the ratio of facts taught to the ratio of facts
you were supposed to know for a test was one
to one. And at the time people said, well, he's
teaching twelve year olds like it's a college course. But
you know, I went on to college and made history
and never had a single test like this guy's tests,

(06:05):
where each one had the thickness of a magazine and
you were expected to answer multiple choice questions, true false questions,
fill in the plank questions. And worst of all, he
would put in these crudely drawn maps in blue Ditto
inc Which looked something between a Rushak blot test and

(06:25):
the outline of a pile of scrambled eggs on a plate.
It would be labeled Mesopotamia, and you were supposed to
label each egg curd, Here's the city of er, Here's
the Tigris and the Euphrates, even though it might better
have been an example of the kind of badly bordered
mole that you needed to rush to the dermatologists and

(06:45):
have removed lest you be killed by melanoma. In my
school system growing up, we had three years in the
Junior High school building seven, eight, and nine, and for
some reason, I just had very bad luck and I
got extremely sick all three years, probably about a month
of time cumulatively each school year, and I was really
too ill to be doing work at home, like these

(07:08):
were serious problems. When I finally came back, I had
missed about a month of this guy's class. I hadn't
studied anything, I hadn't done anything. I walked back into
his class for the first time. He hands me a
Manila envelope. He says, go to the library and take
this test. And the envelope again has something in it
the thickness of an old omni magazine. If that does

(07:29):
anything for you. It had the Sears catalog in it.
And I go to the library. I sit down at
a table and I pull this evil Playboy magazine sounds
good pictures out of this envelope, and I see what
I just described to you, hundreds of questions on topics
I have never seen before, and I just stared at it,

(07:52):
and I stared up, and I stared at the imaginary camera,
just waiting for something to happen that would remove this
burden from me, this hopeless, pointless, ridiculous, sadistic burden. And
finally I just pushed the thing away because I realized,
for one of the first times in my then brief existence,

(08:14):
this is not real life. This is the Infinite Inning. Well,

(08:56):
hello there, and welcome back to the show, Infinite Inning,
number three forty two. I remain Stephen Goldman, your convivial
host for this journey, this time travel trip taken with
the express purpose of better understanding the present via a
trip to the past. I hope this week's show finds
you well, as it finds me increasingly well, which, as

(09:19):
we know, is always a temporary situation. But we do
what we can while we can. That last segment was
supposed to be entirely about the fall of the Washington Senators,
but I did go off on a tangent. I reserve
the right to do that. I always tell you I
have notes, I have outlines. Not every aspect of the
show is extemporaneous. However, I don't want to feel like
I'm reading to you. And so though that long ago

(09:41):
teacher might have objected to my method, here the notes
are intentionally incomplete, and I allow myself room to roam,
room to digress, to follow the show where the show
tells me it wants to go. The other part of
the show that is not spontaneous and unrehearsed, as they
used to say on the Old Information Please Radio show,
is that I edit out all the times that my

(10:03):
tongue ties itself in knots, and then I spend thirty
seconds cursing, screaming, crying. You get the idea. So we'll
get back to the senators in a moment. But given
the structure of the show, the way that I'm required
to take ad breaks every so many minutes, it just
made sense to take a moment to recollect ourselves and
then return to the story after I had had my

(10:25):
usual chance to chat with you outside of storytelling mode.
Want to you're a sad manager. In a few minutes,
I am going to tell you a story that, as
is often the case, has Casey Stengle in it, but
he only has three words of dialogue. Now, this was
nineteen forty two, and he was managing a bankrupt Boston
Braves team. How bankrupt, he was personally helping them make payroll.

(10:49):
At the same time, the Dodgers, having revived in the
late thirties and one a pennant in nineteen forty one,
were in a tight pennant race with the Cardinals, one
they would ultimately lose manager Leo Durocher. The Dodgers had
become notorious for both head hunting and bench jockeying, and
Casey stangle again in the National League. Managing the Braves

(11:09):
resented this, as many managers, players and owners did. In
an interview that he gave roughly at mid season, he
admitted he was getting awful sick of them Dodgers and
they're rough riding. He predicted that all the National League
teams were going to and I quote throw everything they've
got against them. Whatever that meant. He paused and said,
wish I had something to throw. The Braves went fifty nine,

(11:32):
eighty two and two that year and finished seventh, so
you see what he meant. He did get very sulky
towards the end of that Braves run. It really wasn't
what he had expected it to be, and he did
get a little complacent. Related, I happened to catch a
nineteen forty nine episode of Bill Stern's radio sports show,
which is just awful. The shows were only fifteen minutes long,

(11:56):
and they claimed to feature interviews with important sports figure
of the day who did show up. But thirteen minutes
of the show is Babbel, and two minutes of it
is the interview. So, for example, in early nineteen forty nine,
just after Casey had been named the manager of the Yankees,
he had Casey. However, Casey's mostly not there. He had

(12:16):
time for about four sentences with Casey. Here's the thing,
though one of them was a good sentence. By way
of introduction, Stern said, now I bring you one of
baseball's great screwballs, Casey Stangle. And the first thing Casey
said was Bill, I object to being called a screwball.
And right there you have the thesis of my book
on Casey forging genius. Except I hadn't heard that line

(12:40):
until now. I want to put it in there. In
their one hundred and twenty seconds together, they do get
into a story I did tell in my Casey Stangle
book about an outfielder he had with the Dodgers Frenchy
Borda Garay. I tell a bunch of stories about their
time together, but the one that Bill Stern picked out
was about the year that Borda Garray decided to to
grow a mustache, which sounds unspectacular, except at that time

(13:04):
the fashion was that ballplayers were clean shaven, and somehow
Stangele felt embarrassed by the fact that he had the
one mustachi owed ballplayer since the eighteen nineties. Stern said, so,
what did you do about that, Casey? And Casey said,
I told opposing pitchers to throw at the mustache, and then,
with perfect timing, he paused and said, but it was okay,

(13:26):
I said, I would pay for the funeral. Turning to
our bulletin Board section this week at Baseball Prospectives, I
wrote a story called Roger Clemens, Hero of the Fatherland,
and it's about as blunt as I get in the
BP context. It's about the President insisting or ordering that
Clemens immediately be placed in the Hall of Fame. Not
elected democracy is for losers. Now, why is the government

(13:49):
of the United States, in the form of the President,
concerning itself with this pittling little thing, this special pleading
on the part of an old time pitcher in the
same way that it concerned itself with Pete Rose's Hall
of Fame case. Well, it's all the kind with everything
that fascism does. And that's what I tried to explain
in the story, that Roger Clemens is a means to

(14:12):
an end, and I hope you'll read it, and I
hope you'll tell me what you think. The comments have
been mostly complimentary. There was one that said that the
story was and you'll see it if you look a
mouthful of codswallop. Now that one really crushed me. Let
me tell you godswallop, she said, and walked out of
my life forever. There was one that my bosses did

(14:33):
not let through because it was from a guy who
seems to subscribe in order to just troll the readers
and the comments sections. And he said, I presume of
the president living read free in liberals' heads for another
three and a half years, groovy. I would like to
correct that the rent is very, very high, and I'm

(14:53):
the one paying it. I will never forgive the roughly
forty percent of my countrymen to approve of what's happening.
For inflicting it on the rest of us. And it's
not even that they approve of policies I disagree with
that happens. That's part of democracy too. You win some
and you lose a lot, and you accept that in

(15:16):
return for all the rights you get and the stability
that comes with accepting it. Whatever your issue is or
issues are, it's that they overthrew or disregarded a lot
of great important values and pretty much our entire history
for this guy and his very odd self defeating goals.

(15:38):
I direct you to the Book of Exodus and the
Tale of the Golden Calf. We elected that shiny horiiferous bovine,
Well we didn't, some of us did. But don't pull
your Bible off the shelf, not until we've finished off
this episode. And that means coming back after a break
and actually doing the Washington Senators. I just promised you.

(16:01):
I had barely begun it when I got kind of
off track, and then in what is now the third
act of the show, I had promised you last week
a light second act, and before I gave it to you,
I went off on a long tangent about history. As
per usual, kind of a dark tangent. Well, this time
we'll hit that beach directly for a light bit about

(16:21):
catchers on the base paths, just some baseball wankery, and
that will arrive right after this break man Xander Bogart's
broken foot, Marcus Semon broken foot, Corey Seeger app indectomy.
What is even happening around here? Could it be that
vaccines made their bones fragile? So where in the name

(17:01):
of Leon Goose Goslin was I? Oh, yes, So the
reasons why the Senators decline are pretty simple. The reasons
why they had to leave town they had exhausted their
credibility by nineteen sixty, and I would say it was
approximately ninety five percent a self inflicted wound. To go
back to the beginning, just very briefly, the original owners

(17:21):
didn't know what they were doing, ran a lot of
bad teams, some really bad one hundred lost teams. But
they brought Clark Griffith in eventually, who became manager of
the former pitcher starting in nineteen twelve and eventually bought
out his bosses. And he did know what he was doing,
at least for a while. His very first Senator's team
won ninety one games in large part because Walter Johnson

(17:44):
was worth something like fifteen wins above replacement, which is
just a ludicrous total. It's like a year and a
half of MVP level, Aaron Judge. The Senators weren't consistent
at that level, but the years of being outright miserable
with regular one hundred loss seasons, those were over, at
least for a while in nineteen twenty four. In nineteen

(18:05):
twenty five they went back to back American League penance. Again.
I'm not saying that the Senators were capable of knocking
off the Yankees most years the Ruth era Yankees, because
as you know, the historical record shows that they didn't.
But they were solid winning clubs. In twenty four they
won the World Series against the Giants in seven games,

(18:25):
and in twenty five they lost it to the Pirates
in seven. They regrouped in that period as some of
their older stars began to age out. They were never
bad again, and they started winning ninety games a year
beginning in nineteen thirty, climaxing in the nineteen thirty three Pennant.
The Giants beat them four games to one in that
World Series, and after that they never won again and

(18:48):
were almost never competitive, barring a couple of fluke seasons
that came about due to all the teams being shaken
up by World War II. They lost one hundred games
for the first time in forty years in nineteen forty nine,
and they did it again in nineteen fifty five. And
I could break this down granularly, but to save time,

(19:09):
let's just tell instead of show this once. Okay, the
reasons are this. Washington was among the major smaller markets,
and although the war swelled up the town a bit,
they were still trailing most of the American League in population.
They were never a huge draw, and Griffith, a former pitcher,
as I said, didn't have the deepest pockets. As teams

(19:29):
began building farm systems, Griffith didn't or couldn't spend the money,
and the Depression came in at about that same moment,
which tightened things up even further. Most famously or infamously,
he agreed to sell his nineteen thirty MVP shortstop also
his manager also his son in law, to the Red

(19:51):
Sox for cash. That, of course, was future Hall of
Famer Joe Cronin. Now he did go all in on
Cubans White Cubans because he had an inn in Cuba
via scout Joe Cambria, and because Cubans were cheaper than
American players. Finally, although breaking the color line would have
solved a lot of problems for him, and he knew it,

(20:14):
he wasn't particularly interested in doing that. Further, as the
book Beyond the Shadow of the Senators by Brad Snyder
makes clear, his hands were unclean. He was making way
too much money from renting his ballpark out to the
Homestead Grays to think about the issue objectively. Finally, as
we kareem into the nineteen fifties, Washington became a majority

(20:38):
black city. It isn't anymore, but it's close. And the
Griffiths I say Griffiths plural, because by then Clark's adopted nephew, Calvin,
was running things. Clark and his record setting eyebrows getting
up there in years at that point. They didn't like that.
They also argued that the ballpark was out of date,
which was probably true, and that the neighborhood had become

(21:00):
dangerous so people wouldn't come. Again the word people doing
a lot of heavy lifting there. Now, I have no
way of evaluating that, given that the team was terrible
and people wouldn't come for that reason. What I do
know is that the claim is consistent with white attitudes
in the nineteen fifties, as quote, white flight to the
suburbs became an American phenomenon. We're still dealing with the

(21:21):
consequences being everything from the housing supply to environmental degradation.
They were huge consequences at that exact same moment. For
reasons I don't quite understand, Griffith gave his assent to
the Saint Louis Browns moving to Baltimore, further dividing his
already limited audience. And so in nineteen sixty, with Clark dead,

(21:43):
Calvin left, and he later freely admitted that he did
so because Washington had become a black city, and he
said he felt that blacks would not go to baseball games,
which contradicts most of the experience of the Washington Senators,
which had very good adoption by the black community in
Washington while the team was good. But more importantly, or

(22:04):
as importantly, Clark died and Calvin left without even denting
the color line, or barely denting it. They didn't bring
in their first player of color until nineteen fifty four,
Carlos Paula, a Cuban, naturally got a cup of coffee
that year. Seven seasons PJ. Post Jackie, he played regularly

(22:27):
in fifty five, wasn't very good, and so things just
kind of went back to the way they were for
a while until nineteen sixty, when they traded for Earl Batty,
the catcher who they acquired in spring training of the year,
they ceased to exist. So how do you untangle all
these factors, including the team was miserable for seventeen years,

(22:48):
The market was small and getting smaller in the sense
that there was the sense that the inner cities were
in crisis and white flight was a real thing. And simultaneously,
the Senator's ownership refused to do anything to reach out
to the black community that was then inhabiting the city.
Add in a decrepit ballpark and park effects that for

(23:09):
most of the team's history prohibited the club from having
the kind of dramatic hitting seasons that fans wanted to
come to see. And you have this kind of perfect
culmination of everything that or almost everything that could go
wrong for a team, aside from some kind of natural
disaster to blame the fact that the majority population in
the area was black at the time seems disingenuous, cynical,

(23:32):
and simplistic at best. But then no one ever said
that Calvin Griffith was a good guy. They mostly said
the opposite. I want to get into one small aspect
of this one which I wasn't aware of until I
read the aforementioned book by mister Snyder. One argument used
against integration by baseball owners, players, and managers prior to

(23:53):
nineteen forty seven was that whites and blacks could not
coexist in the same ballparks, whether in the stands, on
the field, or in the clubhouse. And it turns out
that Clark Griffith had what he thought was definitive proof
of this, and it happened way back in nineteen twenty.
In investigating this story, Snyder found that none of the
regular Washington papers like the Post, covered this when it happened.

(24:17):
They might have hit on the game in which it happened,
but they didn't mention the incident. Now that's not unusual.
If you've listened to this show long enough, whatever this story,
you will have heard me say that. Oddly enough, although
this was the most interesting aspect of a given game,
some paper or another didn't bother mentioning it, and that
could include a player losing a leg in a bear

(24:40):
trap in left field and then being out for the
rest of the season or the rest of his life.
Rather than explain it, a lot of papers just dropped
that guy as if he never existed. I came across
that in preparing this episode. As you'll hear a little
later when we get into this wonky bit about Catchers
I was going to talk about. I'll point it out
when we get to it. Catcher suffered a bad injury

(25:01):
on a play at the plate, had to leave the
game in the fifth, didn't appear for about a month.
None of the game stories in multiple papers mention it. Now,
in this case, we're talking about a postseason exhibition game,
so it's not surprising that they didn't exactly put Woodward
and Bernstein on it. We only know about it because
journalist Sam Lacey, a tireless advocate for desegregating baseball, wrote

(25:25):
about it after the fact. His paper was The Washington Tribune,
one of many publications from that time. We are in
again nineteen twenty that was aimed at a black audience.
After the nineteen twenty regular season ended, Senators first baseman
Joe Judge put together an all Star team to play
the Baltimore Black Sox, an independent club that was later

(25:48):
part of the Eastern Colored League. A small irony, a
later iteration of that team was owned by none other
than Joe Cambria. I don't know a lot about their
nineteen twenty players, but I will note that one of
them was ed Google's Polls, which less than one hundred
years later became a complete sentence. Among the players that
Judge chose for his All Star team was a twenty

(26:10):
seven year old Senators outfielder first baseman just coming off
of his rookie year, Frank Turkeyfoot Brower. Now, his actual
nickname from childhood was supposedly Tucky, but Brower had such
a deep rural Virginia accent that writers thought he was
trying to say Turkey. Later this was amended to Turkey Foot,

(26:33):
supposedly because of his speed, except it doesn't seem like
he was notably fast. He was more of a power hitter,
and in fact, poor defense hampered his major league career,
even though he was quite a good hitter. He had
reached the majors as a first baseman, but judge existing
meant he got pushed to an outfield corner and he
wasn't great at that. Additionally, whereas we've seen fast players

(26:54):
compared to cheetahs and jaguars and gazelle's and the like,
you have never heard one compared to a turkey, have you.
Former outfielder Clyde Milan, the Senators Stolen base guy, was
actually Brower's manager for some of his time in Washington.
He was called Deerfoot and the Flyer, but never the
Turkey or the Turkey flyer, although the Turkey flyer would

(27:16):
be kind of fun. There's an amusing little side note
to Brower's career that has a first son of Shoeless
Joe Jackson about it. Brower went to college at Washington
and Lee University in Virginia. I do believe I was
brought around that place many years ago for reasons that
are sort of painful to think about now, so put
that aside. Griffith signed him off of that campus when
he was about twenty way back in nineteen thirteen. But

(27:40):
while Griffith was figuring out what to do with Brower,
he got homesick and left, and I guess Griffith figured,
go your own way, mister Brower, will let bygones be bygones,
and let him be. He then signed with Scranton in
nineteen fourteen in the miners, I mean, and he had
some success both as a hitter and pitcher over the years,
even a little mop up work later on in the majors,

(28:02):
and wasn't bad at all. He had spring training trials
with the Cardinals and Phillies. The Yankees looked at him
as an option at one point, but he didn't make
it back to the majors until Griffith picked him up
from reading of the International League in nineteen twenty, along
the way saying forget this pitching business. You're a first
baseman slash outfielder. It is for that that you will
be known. So the game in question the exhibition game

(28:25):
they played it in that same year, October nineteen twenty
at Griffith Stadium. The game was tied one to one
late when Brower was called out on a close play
at first base by one of the umpires. Now they
used a mixed umpiring crew. The umpire, whose name was
John F. N. Wilkinson, happened to be Black, and there

(28:46):
was an argument. Brower shoved or punched him in the face,
and at that point there was a near riot and
Brower had to be escorted out of the park by
the police. Writing about this over a dozen years later,
Lacy said that fan hostility to Brower carried over into
nineteen twenty one. I quote. This was not forgotten by

(29:07):
the denizens of the right field pavilion, despite the fact
that the six months off season from October to April
had elapsed between the time of his act and his
next appearance on the local field. Followers of professional baseball
in the Capitol know that this portion of the paid
customers at Griffith Stadium is and always has been, ninety

(29:29):
percent black. It did not take Brower long to realize
that the reception tendered him by those who support and
good will right fielders try to cultivate was extremely cold.
The popularity of this rookie upstart was diminished. He had
himself dimmed the pathway to probable stardom. The influence of

(29:52):
the right field stands on the rest of the park
is great, and before long Broer by now just another
performer of mediocre. Her ability was in general disfavor. It
was then probably a coincidence that ere the end of
the season arrived he had been shipped to Toronto of
the International League, his one and only major league chance gone.

(30:16):
Now in this last Lacey was inaccurate, and it's easy
to figure out that he was. Brauer was not sent
to Toronto. He never played there. He's stuck in Washington
through nineteen twenty two, then was traded to Cleveland in
return for outfielder third baseman Joe Doc Evans of Mississippi.
He was called Doc because he had an honest to

(30:38):
goodness MD. It was a bad trade for Washington in
that Evans, who had to be talked out of retirement,
there was a lot more money to be made in medicine.
He couldn't really hit. He had a fluke three forty
nine season in part time play for the World Series
winning Cleveland team in nineteen twenty, but that was just
a small sample. He was attractive to Griffith because he

(30:59):
was right hand and he wanted to balance the lineup.
And also, whereas Tris Speaker had used him as a
left fielder in Cleveland, he had come up at the
hot corner and Griffith needed a third baseman as well.
There was previously some chicanery with Jump and Joe Dougan
that I've talked about in a previous episode. The Senators

(31:19):
no longer had him, and what's interesting here, As I
said earlier, a problem for the Senators in attracting an
audience was the severity of the park, and the player
who eventually solved the Senator's third base problem for most
of twenty years was Assi Bluegie, who we've talked about
before as well. The same year that Griffith traded Brower

(31:43):
to get a third baseman, blue Gie came up from
the Miners. He was primarily a glove man. In a
good year, he'd hit two ninety and take some walks
in kind of scrape being league average, but mostly he
didn't do that. He hit only forty three lifetime home runs,
and the whole reason I bring this up is that
Griffith Stadium was such a tough park that he hit

(32:03):
thirty six of them on the road. Brower meanwhile, hit
very well for Tris Speaker, averaging two eighty four four
h one to five oh two over the next two years.
He started at first base in the former season, and
he was fine. I mean, those averages are good. But
Cleveland made a big trade for first baseman George Burns,

(32:26):
who was superficially better because he was a three hundred hitter.
Cleveland had had him before and then traded him out
to the Red Sox for stuffy mcinness and regretted it,
and they were right. That trade is low key, one
of the worst in Cleveland history. Bringing him back might
have scratched an itch or salved a wound, but in reality,
Burns wasn't nearly as good at getting on base as

(32:47):
Brower was. This was, by the way, as the rules say,
we must always specify the AL George Burns Burns the
lesser rather than the NL George Burns, the giant leadoff
hitter who was actually very good, or Nathan Burne bound
of Burns and Allen and oh God fame. After Burns
was reacquired, Brower was given a chance to win the
right field job, but Speaker chose a different player, Homer Summa,

(33:10):
who had a great name but was kind of the
same deal as Burns. He could hit three hundred, this
at a time that a lot of hitters did hit
three hundred, but he never got on base or rarely
compared to a more patient player. And only then did
Turkey Brower's major league career come to an end. He
went off to the San Francisco Seals, continue to hit

(33:30):
very well, and played in the miners through nineteen twenty nine,
when he was thirty six. That he suffered some sort
of dramatic consequence or any consequence for punching a black
umpire in the face seems like it was wishful thinking
on Sam Lacey's part. Maybe he was feeding red meat
to his audience. The departure of Brower will be keenly

(33:52):
regretted by fans of the Capitol, with whom he has
been a prime favorite since he was purchased from the
Redding Club in the summer of night eineteen twenty, wrote
The Washington Evening Star, after he was traded away. Now,
there is some mention around that time that Brower had
asked to be traded. So is it possible he felt
so disliked that he had no choice but to leave. Sure,

(34:16):
but he could have asked for a trade for any
number of reasons, if indeed he had asked to be
traded at all. No, the real consequence the only consequence
of this incident, in which he punched a black umpire,
was that it solidified Clark Griffith in his opposition to
racial mixing on the field, something he never allowed in

(34:38):
his stadium. Again, you'd think that Lacey would have known better,
and he probably did realize that when it came to
racial relations in twentieth century America, the only place the
punishment fit the crime. Well, I've already told you once
in this episode, but there's no harm in saying it
again was in the infinite inning. We'll take a quick

(34:58):
break and then wrap the show with some fun with catchers.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
Woo.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
And here we bring the time machine around to twenty
twenty five, which is sort of redundant. I guess it
just sits in the garage. Well, it needs to rest
every once in a while. If you're following baseball this year,
and I assume you are, then you know that Seattle
Mariners Tatrick cal Rally is having what the scientists referred
to as a great Big year. He's having a kind
of a Johnny Bench season, albeit one that takes in

(35:43):
changes in the game, since Bench's time batting averages are down,
not that they were huge in the nineteen seventies, strikeouts
are up, and Rally has the luxury of spending time
as the designated hitter, which, since Bench spent his entire
career in the National League, he never had. To date,
he has hit fifty home runs, which is an unprecedented
total for a backstop, even though ten of those long

(36:03):
balls have come when he was getting a partial day off.
Forty home runs while catching is still a ton. Of course,
Bench and Mike Piazza did it twice. For other players
aside from Rally did it once each, including the still
active Salvi Perez. Perez is forty eight in twenty one
twenty twenty one. That is, Salve Perez did not play
with Babe Ruth for well reasons that we discussed earlier

(36:26):
in the Senator's segment of the program. Also, he hadn't
been born yet, but try not to hold that against him.
He hit thirty three as a catcher. Fifteen is a
DH But according to whoever gets to decide these things,
forty eight by Salvador Perez in twenty twenty one was
considered a record for home runs by a catcher, at
least until this year. Thick transit Gloria Munday Salvador Perez.

(36:49):
It's probably obvious why catchers haven't had too many seasons
like these. They play such a demanding position that, going
back to the very beginnings of the game, teams have
often split the job between a couple of players, not
having a starter and a backup but two starters. Think
of the nineteen twenty seven Yankees. For the first two
thirds of the season, catchers Johnny Grobowski and Pat Collins

(37:13):
played on an odd even schedule. It wasn't a platoon,
It had nothing to do with who the opposition was starting,
and it wasn't a personal catcher situation dictated by which
pitcher was going for New York. It was just on off,
rigidly adhered to for one hundred games, Grobowski, Collins, Grabowski,
Collins over and over again. They only changed it up

(37:37):
because Grobowski got hurt on July twenty ninth, when fellow
catcher Luke Sewell nailed his bare hand with a foul
tip and he suffered quote, a split finger. He missed
about thirty games, so split sounds a lot like broken.
In his first start after returning, he seems to have
been spiked on that same hand on a play at
the plate. The play by play suggests that this was

(37:59):
on an unlikely straight steel of home attempted by Bob
Fatz Fothergill, although the game stories, as I alluded to earlier,
say nothing of it. Big Bob attempted twenty six steals
that year and was caught seventeen times. Way to go,
Big Bob Grabowski was sent home for another three weeks

(38:19):
and his spot was taken by Benny ben Gooff. Manager
Miller Huggins loosened the rotation up just a little at
that point, but it was still mostly odd even ben
Goff Collins ben Goff Collins, despite being more or less
healthy all year, Pat Collins only got into eighty seven games.
Now in the last year of his life. Huggins had

(38:40):
Bill Dickey behind the plate and playing regularly, but as
good as he was, he had to be handled like
a catcher, so he started only one hundred and seven
times that year, not accounting for every injury that Bill
had or month long suspension he suffered for punching Carl
Reynolds in the face and shattering his jaw, or even
some light platooning at the heart of his career, which

(39:01):
spanned from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen forty one. He
started only one hundred and eleven times per season, even
though he hit three thirteen with a three to eighty
one on base and a four to ninety four slugging
percentage at the time, and the reason he didn't play
every day is the same reason that most catchers don't
play every day. It's just too physically demanding a position.

(39:22):
The catchers who are the exception, guys like Bench Thurman
Munson and Lance Parrish, wore down very fast. There are
at least two other reasons that catchers don't put up
huge numbers in most seasons. One of course, is that
players are selected for defense, so a lot of non
hitters get to play behind the plate. Austin Hedges has
had an eight hundred game career while hitting one eighty

(39:44):
four with a two forty three on base percentage and
a three to eleven slugging percentage. Second, it's not just
how often they play, but what they have to do
while they play. Tim McCarver, who was a pretty good
hitter for a catcher at times in his career and
roughly a league average hitter overall, said that if you
spend all day catching fastballs, your hands hurt too much

(40:06):
to grip the bat as well as you might have otherwise.
Let me return to that Austin Hedge's point for a second.
Think about the reverse of that. Think of all the
players who ended up as first baseman or at some
other position who might have been loose Hall of Fame
candidates had they just been able to remain behind the plate.
I'm talking about guys like Rudy York, Mike Napoli, Victor Martinez,

(40:28):
even Carlos Santana might have had interesting Hall of Fame
arguments had they had the glove to catch. Brian Downing
and Joe Tory too. I realized Joe Torre is in
now because of what he did as a manager, and
he spent many years catching, but he was not considered
the greatest defensive catcher. He won sort of a flute
Gold Glove a year that no one else played, and
he won his MVP Award while playing third base. If

(40:51):
you just moved some of that stuff around, you'd see
he has the career value, certainly as a backstop, to
make the Hall two ninety seven career average about twenty
four hundred hits. What's to disagree with just that he
was considered a good hitter who happened to catch, as
opposed to being a catcher who was a good hitter.
Let me mention also, as you're no doubt aware that

(41:12):
catchers are generally slow runners. If they don't start out
that way, they get that way via squatting all the time.
You thicken down there and it's hard on your knees.
Give a catcher enough base runners and he'll drive in
one hundred runs. Raley is already over one hundred this year,
and it's his second such season. It hasn't happened a lot, though,
again because of the limited playing time and the defense

(41:35):
bias in selection. Piazza and Bench did it six times,
Yogi Barra five times, Dicky and Gary Carter four times apiece,
and then the list descends from there. In other words,
catchers haven't done that. Driven in one hundred runs is
often as right fielders or first baseman have, but it's
not a rare occurrence either. But one hundred runs scored

(41:57):
by a catcher that doesn't happen very often at all.
Only nine everyday catchers have ever done it. Mickey Cochran
who played in the high offense in nineteen twenties and
thirties and hit kind of like a really good second
baseman did it four times. Piazza and pad Rodriguez did
it twice. Six others did it once, four of them

(42:17):
Hall of famers Barra Bench, Roy Campanella, who was also
one of the forty home run catchers, and Carlton Fisk.
Have I told you this one before. One of my
favorite stories about slow catchers is about the slowest of all,
the Hall of Famer, Ernie Lombardi. Naturally, and I mentioned
this earlier. Don't say I don't pay off the foreshadowing.

(42:38):
This is Chekhov's backstop. Casey figures in the tail. But
like I said, he has but three words. There are
good three words. They're an important three words, but nevertheless
only three. And I would argue that neither he nor
Ernie Lombardi are necessarily the main characters in the story,
but rather the main character is Philadelphia Phillies' incompetence as

(42:58):
a whole, which I hate to point out does not
apply to the twenty twenty five version, where every player
in the lineup except Nick Castianos is busy blasting balls
over buildings, or perhaps I have that backwards, and neither
Nick Castianos nor anyone else except for Kyle Schwarber is
blasting balls over buildings. But they're hanging in there and
doing rather well anyway. With the caveat that, having lost

(43:22):
Zach Wheeler potentially for the rest of eternity due to
his need of thoracic outlet surgery, we don't know if
their pitching is going to hold up the rest of
the way. As you no doubt know by now, Lombardi
was a killer hitter for average, and the joke was
that if the infielders had to play him honestly that
is not set up on the grass, because they had
all the time in the world to throw him out,

(43:44):
he would have hit four hundred. Larry McPhail, who was
the general manager of the Reds when Lombardi broke out
as a star, said, I hate to think what Lombardi
would hit if he played half his games in Baker
Bowl and had average speed. I can't really do Larry
McPhail's voice. There are recordings of it. There's a great
New Yorker profile of him from about nineteen forty which

(44:07):
explains that in his Dodger's office. He was general manager
of the Dodgers during the period I mentioned involving Leo
durocher and head hunting. He had a mounted moosehead on
the wall, and that sometimes McPhail would stand beneath the
moosehead while talking to someone, and that observers found the
effect very disconcerting. Putting the moose part aside, we can

(44:27):
kind of answer his point. While we can't know what
Lombardi would have hit if he had any foot speed
at all, and we can't know what he would have
hit had he played in the Baker Bowl as a
Philly of the period and thus not been able to
hit off of Philly's pitching, but we can say that
he got two hundred and twelve played appearances in that
park and hit three eighty seven with a four to

(44:49):
twenty five on base percentage and a five eighteen slugging percentage.
He really was that slow. He couldn't beat out a
double playground er to save his life, as evidenced by
his hitting into all the double plays as many as
thirty in a season. He led the league virtually every
year he was a regular. The thirty came in nineteen
thirty eight, the year he won the National League MVP,

(45:11):
which describes a lot of the MVP votes in a nutshell.
He had led the NL and batting average at three
forty two, unusual for a catcher then and now. That's
why he won it, But he wasn't necessarily that effective
an offensive player. The center of his career was the
ten years he spent with Cincinnati, and then after that
he drifted around a little, as veteran players tend to do.

(45:33):
He had had an off yere in nineteen forty one,
hitting only two sixty four, and the Reds just outright
sold him to the Braves. He was going on thirty four,
so the Reds probably felt safe in assuming that his
career was in its sunset years. As I said back
when I last talked about Lombardy circa episode one ninety nine,
even if he wasn't washed up at the time, and

(45:54):
he would prove not to be, certainly he wasn't getting
any faster. There was also some animus between him and
the Reds general manager at that point were in Giles,
due to some hostile salary negotiation. Giles also figured his
offense was no longer offsetting his defense. He more or
less said that Lombardy was a big guy with huge
hands and he could definitely throw, but he led the

(46:16):
NL in pass balls nine times because his lack of
speed meant that he also wasn't nimble and he couldn't
get off his haunches fast enough to corral those pitches
in the dirt. The Reds wanted to replace him with
Raleigh Hemsley, who wasn't half the hitter and in fact
averaged one thirteen in thirty six games that year before
they dumped him out to the Yankees, where he did

(46:37):
a lot better. And I believe we've talked about that
in the past two but he was a much better receiver.
In acquiring Lombardi, the Braves were trying to do exactly
the opposite thing. Their catcher was Ray Bearris, who had
just hit two zho one two forty seven, two forty
seven in one hundred and twenty games. If you know
the family and believe his name was pronounced Ray Bears,

(46:57):
let me know, I've never heard it pronounced. This is
my best guess. It's either Ray Beerris, Ray Bears or
Ray Bears, which sounds like something out of Buck Rogers.
And if it isn't it should have been Wilma. Those
are signs are brandishing their ray guns in an aggressive manner.
I have a bad feeling about this. Better quit and
get a snack. By any other name Ray Bears was

(47:17):
Austin Hedges, Mark One, or Maltine Maldonado or Jeff Mathis.
It's not bad to have that guy. But the Braves
wanted to squeeze more juice out of the position, and
as it turned out, Lombardi still had some good hitting
left to do. In fact, he won his second batting
title at three point thirty. He played only one hundred
and five games, but was deemed to have met the
qualifications at the time, and like all Braves, he did

(47:40):
most of his hitting on the road. After Lombardy was
traded to Boston, a Globe writer wondered if he would
have to run out more triples than he was typically
given to given the big outfield in Boston. Lombardy averaged
about one triple a year, and it's a fair assumption
that an outfielder broke a leg on the play. Actually,

(48:00):
in nineteen thirty two, when he was playing in his
first season as regular, he hit nine three baggers eight
of them at Cincinnati's Redland Field, and I wonder if
there was some sort of park effect involved there, like
a doghouse in the left field power alley and the
pitch Lombardy lines another shot into left. It's in the
power alley. He could run af ah, It's into Bingo's

(48:23):
doghouse again, and there's just no way for Red Worthington
to fish it out of there without losing a hand.
That Bingo is vicious, big park or not. Lombardi went
sons triples in nineteen forty two. He had just two
more to go in his career, which lasted into nineteen
forty seven. He did, however, steal a base by process

(48:44):
of elimination. This could only have happened at Braves Field
against who else, as I told you the Phillies on
May ninth, nineteen forty two. It was the bottom of
the eighth inning. The Braves were up five runs to two,
so there wasn't that much at stake. The catch for
the Phillies was journeyman Ben Warren. The pitcher was a

(49:04):
very special player named Earl Naylor. Naylor was the bizarro
shohey Otani, I feel like I could make a meal
out of this guy, so I'm probably doing the show
at disservice by throwing him away here. But he played
both centerfield and pitched, even though he couldn't do either.
As a hitter, he averaged one eighty six. As a pitcher,

(49:25):
he went zero to five with a six twelve Era.
Lombardi walked to lead off the inning as the next
batter got set in the box. True story. Braves manager
Casey Stangele, the guy who objects to being referred to
as a screwball, shouted steal it. Lom and Ernie Lombardi
lit out for second. True story. All the Phillies were

(49:48):
so stunned they didn't know how to react. In a
sub section headed yes, Virginia Lombardy stole second, The Boston
Herald reported catcher Ben Warren was so entranced by the
spectacle that he lost sight of second base and heaved
the horse side into center field, taking a deep breath.

(50:08):
Lom jibed at a sixty degree angle and was barging
in the general direction of third when centerfielder Ernie Coy,
also staring in astonishment, allowed the ball to trickle between
his legs, so there was nothing for our new whippet.
See whipp it not turkey to do but to take
another deep breath at the far corner and continue home.

(50:30):
There wasn't even a close play at the plate. Lom
beat the ball home by more than his nose, which
is simply a short way of saying that he won
the race around the paths going away. Now, Lombardy never
scored one hundred runs in a season. He never came close.
The big man with the bigger nose topped out at
sixty runs scored in one hundred and twenty nine games.

(50:52):
Now neither has col rally. However, as he's already scored
himself fifty times on the season, he's already cross the
plate eighty eight times. Will he become the tenth catcher
to score one hundred runs in a season? A true rarity.
Stay tuned by the sacred memory of Minerva Pious. We

(51:15):
have come to the end of another show. Should you,
orriorcat wish to follow me on social media, you can
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(51:37):
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(52:00):
you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare, go
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And if your podcaster doesn't let you do those things,
as Frederick Douglas said, agitate, agitate, agitate. Wow, we're moving
right along here. For one of my credit segments, our
theme song, which you are hearing now and have been

(52:21):
listening to throughout the episode, is called The Infinite Man.
It was a co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring,
who asks, who the hell is Medea, Papyrus or whatever
it was that you just said. I'm really getting sick
of you sometimes I think you're just purposely obscure.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
What was she?

Speaker 1 (52:37):
The bathing suit model who posed for NASA McMain on
a McCall's cover in nineteen twenty six. Well, that's the
wrong answer, but I have to admit it is plausible
where I'm concerned. So if I can just survive the
humiliation of that answer, I'll be back next week with
more tales from inside the Infinite Inning.