1948 Yankees of the Past: Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock

WAITE HOYT

A SUIT THAT WAS TRUMP

"They tell about the time Waite Hoyt was pitching for the Pirates against the Cubs, who had quit to the Yankees in a World Series. The Chicago bench was abusing him. Hoyt called time and sauntered over to the Cubs' dugout.

'If you guys don't shut up,' Waite said, 'I'll put on a Yankee uniform and frighten you to death.'

They shut up."

-Jimmy Cannon in the New York Post (Baseball Digest, June 1948)

THIS HOYT!

"Umpires are continual targets for the jockeys, although they have the last word in that they can thumb all offenders out of the game. However, an arbiter with a sense of humor- such as Billy Evans was- occasionally will let an athlete get away with more than he's entitled to. Billy loves to tell one story on himself.

Waite Hoyt was pitching, and he always had a mind as sharp as his curve. Hoyt continually shaded the plate, firing at the corners and making it very tough on the umpires. Evans called too many of the close ones balls instead of strikes to Waite's growing wrath. At the end of one inning he asked Evans in an unnecessarily loud voice: 'How many do you umpires miss in a game and still consider it a good day?'

Feeling very smug and superior, Billy swallowed the bait and replied just as loudly: 'With the limited stuff you have, Mr. Hoyt, we shouldn't miss over a dozen.'

To the vast chagrin of Evans, the quick-witted hurler then bellowed: 'You've already taken three times your limit today and we've only played five innings.'

The crowd roared. Hoyt grinned mischievously. And, believe it or not, Billy himself joined in the laughter.'

-Arthur Daley in the New York Times (Baseball Digest, October 1948)

HERB PENNOCK

BASEBALL MOURNS THE MAN WHO LOOKED EASY TO HIT - BUT SOMEHOW NEVER WAS

"Bennie Bengough was warming up Herb Pennock one day when the Yankees were playing the Indians in old League Park in Cleveland and a fan sitting in a box directly in a line with them called out to Bennie:

'Hey!' he said. 'Hey! Can I ask you a question?" Bennie walked back to the box.

'Sure,' he said. 'What is it?'

The fan nodded toward Pennock.

'How does he do it?' he asked.

'How does he do what?'

'How does he get anybody out?'

'What's the gag?' Bennie asked.

'No gag,' the fan said. 'From here it looks as though I could take a bat and go up there and hit him myself.'

'Wait,' Bennie said. 'I'll get you a bat and you can try it.'

'Oh, no!' the fan said. 'I'm too smart for that. But, as I was saying, he looks easy to hit from here.'

'Talk to some of the hitters,' Bennie said. 'He looks easy to hit from where they stand. But he ain't.'

The Yankees were going into St. Louis for an important series and Pennock got up on the train in the morning to find that he couldn't raise his left arm as high as his shoulder.

'You'll have to help me, Bob,' he said to Bob Meusel, who was his roommate and, with Waite Hoyt and Joe Dugan, one of his great companions.

'Help you,' Bob asked. 'Help you do what?'

'Comb my hair,' Herb said. 'Button the collar of my shirt. Tie my tie.'

'What's the matter with you?'

'My left arm hurts when I try to lift it and you know I'm no good with my right.'

Meusel was scared.

'What happened to your arm?'

'Muscular cold, I guess,' Pennock said. 'Come on. Get busy.'

It was Pennock's turn to pitch that afternoon, so he said nothing about the condition of his arm to Miller Huggins. He would make a stab at pitching and, if he failed- well, there was always Wilcy Moore to come in to check the Browns. And the Babe, Lou Gehrig, Meusel and Tony Lazzeri to get back the runs he might yield.

Pennock had sidearm curves, and- maybe his best pitch- an overhand curve. He teased the Browns with his sidearm curves. One this big, one a little bigger, one not quite so big. They went for them, missed them, topped them and went down on called strikes. They were waiting for that overhand curve with the zip on it. They were still waiting for it when the game was over. Pennock had yielded about five scattered hits and one run. The Yankees had made seven.

As a kid right up from Atlanta with the White Sox, Blondy Ryan went to bat for the first time against Pennock and hit a home run.

'It was the first and last hit I ever got off him as long as I was in the league,' Blondy said. 'I wasn't in the league very long, but if I had been in it for fifty years I never would have got another hit off him. All he needed was one look at me.'

One of Pennock's greatest admirers was Stanley Harris, who was managing the Senators when Pennock was at his peak.

'Nicest fellow in the world,' Stanley would say. 'Off the field, that is. On the field, he just stands there and looks at you ... and tugs on the bill of his cap ... and winds up and lets go. The ball never is where you think it's going to be. It was- just a split second before. But when you swing at it, the best you get is a piece of it. You fuss and fume and sweat and holler and he stands out there and looks at you ... and tugs on the bill of his cap and- aw, what's the use?'

The Tigers had a big right-handed-hitting outfielder named Bob Fothergill who was no gazelle in the field, but could hit the ball a mile.

'Left-handers,' he said, 'are milk on the cat's saucer for me.'

The first game in which he faced Pennock he struck out a couple of times and didn't hit a ball out the infield in four trips to the plate. That night he was disconsolate.

'Four-for-O for me against a left-hander,' he said to Harry Heilmann, his roommate- and one of the greatest right-handed hitters of all time. 'A left-hander doing that to me.'

'He's done it to me, too, Bob,' Harry said. 'That wasn't just another left-hander. That was Herb Pennock.'

In the World Series of 1927, the Yankees moved in against a Pirate team that had slaughtered all the left-handers in the National League. Pennock held them to three hits.

'I thought you said,' Meusel growled at a reporter in the clubhouse after the game, 'that no left-hander could beat the Pirates.'

'I didn't say that,' the reporter said. 'I said no left-hander in the National League could beat the Pirates. But they don't have a left-hander like Pennock in the National League.'

Pennock, to a greater degree than perhaps any other pitcher who ever lived, made a science of pitching. He didn't do it easily. As a kid breaking in with the Athletics, he was so wild that he seriously considered quitting baseball. Reconsidering, he made up his mind that, no matter how much of an effort it required, he would make a pitcher of himself. And so, the hard way, he learned control. Learned to pace himself. Learned to relax during the most critical ball game. Learned, from watching the top pitchers on other teams, how to pitch to enemy hitters. Connie Mack traded him to the Red Sox before he became a pitcher, and it was not until he joined the Yankees in 1923 that he became a great pitcher.

He was a great pitcher, a great competitor- and my friend. The news of his death was shocking."

-Frank Graham, condensed from the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, April 1948)

1948 Yankees of the Past: Hank Majeski and Nick Etten

HANK MAJESKI

MAJESTIC MAJESKI
He's One of the Bigger A's
"Connie Mack's Athletics had given Joe Dobson a rough time the previous day and the Boston Red Sox right-hander was saying: 'What a pest that Majeski is. I pitched him three different ways in three different innings and he hit me each time.'
'Yeh, but he's a streak hitter, Joe,' a Red Sox teammate remarked.
'Maybe so,' Dobson replied, 'but his streaks are coming closer together these days.'
Which, of course, they are. Chunky little Hank Majeski, third baseman of the Mackmen, is a pretty good hitter, with more power than a lot of hitters almost twice his size.
'His power is in his wrists,' Al Simmons, Philadelphia coach, explained. 'He snaps that bat pretty quick.'
Ever since Pinky Higgins was sold to the Red Sox, Connie Mack has been searching for a 154-game third sacker. The list of those who tried to fill Pinky's shoes reads like a Who's Who for the minor leagues. But then Hank arrived on the scene and Connie's far turn troubles were over.
A long-ball hitter, Majeski last season helped make the Athletics one of the surprise clubs of the American League, hitting a good .280, with thirty-nine of his hits going for extra bases. Not only that, he paced all regular American League third sackers in fielding, handling 428 chances with only five errors. This season he already is playing a vital role in another Mackman outfit that started the campaign raising havoc among the preseason favorites in the Will Harridge circuit.
From the stands, Majeski appears as nervous as a cat around third base, taking a step from side to side, or in and out, with each delivery by the Philadelphia pitcher. But, actually, he is as cool as the well-known cucumber. He keeps on the move out there only because he plays the game up to the hilt, and the more action the better.
'I really love third base and no kidding,' Hank said. 'There's always something doing out there. You're in the game every minute because you never know when somebody is going to slash one at you.'
The five-foot-nine, 180-pound Mackman wasn't always a third baseman. Casey Stengel changed him in 1939 with the Boston Braves and Hank has played there ever since.
'I was a second baseman until I joined the Braves,' Hank told me. 'But Stengel had Tony Cuccinello at second, so I moved over to third.'
Majeski figures Stengel did him a big favor.
'I probably could have played fast minor league ball at second base for the rest of my life, but might never have made the grade in the majors at that spot,' Hank said.
Credit for the boy's improvement at the plate goes to Earle Brucker. 'He talked to me in the spring of '46, just after the A's had bought me from the Yankees,' Hank said. 'He pointed out that I was going through a lot of unnecessary motion at bat before the ball was delivered. He advised me not to wag the stick so much. And it made a better hitter out of me.'
When handing out credit for what success he has had in baseball, however, Majeski speaks first of Harry O'Brien, his coach at Curtis High School, at Staten Island, N.Y.
'When I was a kid in high school, I was only about five-four or five-five in height, too small to play anything except baseball,' Hank said. 'And most of the kids out for the nine were six foot or close to it. So it didn't look as though I had a chance.
'But Harry O'Brien felt I had the stuff to play on the team and his confidence in me got me started,' he continued. 'He took a personal interest in me and helped me plenty. He's one of the best handlers of youngsters I've ever seen and still coaches every sport except football at Curtis High.'
Majeski played on the Curtis varsity for three years. In his spare time he played second base for the Staten Island team in New York's popular Police Athletic League. Jack Daly, who handled semi-pro clubs in the neighborhood, got Majeski on the road to organized ball. He arranged a letter for Hank to take to Charlotte, N.C., in the Piedmont League.
The first fellow young Hank met at Charlotte was the late Herb Pennock, then in charge of the Red Sox minor league interests, Charlotte being a Sox farm club. The kid second sacker worked out for a few days, then was shipped to Eau Claire, Wis, of the Northern League, where he signed his first pro contract. Also breaking at Eau Claire that year, 1935, was Stan Spence.
The following year the Eau Claire option was dropped by the Red Sox and picked up by the Chicago Cubs, so Majeski went to Catalina Island for spring training in '37. Sent to Moline of the Three-I League, he had a good year and was sold to Birmingham. Indianapolis drafted him from the Barons at the end of the 1938 season and the Braves bought him a few days later.
Hank commuted between Boston and Newark during the next three years, being cut loose by the  Braves in '41. He was ready for another chance at fast company by '43 but entered the Coast Guard in January of that year. Out in November, '45, he went to spring training with the Yankees in '46, the Bears being a Yank farm. It was during that '46 campaign that he was sold to the Athletics.
Majeski still lives in Staten Island, but in the summer of '46 moved into a new home with his wife, Margaret. His chief off-season pastime is puttering around the house or sitting beside a new television set, following football, basketball or hockey games.
'I'm anchored beside that set most of the winter,' Hank said, grinning.
During the spring, summer and early fall, Connie Mack uses the anchor- to anchor Majeski at third base."

-Ed Rumill (Baseball Digest, July 1948)

NICK ETTEN

"Nick, who bats and throws left, started playing professional baseball in 1933. In 1944 when with the New York Yankees, he led the league in home runs and in 1945 led in runs batted in. He joined the Oaks in mid-season last year.

Born in Chicago in 1914 of German descent, Nick is 6' 2" and weighs 198 pounds. He likes to bowl, read and go to the movies."

-1948 Signal Gasoline Oakland Oaks

1948 Yankees of the Past: Lou Gehrig and Bill Dickey

LOU GEHRIG'S FOUR HOMERS

"The name Lou Gehrig will be found on virtually every All-Time All-Star baseball team and one of his outstanding feats of slugging was accomplished against the Philadelphia Athletics on June 3, 1932. For it was on that day in Shibe Park that Gehrig blasted four baseballs out of Shibe Park for a quartet of home runs- the first time that had been accomplished since 1896.

Three times Big George Earnshaw was the victim of Gehrig's dynamite-laden bat. In the seventh, Larrupin' Lou teed off on LeRoy Mahaffey to tie the score at 10-10 and make American League history. The Yankees finally won the game, 20-13, in as weird and free-hitting a ball game as ever was played in the American League."

-1948 Swell Sport Thrills No. 14

BILL DICKEY'S LAST HOME RUN

"The St. Louis Cardinals had drubbed the Yankees 4 games to 1 in the 1942 World Series. Now, in 1943, the two teams met again. The Series stood at 3 games to 1 in favor of the Yankees. Another victory would reverse last year's defeat. But big Mort Cooper, who had beaten the Yanks for the Cardinals' sole victory thus far, was pitted against them.

For five innings Cooper was locked in a scoreless pitching duel with Spud Chandler. Two were out in the Yankee sixth. Charlie Keller was on first when Bill Dickey came to bat. Cooper reared back and pitched a high, fast one. Dickey swung his bat around and timed it perfectly.

It was a home run- Bill Dickey's last major league home run- and it won a World Series for the Yankees."

-1948 Swell Sport Thrills No. 6

1947 Yankee Minor Leaguers of the Past: Al Glossop and Xavier Rescigno

AL GLOSSOP (Yankee Farmhand of the Past)

"Al is one of those rare modern birds- a 'turn around' or 'switch' hitter. He is the 'handy' man on the Angels roster.

Alban Glossop was born in Christopher, Illinois, July 23, 1915. He attended high school in Belleville, Illinois, where he starred in baseball, football and basketball.

Al bats left and right- one of the few modern switch-hitters- and throws right. He is a great utility player and pinch hitter. He was with Los Angeles last year where he hit .250 in 93 games.

His hobbies are hunting and fishing."

-1947 Signal Gasoline

XAVIER RESCIGNO (Yankee Prospect of the Past)

"His greatest baseball thrill was pitching and winning his first big league game and getting two hits. He is a graduate of Manhattan College (N.Y.) and has a B.A. degree. He is famous for his violent temper and his love of winning. His nickname 'X' is believed to be the shortest in baseball.

Xavier Frederick Rescigno was born in New York City, October 13, 1913, of Bohemian-Italian descent. He attended St. Ann's Academy, New York, N.Y., and graduated from Manhattan College, New York, N.Y. He holds a B.A. degree. X was captain of his baseball and basketball teams in high school and captain of his college baseball team.

His father is in the real estate business. Xavier's hobbies are golf, bowling and tennis. He was a member of Phi Rho Phi of Manhattan College."

-1947 Signal Gasoline

1947 Yankees of the Past: Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez

RED RUFFING
RUFF AND READY
"One day years ago the Yankees were playing at Comiskey Park and suddenly saw a sizeable lead melt away under a White Sox uprising. McCarthy began casting about for a relief hurler. He didn't have much success.
One kid had just pitched batting drill. Another had a bad arm. A third insisted he had a sore back.
Finally Joe spotted Charley Ruffing, whom he never used in relief, sitting back to one side. 'How do you feel, Red?' he barked. Ruffing recovered from his surprise, picked up a glove and replied, 'What difference does it make?' ... while preparing to start for the bullpen.
That was all McCarthy needed for a lecture. He rose majestically, struck a pose with finger pointing at Ruffing and began, 'There you are. All right, you rookies, there's a lesson for you.
'There's a man willing to go in, no matter how he feels. There's a big leaguer. Sore arms, sore backs ...' and Joe broke off right there for emphasis.
Did Ruffing go in? He did not! Joe motioned for him to sit down ... and took his choice from a quartet of sudden volunteers."

-John P. Carmichael in the Chicago Daily News (Baseball Digest, July 1947)


LEFTY  GOMEZ
MINOR OVERSIGHT
"Vernon (Lefty) Gomez, former pitching great for the Yankees, is managing the Yanks' Binghamton, NY club of the Eastern League.
One day last summer, Gomez' team went into the bottom of the ninth trailing by one run. When the first Binghamton batter singled, Gomez called in a pinch hitter for the pitcher and instructed him to sacrifice.
The batter tapped the first pitch directly to the pitcher who scooped up the ball, threw to second, forcing the runner. The man covering second whipped the ball to first, completing a double play. All this time, the hitter never left the batter's box. He was still standing at home plate when called out at first base.
Gomez yanked off his cap, pulled his hair and screamed, 'It's all my fault! It's all my fault!'
The base umpire, somewhat amazed, said, 'What do you mean it's your fault? It's that dumb batter's fault for not running out the bunt.'
'No, it's my fault,' moaned Gomez. 'I told the guy to bunt, but I forgot to tell him to run.'"

-George Barton in the Minneapolis Tribune (Baseball Digest, July 1947)

1947 Yankees of the Past: Joe Dugan and Lefty O'Doul

JOE DUGAN

DUGAN JUMPS BACK
"Through several seasons he used to run away from baseball, but now Jumpin' Joe Dugan is back in the game, manager of the Newburgh, N.Y., club in the Atlantic League.
Dugan came out of Holy Cross about a generation ago, going from the campus to third base in the Athletics' infield. One of the star college players of the era, he was also one of the best prospects in the majors.
As a player, Dugan was a greyhound in motion. Tall and lithe, he moved with sudden speed, pouncing on ground balls everywhere in the vicinity of third base.
His artistry as a fielder was never more vivid than in the World Series of 1927 when the Yankees took the Pirates in four games.
Dugan made a play in the series, which I have never forgotten, and which I always associate with his name.
The situation regarding how many, if any, were on base, the inning and the score I don't recall, but the bunt I remember was unexpected.
As the hitter choked the bat, Dugan leaped into action. It was a perfect bunt. The ball rolled close to the foul line, and obviously it would remain in fair territory.
At a full gallop, Dugan swooped and snatched the ball. At this point he was flying through the air, horizontally. Without looking and with a continuation of the same motion used in picking up the ball, he fired under his body and then sprawled in the dirt base path. The runner was out by a clear margin.
On a play like that, ball players say 'you do or you don't.' If there is only a slight deterrent the play is almost always missed.
Such deterrents can come from fear of missing the ball in the quick grab, or of missing the first baseman in the blind throw. There's no time for caution.
Dugan apparently never entertained thoughts of missing. If he did, he didn't seem to care. Occasionally, the ball did escape him or his throw was wide, but such misses never slowed his charge.
Chances are Dugan could see the first baseman as vividly as if looking at him. The location of the ball in relation to the foul line supplies the throwing angle.
It's good to recall an old-timer in one of his brightest moments."

-Ed Pollock, condensed from the Philadelphia Bulletin (Baseball Digest, November 1946)

LEFTY O'DOUL

O'DOUL- FRISCO'S PRIDE AND PAL

"Back in 1931 a political crisis was developing in Europe that would lead, eventually, to World War II and one day the late Arthur Brisbane set out on a column about a mugg named Adolf Hitler and told what a menace the Austrian with the toothbrush mustache might become. But two-thirds of the way down the page he broke off into what undoubtedly had been in the back of his mind all the time. It seems the day before he had seen a ball game and had come away with a lively impression of one of the players in the game, and wrote, in part:

'Anybody named Lefty O'Doul could not possibly be commonplace or fail to make his mark in some direction.'

That, mind you, was in 1931. It is too bad that Brisbane could not be around San Francisco today to see Lefty O'Doul, because his prophecy has come true. Lefty O'Doul is the biggest guy in the town. As manager of the Seals, he won the Pacific Coast League pennant. He owns a bar on Powell St. that bears his name and, with a partner, Al Krug, has a place on 'Nob Hill' called appropriately enough, 'On The Hill.' Everybody in the town knows him- cops, firemen, bootblacks, newsboys, politicians, millionaires, cab drivers, newspapermen, of course. Everybody. He can't possibly know them all but anybody giving him a big hello gets a big hello in return and when they tell you that he could be the mayor of San Francisco, if he wanted to, you know they are telling the truth.

Big and wide shouldered, darkly handsome and trim as he was when he was playing ball- and the best dressed guy in town- he is not only the most conspicuous figure on the streets but the most energetic, and when you trail him for a few hours you wonder how he holds the pace. You wonder, among other things, when the guy sleeps. The Seals play their games at night except on Saturdays and Sundays, but every night after the ball game you could find him at 'On The Hill' and you were likely, coming out of the St. Francis after an early breakfast, to find him bustling through the crowd at Powell and Geary Sts. or whirling past in his big gray car, returning a traffic cop's salute or yelling to a friend.

At midnight one night he was busy straightening out a fellow who had got himself into a jam. The fellow had been in jams before and was not the kind of fellow you would go out of your way to help if you were not Lefty O'Doul. 'Why do you bother about a guy like that?' somebody asked. 'Why,' he said, 'the guy is in trouble.'

The spirit of  San Francisco is all wrapped up in Lefty O'Doul, whose roots are deep in the hills that rise above the bay that leads to the Golden Gate. As far back as he knows, his family, on both sides, were San Franciscans and his father, who died at the age of forty-six, must have been very much like him, for all around the town you find people who remember him and talk about him with unrestrained admiration.

Lefty left California in 1919 to join the Yankees as a pitcher and for sixteen years he bounced back and forth between the Coast and the major leagues and he bounced in the major leagues, too. The Yankees- the Red Sox- Salt Lake City- San Francisco- the Phillies- the Giants- the Dodgers. A lame arm took him out of the pitcher's box and sent him to the outfield. He never was any great shakes as an outfielder but he could powder the ball, especially in the pinches, and one year he led the National League in batting.

In 1935, he went back to San Francisco to stay and took over the management of the Seals.

'I became a great manager that year,' he says. 'You see, I had a fellow named Joe DiMaggio on by ball club and by overpowering the rest of the league in the bat and in the field, he made me a great manager. Ever since then, I've been trying to live up to the reputation he established for me.'

He was talking about his beginning as a ball player.

'It's funny,' he said. 'It's funny how small things shape a guy's life. I was crazy about baseball as a kid, and, if you'll pardon me for saying so, I was the best pitcher in the grammar school league around here. Then, for three years, I didn't play ball at all. I was stuck on a girl and every Sunday, when I might have been pitching for a semipro team, I used to take her to picnics at Petaluma. Meanwhile, at my father's urging, I joined the Native Sons of the Golden West and they had a baseball league and every Sunday my father would go to the game but I was too much interested in picnicking at Petaluma to go with him.

'Well, one Sunday my girl went on an outing for the business college she was attending and, of course, I couldn't go, so I went with my father to a ball game. The pitcher for my father's team didn't show up and I was sitting in the bleachers and they asked me if I could pitch.

' 'Pitch, heck,' I said. 'I haven't played for three years.'

'But they insisted and I pitched and struck out a lot of guys and wound up with a shutout and now I was interested in baseball again. I quit going to Petaluma on Sundays and lost my girl but I won the Native Sons League championship for our team and, that Fall, was signed by the Yankees.'

Everything came out all right. Lefty met another girl and married her- and went to the big leagues."

-Frank Graham, condensed from the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, November 1946)

1946 Yankee of the Past: Tony Lazzeri

LAZZERI: PLAYER OF THE YEARS
"When the iceman cometh, it doesn't make a great deal of difference which route he takes, for the ultimate result is the same in any case. Nevertheless, there was something especially tragic in the way death came to Tony Lazzeri, finding him and leaving him all alone in a dark and silent house- a house which must, in that last moment, have seemed frighteningly silent to a man whose ears remembered the roar of a crowd the way Tony's did.
A man who knew the roar of a crowd? Shucks, Tony Lazzeri was the man who made the crowds and who made them roar. Frank Graham, in his absorbing history of the Yankees, tells about the coming of Lazzeri and about the crowds that trooped into the Stadium to see him, the noisy jubilant Italian-American crowds with their rallying cry of 'Poosh-'em up, Tony!'
'And now,' Frank wrote in effect, 'a new type of fan was coming to the stadium. A fan who didn't know where first base was. He came, and what he saw brought him back again and again until he not only knew where first base was, but second base as well.'
It was a shock to read, in the reports of Lazzeri's death, that he was not yet forty-two years old. There are at least a few right around that age still playing in the major leagues. One would have guessed Lazzeri's age a good deal higher because his name and fame are inextricably associated with an era which has already become a legend- the era that is always referred to as the time of 'the old Yankees.'
You can't think of Tony without thinking also of Babe Ruth and Bob Meusel and Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt and Lou Gehrig and Mark Koenig and Benny Bengough and Wilcy Moore, all of whom have been gone from the playing fields for what seems like a long time.
And you think of Grover Cleveland Alexander, too, for it was Lazzeri's misfortune that although he was as great a ball player as ever lived, the most vivid memory he left in most minds concerned the day he failed.
That was, of course, in the seventh game of the 1926 World Series when the Yankees filled the bases against the leading Cardinals, drove Jess Haines from the hill and sent Rogers Hornsby from his position at second base out towards the Cardinals' bullpen where Alexander drowsed in the dusk.
Everyone knows the story, how the St. Louis manager walked out to take a look at Alexander's eyes, how he found them as clear as could be expected and sent Old Pete to save the world championship by striking out Lazzeri. Come to think of it, Alex wasn't a lot younger at that time than Lazzeri was when he died.
It was after that game that someone asked Alexander how he felt when Lazzeri struck out.
'How did I feel?' he snorted. 'Go ask Lazzeri how he felt.'
Tony never told how he felt. Not that it was necessary, anyway, but he wasn't one to be telling much, ever. He was a rookie when a baseball writer first used a line that has been worn to tatters since. 'Interviewing that guy,' the reporter grumbled, 'is like mining coal with a nail file.'
Silent and unsmiling though he was, Lazzeri wasn't entirely devoid of a taste for dugout humor. Babe Ruth, dressing in haste after one tardy arrival in the stadium, tried to pull a shoe out of his locker and found it wouldn't move. He didn't have to be told who nailed it to the floor.
When other players found cigarette butts in their foot gear or discovered their shirts tied in water-soaked knots or were unable to locate their shoelaces, they blamed only one man.
Lefty Gomez tells of the day, long after Lazzeri's experience in the 1926 World Series, when he lost control and filled the bases. Lazzeri trotted in from second base to talk to him. Lazzeri always was the man who took charge when trouble threatened the Yankees. Even in his first season when he was a rookie who'd never seen a big league game until he played in one, he was the steadying influence, the balance wheel. So after this incident, Gomez was asked what words Lazzeri had used to reassure him in the clutch.
'He said,' replied Lefty, who didn't necessarily expect to be believed, ''You put those runners on there. Now get out of the jam yourself.''
They chose Lazzeri 'Player of the Year' after one of his closing seasons. They could just as well have made it 'Player of the Years,' for in all his time with the Yankees there was no one whose hitting and fielding and hustle and fire and brilliantly swift thinking meant more to any team.
Other clubs tried to profit by those qualities of his when he was through. He went to the Cubs and the Dodgers and the Giants. None of those experiences was particularly happy; none endured for long. He managed Toronto for a while and then just before the war he went home to San Francisco. That was the last stop."

-Red Smith, condensed from the New York Herald-Tribune (Baseball Digest, October 1946)