HOME RUN BAKER WAS ENTITLED
He Batted .367 In Six World Series
"Baseball was paying a tribute long overdue when, finally, it beckoned J. Franklin Baker into its Hall of Fame in Cooperstown a few weeks ago. It was a special committee, authorized to memorialize old-timers which crooked a finger in the direction of Trappe, Md., and advised that town's most distinguished citizen he was wanted.
They could have enshrined Frank Baker among Cooperstown's immortals more than a decade before when another committee was arbitrarily blanketing into the Hall of Fame some of the more important figures of baseball. Some who made it in that manner had claims that were pale compared to Baker's.
For four consecutive years, nobody hit as many home runs as Home Run Baker. You could add up his homers over that four-year span and still get a total of only 39, which is not impressive by latter-day standards; in fact, it wouldn't lead the league in any year. But conditions, of course, were different in Baker's time.
If it is startling to recall that Baker led the A.L. in homers with nine in 1911, and with a mere eight in 1914, it is well to recall also that he had no souped-up ball to swing at it, and like other hitters of his era often was a pigeon for the doctored deliveries like the shine ball, the spitter and the emery ball.
For four straight years, and he was playing in a league that also boasted such as Cobb and Speaker and Crawford, nobody could dethrone Baker as home run king. It is a bit intriguing to remember that last season Stan Musial accumulated five homers in one day (double-header), more than half of Baker's total for a season. Yet Baker in his time was more famed as a home run hitter than Musial in his.
Paradoxically, the young man from Maryland's Eastern Shore was labeled Home Run Baker not because he led the league in homers, but because of two very special home runs he hit in the World Series of 1911 against the Giants. He picked the National League's most famous pitchers to hit them against, Rube Marquard and Christy Mathewson, on consecutive days.
It was the setting of Baker's homers in a World Series atmosphere that won him the name Home Run Baker. Others had hit World Series homers before him, even as others before Patrick Henry had exclaimed 'Give me liberty or give me death.' But if Baker and Patrick Henry weren't doing it first, they were doing it best in the sense of timing, and wound up being identified with their specialties.
Home Run Baker was the cross the late Jack Dunn of the Baltimore Orioles bore during most of his career. Dunn, the great prospector for talent, who divined greatness in such youngsters as Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw, Joe Boley and Max Bishop, fluffed miserably the chance to sign a boy from the Eastern Shore name of J. Franklin Baker. A scout brought him in from Ridgley, Md., where he was pitching for a semipro team, and Dunn, unimpressed with the gawky country kid, sent him home.
That was in 1906, and three years later the boy whom Dunn had scorned was the regular third baseman of the Philadelphia Athletics, a .305 hitter, and soon to be a member of the famed '$100,000 infield.' Nobody else played third base for Connie Mack from the day Baker arrived in Philadelphia until Mr. Mack decided to sell off his stars at the end of the 1914 season.
Baker demonstrated that he was a rugged individualist when he refused to report to the Yankees, to whom Mack had sold him. He didn't like the idea of being sold by Philadelphia, didn't like the salary the Yankees offered him, and stayed out of organized ball for a full year during which he contented himself with playing semipro ball in Upland, Pa. In 1916, he changed his mind and reported to the Yanks.
Unlike such as Ralph Kiner, whose claims to the Hall of Fame begin and end with his home run hitting that led the National League for many years, Home Run Baker could advance other weighty reasons. When he quit the majors in 1922, he could show an average of .305 for his 15-year career, and he had stolen as many as 40 bases in a season.
His World Series record also was heavily in his favor as a candidate for Cooperstown. He played in six World Series that added up to 25 games, and had a Series batting average of .367.
Home Run Baker might have qualified for the Hall of Fame as a scout as well as a ball player. It was following his retirement that he noted the skill of a young farmer playing semipro ball in neighboring Sudlersville, Md. He took the young man by the hand, escorted him to Shibe Park and personally delivered Jimmie Foxx to Connie Mack with the suggestion, 'I think you'd better sign him, Mr. Mack. You won't find his likes anywhere else.' "
-Shirley Povich, condensed from the Washington Post and Times Herald (Baseball Digest, April 1955)
BAKER HOMERED WITH 52-OUNCER!
Used Bat Half Again As Heavy As Moderns
"All that the post village of Trappe, Md., rates in the U.S. Postal Gazetteer are three lines ending with the almost embarrassing fact that the population is 272.
It also states that there are four churches and a high school.
But future editors of the publication had better bear in mind another fact for inclusion in the context.
That is that in a large, comfortable, yellow house near the end of the main street- not Main St., just the main street- lives Trappe's most illustrious citizen. His home has been the chief point of interest in Trappe for the past few weeks, for the owner is John Franklin Baker, one of the 1955 additions to Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and Philadelphia's dynamic baseball hero.
It is almost incredible that a lad 17 years old could ever have been found in this charmingly remote spot of Maryland's Eastern Shore- a lad who now says at 68 that 'I dreamed of being a ball player even when I was ten years old working in the fields on my father's farm.
'I could see myself in a big league uniform,' he said. 'I dreamed of playing before big crowds. I dreamed of being a hero. But never, never, never did I dream that I would ever be in the Hall of Fame.'
This John Franklin Baker, who became famous as 'Home Run' Baker by winning two games in the 1911 World Series for the Athletics, has aged gracefully. His hair is gray and his hands show the scars and knots of baseball injuries that followed hard farm work.
But he has tastefully dressed in a brown suit, worn green wool socks and moccasin type brown shoes. He had a brown striped shirt and a brown wool tie upon which were embroidered dogs' heads.
The living room was typical of any well appointed room in which people of good humor lived. There were family portraits, etchings of wild ducks in flight, a collection of classic and modern books, a piano, an antique grandfather's clock and a fireplace that had known many roaring fires.
Baker sat back comfortably at the end of the sofa. 'Yes,' he said. 'My family has been in these parts for many years. My grandfather's great-grandfather came here to settle more than 200 years ago.
'Ours was a big family. Some of the early Bakers went to Virginia, others settled in Baltimore, one of my father's grandfathers went to Texas, but most of us have been around Maryland.
'Then there was my mother's family. Her name was Mary Catherine Fitzhugh. The Fitzhughs came from Virginia and were related to General Robert E. Lee. One strain is English on father's side and Scottish on mother's.'
'Were there any athletes among the Baker ancestors?'
'Let me tell you about my father,' the home run sensation of the early 1900's went on.
'He never saw a trick in the circus he couldn't perform. I saw him one day when he was in his 60's bend over and pick up a 120-pound sack of wheat in his teeth and lift it onto a table. When he was 68 he turned handsprings right out there in the street. He cartwheeled the length of the street in front of our house and finished off by landing on his feet in an upright position.'
'Maybe that's where the home run prowess came from,' it was suggested.
'I was pretty husky,' Frank allowed, 'but there was something else. When I swung at a ball I knew it was where I wanted it to be. I waited until the last split-second before I swung. I wasn't one of those fellows who was always 'way out in front of a ball.
'And I used a man's-sized bat. Up until I got too old to get around on good fast ball pitching I used a 52-ounce bat. Honest! You had to hit that ball fair and square and with some weight and power back of it to make it go over a fence.
'I won't take anything away from present-day players. They're fine boys and play good baseball. But the ball is different.
'Why you know I've swung with all my might at a good fast ball, hit it fair and square and was lucky if it bounced against the fence. I hit the fence in Shibe Park- it's not Connie Mack Stadium to Baker- 38 times in one year. Eddie Collins told me if I had been hitting the ball Babe Ruth hit, every one of them would have gone over the fence.
'One day when I was at the ball game I saw Joe DiMaggio, using a 35-ounce bat, take just an easy swing and hit the ball over the fence in right-center field.'
'Were you, a left-handed batter, ever taken out of a ball game because a left-handed pitcher worked?'
For a moment, Baker was non-plussed.
'Indeed I wasn't,' he said with some choler. 'And I never moved around in the batter's box because one was pitching. I always stood with my left foot against the back line of the batter's box. I didn't hit outside pitches to the opposite field very often unless Connie Mack told me to. I swung pretty much straight away.
'What left-hander would I get out of the game for? I hit against Rube Waddell and he was still mighty fast. I hit Vean Gregg, a really great curve ball pitcher. And Doc White with the White Sox. I hit that home in 1911 that beat the Giants in the World Series off Rube Marquard, another fine left-hander. Why I would have fought Connie Mack if he had tried to take me out because we had to bat against a southpaw.
'But we didn't play that kind of baseball, then. There were some pretty good pinch hitters and there were some really pert relief pitchers. But we started with nine men and usually ended the game with nine men.
'Just look at how Ed Walsh could pitch year in and year out and win 40 games a year. Same way with Cy Young. Do you know, I believe if those big strong fellows of those days had taken the proper rest the way the pitchers do today they'd still be pitching.
'There was Walsh with the White Sox; George Mullin and Bill Donovan with Detroit; Jim Bagby and Addie Joss at Cleveland; Walter Johnson at Washington; Carl Mays, Eddie Cicotte and that awful man with the emery ball- Russ Ford.'
Did he hit his first major league home run off any of those pitchers of legend?
'No, I didn't,' he said. 'My first home run in the majors was what they now call 'a grand slam.' It was in the opening game of the 1909 season in Boston. We got men on second and third and the Boston pitcher was a fellow by the name of Frank Arellanes. He walked Danny Murphy to get to me.
'When Murphy got down to first base, he said to Jake Stahl, 'That was a mistake walking me. That kid can hit the ball outta the park.'
'And on the first pitch to me, I hit it over the right field fence. When I got back to the bench Murphy said, 'Kid, you made Jake Stahl think I am the greatest prophet in baseball.' Then he told me what he had said.'
There are reams and reams of interesting recollections of the old A's in Baker's memory. How Doc Powers was his protecting guide; how he roomed with Stuffy McInnis; how Eddie Collins will always rate as the greatest of all second basemen in his mind even overshadowing Larry Lajoie; how he was almost scared to death as he took over third base from the great Jimmy Collins; how he was almost killed by a Walter Johnson pitch, and how Connie Mack wears more 'stars in his baseball crown than any man who ever lived.'
Ty Cobb, despite the famous spiking sprees, was never an enemy off the field; Eddie Plank was the finest left-hander he ever saw; Chief Bender, the 'dearest friend' anyone could ever have, and Christy Mathewson 'a wonderful pitcher and wonderful gentleman.'
Baker enjoyed chortling over a famous incident in the 1911 World Series. When Baker hit the home run off Marquard to win the second game, 3-1, Matty, writing a first-person narrative in a New York newspaper, took Rube to task for pitching Baker a high fast ball.
'Everyone knows Baker can't hit a low curve,' Matty pontificated.
'That's where I always got the laugh,' Frank recalled. 'It was the next day in New York Matty pitched against Jack Coombs. Matty had that wonderful fadeaway- the pitch they now throw a screwball. He got two strikes on me and instead of throwing the fadeaway he tried a low, outside curve ball. And I hit that one over the right field fence. The very pitch he said I couldn't hit and the pitch he thought Marquard should have thrown me.'
The day Baker received news of his election to the Hall of Fame was the happiest of his life, but the saddest was when he was sold to the Yankees.
'I've often thought of what Eddie Collins said when he was traded to the White Sox,' Baker recalled. 'Even though he became manager of the White Sox he said, 'They could take a lot of money off my contract if I could go back and play for Connie Mack.'
'And that's what I said when they told me I was being sent to New York.
' 'Just give me less money and let me play here,' was all I could think of saying.' "
-Frank Yuetter, Philadelphia Bulletin (Baseball Digest, May 1955)
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