I just had an occasion to use my sabermetric research skills, such as they are, in my day job, which as some of you know is to be an obnoxious know-it-all, particularly on the subject of modern American literature.  So I’m minding my own business, annotating the 1935 John O’Hara novel Butterfield-8  for the Library of America’s new edition  (maybe you know the 1960 movie, starring Elizabeth Taylor—she won her Oscar for this performance) and I come across another reference to baseball. My first reference to baseball in O’Hara on BJOL was my reprinting here of a blog post I wrote for Penguin Classics website a few years ago, in "Readers’ Posts," about a reference in an O’Hara story to Joe DiMaggio hitting a HR that turned out, upon a little searching (okay, a lot of searching), to be fictional. Some of you offered me some helpful comments (it appeared in Reader’s Posts on September 9, 2013, but the link to the article no longer works—in fact, I can’t locate the blog post anywhere on the web), and this time, my search was more fruitful, in that I unquestionably found the game O’Hara was referring to, and it had an unexpected side-effect: it allowed me to date the novel with extreme specificity. The game took place, on Ebbets Field, on Monday afternoon, May 4, 1931, so I was now able to date the novel, which basically is set in a few days’ time, very specifically just before and just after that date. Conveniently, the passage appears smack in the middle of the novel, meaning I now know exactly when the novel starts and when it ends.  Such are the modest achievements of literary scholarship.

The baseball reference appears in a conversation taking place the next morning, a Tuesday we now know, when a morning newspaper is picked up by Eddie (played by Eddie Fisher in the film, on the set of which, or just off it, Mr. Fisher, the husband of Debbie Reynolds and the father of young Carrie Fisher, began his scandalous affair with Elizabeth Taylor, but that’s another story altogether). Eddie reads aloud from the paper that "the Giants beat Brooklyn, if you’re interested. Six to three was the score. Terry tripled, scoring when the Giants worked their squeeze play, Vergez laid down a perfect bunt."

I assume Eddie (who does not have an affair, scandalous or otherwise, with Elizabeth Taylor’s character—they have a very chaste relationship, one of the few in O’Hara’s novels, though Taylor plays a floozy and Fisher plays a jazz musician, so what are the odds on that?) is reading verbatim from the newspaper. (I could look up which one, I suppose, but there were a lot of NYC morning newspapers back then, some tabloid format, some broadsheet, and which one he prefers makes only the vaguest of comments on Eddie’s character.) If he is reading verbatim, and not improvising on the text, it’s a curious, almost aesthetic, point that the paper singles out Johnny Vergez’s bunt in its lede, in that the Giants were ahead 5 to 3 when it occurred, and they won the game as O’Hara notes 6 to 3, meaning the bunt wasn’t particularly crucial to the victory.  It must have been a beauty, though.

I’ll reproduce Retrosheet’s play-by-play below so you can appreciate the excellent bunting:

GIANTS 6TH: Terry tripled to center; Ott grounded out (first unassisted); Marshall grounded out (third to first); On a bunt Vergez singled [Terry scored]; O'Farrell singled to center [Vergez to third]; Mitchell popped to first in foul territory;

1 R, 3 H, 0 E, 2 LOB.  Giants 6, Robins 3

The bunt came, in other words, with two outs, which isn’t really seen that much these days, I think.  Since Vergez was bunting for a hit, by necessity, would this even be regarded as a squeeze play? I thought a squeeze play was, by definition, a sacrifice bunt (which sometimes turn into bunt singles, but not by design, just by excellent execution).  According to Wikipedia, a squeeze play is

a maneuver consisting of a sacrifice bunt with a runner on third base. The batter bunts the ball, expecting to be thrown out at first base, but providing the runner on third base an opportunity to score. Such a bunt is uncommon with two outs because there is a significant chance that the batter would be thrown out at first base, ending the inning and thus negating the score. Likewise, such an attempt is unlikely with two strikes because a bunt attempt that is fouled off is an automatic third strike. The squeeze play is said to have been invented on the baseball field at Yale by Dutch Carter and by George B. Case, who later went on to found the white-shoe law firm White & Case.[1][2] White shoes later went on to become the trademark of the Kansas City (later Oakland) Athletics.

In a safety squeeze, the runner at third does not take off until the batter makes contact bunting, waiting for more certainty that the ball will go to a location from which it will be difficult for the fielding team to make an out at home plate.

In a suicide squeeze, the runner takes off as soon as the pitcher begins to throw the pitch, before releasing the ball. If properly executed, a play at home plate is extremely unlikely. However, if the batter fails to make contact with the pitch, the runner is likely to be put out at home plate (hence, "suicide"). Therefore, the suicide squeeze usually requires a skilled bunter who can make contact consistently, even on difficult pitches.

These plays are often used in the late innings of a close game in order to score an insurance, winning, or tying run.

The full box-score is here: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1931/B05040BRO1931.htm. Do you think we don’t see this play anymore (at least, I don’t) because of a decline in bunting skill? Better quality fielding? Better defensive positioning? An abandonment of small-ball baseball strategies? Or maybe I’m just not playing attention as I need to.

Johnny Vergez (Jean Louis Vergez, pronounced "VEER-jess," though the French pronunciation would be more like "Vair-JZAI") was a hot-as-hell rookie on May 4, 1931, batting above .390 in his first 17 MLB games as of that morning, so you wouldn’t think he’d had a lot of opportunity to prove to Bill Terry, who was both the runner on third and the Giants’ manager, that he was a fabulous bunter, but who knows? Seems to me if you’re going to trust someone to bunt you in from third with two outs, you’d want to be very confident that he’s a spectacularly reliable bunter.

I included all these extraneous details because it’s fascinating to see where these things lead. You don’t suppose that George B. Case of Yale baseball and law-firm fame is related to the multiple base-stealing leader George (Washington) Case, who played for the Senators and Indians in the 1930s and 1940s, do you? And what in the world do the Athletics’ footwear have to do with white-shoe law firms, or the squeeze play, for that matter? This is one of those strings that, if you follow it out to the end, you’ll never stop following it. George Washington Case, just to keep the string going a little bit, is a fascinating character, unrelated as he apparently is to George B. Case of Yale and to George Washington of the Continental Army, as well as to George Washington Carver of peanut-butter fame. According to SABR’s bio he was the fastest man in baseball, and in 1946 Bill Veeck arranged a 100-yard foot-race between Case and Jesse Owens, which Case lost by a tenth of a second, the only race he is known to have lost to anyone, anywhere. http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/eb836343. Case’s son was Executive Director of SABR from 2000 to 2002, according to that article, and is a Facebook friend of mine.

Returning to the matter at hand, I suppose the newspaper account O’Hara’s character is reading from is technically accurate, in that Wikipedia says that a two-out squeeze play is merely "uncommon," not impossible. I would have called this play an infield hit, but I suppose there needs to be some distinction between an infield hit and a bunt single where there is no possibility of sacrifice.

There is another unusual element here—Vergez’s hit was made with a two-run lead in the sixth inning, which doesn’t quite match up with the notation that squeeze "plays are often used in the late innings of a close game in order to score an insurance, winning, or tying run." The sixth inning isn’t all that late, and the run it scored wasn’t either "an insurance, winning, or tying run," other than the sense in which all tacked-on runs are insurance runs. I always thought an insurance run was only that run that turned a one-run lead into a two-run lead, but that’s not written in stone or anything. You might consider a run that gives you a three-run lead an insurance run, though I think that’s stretching the definition a bit.