Just a quick note—I know I said I’d avoid doing any more tracers, but this is just too good.

I should join a 12-step program for tracer-junkies, I know. Kinder, gentler tracer-junkies than I am, like Rob Neyer, my inspiration in doing these things, are mostly amused when the telling varies wildly from the discernable facts, expressing great tolerance for the tellers and mis-tellers of baseball history, but I usually see something malevolent, even twisted, in human nature that prevents these guys from relating the facts as they occurred, or at least from telling the microphones thrust in front of them, "Gosh it was so long ago—I really can’t help you out. I barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday."

I’m a big sucker for oral histories, where the guys who played the game remember what happened on the field way back when, but of course mostly they mis-remember what actually happened. Usually, we just plow on in the text, assuming they got the facts, or a few facts, or a few important facts right, and don’t go running to baseball-reference.com to check them out.  What I’ve found over the years is that whenever my Spidey-sense twitches, and I do go running to the record books, I’ve never NOT been able to find a flaw, often a serious flaw, in the telling—and that serious flaw is nearly always to the credit of the teller of the tale, never to his disparagement (unless the story’s point is to prove what a fool the teller was, in which case the exaggeration is always to his disparagement).  

So I’m reading Bombers: an oral history of the New York Yankees by Richard Lally, a series of transcribed recordings of the Yankees’ dynasty, which I happen to own because I took it out from the library a decade ago and then couldn’t find it for several years, by which time I’d paid the library for it as a lost book, so I re-read it now and then to get my money’s worth. Anyway, I came across this passage from Elden Auker, a 1930s pitcher with an unusual underhanded motion that supposedly baffled Babe Ruth. Auker explains it as follows.

The first time I faced Ruth was 1933. I’m a rookie with the Tigers, and he was near the end of the line, but he was still dangerous. I was in the bullpen and Bucky [Harris] called me in to relieve Carl Fischer. Who walks up to the plate but Ruth. First time in Yankee Stadium and I’m facing the Babe. Struck him out on four pitches. Then I got Gehrig out to end the inning."

Sentence by sentence:

The first time I faced Ruth was 1933.

Auker pitched twice in his rookie season against the Yankees, once at home, once in the Bronx. In the Bronx game, which is where this humiliation of the Babe took place ("First time in Yankee Stadium"), Auker didn’t strike Ruth out upon entering the game, mainly because Ruth was not available to be struck out. He never got into that game, so, no, first shot out of the box, Auker’s entire story is fatally flawed.  (Box score and play by play of game: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA193309120.shtml ). The first batter Auker faced in Yankee Stadium was Joe Sewell, not Babe Ruth.

But wait! There’s more, much more:

Kinder, gentler souls than mine would sometimes be inclined to say, OK, maybe Auker screwed his story up by remembering the away game instead of the home game against the Yankees in 1933—no capital crime there, anyone could mistake Detroit and his own wife’s cooking for New York City and room service, so let’s see if this might have happened in Navin Field instead: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/DET/DET193308272.shtml.

Uh, no. No Babe Ruth that day, either. Ruth got into 137 games in 1933, but skipped both games where Auker pitched.

OK, coulda happened to anybody. Maybe Auker got the year wrong. If it wasn’t 1933, it had to be 1934, though, because that was the only other year both Ruth and Auker played in the AL.

Here we have five Tigers-Yankees matchups that Auker played in, so this strikeout must have occurred in 1934, right?

Second sentence:

I’m a rookie with the Tigers, and he was near the end of the line, but he was still dangerous.

Well, not so dangerous if he wasn’t in the lineup, so we move on to the third sentence:

I was in the bullpen and Bucky [Harris] called me in to relieve Carl Fischer.

Problem here is that Harris was fired as the Tigers’ manager at the end of the 1933 season (Del Baker took over for the Tigers’ last two games.) By 1934, Mickey Cochrane had been hired to manage the team.

Just as an aside, there is a Babe Ruth connection here, though it has nothing to do with Elden Auker.  According to Jane Leavy’s biography of Ruth, he was hungry for a big-league managerial job at this late point in his career, and was offered the Tiger job after the 1933 season was over. But the offer came while he was on one of his barnstorming tours, and he wired the Tigers’ owner that he would negotiate terms for the job when he got home (I think he was in Hawaii at the time). By the time Ruth returned to the mainland, Cochrane had the job, and Ruth never got another managerial offer again, to his enormous frustration.

So the Babe was in the lineup in two games at Yankee Stadium in 1934, facing Cochrane’s Tigers, in which Auker got to pitch.  The first game, on May 5, 1934 is probably the one that Auker is relating in Bombers, as he did relieve starter Carl Fischer in the second inning, and did retire the first two batters, who were Ruth and Gehrig. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA193405050.shtml

He didn’t strike Ruth out, much less do so on four pitches. Ruth hit a groundball that scored a runner from third base.

Maybe Auker mixed up this game with the other one in Yankee Stadium, in addition to mixing up 1933 with 1934 and Bucky Harris with Mickey Cochrane?

No, he didn’t strike out Ruth in that game either: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA193406160.shtml. Ruth hit a single against Auker, who came in in relief of Tommy Bridges, driving in two runs, at which point Ruth came out of the game. 

Well, maybe Auker just confused Yankee Stadium with Navin Field, which is—oh, the hell with it. I will flip over all the cards and reveal Auker’s lifetime record (all in 1934) against Babe Ruth, home and away:

I call your attention to the ninth column (SO = 0), but note that the overall performance is none too shabby, especially for a fat guy on the verge of retirement. The batting average matches Ruth’s lifetime HR tally, which ain’t bad, and the OPS looks plenty healthy too.

So where did Auker’s final four sentences

Who walks up to the plate but Ruth. First time in Yankee Stadium and I’m facing the Babe. Struck him out on four pitches. Then I got Gehrig out to end the inning.

come from?  Only his proctologist knows for sure, and Auker’s medical records may never be unsealed. But of special interest to me are the layers of detail in this short anecdote, layers that imply far more certainty than if Auker had merely noted, "I got Ruth out the first time I faced him, and Gehrig, too." You read something like that and you go "Huh, doesn’t seem as if Auker remembers that game very clearly. There are no details about how he got Ruth out—a flyball? A grounder?—and there are no details about where the game took place, what inning it was, whether he started or relieved. Sounds kind of fake to me."

It’s the details that lend authenticity to Auker’s capacious memory. I especially enjoyed the detail of striking him out on four pitches, and would have enjoyed  a few further details about that fourth pitch. Did Ruth hit a long, scary foul ball? Or did Auker miss the plate on a close one that he felt should have been called a strike? My point is that recalling that he struck Ruth out on three straight pitches might have seemed fantastical—it’s that fourth pitch that fleshes out the incident convincingly.

Somewhat improbably, Auker goes on to draw a conclusion from this one strikeout that the facts, particularly that eye-bulging 2.321 OPS, bely: that he was a source of vexation to Babe Ruth, a maddeningly effective pitcher against the great hitter. "Babe didn’t hit too many balls hard against me because he couldn’t pick up the ball. His eyes didn’t help him. It’s like I was pitching to his blind spot, taking away his advantage."

Auker also quotes a Yankees coach, Art Fletcher, confiding in him that Ruth had complained about his unmanly pitching style: "You got the Bam [Ruth] all upset. He said he’s been struck out before, but it’s the first time he’d ever been struck out by a goddamned woman."

More improbably, Auker then tells of conversations he had personally with an upset and frustrated  Babe Ruth:

Fletcher said that because I threw underhand, submarine style. Ruth didn’t like that delivery. Several times he told me, "Elden, I just can’t pick up your ball. After you release it, I have trouble following it."

These recollected conversations, with direct quotations, now take us from the realm of self-serving false memories into conscious fictionalizing. It’s one thing to misremember details from one’s youth, but when you start recounting conversations that not only did not take place, but which couldn’t have taken place, you raise the possibility that you’re perfectly aware of what really happened and are taking deliberate advantage of the opportunity to exaggerate and aggrandize your accomplishments.

If Ruth had knocked in 9 runs off me in only 7 at bats, I might have taken a swing at him if he teased me by claiming he just couldn’t follow my pitches. No, it seems to me far more likely than this conversation ever taking place is that Auker took his chance to get into Richard Lally’s book a story of what he wished had happened in his encounters with the Yankee star. And the funny thing is that I wouldn’t be surprised if this passage were to get quoted, and re-quoted, until it became a part of the received knowledge, and Auker were ultimately to succeed in his aim of being known by future generations as the man whom Babe Ruth couldn’t touch.

Don’t believe everything you read, and don’t mistake a profusion of details for the truth.