Organizing my baseball library, a mandatory twice-per-century task, I found a book I’d never read entitled Voices from Cooperstown, by Anthony J. O’Connor, and decided to run down, quick’n’dirty, a few anecdotes, checking them for accuracy, always a good use of my time as finals approach, when I search for any excuse to procrastinate grading papers:
I’m starting at the section about knockdowns, brushbacks, HBPs, because I figure chances are good that the players are going to be stirred up, even years later, about these things, and these anecdotes may contain a high proportion of misrememberings:
Stan Musial (p. 142 ) recalls a close game against the Giants wherein he was thrown at by a Giants’ pitcher – "I think it was Windy McColl or was it Marv Grissom?"—who was being agitated by his manager (Leo Durocher, whom the Man remembers very distinctly shouting from the dugout: "Hit him! Hit him right on the big red number 6!"). The Giants pitcher, McCall (not McColl), promptly did so. Stan, uncharacteristically, returned to the bench furious after being plunked to implore his pitcher to plunk the next Giants’ batter. In the next half-inning, however, the unnamed Cardinals’ pitcher threw over the head of the Giants leadoff batter, who was Willie Mays, and then again threw way over Mays’ head. Pissed at his pitcher’s reluctance to retaliate, Musial "went over to him from first base and said, ‘You’ve got to hit him. We can’t let them get away with what they’re doing to us.’" But instead the pitcher threw a pitch that Mays could hit, which he did: "sure enough, Mays hit a home run that beat us. That was the only time I ever really got on a pitcher on my own team."
A little research shows that this game took place on May 13, 1955 (a Friday the 13th) in Busch Stadium, and the unnamed pitcher was Harvey Haddix. One odd stat that doesn’t support Musial’s story, which otherwise checks out, is that Haddix had already plunked two different Giants that day, before Mays hit his HR, hitting Hank Thompson in the 6th inning and then Al Dark in the 7th, making Durocher’s cries to plunk Musial seem a little less motivated by irrational bloodlust. More inexplicably, Haddix also hit Monte Irvin, the batter after Mays in the 10th inning, making Haddix one of the more prolific single-game plunkers in MLB history. (Would Haddix today even be in the game after hitting two Giants? How many batters can you fire baseballs at before you are compelled to take a shower for non-hygienic reasons?) Of all the accusations Musial could have thrown at Haddix that day, "scared to throw close" isn’t one of them. Haddix hit five batters in all of 1955, three of them in this game, and Musial was complaining that he was insufficiently rigorous in defending his own teammates?
Reads like a very frustrating game for the Cardinals and for Musial specifically: in the first inning, with the bases loaded and one out (Musial had singled and was on second base), Red Schoendienst hit a ball that Giants RFer Monte Irvin fielded on a hop but somehow threw out Solly Hemus at home plate, not a play you see every day, a forceout at home by an outfielder. Then in the second inning, Musial got up, again with the bases loaded, and this time he doubled, driving in two runs but the third runner was again nabbed at the plate, this time by Willie Mays. It’s understandable how the genial, gentlemanly Stan Musial might have been so agitated by the frustrations of this game that he left out the headhunting by his own team that started all the HBPing.
OK, maybe Musial isn’t as good a batter as you want to read about, so let’s find a better one: Babe Ruth. Actually the knockdown story Ruth tells in this book features him as a pitcher, and his memory is so shoddy that the buildup is much longer than what actually happened, so I’ll just tell you in advance that the whole thing is nonsense. Ruth specifies (pp. 138-9) that he’s talking about the 1918 Series, Sox vs. Cubs, and he tells a highly detailed story about being ordered by his manager to "dust off" Cubs outfielder Leslie Mann, which Ruth promised to do. But the Cubs, unbeknownst to Ruth, had substituted outfielder Max Flack for Mann between innings, so when Ruth "flattened" the batter facing him, man oh man, was he embarrassed after the inning to learn that he dusted off the wrong Cub. His manager "cussed me up one side and down the other. And I don’t blame him." Don’t you hate when that happens? You’re so proud of yourself for following orders, but it turns out you messed up, so you remember your screwup for decades afterwards, and you remember getting scolded for the screwup even more, amirite?
In both games Ruth pitched against the Cubs in the 1918 Series, however, let the record show, Mann played the whole thing in LF and Flack in RF so there was never any possibility that one would be substituted for the other. I had to triplecheck that I was reading Ruth’s account correctly, and that my eyes were attached properly to my head. "In the 1918 World Series…the Cubs…had Leslie Mann and Max Flack alternating in the outfield" seems plain enough, and it’s hard to imagine how Ruth could remember something so specifically that never happened. But it didn’t. In the fifth inning of his opening shutout of the Cubs, Ruth did plunk Max Flack, but Mann was in the game at the time—perhaps Ruth did mix the Cubs up and misconstrue his manager’s instructions as to which one he was supposed to plunk, but the central, juicy detail about Mann being replaced by Flack was just impossible under the circumstances.
OK, when I look for stories to run tracers on, what I look for is details, and Billy Herman’s tale is highly specific and very easy to look up. His divergence from the truth is even crazier than the Babe’s:
My first time at bat in the big leagues I got a base hit. The next time up I got hit right in the head. Si Johnson stuck one right in in my ear.
…it tore up my ear. The funny thing…I went to the ballpark the next day and I still had this blood all over my uniform. I put it back on, dried blood all over it. They didn’t wash the uniforms every day like they do now. You couldn’t stand the sight of blood, you couldn’t play.
Vivid, right? Memorable? You’d think that it’s your first MLB game, and you literally took a fastball to the head that turned your ear into a blood-faucet, that’s a memory that’s gonna stick.
You’d think. Something extraordinary happened here, but it’s hard to reconcile what the boxscore says happened with what Herman says. Not only did Si Johnson, the opposing pitcher, not hit any batters that day, but after his second-inning single, Herman was pinch-hit for, which is downright weird. I mean, a rookie gets a single in his first big league at-bat, which happened exactly as Herman says, why are you going to pinch-hit for him in the third inning? I dunno, but that’s what happened. It’s not as if Herman got hit, and removed from the game with blood soaking his uniform, because the guy who pinch-hit for him (or pinch-ran for him after the HBP that never happened) did not take first base at all. Pretty memorably, I’d imagine, the pinch-hitter, Footsie Blair, hit an inside-the-park HR to spark a 7-run rally.
I can’t begin to reconcile the boxscore with Herman’s version. Following his single in the second inning, Herman got erased attempting to steal second base. Could his ear have gotten bloodied on the stolen base attempt, and that’s what Herman is remembering? Not very likely. How is the pitcher trying to throw out a baserunner going to aim deliberately at the runner’s ear? The ASB was scored as 2-4, anyway, meaning that the catcher, not the pitcher, threw the ball to second base. Besides which, Herman was called out, which he wouldn’t have been if the throw to second base would have hit his ear rather than the infielder’s glove. Herman played the top of the third inning in the field, and then was removed for Footsie Blair in the bottom of the third. It’s hard to imagine a rookie dripping blood all over his uniform for fifteen minutes staying on the field, but it’s even harder to see how Herman got HBPed in a game where there were no HBPs.
Herman tells some wild stories. I wish the next one (p. 155, not about a HBP) had some more details: he tells of a night game in Fenway when he was coaching at third base for the Red Sox. The O’s score a run in the top of the eleventh, and in the bottom of the inning, with a man on base, Gary Geiger hits a standup triple, tying the game, but when Herman looks towards Sox manager Mike Higgins to see if he wants to squeeze the winning run in or hit away, he hears a gasp from the crowd: Geiger, having forgotten that the Orioles scored a run in the top of the inning and assuming he’d just driven in the winning run, has wandered off third base and has been tagged out.
Pretty good story, right? Never happened. In Higgins’ entire tenure managing the Sox, they played only a handful of extra-inning games against the Orioles at Fenway, and in none of them did anything resembling this occur. Now, maybe Herman just got some details wrong-- I looked up only games at Fenway against the O’s on Higgins’ watch, 1961-63, because the story doesn’t make any sense if it took place at Memorial Stadium (the O’s run would win the game outright), and because Herman mentions Higgins specifically several times in the story. He repeats several times that the opposing team was the Orioles, and that it happened in extra innings, at night, so that’s what I looked for, extras vs. the O’s at night while Higgins was managing the Sox in Fenway. Nada.
Oh, wait—I decided to check out Geiger’s SABR-bio, and voila! Here’s what happened:
On the 8th [of June 1961], the Red Sox were down 4-3 in the bottom of the 11th inning against the Los Angeles Angels when Geiger hit his second triple of the game, driving in the tying run. Upon reaching third, however, thinking the game had been won, he jogged off the field to return to the dugout and was tagged out. The game, the nightcap of a double header, was called at 1 A.M. with the score tied, 4-4 .
Here's the boxscore: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS196106082.shtml . The game didn’t even get underway until 9:06 PM, so I imagine Geiger’s teammates were not at all pleased to see him wiping himself off third base with a good chance at scoring and them going home happy. Here’s how BBref.com records the play: "Triple to CF (Deep CF); Schilling Scores; out at 3B/LF-2B-3B-C," which somewhat contradicts Herman’s telling, where Geiger bangs his triple off the Mawnstah, which doesn’t extend quite to CF, as I recall. OTOH, despite the repetition of "CF (DEEP CF)," it’s the LFer who throws the ball into the infield. If I’m not mistaken, Bill explained at some point that it’s close to impossible to hit the ball to the LF wall in Fenway and get a triple out of it. That is one weird-looking play, as described: Geiger hits a triple and is out at third base. Usually, that’s what we call a "double," innit? I guess they can’t really write a full description of weird plays in that tiny space annotating the play-by-play. To make things worse for Geiger, when they replayed the tie game, the Angels won it 5-1. So, except for calling the Angels the Orioles, Herman nailed this story almost as well as the Angels nailed Geiger.
It’s rare you come across a story with details in it that actually checks out, which I find a little strange because these stories are being told BECAUSE they’re so memorable. I mean, it’s not as if a reporter is sandbagging these old guys about something that happened on September 25, 1938 and pressing them on the spot to remember exactly what happened. These old guys are telling stories, probably not for the first time, about something that was so unusual or great or terrible that it sticks in their memories.
Take a guy’s first or last big-league at-bat—you’d suppose that the small details, as well as the large details, would stick out, because you get only one first or final big-league at-bat. But here’s Goose Goslin’s final at-bat, which occurred on September 25, 1938:
Fact is, I didn’t even complete my last time at bat. Lefty Grove was pitching against us—he wasn’t any spring chicken any more, either—and I swung at a low outside pitch and wrenched my back.
…So Bucky [Harris, Senators’ manager] had to send in a pinch-hitter to finish my turn at bat.
"Come on out, Goose," he said, "and rest up a bit."
That was the last time I ever picked up a bat in the big leagues. It was also the first and only time a pinch-hitter was ever put in for the old Goose.
Well, first place, Lefty Grove was just finishing his fifth season with the Red Sox when Goslin remembered him pitching for the Athletics against him on September 25, 1938 (and it’’s not as though this was a forgettable detail—Grove won his third ERA title as a Red Sock in 1938, was in the process of leading the AL in w/l percentage that year, and may well have been the best pitcher in the AL). So he’s off by five years in remembering who he faced in his last big-league at-bat, and it will not surprise to you to learn that he completed that at-bat: he flied out to centerfield (off Bud Thomas) and was replaced in the next half inning by a new pitcher. So unless he’s also wrong about that being the first time he was pinch-hit for, there was never a pinch-hitter for Goslin. You got to wonder where these weird details come from.
Crazy stuff happens all the time in baseball, I’m quite sure, just not as often as these old "Voices from Cooperstown" would have you believe. By this point, after finding dozens if not hundreds of detailed accounts, I make it the rule, not the exception, that the truth (or at least the boxscore) is going to be a more plausible, less colorful rendering of these anecdotes.