5-G WAKEFIELD SPLITS BONUS PLAYERS
Phils, Still Undeterred, Shell Out
"On the same day the Philadelphia Phillies endowed a young Texan with $50,000 for signing a baseball contract, there was news of another bonus baby, the most famed of them all. Dick Wakefield's silver spoon has tarnished.
Wakefield commanded the sum of $52,000 and shiny new Cadillacs for himself and his Mom before he consented to sign with the Detroit Tigers back in 1941, when the value of the dollar had an honest ring. However, Owner C.A. Laws of the Oakland Pacific Coast League club has devalued Wakefield sharply.
In 1951, Wakefield will work for a $5,000 salary or he won't work with Oakland, Laws stated. Obviously he was not pleased with the performance of Wakefield last season, after the outfielder was waived out of the majors. He is offering Wakefield a wage that is the legal minimum for a major leaguer.
Thus Wakefield could tell young Ben Tompkins, the Phils' latest bonus baby, to get the dough in while the getting is good. It is nice to be born into the majors with money in the bank, because club owners can become disenchanted with bonus babes. A year ago, General Manager Billy Evans of Detroit declared his team was out of the bonus market.
It is no coincidence that the Phillies are the club which grabbed off young Tompkins despite the price tag. The Phillies are unimpressed by the Detroit's withdrawal from the bonus bidding, and with good reason. They built a pennant winner out of bonus babies last season.
The Phillies have had more luck with the bonus kids than all the other teams combined, perhaps because they go in more for that kind of talent-hunt, perhaps because their scouts are smarter operatives. But no fewer than five of Eddie Sawyer's pennant winning team- Pitchers Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts and Bob Miller, Outfielder Richie Ashburn and Catcher Stan Lopata- were bonus kids.
In the case of Tompkins, though, the Phillies were a brave outfit. They were undeterred by the fact the rugged twenty-year-old University of Texas junior is 1-A in the draft and the next uniform he will wear will be Uncle Sam's. Apparently they are willing to wait for something that resembles world peace, and take their chances.
Tompkins has one distinction, though. He's a shortstop-third baseman, one of the few young infielders to command any kind of a rich bonus figure. Usually, the big league teams are more willing to invest in pitchers.
The Tigers can flourish as much wealth, in fact more, under the responsive noses of the bonus kids than the Phillies, but if they are bonus-shy now it is understandable. Wakefield didn't pan out, and two years ago the Tigers gave a kid catcher named Frank House $75,000 for signing a contract.
They brought House up from the minors last year under the rule a bonus player can be farmed out for only one season, and it was early discerned he wasn't ready to catch in the big leagues. Manager Rolfe griped all season he was handicapped by being compelled to keep House on the roster when he preferred to make room for more helpful talent.
When the Tigers began to develop pennant possibilities last season, Rolfe declared flatly that 'House won't catch an inning as long as we are in the race.' Only when the Tigers dropped out of it, did he see action. It was a wasted year on the Detroit bench for the boy who should have been soaking up some more baseball in the minor leagues. The owners had that case in mind last December when they abrogated the rule limiting bonus kids to only one year in the minor leagues.
Wakefield's flop was a surprising one. The Tigers had come up with a rare piece of talent when they signed the fellow out of the University of Michigan ten years ago, every club that scouted him agreed. Even Clark Griffith was so impressed he telegraphed Wakefield a Washington offer of $45,000 as a bonus for signing.
Wakefield came along at a time when the Boston Red Sox, with their Ted Williams, were the envy of every other team. The facial and physical resemblance of Wakefield and Williams was startling, and the teams tumbled over themselves in the bidding before the Tigers landed the boy. He had speed, power, and everything to make good except the firm resolve to make good.
What happened is that Wakefield messed it up for himself. Whether it was his new and sudden affluence, or simply a built-in, don't'-care approach to the business of playing baseball, he never did capitalize on his natural talent. It took the Tigers nine years to give up on him, however. Because they couldn't kiss off their big investment right away, Wakefield was blessed with a nine-year tryout, one that left the Tigers weary of bonus babes."
-Shirley Povich, condensed from the Washington Post (Baseball Digest, April 1951)
Monday, November 13, 2017
Sunday, November 5, 2017
1951 Yankee Scout of the Past: Bill Essick
ESSICK: COAST'S STAR STAR-PICKER
He Had Faith in DiMag, Gomez
"Bill Essick, who scouted ball players for the Yankees in California for twenty-five years, has retired. Bill made a pretty good score over the years, coming up with, among others, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Crosetti, Joe Gordon, Vernon Gomez and, I believe, Tony Lazzeri.
Not many scouts could look back on a record like that. Paul Krichell, now and for many years chief of the Yankees' staff ... Dick Kinsella of the New York Giants and Larry Sutton of the Brooklyn Dodgers, both now dead ... discovered more players than Essick. Krichell's greatest find was Lou Gehrig. Kinsella, a paint store proprietor in Springfield, Ill, a friend of John McGraw's and practically the only scout the Giants had over a span of almost thirty years, started with Larry Doyle and wound up with Carl Hubbell. Sutton, lone prowler of the sticks for the Dodgers in the time of Charlie Ebbets, stocked Brooklyn with heroes, his most illustrious being Casey Stengel. But Krichell, Kinsella and Sutton roamed far and wide, while Essick confined his operation to the Pacific Coast League and that great proving ground of baseball players in San Francisco, Golden Gate Park.
Bill was one of the scouts engaged by Ed Barrow in the reorganization of the Yankees that followed Barrow's engagement as general manager of the club in 1920. Before that, Jake Ruppert and Cap Huston, the Yankee owners, had spent hundreds of thousands for players, many of them not worth the price paid for them. Barrow, by putting together a group of competent judges of talent in the raw, not only saved the club a tremendous amount of money but built the teams that won pennants and World Series and made the Yankees famous the world over.
Essick didn't discover DiMaggio. Everybody on the Coast did, at virtually the same time. Joe's terrific hitting and his matchless fielding made him a natural, so you didn't have to be a trained observer to say, on looking at him for the first time: 'Here is one who is destined for greatness.'
It was Bill's faith in Joe that paid off. In the summer of 1934, with a dozen major league clubs bidding for DiMaggio, the late Charlie Graham, who owned the San Francisco club, was sitting still and saying nothing. The bids started at $25,000. Now they were up to $75,000. Charlie was patient. He felt he could afford to be. If he held out long enough, he could get $100,000. Maybe more.
Then, one day when the Seals were playing at home, Joe took a cab to his sister's house after the game. The game had dragged and Joe was late for a dinner party and as the cab pulled up in front of the house, he leaped from it and his left knee popped.
'Like a pistol,' Joe was to say later.
The cab driver helped him into the house. An ambulance took him to a hospital. The major league club owners who had been bidding for him stopped bidding. Who wanted a young player with a trick knee?
Well ... Bill Essick did. Trick knee or no, this was a great ball player in the making. When Joe got out of the hospital, Bill trailed him into and out of every ball park in the Coast League.
One night he called Ed Barrow.
'Buy DiMaggio,' he said.
'How about that trick knee?' Ed asked.
'Listen,' Bill said. 'That's what I've been looking at for weeks. He can run. He can pivot at the plate. He can make the fast breaks in the outfield. He can even go down for a ball and come up with it and throw it. They all think I'm crazy out here but I'm not, they are. This kid is going to be one of the greatest ball players you ever saw. Believe me, Ed.'.
Ed believed him. He called Charlie Graham. The asking price was $40,000. Ed offered $20,000. They finally settled on $25,000. This was one of the greatest bargains in baseball history. Ed never has claimed credit for it. The credit, he said, belonged to Bill Essick.
That was, undoubtedly, Essick's greatest achievement as a Yankee scout. Next to it, I would take his recommendation of Lefty Gomez, then pitching for San Francisco.
Lefty was a skinny kid out of Rodeo, Cal., a town nobody ever heard of before and that nobody has heard of since. He was ... and still is ... roughly six feet tall. At the time the Yankees bought him he weighed ... but let him tell it: 'I was in the office and they had just told me I had been sold to the Yankees,' he said. 'I wandered into the secretary's office and I saw a wire he was going to release to the papers about my sale. It said I weighed 147 pounds. There was nobody else in the office. I scratched out the 147 and made it '167.' I didn't want anyone to think the Yankees were buying a ghost.' Actually, when Gomez showed up at the Stadium, Barrow was startled. He thought he had bought a ghost. When the season ended, he turned Lefty over to the club physician, who prescribed, among other things, three months on a milk farm, where Lefty could be fattened up. It was then that Lefty pulled one of his celebrated tricks.
'You come back to us in the spring weighing 180 pounds,' Barrow said, 'and you'll make old Yankee fans forget Jack Chesbro.'
'If I come back weighing 180 pounds,' Lefty said, 'I'll make them forget Gomez.'
He didn't. That is, he didn't come back weighing 180 pounds and, after what he did in the years that followed, they'll never forget Gomez. He never weighed more than 170 and he was great. But, remember, it was Essick who caught him at 147 ... and he was keen enough to know he would make the major league grade with something to spare. Bill couldn't foresee the milk farm. He just knew the guy was a big league pitcher."
-Frank Graham, condensed from the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, March 1951)
He Had Faith in DiMag, Gomez
"Bill Essick, who scouted ball players for the Yankees in California for twenty-five years, has retired. Bill made a pretty good score over the years, coming up with, among others, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Crosetti, Joe Gordon, Vernon Gomez and, I believe, Tony Lazzeri.
Not many scouts could look back on a record like that. Paul Krichell, now and for many years chief of the Yankees' staff ... Dick Kinsella of the New York Giants and Larry Sutton of the Brooklyn Dodgers, both now dead ... discovered more players than Essick. Krichell's greatest find was Lou Gehrig. Kinsella, a paint store proprietor in Springfield, Ill, a friend of John McGraw's and practically the only scout the Giants had over a span of almost thirty years, started with Larry Doyle and wound up with Carl Hubbell. Sutton, lone prowler of the sticks for the Dodgers in the time of Charlie Ebbets, stocked Brooklyn with heroes, his most illustrious being Casey Stengel. But Krichell, Kinsella and Sutton roamed far and wide, while Essick confined his operation to the Pacific Coast League and that great proving ground of baseball players in San Francisco, Golden Gate Park.
Bill was one of the scouts engaged by Ed Barrow in the reorganization of the Yankees that followed Barrow's engagement as general manager of the club in 1920. Before that, Jake Ruppert and Cap Huston, the Yankee owners, had spent hundreds of thousands for players, many of them not worth the price paid for them. Barrow, by putting together a group of competent judges of talent in the raw, not only saved the club a tremendous amount of money but built the teams that won pennants and World Series and made the Yankees famous the world over.
Essick didn't discover DiMaggio. Everybody on the Coast did, at virtually the same time. Joe's terrific hitting and his matchless fielding made him a natural, so you didn't have to be a trained observer to say, on looking at him for the first time: 'Here is one who is destined for greatness.'
It was Bill's faith in Joe that paid off. In the summer of 1934, with a dozen major league clubs bidding for DiMaggio, the late Charlie Graham, who owned the San Francisco club, was sitting still and saying nothing. The bids started at $25,000. Now they were up to $75,000. Charlie was patient. He felt he could afford to be. If he held out long enough, he could get $100,000. Maybe more.
Then, one day when the Seals were playing at home, Joe took a cab to his sister's house after the game. The game had dragged and Joe was late for a dinner party and as the cab pulled up in front of the house, he leaped from it and his left knee popped.
'Like a pistol,' Joe was to say later.
The cab driver helped him into the house. An ambulance took him to a hospital. The major league club owners who had been bidding for him stopped bidding. Who wanted a young player with a trick knee?
Well ... Bill Essick did. Trick knee or no, this was a great ball player in the making. When Joe got out of the hospital, Bill trailed him into and out of every ball park in the Coast League.
One night he called Ed Barrow.
'Buy DiMaggio,' he said.
'How about that trick knee?' Ed asked.
'Listen,' Bill said. 'That's what I've been looking at for weeks. He can run. He can pivot at the plate. He can make the fast breaks in the outfield. He can even go down for a ball and come up with it and throw it. They all think I'm crazy out here but I'm not, they are. This kid is going to be one of the greatest ball players you ever saw. Believe me, Ed.'.
Ed believed him. He called Charlie Graham. The asking price was $40,000. Ed offered $20,000. They finally settled on $25,000. This was one of the greatest bargains in baseball history. Ed never has claimed credit for it. The credit, he said, belonged to Bill Essick.
That was, undoubtedly, Essick's greatest achievement as a Yankee scout. Next to it, I would take his recommendation of Lefty Gomez, then pitching for San Francisco.
Lefty was a skinny kid out of Rodeo, Cal., a town nobody ever heard of before and that nobody has heard of since. He was ... and still is ... roughly six feet tall. At the time the Yankees bought him he weighed ... but let him tell it: 'I was in the office and they had just told me I had been sold to the Yankees,' he said. 'I wandered into the secretary's office and I saw a wire he was going to release to the papers about my sale. It said I weighed 147 pounds. There was nobody else in the office. I scratched out the 147 and made it '167.' I didn't want anyone to think the Yankees were buying a ghost.' Actually, when Gomez showed up at the Stadium, Barrow was startled. He thought he had bought a ghost. When the season ended, he turned Lefty over to the club physician, who prescribed, among other things, three months on a milk farm, where Lefty could be fattened up. It was then that Lefty pulled one of his celebrated tricks.
'You come back to us in the spring weighing 180 pounds,' Barrow said, 'and you'll make old Yankee fans forget Jack Chesbro.'
'If I come back weighing 180 pounds,' Lefty said, 'I'll make them forget Gomez.'
He didn't. That is, he didn't come back weighing 180 pounds and, after what he did in the years that followed, they'll never forget Gomez. He never weighed more than 170 and he was great. But, remember, it was Essick who caught him at 147 ... and he was keen enough to know he would make the major league grade with something to spare. Bill couldn't foresee the milk farm. He just knew the guy was a big league pitcher."
-Frank Graham, condensed from the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, March 1951)
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
1951 Yankee of the Past: Branch Rickey
CARPETBAGGER
"One day, when Branch Rickey was still doing business in St. Louis, a friend dropped in to the Cardinal offices and found him frantically rolling up the rug in his private suite.
'What's the idea?' the visitor gasped. 'You the janitor around here, too?'
'Judas Priest,' Branch panted, 'give me a hand. I just got word from Mrs. Rickey that she's coming home tonight, and if I don't get this rug of hers home and back on the parlor floor, I'm in trouble.'
Rickey was entertaining a business acquaintance with whom he wanted to do business. To impress him how lush affairs were with the Cards (they weren't at the time) he had borrowed one of Mrs. Rickey's Orientals and laid it in his office."
-Chester L. Smith in the Pittsburgh Press (Baseball Digest, February 1951)
THE WHY OF THE MAHATMA
"How Branch Rickey got the name Mahatma is a good story because it reveals so much about the complex character of an amazing man who has been as contradictory as any to labor in baseball's vineyards.
Tom Meany, the magazine writer, was telling how Branch got the nickname at Rickey's good-bye party for the New York scribes. Meany had been reading John Gunther's Inside Asia and in his first sentence on Mohandas Gandhi, Gunther had written of Gandhi as 'an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father.'
The evangelical opportunistic pattern of Rickey's ways was new to Flatbush then, but Branch had already revealed at least three sides of his many-sided self. Meany could not help but note what he had seen of Rickey was part paternal, part political, part pontifical. And so to Meany, and subsequently to all of baseball, Branch became the Mahatma.
No doubt Rickey likes the name because if he could be pressed to put into two words what he prefers to put into two hundred he might describe himself as a practical idealist."
-Milton Gross in the New York Post (Baseball Digest, March 1951)
BING MEETS THE MAHATMA
"Bing Crosby tells this tale of his first meeting with Branch Rickey, the new general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a club in which Bing owns stock and is vice-president. 'I had a golf date at Oakmont (the famous course just outside Pittsburgh),' he recites, 'but Roy Hamey (former Pirate G.M.) says to me, 'Bing, you've gotta meet this Rickey (then of Brooklyn). He's fabulous.' So I went. The meeting was to start at 11 A.M. My golf date was scheduled for 2 P.M.
'I think they were to talk about trading Johnny Hopp, but in the two hours I was there, we didn't get around to Hopp. Rickey told us how rough the plane trip had been from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh; how he had a boy named Marv Rackley who would be a marvelous catch for somebody; how his farm system had him worried. Then he went into a dissertation on pitcher Rex Barney, who had broken training. 'I loved that boy more than my own,' Rickey lamented, and then he turned to his own son who was seated alongside. Looking over his spectacles, he apologized, 'Excuse me, my boy.'
'So it went on, all of us charmed and delighted by this magnetic man. Then I looked at my watch. I got up to go. It was almost two o'clock. 'Where are you going?' Rickey demanded. I said I was on my way to play golf. He harumphed. 'Golf,' he snorted, and then he harumphed again.
'I said I'd send up a string orchestra on my way out.'
Later, Bing continued, when Rickey joined Pittsburgh, he called the crooner to assure Bing the Pirates would be in the first division within four years and would win the pennant within five.
'Don't worry about a thing,' Rickey consoled. 'I'll take care of the ball club- you just keep on with your singing.'"
-Art Rosenbaum in the San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, April 1951)
"Branch Rickey of the Pirates stirs up tales by the bushelful but suppose we pass on one concerning Irv Noren, the outfielder who is embarking on his critical sophomore year with the Washington Senators.
When The Mahatma ran into a buyer's market fifteen months ago with surplus Brooklyn-owned talent to sell, he tried to peddle Noren to the Chicago White Sox. It was no soap, whereupon Rickey commented:
'If you're not sold you shouldn't take Noren. And incidentally, I'm glad you're not. I intend to sell Noren to the one major league club owner who has never purchased a player from me.'
'And,' the Messrs. Chuck Comiskey and Frank Lane wondered, 'who might that be?'
'I'll tell you if you don't reveal his name until the deal is consummated,' the wise man replied. 'Clark Griffith.'
And up to that moment he hadn't even broached the subject to the Senators' owner."
-Rube Samuelsen in the San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
"One day, when Branch Rickey was still doing business in St. Louis, a friend dropped in to the Cardinal offices and found him frantically rolling up the rug in his private suite.
'What's the idea?' the visitor gasped. 'You the janitor around here, too?'
'Judas Priest,' Branch panted, 'give me a hand. I just got word from Mrs. Rickey that she's coming home tonight, and if I don't get this rug of hers home and back on the parlor floor, I'm in trouble.'
Rickey was entertaining a business acquaintance with whom he wanted to do business. To impress him how lush affairs were with the Cards (they weren't at the time) he had borrowed one of Mrs. Rickey's Orientals and laid it in his office."
-Chester L. Smith in the Pittsburgh Press (Baseball Digest, February 1951)
THE WHY OF THE MAHATMA
"How Branch Rickey got the name Mahatma is a good story because it reveals so much about the complex character of an amazing man who has been as contradictory as any to labor in baseball's vineyards.
Tom Meany, the magazine writer, was telling how Branch got the nickname at Rickey's good-bye party for the New York scribes. Meany had been reading John Gunther's Inside Asia and in his first sentence on Mohandas Gandhi, Gunther had written of Gandhi as 'an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father.'
The evangelical opportunistic pattern of Rickey's ways was new to Flatbush then, but Branch had already revealed at least three sides of his many-sided self. Meany could not help but note what he had seen of Rickey was part paternal, part political, part pontifical. And so to Meany, and subsequently to all of baseball, Branch became the Mahatma.
No doubt Rickey likes the name because if he could be pressed to put into two words what he prefers to put into two hundred he might describe himself as a practical idealist."
-Milton Gross in the New York Post (Baseball Digest, March 1951)
BING MEETS THE MAHATMA
"Bing Crosby tells this tale of his first meeting with Branch Rickey, the new general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a club in which Bing owns stock and is vice-president. 'I had a golf date at Oakmont (the famous course just outside Pittsburgh),' he recites, 'but Roy Hamey (former Pirate G.M.) says to me, 'Bing, you've gotta meet this Rickey (then of Brooklyn). He's fabulous.' So I went. The meeting was to start at 11 A.M. My golf date was scheduled for 2 P.M.
'I think they were to talk about trading Johnny Hopp, but in the two hours I was there, we didn't get around to Hopp. Rickey told us how rough the plane trip had been from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh; how he had a boy named Marv Rackley who would be a marvelous catch for somebody; how his farm system had him worried. Then he went into a dissertation on pitcher Rex Barney, who had broken training. 'I loved that boy more than my own,' Rickey lamented, and then he turned to his own son who was seated alongside. Looking over his spectacles, he apologized, 'Excuse me, my boy.'
'So it went on, all of us charmed and delighted by this magnetic man. Then I looked at my watch. I got up to go. It was almost two o'clock. 'Where are you going?' Rickey demanded. I said I was on my way to play golf. He harumphed. 'Golf,' he snorted, and then he harumphed again.
'I said I'd send up a string orchestra on my way out.'
Later, Bing continued, when Rickey joined Pittsburgh, he called the crooner to assure Bing the Pirates would be in the first division within four years and would win the pennant within five.
'Don't worry about a thing,' Rickey consoled. 'I'll take care of the ball club- you just keep on with your singing.'"
-Art Rosenbaum in the San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, April 1951)
"Branch Rickey of the Pirates stirs up tales by the bushelful but suppose we pass on one concerning Irv Noren, the outfielder who is embarking on his critical sophomore year with the Washington Senators.
When The Mahatma ran into a buyer's market fifteen months ago with surplus Brooklyn-owned talent to sell, he tried to peddle Noren to the Chicago White Sox. It was no soap, whereupon Rickey commented:
'If you're not sold you shouldn't take Noren. And incidentally, I'm glad you're not. I intend to sell Noren to the one major league club owner who has never purchased a player from me.'
'And,' the Messrs. Chuck Comiskey and Frank Lane wondered, 'who might that be?'
'I'll tell you if you don't reveal his name until the deal is consummated,' the wise man replied. 'Clark Griffith.'
And up to that moment he hadn't even broached the subject to the Senators' owner."
-Rube Samuelsen in the San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
Monday, October 23, 2017
1951 Yankee of the Past: Johnny Lindell
"Johnny Lindell, the big ex-New York Yankee outfielder, who is being tried as a pitcher this year by Hollywood, says, 'I haven't pitched regularly since 1942, so I guess you can call me a thrower with eight years' rest."
-Emmett Watson in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
-Emmett Watson in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
1951 Yankee of the Past: Gabby Street
FOULED OUT OF THE BOX
"In 1936 while managing the St. Paul Saints, the late Gabby Street made one of the oddest 'strategic' moves in organized baseball. Carl Fischer, an eccentric left-hander, was pitching for St. Paul. The Milwaukee Brewers had scored a few runs in the first inning and had runners on first and second. Eddie Hope, the light hitting Brewer infielder, lined a foul ball to left. Street rushed from the dugout, called time and walked to the mound. He asked Fischer for the ball and then called in a relief pitcher.
'I guess this is the first time in history a pitcher was yanked after a batter hit a foul ball,' Street explained later. 'But when a hitter like Hope can hit such a loud foul I was convinced Fischer didn't have a thing. So, I took him out.'"
-Sam Levy in the Milwaukee Journal (Baseball Digest, April 1951)
"In 1936 while managing the St. Paul Saints, the late Gabby Street made one of the oddest 'strategic' moves in organized baseball. Carl Fischer, an eccentric left-hander, was pitching for St. Paul. The Milwaukee Brewers had scored a few runs in the first inning and had runners on first and second. Eddie Hope, the light hitting Brewer infielder, lined a foul ball to left. Street rushed from the dugout, called time and walked to the mound. He asked Fischer for the ball and then called in a relief pitcher.
'I guess this is the first time in history a pitcher was yanked after a batter hit a foul ball,' Street explained later. 'But when a hitter like Hope can hit such a loud foul I was convinced Fischer didn't have a thing. So, I took him out.'"
-Sam Levy in the Milwaukee Journal (Baseball Digest, April 1951)
Sunday, October 8, 2017
1951 Yankee of the Past: Billy Werber
PREMIUMS ON A SLIDING SCALE
"They tell a story about how Billy Werber played third base and peddled insurance at the same time.
One day, it's said, Rick Ferrell slid into third and Weber tagged him out. As they untangled in a cloud of dust, Bill starting talking to Rick, telling him he was getting pretty well along in years and that he might break a leg sliding into the bag someday.
He told Rick he needed insurance and made an appointment for after the game. Bill sold Rick- and good."
-Baseball Digest (February 1951)
"They tell a story about how Billy Werber played third base and peddled insurance at the same time.
One day, it's said, Rick Ferrell slid into third and Weber tagged him out. As they untangled in a cloud of dust, Bill starting talking to Rick, telling him he was getting pretty well along in years and that he might break a leg sliding into the bag someday.
He told Rick he needed insurance and made an appointment for after the game. Bill sold Rick- and good."
-Baseball Digest (February 1951)
Monday, October 2, 2017
1951 Yankee of the Past: Lou Gehrig
THE HOME RUN THAT WAS HIT THREE TIMES
"I don't recall the exact date, but I'll never forget the incident. It occurred in New York's Yankee Stadium more than 15 years ago.
The quiet, mild-mannered, immortal Lou Gehrig stepped into the batter's box and promptly larruped the first pitch down the right field foul line into the stands for an apparent home run. He was already nearing second when the plate umpire called him back, ruling the ball had been foul by inches.
Lou accepted the decision and ambled back to the plate for another try. The crowd, however, let the umpire know what it thought with some especially vigorous booing.
Gehrig then smashed another drive on precisely the same line, yet even further up into the right field stands. The crowd leaped to its feet and cheered the Yankees' great first baseman as he again started to circle the bases. But again the plate umpire ruled it a foul- by inches.
The patient Lou finally lost his temper and proceeded to 'beef' vehemently to the arbiter. Unable to get him to change his decision, Gehrig angrily took his stance once more in the batter's box and belted the next pitch for a sizzling line-drive home run which carried well over 400 feet.
The fans in that particular vicinity of the right-center field bleachers ducked out of the way of the murderously driven ball as it landed among them like a shot. It would have been foolhardy for any fan to have tried to spear it. If the ball had had as much lift as it had straight away power, it would have gone out of the Yankee Stadium entirely.
There was no question about this being a home run. It was one the hardest, most vicious homers ever hit anywhere, even though its abrupt collision with the right-center field bleacher seats prevented it from becoming one of the longest home runs in the history of baseball.
Lou Gehrig, still standing in the batter's box, turned to the plate umpire and pointed out toward the distant spot where the ball had scorched out of view and asked the umpire if he thought this last drive was a questionable home run, too.
The umpire smiled and gave Lou a friendly go-ahead slap on the shoulder. This caused the flushed Gehrig to snap back to his usual good-natured self and brought a sheepish grin to his face.
This time there were tumultuous cheers as Lou Gehrig triumphantly completed his circling of the bases- on a home run he had hit three times."
-Jack Nugent (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
GEHRIG'S ANALYSIS OF SLUMPS
"Hitters never accept slumps as a part of their business, not recognizing that if they never had a slump, they would hit .500 at least. Nor do they ever credit the enemy pitchers for getting them down. They blame their slumps on themselves.
'You have to,' Lou Gehrig once explained. 'What are you going to do- admit to yourself that the pitchers have you on the point of surrender? You can't do that. You must make yourself think that the pitchers are just as good as they have always been- or just as bad. So, if you are not hitting, the fault is yours. Having admitted that, what do you do? You ask everybody on the ball club: 'What am I doing up there that I shouldn't do?'
'You'd be surprised at the answers. One fellow tells you this ... another tells you that ... somebody else tells you something else. You've changed your stance. Your feet are too close together ... or too far apart. You're swinging too soon ... or too late. You take all the advice you hear ... and what happens? You're lucky you don't get hit in the head. Then, one day, you start to hit and you know that all the time it was your fault and the pitchers had nothing to do with it.'"
-Frank Graham in the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
"I don't recall the exact date, but I'll never forget the incident. It occurred in New York's Yankee Stadium more than 15 years ago.
The quiet, mild-mannered, immortal Lou Gehrig stepped into the batter's box and promptly larruped the first pitch down the right field foul line into the stands for an apparent home run. He was already nearing second when the plate umpire called him back, ruling the ball had been foul by inches.
Lou accepted the decision and ambled back to the plate for another try. The crowd, however, let the umpire know what it thought with some especially vigorous booing.
Gehrig then smashed another drive on precisely the same line, yet even further up into the right field stands. The crowd leaped to its feet and cheered the Yankees' great first baseman as he again started to circle the bases. But again the plate umpire ruled it a foul- by inches.
The patient Lou finally lost his temper and proceeded to 'beef' vehemently to the arbiter. Unable to get him to change his decision, Gehrig angrily took his stance once more in the batter's box and belted the next pitch for a sizzling line-drive home run which carried well over 400 feet.
The fans in that particular vicinity of the right-center field bleachers ducked out of the way of the murderously driven ball as it landed among them like a shot. It would have been foolhardy for any fan to have tried to spear it. If the ball had had as much lift as it had straight away power, it would have gone out of the Yankee Stadium entirely.
There was no question about this being a home run. It was one the hardest, most vicious homers ever hit anywhere, even though its abrupt collision with the right-center field bleacher seats prevented it from becoming one of the longest home runs in the history of baseball.
Lou Gehrig, still standing in the batter's box, turned to the plate umpire and pointed out toward the distant spot where the ball had scorched out of view and asked the umpire if he thought this last drive was a questionable home run, too.
The umpire smiled and gave Lou a friendly go-ahead slap on the shoulder. This caused the flushed Gehrig to snap back to his usual good-natured self and brought a sheepish grin to his face.
This time there were tumultuous cheers as Lou Gehrig triumphantly completed his circling of the bases- on a home run he had hit three times."
-Jack Nugent (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
GEHRIG'S ANALYSIS OF SLUMPS
"Hitters never accept slumps as a part of their business, not recognizing that if they never had a slump, they would hit .500 at least. Nor do they ever credit the enemy pitchers for getting them down. They blame their slumps on themselves.
'You have to,' Lou Gehrig once explained. 'What are you going to do- admit to yourself that the pitchers have you on the point of surrender? You can't do that. You must make yourself think that the pitchers are just as good as they have always been- or just as bad. So, if you are not hitting, the fault is yours. Having admitted that, what do you do? You ask everybody on the ball club: 'What am I doing up there that I shouldn't do?'
'You'd be surprised at the answers. One fellow tells you this ... another tells you that ... somebody else tells you something else. You've changed your stance. Your feet are too close together ... or too far apart. You're swinging too soon ... or too late. You take all the advice you hear ... and what happens? You're lucky you don't get hit in the head. Then, one day, you start to hit and you know that all the time it was your fault and the pitchers had nothing to do with it.'"
-Frank Graham in the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
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