Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

This week on Clear the Field, Ted and I did a show I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. With Halloween coming up, it felt like the right moment to revisit the eerie (and unexpectedly heartwarming) tale of Billy Earle, a catcher from baseball’s early years who became the living embodiment of bad luck among his superstitious colleagues.

I’m really proud of this episode, and Ted did some fantastic voice work bringing Billy’s words to life. The guy was a master storyteller and he had some stories to tell. I hope you’ll check out the show and I know you’ll enjoy it, especially if you’ve joined the Project 3.18 community in the two years since I first stumbled onto this story. The show is here on Substack, on YouTube, and if you prefer to listen, you can do that wherever you get your podcasts!

Earle got swept up in the irrational fears of his teammates and essentially spent his career on the run from their prejudices, so we talk a fair amount about superstition in the episode. Afterward, I wondered how all these adults convinced themselves that a hard-nosed catcher was actually a walking jinx. I started surveying my own rational experiences looking for superstitious beliefs, and that got me thinking about my grandmother.

Dorothy Hudson wasn’t the most expressive person, but one of the ways she cared was with cars. She worked at the local Department of Motor Vehicles and she took her cars seriously; it seemed like she upgraded every year or two, and instead of trading cars in, she liked to find them a good home in the family. And if she didn’t have what you needed, she’d accompany you to the local dealership and those salespeople better look out.

My grandmother stopped driving when I was in my early 20s. She’d held out as long as she could (and probably a little longer than she should have, but no harm done). Around that time, I found myself needing a car. Her last vehicle was a large, barely used hardtop sedan, the Cadillac of Toyotas. It wasn’t necessarily to my taste, but it had a V6 engine and it was available for a generous family discount.

The car came with a passenger. A small stuffed dog, a black and white Pound Puppy, if that rings any bells. Eighties kids will remember the brand, but my grandmother, a Thirties kid, liked them enough to have a few around the house and one in her car. I don’t think I ever talked to her about it, but when the car came to me, I decided to keep the dog in a cup holder or on the dashboard as a little Easter egg in her honor. It’s still there.

The dog’s black spots are turning brown and its red ribbon collar is now orange, but in the 20 years and four cars that we’ve been together, I have never caused or been involved in a car accident requiring repairs and my cars have never had a mechanical malfunction in a dangerous situation—not even a flat tire on a busy road. Now, you might suggest that my success is the result of a defensive driver buying reliable cars and springing for the recommended maintenance even when it seems scammy, but—hear me out—what if it’s the dog?

In 2010, my wife and I bought a new, smaller car, better suited for Chicago streets. Dorothy’s sedan, still in excellent condition, went to my parents, but the dog stayed with me. Just a few months later, my parents parked the sedan on the street across from my apartment in Chicago and while they were elsewhere, somebody hit it, totaled it, and drove away. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s the dog.

I don’t believe in ghosts, psychics, or astrology. I don’t worry about black cats or Friday the 13th, but you better believe that every time we get a new car, the first thing I do is move Dorothy’s stuffed dog into the proper place. No dog, no go.1

My confidence in that dog is an example of what psychologists call “magical thinking.” Even the most sober-minded of us have a stray magical thought or two, and athletes are more likely to have whole magical brainstorms. Studies have consistently shown that baseball players are the most superstitious athletes. The going theory is that baseball players look for professional help not just because baseball is difficult—all sports are difficult at the highest levels—it’s because baseball is so random.

Despite being the best at what they do, baseball players have remarkably little control over their fate compared to many of their peers. The best hitters make outs more than two-thirds of the time, sometimes based on the whims of an umpire’s fallible judgement. A pitcher throws a statistically perfect breaking pitch but a hitter throwing his bat at it manages to dump it steps in front of an outfield defender. More than one baseball statistic essentially aims to quantify a batter’s luck. We all know baseball is confounding because we say, “That’s baseball,” whenever it confounds. Since professional baseball’s earliest days, this capricious game has sent even the best players looking for help anywhere they can get it.

An 1897 article did a great job describing the precarious life of a professional ballplayer: “He is one day a hero, the next day a back number, and his work is like no other class, profession or trade. He is a wise, polished, shrewd, suspicious, and cunning fellow.” In his business, “his nearest friends are also his dearest enemies.”

Modern psychologists reading that description would see the perfect conditions for magical thinking, and sure enough, a 1905 article said, “Professional baseball players develop eccentricities more rapidly and violently than any other class of people in the world, possibly excepting school teachers.”

School teachers?

According to period accounts, baseball’s culture was maturing at the beginning of the 20th century, with an “intellectual” class of players replacing the “bummers and thugs” of the Pioneer Era. Many of those frat-boy teams of the late-1800s teams had embraced a “mascot” for luck, usually an individual whose race and/or physical attributes would have made them an outsider or an undesirable, except that the players had decided that good things happened when they were around. Mascots were invited to travel with the team, with the players paying their way—as long as the individual’s “luck” held. This era of “mascotry” was dying out by the early 20th century and social commentators at the time said, “Good riddance.” When social commentators from the 1900s thought a practice was too racist, you know it had to be really bad.

Not every mascot was an exploited person, however. In some cases the mascot was the one doing the exploiting. In 1906, the Detroit Tigers were in Philadelphia when a man “who looked like a tramp but talked like he’d seen better days” came to the team hotel, asking for the team manager, Bill Armour, who was extremely superstitious (i.e. an easy mark). The visitor said he was a good-luck mascot and offered his services. Detroit was stuck in a losing streak at the time so Armour let the guy join the team for the day. Call it an audition.

The Tigers won convincingly and the new mascot was invited back to Detroit. When the team won eight straight games, they bought the man a nice set of clothes and started bringing him on road trips (they would hide him from train conductors to avoid paying for another ticket). Such was the mascot’s prestige that two of the players had to share a bed on the team’s sleeper train car so he could have one all to himself.

Another Armour ritual had to do with the broom the umpires used to sweep off home plate. The broom was typically tossed to the left side of the batter’s box when not in use, but Armour insisted it be kept to the right. The umpires didn’t care, so they tried to oblige him, but the players eventually worked out what was happening and realized this was an opportunity to torment a manager and the officials in one go. Batters kicked the broom to the left side, requiring Armour to stop the game and request it be repositioned. On one occasion a fed-up umpire threatened to eject a group of New York Highlanders players if they didn’t stop moving the broom.

Another of Armour’s quirks made him something of a human scoreboard. He always managed in street clothes: a suit, jacket, and hat, usually a bowler or a straw hat with a flat brim. When the Tigers were winning, the hat was pushed back on his head, but in a close game, the hat was parallel to the ground. And if the Tigers were losing, Armour pushed his hat so far forward it was hard to see out from under it. Maybe that was the point.

One superstition from this era has been entirely lost in modern times, but it used to be a Big Deal. For a large population of turn-of-the-century baseball players, barrels were one of the most powerful omens. “No baseball player dares to side-step the salute that the wagon-load of empty barrels demands of him, if he would be on an even keel with Lady Fortune.” I found a dozen quotes like this.

Consider this scene from Cleveland’s Euclid Hotel lobby in the summer of 1905. The visiting Washington Nationals were killing time, watching the action on the street through the hotel’s large plate-glass windows. In this period, Cleveland had a large barrel-making industry, and wagons loaded with new-made barrels rattled past the hotel at regular intervals, keeping the players on their toes.

The first player to spot a cart of barrels gave a signal: “Kegs! All hands up!” Each man was required to stand and lift his hat off his head. On this particular afternoon 14 carts of barrels passed by the hotel and the hats went up and down 14 times “as if moved by one lever.”

During one of these salutations, the trainer was apparently preoccupied petting the team dog (!) and failed to rise. The players glared at him and shouted, “Kegs, you goat-rubbing salve-hand!”2 The trainer scrambled to his feet and lifted his hat.

On the same afternoon, two cartloads of hay passed the hotel, and the older players recognized these haycarts as omens of success, which they acknowledged with a “sly-dog wink” and several blown kisses. Even the writer who documented this tradition said he had no idea where baseball players came up with this stuff.

An 1897 report said encountering hay on the way to the ballpark was such a powerful omen that players were liable to jump off their carriages and steal some, sticking the straw in their hair and caps to maximize their good luck.

Encountering empty barrels on the way to work was also good news. The turn-of-the-century New York Giants were known to tip carriage drivers whose route took the team past barrel trucks on game days, but there were conditions. The barrels had to be empty and the barrels had to be going the same direction—anything else was a sure jinx.

How did barrels acquire such supernatural properties, and when did they lose their power over professional ballplayers? Questions for future research, perhaps, but if any of you are scholars of 19th century coopering, now is your moment to shine in the comments.

A few more favorites:

Open umbrellas in a clubhouse were a no-no.

Bringing one in, even on rainy days, “would draw a cry of horror from the ball-tossers which would freeze the blood in a person’s veins.”

“More good luck for us, boys.”

Encountering a funeral on the way to a game was generally regarded as lucky, but crossing in front of or through a funeral procession was taboo.

Keep it rolling.

When a team was winning, the team bus or carriages were expected to take the same route to the park every day. Unless, presumably, it was necessary to divert to avoid a funeral.

Socks were a sacred commitment.

• If a player accidentally put his socks on wrong-side out, he had to wear them like that all day. “No amount of persuasion could induce a player to fix them, as that is bad luck.”

• In an ironic twist, red socks were apparently considered very bad luck in some circles. A Washington Nationals player named Case Patten didn’t get the memo and bought six pairs of bright red silk stockings during a road trip. He proudly showed them off to the players congregating in the hotel lobby, but drew cries of dismay and complaints that red socks were sure to “crab the whole trip.” A teammate forcibly escorted Patten back to his room to change. He later exchanged the red socks for a set of green ones “the same shade as tree toads.” Tree toads, we must conclude, were lucky.

“Last night I dreamed I was playing first base in my underwear and you were there pitching, so go warm up.”

Adrian “Cap” Anson, the longtime player-manager of the Chicago White Stockings, denied being a superstitious man, but as a manager he freely admitted to making pitching assignments based on omens from his dreams. “When a pitcher is unexpectedly called on to work, it is a sure sign that Anson has been dreaming.”

Lunch was the most prophetic meal of the day.

• As professionals who earned their money in the afternoons, players started getting twitchy around midday. A pitcher named Danny Friend was famous for a belief that anyone ordering sour food at his lunch table meant he was going to lose the game. When his teammates uncovered this concern, they loaded up on pickles, to the extent that Friend was compelled to sit and eat alone to avoid the jinx.

• Second baseman Cupid Childs believed that if his waiter spontaneously wished him luck, he would play a great game. These lucky servers received a generous tip, but another player tipped off the staff, and Childs got so many well-wishes he nearly went broke.

Players tried to keep their magic thoughts a secret because once they became public knowledge, it was open season. Centerfielder Roy Thomas, a player otherwise described as “quiet and sensible,” had to walk up to the plate via a route that took him behind the back of the umpire. One day a rascally umpire named Tim Hurst retreated all the way up to the wall of the stands behind home plate as Thomas approached, just to see what he’d do. Thomas briefly froze, but he realized Hurst was poised to mock him ruthlessly if he said anything. He dragged himself to the plate and struck out with his dignity intact.

In the 1890s and 1900s, the field of psychology was still coming together. Mental health was mostly ignored up to a certain point and after that point people were whisked away to asylums, where more than one obsessive-compulsive Victorian ballplayer ended up. But even in this pre-DSM era, there was plenty of reflection on just what made ballplayers so quirky:

Superstitions are a tool for stabilizing an inherently unsteady world. No batter has ever worn a lucky undershirt in the hopes that it will make them a .500 hitter; they wear it to hit what is most optimally “normal” for them. In that sense, magic thoughts are often practical, merely a means of achieving one’s self-identified potential.

Our society has become less superstitious over time, but baseball has always stayed closer to the past. Modern baseball continues to be a deeply uncertain game where supernatural forces have plenty of room to maneuver. A former team psychologist for the Baltimore Orioles named Jim McGee observed that baseball players five generations apart still had a great deal in common, especially in their day-to-day anxieties. To cope, players “still do things in 1990 that they did in 1890.” And that observation got me thinking. Did they, really? How different were baseball superstitions a century apart?

Let’s find out.

Next week, we’ll follow McGee’s prompt and explore some of the magical baseball thoughts of the 1990s and 2000s. I’m going to predict barrels didn’t have staying power, but sock stuff probably hung around.

I’d love to see your comments on this one. Rational people: what is your secret superstition? Baseball people: what other old-time superstitions do you enjoy? School teachers: are you still one of the most superstitious segments of the American workforce?

Leave a comment

Turn-of-the-century catcher Billy Earle became a pariah among baseball players despite his passion and work ethic. In this episode, Paul and Ted revisit a nomadic player with a harrowing biography and an ending you will not see coming.

Episode Highlights:

- Old baseball superstitions

- A scrappy minor league catcher hitches a ride with A.G. Spalding’s Baseball World Tour

- Baseball rat by day, performing hypnotist by night

- Stories from the teammates who feared his “mesmeric powers”

- The bottom falls out of Earle’s career, but tough-as-nails baseball legend John McGraw picks him up

- The real reason a useful player and manager couldn’t keep a job

- Starting over in baseball

- The shocking (really, you will be shocked) end of Billy Earle

Support the Show

If you’re a fan of the show, nothing says it like becoming a paid subscriber at Project 3.18. Paid subscribers receive some special newsletter perks and help us build on what we’re doing with Clear the Field.

Subscribe now

You can also follow the show for free on your favorite platform:

YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

If you’re watching the show on YouTube, give us a thumbs-up, follow the channel, and let us know what you think in the comments.

If you enjoyed an episode on a platform like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, can you give it a quick rating and let folks know? A 5-Star rating helps our show appear as suggested and helps people find us.

On Substack, restacking an episode is one click that really helps us, so if you had fun, please click that button up there on the far right of the episode that has two circling arrows on it.

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been enjoying these stories for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

This is the second part of a story of postseason intrigue in 1986, with drama on and off the field. But we’re going to start a few months earlier, when a former mentor to Houston Astros pitcher Mike Scott made an unexpected accusation.

Here’s the first part, if you missed it:

In the summer of 1986, Roger Craig, managing the San Francisco Giants, let it be publicly known that he was against cheating in all forms. Craig believed the game had become too tolerant of illicit shortcuts, with umpires and league officials eager to look the other way: “The umpires know it’s going on most of the time, but they don’t want any part of it. They don’t want to start a big hassle.”

On June 13, Craig started a hassle, accusing two Houston Astros pitchers of defacing the baseballs to get extra movement on their pitches. He didn’t like closer Dave Smith’s funky strikeout pitch in the bottom of the ninth, ending the game and stranding two Giants on base.

Craig claimed to have inspected the balls Smith used during his two-batter save and said the closer was “cutting the ball on the black letters” of the printed signature of National League president Chub Feeney, hiding his crimes in the letter of the law.

The next night, Mike Scott started for the Astros, and Craig found more damaged goods. “I checked several balls and they all were scuffed, all except the last one. [Scott] was three for four.”

Craig kept up the complaints for the next several weeks, any time the Giants faced the Astros and the resurgent Scott. “As much as I admire and respect Mike Scott, I think he’s doing something to scuff the ball.”

The manager acknowledged the history between the two, but Craig insisted that sometime after leaving suburban San Diego with his blessing, his former pupil had turned to the dark side. “I taught Mike Scott the split-finger fastball, but I didn’t teach him how to cut the ball.”

Much to the umpires’ displeasure, Craig insisted on roping them into the feud. He asked umpire Ed Montague to check ball after ball during one Scott start. The weary official found nothing. “I know they’re not angels out there on the mound,” Montague said, “I’m not saying they didn’t do anything. I’m just saying I didn’t find anything.”

Craig kept up the pressure, promising to have another respected official, Doug Harvey, “keep a close eye on Scott” during a late-July doubleheader.

The Giants’ manager wasn’t the first to accuse Scott of cheating, but he made it a cause, treating his former student like a National League version of Gaylord Perry, stopped and frisked in every city on the circuit. Like Perry, the recently retired spitball king, Scott claimed his hands were clean. “I’m a nice guy. I wouldn’t do that. It’s against the rules.” He smiled. “Neither would Gaylord.”

The Giants spent most of that season trying to catch Scott in the act. They tried technology, sending a camera crew along with the team to Houston. The cameras were ostensibly there to capture the excitement of a pennant drive, but they seemed awfully interested in Mike Scott and Dave Smith.

The Giants’ surveillance yielded only rumors and unsubstantiated theories. Astros second baseman Bill Doran was named a co-conspirator. The Giants were “convinced” that Scott would flick his sandpaper away before he could be searched and Doran would hide it and retrieve it when the coast was clear. Other rumors said Doran did the scuffing and Scott did the throwing.

Absent any hard (or rough) evidence, the suspicions that dogged Scott in 1986 and followed him for the rest of his career came from a broadly held conviction that nobody could become a pitching phenom after the age of 30 without a cheat code. Scott found it amusing to be accused of chicanery by the guy passing cheat codes out to any pitcher in earshot.

“I have a new pitch,” he said, “that’s no big secret.” Thanks to Roger Craig, the split-finger fastball was catching on all over baseball. “If you have 140 pitchers throwing them, someone’s got to have the best one.” On September 25, Scott rested his case by throwing a division-clinching no-hitter against Craig’s Giants.

After Scott’s masterpiece, Craig was asked again: Was he scuffing out there?

Craig sighed. “I don’t know. There’s no way the umpires can catch him. He’s throwing more split-fingers. The ball’s breaking down, not riding the way it does when you cut it. He’d make a hell of a thief right now.”

After Mike Scott beat them in Game 1 of the 1986 National League Championship Series, the New York Mets had to tackle Nolan Ryan, the Astros’ less controversial co-ace. On October 9, they did it, snapping off several strings of singles in the fourth and fifth innings to set up Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez, whose extra-base hits drove in multiple runs and capitalized on Ryan’s first lackluster outing in months. Mets starter Bob Ojeda went the distance, giving up his hits but keeping but one Astro from reaching home plate.

The series moved to Shea Stadium. Queens was never a pleasant visit for opposing teams, but the events of Game 3 put the rabid New York crowd in a good mood. Dave Smith entered in the bottom of the ninth with a 5-4 lead. He gave up a bunt single to infielder Wally Backman. One batter later, center fielder Lenny Dykstra hit a walk-off two-run homer, giving the Mets a 2-1 lead in the series.

It had been four days since Mike Scott’s Game 1 masterpiece and the Astros succumbed to the temptation to use Scott again on short rest. Pitching Scott in the fourth game also set up the possibility that he might appear a third time if the series went the full seven. The Mets gave Dwight Gooden another night off, and Sid Fernandez took the start for New York.

Bill Robinson, the Mets’ hitting coach, gave his youthful players some old-school advice before the rematch: “I told them, ‘Stop bitching and swing the bat.’”

Most of the Mets failed to heed Robinson’s advice. They were too busy running a sting operation.

Some fans waved swatches of sandpaper, but it was hard to maintain a sneer while New York’s vaunted lineup flailed and withered. Nobody got a hit until the fifth inning, a harmless single by third baseman Ray Knight. No two Mets were ever on base at the same time. Gary Carter went 0-for-4, dropping his series performance to 1-for-17.

Keith Hernandez went 0-for-4, but the first baseman was at least an appreciative victim. “My third time up, [Scott] had lost his fastball,” Hernandez said. “It was strictly split-finger after that. I was dead sitting on it in my last at-bat and he still stuck it on me. That’s as good as any stuff you’re ever going to see.” Throwing a split-finger pitch that was notorious for going anywhere and everywhere, Scott seemed in total control. He had only one walk in his first start and none in this one. “He paints up there,” Hernandez said. “He’s a Rembrandt.”

In the second inning, Astros catcher Alan Ashby hit a two-run home run, opening up a lead that felt insurmountable with Scott on the mound. Shortstop Dickie Thon added a solo home run in the fifth.

The Mets scratched out a run in the eighth, halting Scott’s scoreless innings streak at 17, an NL postseason record. He had 19 strikeouts between the two complete games, another record. It was easy to forget that he was racking up some of baseball’s most prolific hitters. Broadcaster Tim McCarver reminded national viewers that the Mets, “were not a bunch of humpties out there,” even though it seemed like “no contest.”

Few locations on earth are more closely surveilled than the diamond on a major league baseball field. Long before cameras took over, every pitcher has been monitored by more than two dozen pairs of the keenest and most careful eyes in professional sports. Not even the most artful cheat could evade that dragnet indefinitely.

Ed Hearn, the Mets’ backup catcher, had plenty of time to scrutinize Mike Scott and compare notes with his teammates. After the game he produced a baseball for reporters (“On the wide part of the cowhide, to the side of the trademark, the ball bore a scratch nearly two inches square. The surface of the ball was rough and slightly brown.”) But the journalist was appropriately cautious: “Such a mark could conceivably be produced from a sharp ground ball pounded into the dirt in front of home plate.”

“I’ll show you exactly how [Scott] does it,” Hearn said. “Every time he gets a new ball, he puts his glove under his arm and grinds the ball into his left palm. It’s not like he’s just rubbing it up, because he doesn’t spin both hands.”

“It’s in his palm,” Wally Backman said. “He just makes a grinding motion. It’s blatant to me.”

Backman, outfielder Howard Johnson, and several other teammates seized every baseball they could get their hands on, inspecting them like Customs and Border Protection agents. When a foul ball rolled into the dugout, ABC cameras showed a scramble to scoop it up and add it to the growing pile of evidence. “That’s a nice one,” Backman said, showing another marked ball to reporters after the game. “Grass must have done that.”

“We’re not saying he’s cheating,” Johnson said, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Oh, no,” Backman said. He reached into one of Johnson’s used long socks, where the two had stashed some of the most carved-upon balls they found. “This one here must have hit the screen.”

“Every f***ing ball was scuffed up,” Backman said. “Some of them were even scuffed up twice. He was a master tonight.” Keith Hernandez had admired how Scott painted corners, but Backman and the others focused on his outstandingly subtle chisel work, likening him to an unscrupulous baseball Rodin.

The dugout detectives believed that scuffers, like arsonists or mad bombers, tended to repeat certain tactics each time they struck. Many of the balls were defaced in the same spot—over the printed signature of Chub Feeney. “When you see thirty balls scuffed in the same place, you know he’s cheating,” Backman said. “But if he can get away with it, what are you going to do? If I could get away with it, I would do it, too.”

The Mets’ ballboys eventually carried a bucket of nearly 40 specimens to manager Davey Johnson’s office for safekeeping.

In such a charged atmosphere, the contestants lapsed into half-baked legalese. Astros manager Hal Lanier called the Mets’ bucket of balls “hearsay.” The manager pointed out that during the game, none of the Mets asked the home plate umpire, Dutch Rennert, to examine a “clean” pitch, i.e. one that had not hit the ground.

Rennert confirmed this. “I never saw a scuffed ball and the Mets never asked me to examine the ball. If it was scuffed, maybe it was from where they hit it.”

Lanier suggested a number of Mets might be star-struck facing Mike Scott. “If Backman or any of the Mets is that big a fan of Scott’s, tell them to bring their baseballs over here and he’ll autograph them.”

Backman hadn’t said much after the first game of the series, but he had taken over for Gary Carter as the spokesperson for a small, cringy faction of Mets who seemed to think their best shot at winning the NLCS was to make people feel sorry for them. “The games he’s pitched against us, God couldn’t have gone out on the mound and pitched better.”

The fifth game of the series was postponed a day due to rain, yielding another full news cycle to Scuffgate. On a wet, gray October day at Shea Stadium, umpire crew chief Doug Harvey found himself the center of attention. Harvey, 56 years old, was one of the most respected officials in baseball. Gary Carter said he was “the umpire of umpires.” Keith Hernandez said he would “gladly take Doug Harvey behind home plate for all seven games in this series.” Harvey insisted Mike Scott was innocent—or at least not guilty.

His pitch reacts like a Sandy Koufax curveball thrown at the speed of a fastball. Dammit, guys, that ball comes in there hard. And other than the spitball, it’s the most explosive pitch I’ve ever seen. And it just seems to me that nobody can accept the possibility that this man has just come up with one hell of a pitch.

The Mets’ general manager, Frank Cashen, arranged a meeting with NL President Feeney, where he planned to present the team’s evidence against Scott. In our imagination, this meeting unfolded like the courtroom scene in Miracle on 34th Street:

Too many of the team’s comments had a subtext of “It’s not fair!”, which wasn’t the classical champion’s mindset. “I’d hate to see the whole season go down the drain if a guy is cheating,” Cashen said. “Let’s see if he is or he isn’t. If he isn’t, he’s found some way to make the ball do something nobody in a hundred years has done.” Feeney, as allergic to hassle as the judge in Kris Kringle’s trial, declined to prosecute.

Forty years later, it seems almost unthinkable that so many players and executives made these comments in the middle of the playoffs. On the surface, they condemned Scott, but underneath, they were admitting they couldn’t beat him. In the Mets’ collective imagination, Scott was a split-finger slasher who just kept coming as hitters dropped their bats and ran screaming down the street.

Even Backman knew how this movie ended. “If [the authorities] haven’t done anything yet, they’re not going to start now,” he said. “The best thing for us to do is forget it, win the next two games, go to the World Series, and leave all this split-fingered stuff behind us.”

That was evidently the Mets’ only plan and best chance: finish the series in six.

On October 14, Nolan Ryan gave what he described as one of the best “pressure performances” of his career, allowing only two hits and striking out twelve Mets in nine innings, answering earlier comments from Backman and company that the somewhat-senior statesman was too old to finish games. After grandpa mowed them down, some of the Mets used familiar coded language:

His fastball was sinking—I don’t know where he got that from.

It looked a lot like the pitches Mike Scott throws.

Mel Stottlemyre, the Mets’ pitching coach, grabbed one of the Ryan balls that had been removed from play and felt it all over before stuffing it in his pocket. Apparently the conspiracy was spreading.

New York’s decision to save Dwight Gooden for Game 5 paid off. Gooden dazzled with fastballs and curveballs and pitched ten innings. The score was still tied 1-1 in the twelfth inning when Gary Carter, 1-for-21, hit a game-winning single.

The Astros’ urgency to get back to Scott and the Mets’ desperation to avoid him led to a thrilling battle, widely regarded as one of the most exciting games of the decade and probably one of the best Game 6’s ever. With Scott lurking in everyone’s imaginations, it was a Game 7 in all but number. The teams went back and forth, back and forth until the 16th inning, when the Mets’ closer, Jesse Orosco, went in to protect a three-run lead. The Astros scored twice, but Orosco and the Mets hung on for a 7-6 victory and beat Mike Scott the only way they knew how.

Even without a third appearance, Scott had delivered one of the best playoff performances in decades. His 18 innings of one-run pitching and record-setting strikeout numbers made him the first-ever NLCS Most Valuable Player representing the losing side. Without Scott, the Astros might easily have been swept. With him, they made the Mets uncomfortable indeed.

“You could tell that [the Mets] didn’t want to face him,” Dave Smith said. “They were psyching themselves out with all their complaining. Every time they moaned, I felt better about our chances.”

Umpire Doug Harvey, a veteran of baseball’s Decade of Misdirection, wasn’t sure the Mets were so guileless. Why would New York’s hitters broadcast their conviction that an opposing pitcher was unbeatable? Even if he was cheating, why make so big of a deal about the fact that they didn’t think they had a chance?

Harvey thought this was just another game inside the game.

By way of explanation, the umpire told a story from earlier in the season, perhaps from the late-July doubleheader when he called balls and strikes for a Mike Scott start in San Francisco, the domain of Roger Craig.

As usual, Craig was worked up and on high alert any time Scott’s pitches fooled the Giants’ hitters. “He started in on Scott right from the start,” Harvey recalled. “So I checked a ball in the first inning, and it was fine. I said, ‘Roger, it’s clean, do you want it?’ and he shook his head.”

There was a similar exchange in the second inning. In the third, Harvey was fed up. He confronted Craig, baseball in hand. “The ball is clean, Roger. Do you want to see it?”

Craig waved him away. “Harv, I know what he’s throwing. I taught him the pitch. I’m just trying to get into his mind.”

Harvey recounted that story after enduring the Mets’ Game 4 complaining. “Maybe the Mets are trying to get to [Scott’s] mind, too.“

In 1986, the only person with a prayer of beating Mike Scott was Mike Scott. The adversaries who understood this tried to turn the heat up under Scott and get him to back off from his devastating second pitch, the split-fingered scuffball, the scuffed-up splitter, whatever it was. But Scott had mastered the pitch—and made peace with being perceived as an outlaw—whether or not he was one.

The next spring, Nolan Ryan said he was working on a new pitch and considering asking Mike Scott to teach him the split-finger. Asked if he’d instruct his teammates in the art of the splitter, Scott said he wouldn’t teach anyone Roger Craig’s magic pitch.

“But I will show Nolan how to scuff it.”

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

Going into the 1986 National League Championship Series, the New York Mets knew they had one card to play against Mike Scott. Only four batters into the first game of the series, catcher Gary Carter laid it on the table.

Carter had watched from the on-deck circle as first baseman Keith Hernandez struck out swinging. Not many pitchers could make the 1979 co-MVP look foolish at the plate, but Scott’s diving, dipping pitches easily evaded Hernandez’ hunting bat.

Now it was his turn. Carter swung over strike one, a darting pitch that fell off so steeply he ended up swinging at the wrong place entirely. He grimaced. Scott came set, but this time Carter had no plans to swing. He followed another waterfall pitch all the way into catcher Alan Ashby’s mitt. Umpire Doug Harvey called it strike two.

Carter turned to the umpire and raised his hand:

“Harv—no way.”

Harvey knew Carter wasn’t protesting his strike call—he was protesting the legitimacy of Scott’s pitch. Carter wanted the umpire to check the baseball. “I turned it over one way,” Harvey said. “I turned it over the other way.”

Harvey’s examination showed a white cowhide sphere with red seams and 88 red stitches, stamped with the name and signature of Chub Feeney, the president of the National League. “The ball was as clean as this desk,” Harvey said, seated at a press conference a few days later, recalling the series’ inciting moment. He threw it back to Scott. Now it was Carter’s turn to strike out swinging.

“The bottom dropped out of that ball,” Carter said. “That’s why I asked Doug Harvey to look at it. After that, I didn’t bother. Every ball I saw tonight moved. There was nothing straight. Every pitch was doing something.”

Carter, one of the most vocal and visible among a team of strong personalities, didn’t care about the boos he received for asking the ball be checked. “That’s because I was the one who said something about it. But there are a lot of other guys around who think it.”

At the end of 1984, Mike Scott, age 29, looked about done. That season, his second with the Astros and the worst of his six-year major-league career, Scott posted a 5-11 record with a 4.68 ERA and recorded only 84 strikeouts. Scott had one serviceable pitch, a fastball, but without anything to play it off of, it wasn’t fast enough.

“There was no guessing,” Scott recalled of those years. “Well, [the hitters] were guessing, but they’d guess fastball and they’d get one. If you get behind 2-1 or 3-1 and they know the fastball is coming, even if you throw 95, they’re going to hit it harder than you throw it.”

Two years later, in 1986, the same pitcher, so recently circling the drain, was one of the best performers in major league baseball. Scott won 18 games, recorded an ERA of 2.22, and struck out 306 batters. The latter two numbers led the National League.

The difference, Scott insisted, was a second pitch, a split-finger fastball, which he had learned prior to the 1985 season, when his rebound began. He’d explained the pitch’s remarkable movement to reporters a hundred times, but Gary Carter’s nationally televised objection obliged him to do it again, with a little shade mixed in: “It’s a backdoor pitch. If the hitter gives up on it, it can come back and bite the outside corner.”

That oft-repeated explanation didn’t satisfy some National League hitters. They contended no one pitch could turn a 1984 Mike Scott into a 1986 Mike Scott. A transformation of that magnitude required a miracle—or quick trip to the hardware store. Cynics believed the journeyman-turned-All-Star had added fine-grain sandpaper to his repertoire. According to the doubters, Scott was scuffing up the baseball, creating a patch of rough surface or a loose stitch that added unpredictable movement to his straightforward pitches.

These accusations had flown since 1985, when the Chicago Cubs found a piece of sandpaper near the Wrigley Field mound during one of Scott’s newly impressive starts. A year later, as Scott began putting together what would eventually be a Cy Young-caliber season, the Cubs, the Padres, and the Giants all publicly accused him of scuffery. Ball after ball was checked, and ball after ball was returned to Scott, who kept getting better and better. On September 25, 1986, Scott clinched the NL West division for the Astros by throwing a no-hitter.

The prospect of facing the Astros in a playoff series made even the league-best Mets uncomfortable. Even though New York had the most loaded offense in baseball and won 108 games that year, Houston had Scott and Nolan Ryan. In a best-of-seven series, both could be expected to pitch twice, and one might start three times. It was clear which of the Astros’ co-aces caused the Mets most concern—just listen for the complaining.

“All of a sudden, [Scott] has turned into a 300-strikeout pitcher,” Carter said two days before the series began. “There has to be some reason. Sure, he’s talented, and he developed a split-finger fastball. All in all, though, I think he’s had a little help from a ‘friend.’”

As the Mets’ primary catcher, Carter had batted against all the split-finger fastball pitchers in the league and caught Ron Darling, who threw one himself. “Scott’s ball has a very funny movement,” Carter said. “I’ve never seen a ball dip like that.” He’d even caught Scott during the All-Star Game, when the pitcher threw something that “dropped four feet.” Carter said he’d looked at that ball and found it “marked up.”

Perhaps all that was true; it was also true that Scott’s official record was clean. No umpire had ever found a ball defaced beyond a reasonable doubt. Doug Harvey had officiated five of Scott’s starts that season and never seen cause for a warning, and he wasn’t going to give the Mets any help in the playoffs. They were stuck with Mike Scott and his magic splitter, which looked like a knuckleball traveling at 90 miles an hour.

He didn’t give up a hit until Keith Hernandez singled in the fourth inning. The Mets’ most professional hitter struck out in his other three at-bats. In the sixth, Hernandez gave Harvey an earful on a called strike that (replay confirmed) was out of the zone. After a swinging strikeout during his final at-bat in the eighth, Hernandez tossed his bat back in the direction of the Mets’ dugout in disgust.

“On that at-bat [Scott] threw me four fastballs, up and in,” Hernandez said. “He was like a robot. He reached back for something extra when he needed it. That’s the sign of a great pitcher. He just beat me.” Hernandez, Carter, and Daryl Strawberry, the heart of the Mets’ order, struck out a combined eight times.

Scott was ahead of the hitters all night. “Then you have to hit his pitch,” left-fielder Mookie Wilson said. Wilson battled Scott in the ninth, fouling off six straight pitches before managing a sharp grounder that Astros first baseman Glenn Davis saved from his knees. “That at-bat, he threw me a lot of those whatever you call them, split-finger fastballs, forkballs,” Wilson said. The one he managed to hit was “some kind of wicked drop.”

Meanwhile, Dwight Gooden was hanging in there for the Mets. Early on, Gooden looked shaky but kept reaching the pitcher’s spot in the order when he needed it: Twice the Astros had the bases loaded with two outs when Mike Scott batted and struck out. The only mistake Gooden paid for was middle-middle fastball that Glenn Davis (nickname: The Milkman) hit for a home run in the second inning. That wound up being the only run scored in the game. “I didn’t think [one run] would hold up,” Davis said of the Astros’ first-ever postseason home run, “but Mike Scott slammed the door on them.”

When it was over, Scott had struck out 14 Mets, setting a new NLCS record. He now had a streak of 24 straight scoreless innings at the Astrodome. “I was pretty much in the groove,” he said—a Freudian slip, perhaps? “Now I’ve just got to work on not coming up with the bases loaded.”

Carter was ready to move on. “I tip my hat to [Scott]. He gets away with it.” But some of his own teammates, speaking on background, saw Carter’s “check” call as a white flag the team didn’t need, especially so early in the game:

What if Scott is doing something to the ball? What if he is? What are you trying to prove? I like Gary, I really do. Good guy, great player. But what the hell was the point? Be a man. Don’t come out of the box whining.

He was beaten before he started. He completely psyched himself out. He made up his mind he was going to hit the split-fingered—and you’re not going to hit the split-fingered.

Trying to offset a clubhouse full of dramatic (and talented) players, Mets manager Davey Johnson was tactful. “Mike Scott pitched a great ball game and Dwight pitched a good one,” he said. At least Scott’s turn in the rotation was over and the Mets could get back on track against…Nolan Ryan, already the all-time strikeout leader.

Ryan had struggled early in 1986. He had a sore elbow and a 5.21 ERA, but the elbow had healed. Ryan won 9 of his final 11 starts of the year and struck out 135 batters in 109 innings.

“He doesn’t throw a split-finger, does he?” Johnson asked. “He just throws a 98 mile-an-hour heater, right?”

In the beginning, a pitcher was a hitter who could throw the ball with force and accuracy, and he threw hard and straight. Then Jim Creighton thought up the untamed spinball. And then Candy Cummings made the ball curve. Now it was an arms race. The spitball reared its slippery head. The slider became popular some time around the second World War and Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton made sure it stuck around. The changeup, the cutter, the sweeper—every pitch with a name began as someone’s wild idea.

The iconoclast behind the split-fingered fastball was the man who taught it to Mike Scott: “God bless Roger Craig,” Scott said in the summer of 1986.

Roger Craig was a capable pitcher who did solid work for various teams between 1955 and 1966. Unfortunately for Craig, his claim to fame as a player is probably his two seasons with the expansion New York Mets. He pitched pretty well, but his hapless teammates saddled him with 46 losses over two seasons. After retiring as a player, Craig moved into a career as a coach and later a manager. In the mid-1970s he was a coach for the Astros and the San Diego Padres, giving him ample opportunity to watch the Cubs’ phenom reliever, Bruce Sutter, throw a nasty-looking pitch.

It wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. “When I was still pitching,” Craig said, “guys like Elroy Face, Lindy McDaniel, and Diego Segui threw the pitch and it was called the forkball.”

The forkball had been around since the 1910s (Joe Bush of the Athletics and Red Sox is credited with its invention), but Sutter wasn’t following Bullet Joe’s method precisely. Like the forkball, his pitch was thrown with the ball wedged in between the first and second fingers, but he gripped the ball more shallowly and threw it harder. It looked like a fastball until it was too late.

Sutter learned the pitch that would become known as the split-finger fastball from Fred Martin, a minor-league instructor in the Cubs’ organization. Recovering from surgery to address a pinched nerve in his arm, Sutter had found himself in need of something to offset a loss in velocity, and Martin made a suggestion that worked out pretty well.

Craig said he approached Sutter to get a closer look at this modified forkball. “I asked him how to throw it, but I could never learn the way he teaches it. Sometimes I wonder if he wants anyone to know.” Bruce Sutter had a split-finger worthy of Cooperstown, but the most talented don’t always make the best teachers. Craig wanted to teach, but first he had to learn.

In 1978, Craig became manager of the Padres. In an offseason baseball school he ran for younger players, Craig kept tinkering, seeking a breaking pitch that wouldn’t wreck 14- and 15-year-old arms. The group went back to the forkball and what Craig had picked up on the splitter. “I had them spread the two fingers that grip the ball, hold it along the seams, and throw a fastball.”

The result, Craig said, was pretty close to Sutter’s pitch and surprisingly easy to teach. Any pitcher with big enough hands and a major-league caliber overhand fastball could learn it. Craig said the pitch was good enough to make him think about a comeback, but, at 56, “I was a little too old.”

Craig’s managerial duties with the Padres kept him from doing much with his reverse-engineered splitter, but he was fired after a down season in 1979. Sparky Anderson swooped in to hire him as the pitching coach for the Detroit Tigers and soon the splitters were flying. Craig said his first major-league acolyte was pitcher Milt Wilcox. “He’d be pitching a shutout and give up a three-run homer on a slider. I told him, ‘You got to do something different. I’m going to teach you a different pitch.’ [In 1984] he won nineteen games and the World Series.”

Jack Morris picked it up. In 1983, Morris doubled his strikeouts from the previous year and won 20 games. Craig oversaw a Tigers staff which improved their collective ERA from eleventh place in the American League in 1980 to first place in 1982. Anderson dubbed him “the best pitching coach in baseball.”

By 1984, Craig’s splitter was the “it” pitch of the decade, with a record of reviving flagging careers and Craig passing the technique on to anyone who was curious. He never claimed to be the inventor of the pitch, “I just discovered a better way to teach it.”

After his disappointing 1984, Mike Scott began mentally preparing for the end of his time as a major leaguer. Against the likes of Keith Hernandez and other elite hitters, his fastball alone could not cut it. “It was a desperate time,” he recalled. He was at his lowest when the Astros’ management suggested he go see Roger Craig. Scott readily agreed. “If you had as bad a year as I had, you’d go try anything.”

The split-finger guru had requested a raise from the Tigers for 1985, but the team had declined to pay “the best pitching coach in baseball” the best salary. Craig, feeling disrespected, chose to retire to a ranch he owned in San Diego County. He was the baseball equivalent of a hermit master in a kung fu movie, withdrawn from the world but open to visitors and willing to share his teachings with anyone who vowed to use them against his doubters. Less than a month before spring training, Mike Scott appeared at his door.

“Roger was great,” Scott recounted in 1986. “We went over to Grossmont Junior College in San Diego and after watching me throw he said my mechanics were fine.” Those preliminaries dispensed with, Craig said, “Today we’re going to talk about the pitch.”

Over the next 10 days, Scott threw fastballs while spreading his first and second fingers further and further apart and moving his thumb up the side of the ball. That was all it took, Craig said. “You just aim it right down the middle of the plate and let it go.”

Scott was amazed at the results. Sometimes the splitter darted down and in, other times down and out. Craig warned him his delivery had to match how he threw his four-seam fastball. “That’s the key to it, throwing it like a fastball. That’s what deceives the hitter.”

Scott took to the splitter as well as any pitcher Craig had ever taught. With nothing to lose, Scott said, “I could tell I was going to use that pitch quite a bit.”

He’d never had a spring training like the one he had in 1985. “Right away, people were swinging at pitches that were bouncing in the dirt. I’ve never been a strikeout pitcher, but all of a sudden I’m getting ahead of the hitters with the split-finger and striking them out with the fastball.” The results carried on into the regular season. His strikeouts nearly doubled. His ERA dropped by nearly a point and a half.

It all seemed too good to be true, and before he left Craig’s tutelage, the old master had warned Scott that this was exactly what some people were going to think:

By the summer of 1986, things were going better than Craig or Scott could have dreamed. He had more strikeouts than Fernando Valenzuela, more than Roger Clemens. He was a bona fide Cy Young candidate with a story that gave hope to also-ran pitchers everywhere.

Roger Craig’s warning that the doubters and haters would eventually come for Scott proved quite accurate. In August 1986, an outraged rival manager publicly accused Scott of scuffing the baseballs to generate illegal movement.

The complainer was an old-school baseball man who came out of retirement to take over the Giants in late 1985. He was also the last person Mike Scott expected to hear calling “shenanigans” on his good splitter, but Roger Craig, the Giants’ new manager, was loud and clear:

In the conclusion, Roger Craig takes on his former student and a chorus of Mets call shenanigans after a second helping of Mike Scott.

Over on Clear the Field:

On the latest episode of the podcast, Ted and I profile the ballpark’s most enduring trespasser: the Eastern gray squirrel. Most of these critters come and go, but one of them took the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals on a remarkable run—and wound up immortalized on a World Series ring.

Episode Highlights

- How big does an animal have to be to stop a ballgame?

- Tony LaRussa has a great idea for a children’s book

- The Rally Squirrel’s unheralded road trip to Philadelphia

- The critters go home but the merchandisers runs wild

- World Series umpires really do have to plan for everything

- How many teams have a meme on their championship rings?

- More recently, Max Fried and Ben Rice have a close encounter

Support Us

If you’re a fan of the podcast, nothing says it like becoming a paid subscriber at Project 3.18. Paid subscribers receive some special newsletter perks and help us build on what we’re doing with Clear the Field.

Subscribe now

You can also follow the show for free on your favorite platform:

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

If you enjoyed an episode on a platform like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, can you give it a quick rating and let folks know? A 5-Star rating helps our podcast appear as suggested and helps people find us.

Here on Substack, restacking an episode is one click that really helps us, so if you had fun, please click that button up there on the far right of the episode that has two circling arrows on it.

Comment

If you have comments or details that add to our stories or ideas for future installments, drop them right here on Substack or on YouTube. You can also send us an email at clearthefieldpod@gmail.com.

Warning: If a comment is particularly enlightening and/or funny, we might read it during a future episode.

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

Let’s start with a picture. It’s pretty famous:

That is Boston’s Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds on October 3, 1903, an hour before the third game of the best-of-nine “World’s Championship Series.” The first incarnation of what became the World Series featured the Boston Americans (don’t call them “Red Sox” until 1908) and the Pittsburg Pirates (don’t use the silent “h”, at least not between 1891 and 1911).

The picture first appeared on October 5 in an edition of the Boston Globe. The photographer’s identity is unknown—an accompanying caption identifies him only as “a Globe man.” Credit Mr. Globe for hauling his camera equipment up somewhere where he could capture one of the most enduring images of turn-of-the-century baseball.

The story of the first World Series is a challenge for a modest weekly newsletter. It’s a book-length subject, and those books are out there to enjoy. This is also some pretty crunchy history, even for us. The newsprint is tiny, the language is archaic, and the sportswriters cite Chaucer and Virgil more often than they quote the players. There are a few recognizable landmarks: Honus Wagner, Cy Young, “Tessie,” maybe, but for the most part this history is so far away it risks feeling like homework. (We can’t help but notice it gets little quieter around here when we do old-time stuff.)

We still do the older stories because—consider it—you just looked at a picture from 1903 and instantly understood its subject: an important baseball game. Not only that, you can probably directly connect with this picture from the distant past because you’ve participated in the same activity, though hopefully you stayed in or around your assigned seat…

Baseball is such a powerful cultural time machine that we can go 123 years back and still keep our bearings. As a result, that’s a trip worth taking, and today we’re going to highlight a few Project 3.18-worthy selections from the story of the first World Series—including what’s going on in that famous picture.

The first World Series was arranged by the teams, not the leagues.

The plan for the first “world’s championship series” formed in the later months of the 1903 season, the first full season of peace between the formerly feuding National and American Leagues. The Pittsburgh Pirates were the presumptive favorites in the National League, well ahead in the race for the pennant, their third in a row. On a glide-path to a three-peat, the Pirates’ owner, Barney Dreyfuss, challenged the American League club owners: your best versus our best, for an interleague championship that would sit above the pennant flags teams spent all summer trying to capture.

By September, the Boston Americans were the frontrunners in the younger league, and Dreyfuss entered into negotiations with the Americans’ owner, Henry Killilea, on what the series would look like. At one point they considered playing a best-of-eleven format, but settled on a best-of-nine. Wouldn’t want to overdo it.

Dreyfuss was on good terms with the Pirates’ players, and they agreed to extend their season in return for a significant chunk (at least 50%) of the ticket sales from the games, a compensation structure that wasn’t used for intra-league games. Killilea dragged his feet at the idea of cutting the players in, but the Americans heard what the Pirates were getting and they weren’t pushovers. Some of them were finishing up their contracts and had no obligation or reason to keep playing unless it was worth their trouble. Killilea eventually backed down and the Americans received essentially the same deal as the Pirates.

On September 19, the club owners signed a contract to play “a series of nine games for the world’s championship” beginning on October 1. That bulky description was soon whittled down to just “the world’s series.” Nobody seemed to mind or notice that the “world” in this context was really just the northeastern quadrant of the United States (plus St. Louis).

The two participants were seen as evenly matched, but there might have been some doubts or lingering insecurities among Boston fans. A huge, overflow crowd of 16,000 people attended the first game of the series at the Huntington Grounds, requiring the club to put hundreds of people in the outfield, but when the Pirates won, 7-3, Boston seemed to deflate. Attendance for the second game was 9,400, well under the park’s 11,500 seating capacity.

The true believers who came out that day were rewarded when right-handed pitcher Cy Young, age 36, shut out the Pirates to even the series. Young’s victory blew away the cloud of imposter syndrome above Boston’s baseball district and made the third and perhaps final home game into a must-see regional event.

“Reading accounts of far-away ball games in the newspapers is not what the fans crave,” a radically honest Pittsburgh journalist wrote. “They want to see the players in the flesh performing.”

The closer the better.

The most famous picture of the first World Series shows a game on the brink of being canceled.

How many people the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds could accommodate depended on who you asked. Boston’s public safety authorities would have probably given a number close to the park’s 11,500 seats, but the team routinely added several thousand more. The land had previously been used to accommodate a whole circus; as a ballpark, the elephantine outfield—530 feet to center and 440 feet to left—created some flexibility. With all that standing room available, fans often formed a de facto outfield perimeter during high-interest games.

When the park gates opened at noon on October 3, 3,000 people were already waiting, men, boys, “and some few women.” Business was so brisk that the ticket sellers stopped trying to organize the money and just dumped it on the floor. When they sold through the park’s seating capacity, sellers instructed fans to “go way back and stand up,” in other words, watch the game from behind a rope cordon set up deep in the outfield.

The people stuck out there created an opportunity for the kids who sold peanuts and score cards to run their own racket obtaining chairs and boxes for people to stand on for a better view. The best boxes supported three people and cost $1 per person, which was more than the club charged for a standing-room ticket.

“All the time the tide of humanity was flowing in,” the Boston Globe recounted. “In some places it was steady and smooth, but in others there were signs of quick water and tide rips. Over-anxious people pushed and elbowed and fumed and grew red in the face because they couldn’t move faster.” There were still thousands of people trying to get in, but soon the ticket booths were closed and even the scalpers sold out.

By 1:45 the crowd behind the outfield rope was a dozen deep from one foul line to the other. We’ve often written about the wishful thinking that was crowd control in the early 20th century, and here again, the Americans seemed to think their outfield rope was imbued with magical powers.

When the players came out onto the field for a “limbering-up throw-around,” a few men from the standing crowd ducked under the rope and jogged toward the infield to get a closer look at their heroes. The club had 50 police officers inside the park (up from 35 the day before) to help manage the crowd, and some of these officers moved to push the intruders back. Seeing uniformed police ruining a good time sparked a rebellion in the outfield:

Seeing so many fans out of place, Mr. Globe grabbed his camera and found a high place from which to capture the rowdy tableau for posterity.

The more athletic and determined people stuck outside the park took advantage of the chaos inside and began scaling the high wooden fences. Some perched along the fence-tops only to be pushed inward by people coming up behind them. At least 1,000 people got in over the top.

And a few more under the bottom, perhaps:

The team later claimed that 18,000-19,000 people were inside the park on October 3, but knowledgeable observers declared this was a gross undercount, likely an attempt to keep the heat off the team for admitting far too many people and losing control of the situation. The real number was closer to 25,000 fans, more than double the seating capacity of the park.

As the 3:00 start time neared, some of the fans ringing the infield tried to shove their way into the grandstand or stand just in front of it, blocking the views of those seated in the front rows. This behavior led to “sundry punches and several severe tumbles.”

It looked for a while as though it would be impossible to start the game. The crowd was right back of the plate, about three feet from first base. There was no chance for the players of either team to get to their benches.

The task of preventing a forfeit during the first World Series fell to Joseph Smart, the Americans’ business manager. Smart ordered the park’s groundskeeper to get a hose and point it at the crowds to try and force them back, but somebody retaliated by cutting the hose line. Smart showed the instincts of a battlefield commander, directing the police officers to take the broken hose and use it as a moving cordon to push groups of people back towards the outfield. The Boston Globe got a picture of this, too:

When fans didn’t seem intimidated by the officers’ short clubs, Smart distributed baseball bats for them to brandish instead. “Bats were used to tap people on the toes and swat them on the shins,” and several unruly young men “were made to see stars which no astronomer has yet mapped.” Smart reportedly kept one bat and wielded it himself.

The grandstand invasion was the afternoon’s truly dangerous moment, forcing even some of the Boston players to lend a hand. When two women were caught up in the pressing crowd and nearly crushed, outfielder Chick Stahl and a police officer helped them get to the safety of the dugout until order had been restored.

It took about 20 minutes of “hard work” and the arrival of 100 additional police officers to push the crowd “inch by inch” back into the outfield. You could analyze this scene like an 18th-century battlefield. The police worked the center while both teams formed lines, holding bats horizontally in front of them, and put pressure on the flanks. Major General Smart won the field back, but the rope line was destroyed and the crowds stayed much closer, just 50 yards behind the infield dirt.

Those territorial gains ended up deciding the game. The Pirates won on the strength of five doubles, and four of them were of the ground-rule variety, hit into the human wall that prevented Boston defenders from making what would have otherwise been routine catches.

Many in the crowd complained about the Pirates’ cheap hits, but a Pittsburgh loyalist shouted, “Fair for one as for the other,” but even that wasn’t true. After several early Pittsburgh “doubles,” the police surged into the outfield to push the crowd further back, allowing the Pirates’ outfielders more room to catch subsequent fly balls. Meanwhile, the Americans could not catch a break: In the second inning, Boston first baseman George LaChance (nickname: “Candy”1) hit what would have been an inside-the-park home run, but it only counted as a ground-rule double because of the crowd.

Chick Stahl said, “If it hadn’t been for the crowd and we had played on a clear field,” the Americans would have triumphed. One writer gamed this scenario out and figured Boston would have won by a score of 3-1. Instead they lost, 4-2.

Down two games to one in the series and departing for the ominous “City of Smoke,” things did not look good for the boys from the “City of Culture,” but a Boston writer reminded his audience that luck was no one’s loyal friend:

Luck seldom breaks even; it will follow one club for a while and then flirt with the next-door neighbor, ready to change its abode at any moment.

Pittsburgh started pitcher Deacon Phillippe five times in eight games.

Baseball players battled injuries back then, just as they do today, but the aches and pains of the Pirates’ pitching staff had a period-specific patina. Sam Leever, one of the Pirates’ co-aces, exacerbated an arm injury while trap-shooting, limiting his availability in the Series. In an even more Victorian bit of misfortune, 16-game winner Ed Doheny was declared insane and confined to an asylum in September.

These losses made right-handed Deacon Phillippe the Pirates’ only preferred starting pitcher. Phillippe held Boston to three runs (two earned) in the opener on October 1 and came back two days later to pitch another complete game while his teammates lofted balls over the human wall. Hailed as “Steady Man,” Phillippe was quoted in a Pittsburgh paper after Game Three and he was hyped:

I feel just as good now as I did before the game. My superb physical condition surprises even myself. I never felt better in my life. I could pitch again tomorrow. It was easy today. I never even thought of getting tired. If [player-manager Fred Clarke] will let me, I’ll pitch two more games of the series, and I should win them both. It’s easy money.

Phillippe was named the starter for Game Four, the first on the Pittsburgh leg, and bad weather allowed him an extra day of rest before he went out and pitched another complete game at Exposition Park. In recognition of his contributions, the team gave him a “diamond stick-pin” that day, and Barney Dreyfuss threw in a few shares of stock in the club.

And while he was certainly steady, Phillippe wasn’t invincible, and Boston’s three-run inning near the end of his Game Four start was a warning the Pirates did not or could not heed.

In Game Seven on October 10, Boston finally got to Phillippe, scoring seven times. The Pirates went back to the Steady Man for a must-win Game Eight in Boston on October 13. Despite being completely cooked, the pitcher held the Americans to three runs but lost when Bill Dinneen threw a complete-game shutout and won the first World’s Championship for Boston.

“Tessie” really did help the Americans win the first World Series.

Boston had some of the game’s first superfans, the “Royal Rooters,” an organization made up of mainly men and boys who congregated at the Third Base Saloon, one of America’s first sports bars. The saloon was owned by Michael McGreevy, dubbed “Nuf Ced” for the stock line he used to end baseball-related barroom debates he felt had run their course. The Rooters were famous for their cheering, their singing, and their commitment to attending every home game. There’s no question that these were some of baseball’s most enthusiastic fans, but many Royal Rooters, betting (heavily) on the World’s Series games, were invested in more ways than one.

When the series moved to Pittsburgh, a large contingent of Rooters went with it, riding on the same train as the team and boarding at the same station as some of the players. In the spirit of comity, Pittsburgh’s fan organization arranged a special section for their Boston guests, who showed up at Exposition Park accompanied by a full band and paraded on the field before the game.

The Pirates won Game Four, building a 3-games-to-1 lead over Boston. During the fifth game, the band and the Boston fans cycled through every peppy tune they could think of to try and stir the Americans’ blood. When their team took a six-run lead in the sixth inning, the band was playing “Tessie,” an artifact from a short-lived Broadway musical, The Silver Slipper. The song’s lyrics made it sound like it might be between two sweethearts, but in the play a woman sang it to her pet parakeet.

Pirates infielder Tommy Leach remembered the song as “a real humdinger,” at least until the Royal Rooters turned it into a tool of psychological warfare:

I think those Boston fans actually won that Series for the Red Sox. We beat them three out for the first four games, and then they started singing that damn “Tessie” song, the Red Sox fans did.

In the fifth game of the Series, the Royal Rooters started singing “Tessie” for no particular reason at all, and the Red Sox won. They must have figured it was a good-luck charm, because from then on you could hardly play ball they were singing “Tessie” so damn loud.

A news story on the series’ seventh game (the last one in Pittsburgh) confirms Leach’s recollection:

The Boston rooters marched on the field behind their band, which played “Tessie” and “Tessie” only. It was to the strains of “Tessie” that the first game was won by Boston and since that time the Boston rooters have not allowed the band to play anything else.

They sang it so much they could invent new lyrics and deliver melodious trash-talk on the fly, as they did when Boston beat Pittsburgh’s fourth-choice pitcher, Brickyard Kennedy, on a rare Phillippe rest-day:

Pittsburgh needs a few good pitchers,
Such as Boston’s pennant lifters.
Phillippe you are the only, only, only one.

When the Americans won three straight games to force the Series back to the Huntington Grounds, McGreevy and the other Rooters directors hired a much larger band, the 35-piece Boston Postal Carriers’ Band, to perform “Tessie” during Game Eight and brashly announced that the band had not been retained to perform at a potential Game Nine—there would be no need.

And there wasn’t. Boston won the first world’s championship on October 13, 1903, a victory made possible with clutch pitching, ground-rule doubles, and a song about a bird.

This Week’s Lineup:

- The final (weird) numbers from 2026, and Nico Hoerner saves Paul’s bacon in real time

- Winning the West ain’t what it used to be

- A record year for ballpark stunt food

- Ted’s ballpark angel blesses him with great seats and unlimited ice cream

- Max Scherzer’s farewell

- Justin Verlander’s farewell, and Paul does his own 21-year look-back

Programming Note

With the regular season ending, Slap Hits will be going into hibernation. We hope you’ve enjoyed our series of non-urgent observations on a season in real-time.

Clear the Field will continue over the fall and winter with a bi-weekly story of sideways baseball history.

Next week: The “Rally Squirrel”

What’s This?

Every few weeks during the regular season, Ted and I cover whatever has delighted us from present-day baseball (or sometimes things even further afield) in a lightning round.

There will be news (of a kind), opinion, banter when we agree, and arguing when we don’t. We’re looking at items big and small, obscure or viral, we’re going quick, and we’re not stopping to fact-check.

Got a Slap Hit?

Send us an amusing, baseball adjacent item (interpretation is up to you) you’d like us to mention, bonus points for weird and obscure. Listen to a few episodes of “Slap Hits” and you’ll get the sense of what we like to cover, and it’s often things that don’t get covered elsewhere that delight us the most. If we use it, we’ll credit you for the submission during the show!

Email tips and suggestions to clearthefieldpod@gmail.com or leave a comment on Substack or YouTube.

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

We didn’t always intend to bring you this particular story today, but, as we will see, sometimes things just happen and you roll with it. A stray quote in our research led us from a preempted game1 between the Minnesota Twins and the Cleveland Indians to another incident from a few days prior. The Indians, it seems, were having a really weird week.

A lot of things had to go right for Kyle Denney to reach the majors, but they did.

From the tiny town of Prague, Oklahoma, Denney pitched for two years in community college before transferring to the University of Oklahoma. He entered the Major League Baseball amateur draft in 1999 and was selected by the Cleveland Indians in the 26th round. There were 50 rounds in that bygone version of the draft, and halfway through, the odds of selecting a future big-leaguer were slim. Just seven players taken after Denney went on to substantive major-league careers, a group headlined by Rich Harden, the future change-up artist of the Oakland A’s. Harden, a high-school pitcher, was drafted in the 38th round by the Seattle Mariners but chose to go to college. Good call.

Denney, 21, did not have that option. He signed and started at the bottom of the Indians’ minor league system, hoping to beat some pretty long odds. He pitched passably at each level but never well enough to accelerate his progression, let alone skip a step. His development was significantly hindered by an elbow injury requiring Tommy John surgery in 2001. He spent a year at each stop, reaching AAA Buffalo at the end of 2003. By then Denney was 25; in rookie years, that’s old.

He spent the 2004 season pitching for the Bisons, compiling a 10-5 record across 24 starts with an ERA of 4.41. He came close to getting called up to Cleveland a few times as other fortunes waxed and waned, but the assignment always went to someone else. No player of Denney’s considerable baseball ability wanted to hear themselves described as a “career minor-leaguer,” but in September 2004 that’s what he was.

And then he got lucky.

It started with a chain of other people’s misfortunes. In Cleveland, a pitcher named Jason Davis was removed from the starting rotation due to wildness. The team wanted to fill his spot with another pitcher, Kazuhito Tadano, but he went down with hip and back pain. Lefthander Cliff Lee could have stepped in, but the sub-.500 Indians were cutting back on Lee’s innings to save his arm for the future. But there were still four starts to cover in the present, and Eric Wedge, Cleveland’s manager, said the team’s plan D was Kyle Denney, Buffalo’s Old Reliable, with nearly double the starts and innings of any other Bisons pitcher that year. Even if he wasn’t really a major-league prospect, under the circumstances, Denney certainly deserved his chance.

He was called up on September 14 to make a start against the Detroit Tigers at Jacobs Field. Expectations for the 27-year-old non-prospect weren’t exactly high—the Indians just wanted him to help them get through the season—but even shielded by low hopes, Denney’s debut was a disaster. A 64-win Tigers team hammered him for two home runs, four doubles, three singles, and one triple in just over three innings. Wedge seemed determined to stay out of his overused bullpen, but after Denney’s 22nd batter the manager gave up and pulled him, right around the time that an audible number of sarcastic fans in the home crowd seemed to switch allegiances and start cheering on the Tigers.

After the 11-3 loss, Denney was as poised and accountable as someone with a 21.60 ERA could be, taking responsibility for his many barreled-up mistakes: “You cannot throw the ball in the middle of the plate against anyone. I did, and it was pretty much batting practice for them.”

Somebody asked him what he’d learned in his first start. “I learned where not to throw the ball. I’ll go home tonight and think about it, and tomorrow I’ll forget it.”

Since the team had no better options, Wedge was sympathetic. “It’s his first one and it will get better. He tried to do a little too much. Hopefully he will be more relaxed and more comfortable next time.”

If a pitcher couldn’t get comfortable against the 2004 Kansas City Royals, they were doomed. The Royals were on track to break their franchise record of 100 losses, and since the September roster expansion they were mostly just trying out future contributors.

On September 19, Kyle Denney was able to do just enough against a team in full tank-mode. He lasted five innings and struck out six, but also gave up six hits and a walk. A timely home run by Cleveland first baseman Ben Broussard even got Denney his first major-league win. “You dream about getting to the big leagues,” the pitcher said after the game. “Some people have the perfect outing for their first time, some people don’t. I just felt much more relaxed out there today.”

His ERA had dropped below 10, but his next start was against the American League Central-champion Twins, and even though the Twins had let off the gas after clinching, they still ran over Denney, who gave up six runs on eight hits and again couldn’t make it out of the fourth inning. Most of the damage came in the fourth after he issued a four-pitch walk with two outs and no one on base. “Everything seemed to snowball after that.”

If September 24 was a snowball, September 29 was the avalanche.

In his last start of the year, Kyle Denney had one two personal goals: drop his ERA back to single-digits and pitch respectably in front of an audience including his mother and grandparents, who’d made the five-hour trip from Oklahoma. His mark across three starts was 11.25, and he knew that players on the wrong side of four digits were rarely given a second chance. At least he’d drawn the lowly Royals again, this time at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City. The Royals were fighting against their own infamy, having lost that 100th game to tie their all-time-worst total and now trying to avoid sole ownership of the record.

In the Battle of Regrettable Numbers, Denney and the Indians prevailed, sweeping the Royals with a 5-2 win. Nonetheless, Kansas City seemed to be figuring Denney out; he lasted only four innings and gave up eight hits and three walks, leaving the bases loaded twice. It was a performance one writer likened to “a steeple chase,” but in giving up only two runs he shrunk his ERA to 9.54 and his team won, so the pitcher was all smiles after the game.

There were plenty more smiles in the visitors’ clubhouse when Denney approached his locker to find his street clothes missing. In their place was a cheap blond wig and a uniform of the style worn by female members of the University of Southern California cheering squad, the Song Leaders. As Denney was 6’ 2” and 190 pounds, there may have been some custom tailoring involved, but his teammate and dresser, pitcher C.C. Sabathia, had spared no expense, even adding a pair of non-regulation white knee-high boots to the look.

Sabathia was clearly going for maximum humiliation, forcing his rookie rotation-mate to wear not just a dress but also the cardinal and gold colors of any Sooner’s natural enemy. Denney squeezed into the outfit with good humor, and he wasn’t alone.

It was “Costume Night” for the Indians’ rookies. To let off some steam at the end of the season, the new guys were dressed in all sorts of outlandish costumes and made to wear them during the team’s final trip of the year. Kansas City was a great spot for Costume Night because the players had to go through the public airport concourse to reach their charter flight, ensuring a spectacle and lots of pictures. Multiple teams held such events in 2004. The practice has since expanded, but it has always had its detractors.

“There is an element of cruelty about it,” Bob Dolgan wrote in the Plain Dealer in 2004. Dolgan described Costume Night as “a form of bullying by veteran players against youngsters trying to fit in,” adding, “baseball would never have become America’s pastime if fans saw their heroes walking around in garb that would look weird2 at a Halloween party.”

But the veterans loved it and the rookies made the best of it. Cliff Bartosh, a left-handed member of the relief corps, was quite pleased with his detailed bumble-bee get-up, promising to wear it again…at a Halloween party.

The USC cheerleader outfit was probably a one-and-done, but Denney owned it. He was wearing it when he greeted his family, and he lingered outside Kauffman Stadium to sign autographs while the team buses prepared to depart. One uncharitable writer said he thought Denney looked more comfortable as a cheerleader than he had as a pitcher on the mound that night.

Two buses carried the team to the airport. Kyle Denney climbed into the second one, as did outfielder Ryan Ludwick, manager Eric Wedge, and most of the team’s training staff. Wedge sat in the manager’s customary position in the front seat on the passenger side. Ludwick found a seat on the driver’s side, in Row 20. Denney was sitting one row further back on the passenger side.

The buses rolled away from the stadium at around 11:00 p.m. Everyone was in a good mood, boosted by the win, the sweep, and the timeless satisfaction of a successful hazing. Ten minutes later the second bus was on Interstate 70 when everyone inside heard a bang. Some people thought it sounded like a rock hitting a window. Wedge recalled smelling burning metal. Kyle Denney thought somebody was lighting firecrackers on the rowdy trip, just another torment for the rookies.

“All of us jumped,” he said. But then he felt pain. “It felt like somebody came up and pinched me real hard on the leg,” or like someone had snapped a strong rubber band against his skin. Except that wasn’t possible, since he was wearing high boots. “I reached down to feel [my leg] and there was a hole in my boot. I put my finger inside and pulled it out and there was blood.”

“I’m bleeding,” he said, to no one in particular.

One row ahead, Ryan Ludwick knew something was amiss, even if he couldn’t explain what. His leg was stinging too, and when he heard Denney say he was bleeding, he called out for the trainers.

Nick Paparesta, a trainer for AAA Buffalo, had joined the Indians after the minor-league season ended. He made his way to Denney, removed the boot, and inspected the wound, feeling something hard inside. Lonnie Soloff, the head trainer, took over and began to “manipulate the calf.” Denney said after a few seconds of manipulation, something popped out, “like squeezing a pimple.”

The trainers looked at the crumpled bit of metal. “That looks like a bullet.”

Now Eric Wedge had to make a decision. Stop the bus and wait for police and medical attention at the scene, or make for the airport and leave an unknown assailant behind. It wasn’t an easy choice, but Wedge got paid to make the tough ones, and he told the bus operator to drive on. “If the trainers thought Kyle was more seriously injured, we may have had to do something else. But I didn’t think it was a good idea to stop if the guy was still shooting at us.”

Wedge also called Mike Seghi, the team’s travel director, in charge of the first bus. “I think we got hit by a bullet.”

It helped that Denney’s wound was superficial. Soloff said there had been no need to wait for a doctor to remove the object, “and with the athlete’s discomfort level, it just made sense.”

Seghi got busy on his own phone. By the time the second bus arrived at the airport, representatives from three different police departments and an ambulance were waiting. An officer discovered a small hole about 15 feet from the front of the bus on the driver’s side. Around the same time, Ryan Ludwick discovered a hole in his pants and an abrasion on his leg. The bullet had entered by his legs, just missing him or ricocheting off something and producing shrapnel that lightly scraped his thigh. Then it went across the bus and through Denney’s boot into his calf.

Denney was taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance, where he expected to stay overnight. One of the trainers stayed with him while the rest of the team flew on to Minneapolis for their final series against the postseason-bound Twins, a series that would feature more strangeness but no mortal peril. As he left the team, the rookie was still wearing his cheerleading outfit. “He was sitting in the back of the ambulance [like that],” Mike Seghi said. “I told him, ‘You know, you can take the wig off.’” Someone decided it was appropriate to return Denney’s street clothes, given the extenuating circumstances.

The police held onto the right boot as evidence, leaving Denney with a left boot and a lot of hard-to-categorize memories. He called it “the craziest twelve hours I’ve ever had,” going from a battle on the mound to a costume party in the clubhouse to a police interview at the hospital.

“I think the boot really did help me,” he insisted. “It was kind of thick, and I think it slowed the bullet down. I have to give C.C. a big hug.”

The trainers said Denney wasn’t just making a crack: The thick material of the boot had helped slow down the bullet, keeping it from burrowing deep into the muscle of his leg. He was out of the hospital and on his way to rejoin the team the next morning.

In Minnesota he was observed to have just a slight limp but said he was feeling fine. He was also feeling famous, fending off bookers from the Today Show, the Early Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. “My friends cut me no slack,” he said at a team press conference. “They said, ‘well, it’s better to be known for being shot than having a 9.00 ERA.’ Hopefully I can work on that next year.”

Back in Kansas City, the police quickly ran through a few leads. A small-caliber pistol had been fired into the bus, but it wasn’t clear whether this was an accident or if the team had been targeted. The incident occurred on an active expressway and the bus didn’t stop. MLB arranged for the visiting Chicago White Sox to have a police escort during the last series of the year in Kansas City, but nothing happened and Denney’s case was eventually closed. Just one of those things.

Eric Wedge said Denney handled the whole affair “like a champ.” In a profession where “acting like you’ve been there before” was a virtue, Denney’s teammates were impressed with his composure. Ryan Ludwick said, “Kyle acted like he’d been shot a hundred times before” and meant that as a compliment.

If Kyle Denney’s major-league debut was measured on following orders and media savvy, he might have become an All-Star. But the Indians were paying much more attention to his ability to miss bats, and the numbers were not the kind that got a pitcher invited back to try again.

When the 2005 season began, he was back in AAA Buffalo again, putting up another chunky ERA over his first nine starts. It seemed as if Denney had spent all his good luck making it to the majors, leaving him exposed to one misfortune after another since reaching the top. In the middle of 2005, he was hit on the head by a line drive that fractured his skull. He recovered in time to make one final appearance for the Indians’ Low-A team, but that didn’t go great either and he was released at the end of the season. He had a few brief minor-league stints in other organizations followed, but his baseball career ended in 2007. For better or worse, the story of his major-league career was the one his friends had predicted.

So that’s our baseball story for today, featuring a player in a costume, randomly shot on the team bus after what ended up being his final appearance in the major leagues, saved from further injury by the boots that USC cheerleaders didn’t even wear. All that, and we think this might be one of the more relatable stories we’ve ever told on Project 3.18—hear us out:

Not many people can say they pitched in the majors at age 15 or became a member of the White Sox after a walk-on tryout. But everyone has been through something like Denney’s September 29, 2004—a pileup of experiences that defies categorization, a day when you have to shake your head and marvel at the Mad Lib of human experiences the universe wrote up, just for you.

We’ve all had days like that. Kyle Denney just happened to have the best day like that. Lucky him.

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

As the exhausted Chicago Cubs finish a weather-mangled final series against the Boston Red Sox, our pick for this week’s baseball story seems prescient. We’re looking at a marginal Midwestern postseason contender vying for home-field advantage in the final days of the regular season, whose efforts are hindered by powers beyond their control. Just like we drew it up, Cubbies.

But the culprit in this special Saturday story wasn’t a nor’easter or a hurricane or a fire. The Minnesota Twins’ push for the 2004 playoffs was disrupted by Goldy Gopher, who had powerful friends.

The Minnesota Twins clinched the American League Central division on September 20, 2004, but their place in the four-team AL postseason bracket was still up in the air in the season’s final days. The powerhouse Yankees were locked in the first seed; no matter what, they would host an American League Division Series at Yankee Stadium. In 2003, the Twins had drawn that pinstriped short straw and lost an ALDS to the Yankees in four games. A year later, they hoped not to retrace their steps.

Two days before the end of the season, the Twins still had a chance to begin the playoffs with home-field advantage, against a non-Yankees opponent. If they won their final two games against the Cleveland Indians and the Anaheim Angels lost their final game against Oakland, Minnesota could play their ALDS in the reverberating confines of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, where the noise from a World Series crowd broke a decibel measurement device in 1987.

Early fall was a season for the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the regional civic authority that managed the publicly owned Metrodome. In the early 2000s, the facility was shared by the Twins, the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL, and the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers. On October 2, the final Saturday of the baseball season, the Twins and the Gophers football team were scheduled to play two different sports on the same field.

To make that possible, the Twins’ game against the Cleveland Indians was scheduled to start bright and early at 11:00 a.m. After playing a night game on October 1, the players had to be back at the ballpark at 8:30 the next morning to complete their game in time to reconfigure the stadium for the Gophers’ game against Penn State, due to start at seven o’clock that evening.

The Indians took an early lead in the early game, getting two runs off Twins starter Carlos Silva. They added a third in the top of the fifth when center fielder Grady Sizemore hit a huge home run that banged off the folded-up football seats in right field, but Minnesota came back to tie it with a string of chip-shot hits off pitcher Jake Westbrook, whose ground-ball game didn’t play as well on the Metrodome’s fast-playing artificial surface.

Another Cleveland home run in the top of the sixth, another Minnesota scratch run in the bottom. Both teams scored again in the seventh, locking into a 5-5 tie.

The score was still tied at the end of nine innings—the moment when the facilities staff and the MSFC began to sweat. The grounds crew needed four hours to flip the Metrodome between its baseball and football configuration, and at the end of regulation baseball, kick-off was less than six hours away.

Before the tenth inning began, the outfield message board warned fans that no inning could start after 2:30 p.m. The managers, Minnesota’s Ron Gardenhire and Cleveland’s Eric Wedge, received the same message. “I knew we were in trouble,” Wedge said, “when they came up to us and said, ‘Not to worry, in eleven years it’s never happened.’”

It was true—the Metrodome had successfully turned over every game at the facility since it opened in 1982, but in offering such assurances to Wedge, the MSFC had just dropped an enormous jinx onto the Twins’ playoff push.

In the process of emptying out their bullpens, both teams dipped into some of their better arms right around the time when somebody, anybody, had to score a run. Joe Nathan, the Twins’ closer, pitched the tenth and eleventh innings, while Minnesota used Rafael Betancourt, Matt Miller, and Cliff Bartosh. No one could break through.

Heading to the on-deck circle in the eleventh inning, Torii Hunter, the Twins’ center fielder, found the vicinity unusually crowded with security staff and grounds crew, looking less like landscapers and more like a NASCAR pit crew. “I said, ‘What the heck are you doing here?’ They said, ‘The game is going to be over if you guys don’t get a run.’ So we had guys trying to hit a home run.”

Hunter drew a two-out walk. Eric Wedge changed pitchers, bringing in Cliff Bartosh to face another home-run aspirant, first baseman Justin Morneau. When Morneau hit a playable ground ball to shortstop for the third out, it was 2:33 p.m.

The crowd of 32,000 people booed. They’d been in their seats for over three hours, but now the umpires were walking off and the grounds crew was racing on, lowering the pitcher’s mound, covering up the infield sliding pits, and laying down hash-marks right and left.

“They have to do what they have to do, but I don’t agree with it,” Twins third baseman Corey Koskie said. “I’m disappointed and I’m sure the fans are too. It’s not who’s playing [the Gophers] that’s bad, it’s the fact that we’re double-booked.”

The game was suspended until the following day, when it would be played to conclusion prior to starting the final game of the season. Fans were invited back to enjoy both games from second-level seats that were usually left closed. If that didn’t appeal, they could receive a credit for a 2005 game of comparable significance.

Despite working through lunch, Twins outfielder Lew Ford had four hits that day. “I didn’t even know anything about [the postponement rule], he said. “When everyone started walking off the field, I thought they were kidding at first. I guess the crowd knew, though, because they all left immediately.”

Ron Gardenhire was said to be furious after the game was halted. “I don’t know what to say. It’s got me up in arms…pretty sad. We’re in the middle of a game. And we don’t need a stadium [of our own]? Come on.”

Life at the Metrodome could feel like a math problem, where fandom came with a distinct order of operations. The Twins and the other tenants were fed up of being sliced and diced at what was ostensibly everyone’s “home park.”

“It’s weird,” reliever Juan Rincón said. “We’re trying to prepare for the playoffs in Major League Baseball, get the home field. Now this. It’s like we’re not at home [here]. We’re pretty much screwed. It’s like someone from outside telling you what to do in your own house.”

“We battle our buts off, and then it’s over,” Torii Hunter said. “That’s terrible. We even had our own stadium in the minors. How come we can’t have our own stadium in the majors? I mean, it’s a college game. Why can’t they start it ten minutes or thirty minutes later?”

Hunter questioned whether MLB even had the authority to impose a doubleheader on the players under the circumstances. The rules allowed teams to abruptly alter the schedule in response to weather, but the Metrodome was…domed. Could a dome team just move games (or pieces of games) around willy-nilly?

The Indians, playing spoiler and trying—unsuccessfully—to finish with a .500 record and go home, had their own troubles. The change blew up most of their end-of-season travel plans, which were scheduled based on the scheduled start of Game 162, which was now delayed, not by an act of God, but, apparently, by an act of Gopher.

“This is going to kill a lot of our flights,” first baseman Ben Broussard said. “I think it’s bull. We’re a major league team and a college football team has priority? There’s a lot of important stuff going on here and we can’t finish the game?”

They could not. The rules1 governing the shared facility said that if the University of Minnesota was scheduled to use the stadium on a date which ended up as a Twins’ home playoff game, the Gophers would move. But October 2 was merely a game with playoff implications, so Big Ten Football had the right of way.

“The Twins weren’t very pleased,” the university’s athletic director said after the postponement, “but they have to understand, we’re not very happy about it either. More than anything, it really demonstrates what the problem is. You’ve got a Major League Baseball game with a team that’s going to the playoffs and they can’t finish. That doesn’t make any sense. You’ve got a Big Ten football game with a team that’s fighting for a championship and we can’t play when we want to. If we get a stadium, none of this happens.”

The Gophers wanted a new stadium on the East Bank of their Mississippi River campus, which they would eventually receive, in 2009. For their part, the Twins had been advocating for separation since the mid-1990s. Feeling fresh urgency after being pre-empted on October 2, 2004, the team successfully went to court in 2005 to get out of their lease. With better leverage, the team eventually came to an agreement with the Twin Cities that produced Target Field, a baseball-only facility that opened in 2010.

To Ron Gardenhire’s credit, he ended a strange, frustrating day with solidarity:

If we had knocked in a run earlier this could have been avoided, but it is a very sad situation and we’ll come back out and try this thing again. I hope the Gophers win. I really hope it’s worth it tonight. Come on, Gophers!2

On October 3, the Twins decided to have their fourth starter, Kyle Lohse, pitch on short rest for the first time in his career. Not only that, Lohse would finish the suspended game and then proceed into his scheduled start 20 minutes later. The pitcher reportedly learned of this assignment walking into the stadium that morning. Working both sides of this strange doubleheader gave Lohse, with an 8-13 record, the chance to win two games in the same day, so he took the assignment. “That’s more wins than I had in some months this year.”

The suspension might have been hardest on Grady Sizemore, who was a double short of hitting for the cycle and scheduled to lead off in the twelfth inning. “Don’t jinx it,” he warned an inquiring writer.

Lohse immediately deprived Sizemore of his cycle and got through the inning without damage. In the bottom of the twelfth, pinch-hitter Jason Bartlett walked and infielder Michael Cuddyer hit a game-winning double that split the gap in center-right. Bartlett just beat two relay throws and sparked a restrained walk-off celebration at home plate before everyone took a breather and resumed their positions for the second game.

Lohse struggled in his actual start, giving up five hits and three runs in four innings before leaving the game with a blister. Grady Sizemore hit another RBI triple in the ninth inning to help put the game away. The Twins had managed to overcome their Saturday afternoon pre-emption, but they lost home field advantage anyway.

The Minnesota players had come to work on October 3 with packed bags they hoped not to need, but the 5-2 loss sent them back to Yankee Stadium to face the 101-win Yankees, who would once again defeat them in four games, setting up a historic League Champion Series against the Bambino-cursed Red Sox. The rest of that story you probably know.

That was the tale we aimed to tell this week, of football bullying America’s once-national game in the cramped quarters between summer and fall. The result was another strange game for the Project 3.18 archives, one Michael Cuddyer described as both “the shortest game of the year and also the longest.”

We love the strange around here, but we also love the surprising, and near the end of our research for this piece, Eric Wedge, the Indians’ manager, provided a big one. While Ron Gardenhire fumed after the postponement, Wedge hardly seemed fazed after losing part of a game to football. “Another first,” was all he could say, shrugging his shoulders.

It turns out the Cleveland Indians were having a week full of “firsts,” and after what they’d been through, a traffic jam at the Metrodome didn’t rate as that weird. On Wednesday, September 29, the day they left for that final series in Minnesota, rookie pitcher Kyle Denney—wearing a blond wig and a cheerleading outfit—was shot on the team bus, requiring Eric Wedge to decide whether to divert to a hospital or make a break for the Kansas City airport.

So, yeah…that was a first.

Of course, Project 3.18 must tell that surprising tale, but, darn it, the University of Minnesota football game against Washington starts in a few hours, and they’re telling us we have to clear out. So let’s consider this one temporarily suspended, and we’ll finish it up on Monday morning.

Be sure to keep your ticket stub, and until then—come on, Gophers!

On September 28: “Craziest twelve hours I’ve ever had.”

Over on Clear the Field:

Last week was the anniversary of the great Satchel Paige’s final major-league appearance in 1965, pitching for Charlie Finley’s woebegone Kansas City A’s. A lot of people including the opposing Boston Red Sox assumed the pitcher’s appearance was all a stunt, but apparently Paige didn’t get that memo. We had a great time with this story—listen or watch it here on Substack or on YouTube.

Episode Highlights:

- Looking for work and watching out for moose

- Charles O. Finley’s Kansas City circus

- The Athletics sign Paige for one night only

- The 1960s get a look at a living legend and Paige “unfolds” for one more start

- Underestimated by the Boston Red Sox, but not by “Carl Yastrocki”

- Paige finally gets his major-league pension, and winds up a four-decade career with the Atlanta Braves

Take the Megaphone

What’s your favorite Satchel Paige feat? The hesitation pitch? The gum-wrapper? The infield sit-down? What are we missing? Leave a comment on YouTube or wherever you’re enjoying this story.

Support Us

If you’re a fan of the podcast, nothing says it like becoming a paid subscriber at Project 3.18. Paid subscribers receive some special newsletter perks and help us build on what we’re doing with Clear the Field.

Subscribe now

You can also follow the show for free on your favorite platform:

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

If you enjoyed an episode on a platform like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, can you give it a quick rating and let folks know? A 5-Star rating helps our podcast appear as suggested and helps people find us.

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox.

Subscribe now

Late May, 1949 – Cleveland Indians in sixth place, 7 games back

It started, as many can’t-miss ideas start, during a barroom disagreement.

Charles “Charley” Lupica was having a drink with a friend at a watering hole in his East Cleveland neighborhood. Lupica was part-owner a local establishment variously characterized as a drug store, a confectionery, or a delicatessen. Whatever the business was, it had been a long day behind the counter.

Lupica’s happy hour was disturbed by loud voices from a nearby table, where four men were extolling the virtues of the New York Yankees and mocking the deficiencies of the Cleveland Indians, despite the fact that the Indians bested the Yankees and won it all in 1948. Hopes of a repeat were high in Cleveland and Lupica did not appreciate this kind of talk.

“I was 37,” he recalled, “I thought I could take apart the world.” He butted into the conversation and expressed his certainty that the Indians would again win the pennant. He also encouraged the gentlemen, if they loved the Yankees so much, to feel free to move to New York.

Their fateful response was something along the lines of, “Why don’t you go sit on a flagpole?”

The remark was a dismissive figure of speech, like someone saying, “Oh, get out of here,” but for some unknowable reason Lupica interpreted it as a challenge and accepted on the spot. He already had a flagpole, 16 feet tall, on top of his store.

He rounded up some neighborhood kids to help him build a platform around the pole overlooking the corner of Wade Park Avenue and 118th Street. At the stroke of noon on May 31, he climbed a ladder up to the four-foot by four-foot platform and vowed not to come down until the Indians reached first-place in the American League. That’ll show ‘em.

The Indians were in sixth place—out of eight teams—so Lupica must have known he might be up the pole for a while. If that was the case, some of his preparations didn’t show it. For his first afternoon and night on the uncovered wooden platform, nearly 20 feet above the roof and some 45-50 feet above the street, he took only a sleeping bag and a hat. The platform ended up being too small, even for a man of his short stature, so he slept wrapped around the pole and used his belt to lash himself to the figurative mast.

Traffic immediately backed up around store, requiring the Cleveland Police Department to assign an officer to the corner. A reporter and photographer from the Plain Dealer showed up. Since Lupica was out of earshot, his business partner, Ben DeMarco, did the talking, describing some of the logistics involved in the stunt. Lupica would get two meals a day, mostly sandwiches and drinks from the store, delivered via a bucket on a rope. With only a straw hat to protect him from the sun, the reporter observed that Lupica was already looking a little red.

DeMarco had to agree. “Tomorrow we’ll have to do something to take care of that. I think we ought to install a telephone, too. Then he can talk to his wife and kids.”

Charley and his wife, Augustine, had three children between the ages of six and 10, but that’s not all: On the day Lupica ascended to his perch, Augustine was somewhere in the vicinity of six months pregnant. Asked what Mrs. Lupica thought of the stunt, DeMarco said Lupica had made a persuasive case as to why his extended absence ”would be good for the family.”

“He’s a determined cuss,” DeMarco said. “He’ll probably be up there for quite a while. He thinks the Indians can do it.”

June 1 – Cleveland in sixth place, 7 games back

“Flagpole sitting” wasn’t always a gimmick. The practice is ancient; some early sitters abandoned their worldly lives altogether and climbed up on a rock or pillar to battle the elements and seek spiritual enlightenment. One of these, a 5th-century monk named Simeon Stylites, spent 36 years in a hut on top of a ruined tower. He didn’t descend until his body was carried down—the church made him a saint for that.

By the 1920s, there were actual flagpoles, and a stunt performer named Alvin “Shipweck” Kelly popularized the practice of ascending for the sake of publicity rather than piety. Kelly and many imitators did their “flagpole sitting” to set a record, promote a cause, or draw a crowd. The fad of the ‘20s was much less popular by the late 1940s, but it remained in the public vernacular through the dismissive, “Go sit on a flagpole,” the crack which had inspired Charley Lupica to do just that.

Kelly’s version of the stunt centered on physical endurance. He usually sat on nothing more than a metal stool or crossbar, consuming mostly coffee and cigarettes, and learned how to sleep sitting up with his thumbs jammed into specially placed holes. He aimed to stay up until his body gave out, and he topped out at an unfathomable 49 days.

Charley Lupica’s version of flagpole sitting was a mix of the physical and the psychological. There were three months left in the baseball season. To keep his vow to stay up as long as it took, he’d have to get comfortable.

On the second day he worked on extending the platform to create a few more feet of leg-room. The renovations helped, but the first night of June was unseasonably chilly, prompting the first quote from Cleveland’s newest pole-sitter: “I thought I saw icicles on the stars.”

June 2 – Sixth place, 8 games back

DeMarco was still acting as spokesman. “Charley’s not worried. He says the Indians are getting stronger every day.”

Lupica’s voice was hoarse from shouting down to the crowded street. “I’m feeling okay. I guess I’m getting to be a fixture up here.”

118th Street had become an impromptu high school reunion. Friends and associates Lupica had not seen in years popped up to wave and shout encouragement. The neighborhood bookmakers were also dropping by. Lupica always denied he had any financial stake on how long he could or would stay up, but pretty much everybody else in the area put at least a little money down. Some put down a lot.

June 6 – Sixth place, 9.5 games back

Lupica was taking salt pills to replace some of what he was losing in the Midwestern humidity—he’d eventually lose 15 pounds despite his sedentary routine. He’d gotten a portable radio and an oversized umbrella to shelter under. The prospect of foul weather worried him. Breakfast was poached egg, bacon, and pineapple juice. Dinner was baked ham. Everything went up (and down) in the bucket.

The health department had a problem with that. On June 6, Cleveland’s “sanitary police” issued an order for Lupica to cease and desist on the grounds that he had no camping permit and the “plumbing facilities” on his pole were insufficient.

The postal service regularly sent a mail carrier laden with packages and postcards up the ladder. The Boston Braves organization sent him red pajamas and best wishes. A week in, he’d become so famous the post office successfully delivered a congratulatory letter from out of state that gave his address as: ”Somewhere Over Cleveland.”

He adapted his routine around the things he couldn’t control. “I have to stay up until 3 or 4 o’clock every morning. If I don’t, the drivers below blow their horns to wake me. That wakes the neighborhood. So, I don’t get up until noon.”

Luckily, he was awake when the first two Indians players, pitcher Bob Lemon and second baseman Joe Gordon, drove over to get a look at him.

June 7 – Sixth place, 7.5 games back

Lupica’s lawyer sent a sharply worded letter to the authorities, reminding them that a pole above one’s property did not constitute a “public space” as the term was defined in the relevant city codes. Therefore, a taxpayer like Charles Lupica could do whatever he wanted in a bucket. The sanitary police stood down and Lupica stayed up.

He said his family had only come by to see him once. The weight of his commitment was setting in: “We’re expecting another child in about four weeks. If the Indians don’t make first-place by then, I’ll have to see the kid up here.”

Lou Boudreau, the Indians’ player-manager, stopped by to assure him it wouldn’t come to that. “He said he’ll try to get me down in three weeks,” Lupica reported. Even the great Satchel Paige visited. Lupica prized the photo the pitcher signed, but Paige was too cagey to make written promises:

June 17 – Cleveland in fourth place, 5.5 games back

Boudreau backed up his words with a six-game winning streak. Up on the pole, Lupica was experimenting with a beard, something men of his generation did not do unless there were extenuating circumstances. He soon gave it up.

July 5 – Third place, 7 games back

“That’s where the Indians were when I started this thirty-four days ago,” Lupica groaned. “I didn’t think it would take them six months to get up to first place.”

Conversations were easier, at least. He’d gotten a telephone, making it easier to talk with his wife. There were drawbacks to being reachable, however. A junior staffer at the Plain Dealer was assigned to call him every evening, and his number kept leaking and he was flooded with crank calls and people calling at odd hours. He had to change it four times.

In July, the Indians caught fire behind a run of outstanding starting pitching, but it was also one of the hottest summer months in Clevelanders’ recent memories. The thermometer affixed to the outside of his canvas awning regularly passed 100 degrees. The neighborhood kids celebrated the Fourth of July by shooting firecrackers towards his mostly wooden dwelling.

On July 6, the storm Lupica had been dreading finally hit. Before retreating indoors, people on the street begged him to come down, without success. “The wind was so bad, I was afraid I was going to be thrown off.” The endless pounding rain was a torment. “I thought this was Niagara Falls instead of 118th Street.” He couldn’t sleep until 4 a.m., but the next morning, when a writer called to check on him, he was his jovial self, reporting, “No rain in my basement.”

Lupica’s outlook was increasingly sunny as Cleveland went 14-4 between July 1 and July 19, looking more like the team that won a pennant the year before. They moved into second place in the American League on July 10, but that was still 5.5 games back of the relentless Yankees.

He spent the 47th day of his vigil planning his upcoming 38th birthday. For obvious reasons, it would be a small affair.

July 25 – Second place, 3 games back

His legs hurt, his back ached, and a tooth had begun bothering him. As if to buck him up, the Indians finally got within striking distance of the top of the standings.

On August 2, a Boston radio station arranged a telephone conversation between the nation’s two most famous flagpole sitters. In Boston, a woman named Ruth Ellis had been up on a platform for 19 days, while Lupica was at 63.

They spent seven minutes discussing the shared challenges of heat, noisy crowds, and what was delicately described as “the bathing problem.” Their causes, however, could hardly have been more different: Ellis was protesting the inability of her family to find housing at a reasonable rent. Lupica was up there more or less for glory.

“I hope your husband finds a house for you,” he said as they wrapped up.

“Thanks,” Ellis said. “And I’ll be rooting for the Cleveland Indians.”

It’s tough to guess the most exciting week in a person’s life across such distance, but we think the first week of August 1949 must have been up there for Charley Lupica. Boudreau and the Indians had missed their deadline, but as Augustine’s due date arrived, the Yankees finally heard footsteps behind them.

After winning both games of an August 4 doubleheader against the Washington Nationals on a day the Yankees lost, the Indians pulled to 2.5 games of first place. The team headed to Philadelphia for four games against the middling Athletics. Charley Lupica could practically smell dirt, and not a moment too soon.

The Indians won their first game in Philadelphia, but lost a half-game in the standings when New York swept a doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns. Then, disaster: Cleveland lost the next three games to Philadelphia and gave up half the progress they’d made all summer.

On August 7, the night of the second loss, Charles Lupica, Jr. was born.

Donated modern technology helped Lupica keep up with events from afar. Pictures were delivered, telephone calls were made, and he even got a portable television set (a gadget we didn’t know even existed in 1949) so he could watch camcorder footage recorded in his wife’s hospital room.

On August 8, the ambulance driving Augustine and Charles Jr. home from the hospital stopped under the pole, where Charley waved his hat to welcome his son into a world that was getting stranger by the day.

August 11 – Second place, 5.5 games back

With his 73rd consecutive day on the pole, Lupica passed one Milton Van Nolan of San Francisco, who’d held the American pole-sitting record of 72. In other news, the Indians lost and fell into third place behind the surging Boston Red Sox.

Lupica’s relationship with the people on the street was improving. Well into his third month up there, he had silenced his doubters and detractors. Even the neighborhood kids seemed to have let up. At the peak of his popularity he estimated well over 1,000 people a day were stopping by to get a look at the champ and wonder how far he could go.

August 28 – Third place, 6.5 games back

After beating the heat and the rain and the hecklers and even the urgent requirements of parenthood, a toothache had no chance. On August 28, Lupica’s dentist joined him on the platform to “clean out a bothersome tooth and put in a temporary filling.”

The Indians had lost four out of five, including two in a three-game series against the Yankees. It was becoming necessary for Lupica to clarify that he was not coming down until the end of the season…even if the Indians were mathematically eliminated sooner.

After a broiling July, August had been unseasonably cold, as had Lou Boudreau and his team, who went 18-14. Augustine Lupica received harassing phone calls from local gamblers who’d lost money by betting against her husband and wanted him to quit before they went broke. For months, Lupica had hoped to come down in triumph. As autumn began, he only hoped to come down.

September 14 – Third place, 7.5 games back

It had been 107 days since Charles Lupica first went up the pole for the Indians, and after another loss to the hated Athletics, the team was no closer than they’d been on that glorious spring day when he put his fate in their supposedly capable hands.

It was the season to transfer hope from the present to the future. “The [Indians] can win next year,” he said. “but it’ll take younger men with more hitting power.” As to which specific old men should go: “I don’t want to mention no names.”

He accepted that his ordeal would end with the 1949 season, maybe a little sooner: “I’m coming down before the last [home game] so there’ll be a bigger crowd to greet me.”

A few days later, Augustine was recovered enough to bring the baby up the ladder. Charles finally met Charles Jr.—who would later go by “Chuck,” help his father run the family’s moving business, write a book about him, and raise seven children of his own. “What a kid,” Lupica said of their meeting. “He didn’t even wake up.”

Elsewhere, the Indians started a six-game losing streak.

All through the summer, Bill Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians, had taken care to stay out of Charley Lupica’s hard-earned spotlight. The men had similar tastes and shared a sense of showmanship, which Veeck recognized in his autobiography, Veeck as In Wreck, in which he described Lupica as “a magnificent and dedicated human being.”

Veeck lent a hand in quiet ways, reportedly paying for Augustine’s hospital bills and sending Lupica a portable heater to help stave off the autumn frost, but nothing in the record suggests the owner or the club had a direct hand in the stunt or were a regular partner in it. Charley was on his own, which is how he earned such admiration from Veeck:

There were those who were willing to give me credit for thinking up Charley’s gag, too; patently unfair to Charley. Flagpole sitters, like .300 hitters, are born, not made.

When Lupica’s glorious stunt seemed in danger of coming to a deflating end, Veeck sprang into action.

On September 22, the Cleveland Indians were mathematically eliminated from winning the American League pennant. On what must have begun as a bitter day above Wade Park Avenue, Lupica got an “awful nice” letter from Veeck, in which the owner proposed a mutually beneficial denouement.

If Lupica was willing, the Indians would figure out a way to get him and his flagpole into Cleveland Municipal Stadium. He would spend his last night aloft beyond the fence in left field and descend onto the ballpark dirt as a guest of honor before the team’s final home game on September 25. “Ain’t it wonderful?” Lupica said.

Veeck’s public-relations team found a “lift-truck business” (with the best insurance in the world, evidently) able and willing to saw off the flagpole and transfer the whole thing to a flatbed truck which would ferry it to the ballpark on the other side of town. All of this while Lupica himself remained in place.

“The flagpole was higher than the bus wires,” Veeck recalled, “which meant, we discovered too late, that we needed a special license to move him through the city, and even then we had to devise a long, circuitous route.”

On September 24, Lupica’s home for 116 days was disassembled. The pole and the mostly empty platform were cut down and driven to Cleveland Stadium in a parade of vehicles, drawing crowds all along the winding journey. Lupica ducked under tree branches and dangled his legs cavalierly over the side as he waved to legions of admirers. If he was in any way secured to the structure, it didn’t show.

September 25 – Fourth place, 10 games back

Shut up in an empty, cavernous stadium, the final night was the quietest, but Lupica was too nervous to sleep. He paced for hours around the pole, his constant companion for more days than he’d ever intended. Charley Lupica never used the word “asceticism,” but up on that pole, a “determined cuss” became the American League’s first practicing hermit monk—and a pretty darn good one.

And then it was September 25, Charley Lupica Day. 33,977 people came out to honor the local soda jerk who had obliterated the pole-sitting record and taken their fandom to hitherto unimagined extremes.

A wailing ambulance started around the stadium warning track, followed by an attendant pushing a wheelchair and then the flatbed truck. On the platform, he wore a gray suit. The crowd roared, all for him. The saints never had it so good.

The procession ended at home plate. His wife and children were there to greet him, along with members of the Indians’ front office and the team band, playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Charley Lupica took off his suit coat, put it under his arm, and climbed down.

“It had to be a slow climb,” Veeck wrote, “because the photographers kept shouting at him to slow down so they could get their pictures. Charley, who did not seem to have anything against getting his picture in the paper, was nothing if not obliging.”

At 1:55 in the afternoon, 117 days later, he skipped the last few rungs of the ladder and jumped back to earth.

That last flourish was probably a mistake; his first few steps were unsteady. Three nurses swooped in but he waved them away. “Just let me stand here a minute. Oh, my ankles.”

He stumbled to a waiting microphone and was introduced by Rudie Schaffer, Veeck’s business manager and right-hand man, who dispensed a Christmas’ worth of gifts. A bathtub, a four-poster bed, a radio, and a stove. Bicycles, tricycles, and strollers for the kids. Somebody shoved a puppy into the arms of eight-year-old Carl Lupica. (“In the confusion, the dog’s breed was not established.”)

Then a super-sized gag-gift (Veeck’s favorite): a 50-foot flagpole for the family’s front yard. And, “for your loyal support,” a new Pontiac sedan.

He tried out the bed. He kissed the family. He unsteadily got down on his knees and felt the dirt. He kissed that, too. Flashbulbs exploded. It was true: Charley Lupica never minded having his picture taken. He kissed home plate and rose, enjoying the orange-brown grit on his hands. “The good earth,” he declared, “is the finest stuff in the world.”

Regretting all the trouble they’d had caused, the Indians chipped in and got him a breezy, 7-1 win over the Detroit Tigers, which he enjoyed from a box seat. “They should have brought home plate up to me every day to kiss.”

The day he came down, the fourth-place Indians began their longest winning streak of the year. They won out from there, seven games in all. When the season ended on October 2, Cleveland was 89-65, eight games behind the first-place Yankees and pretty much right where Charley Lupica had found them.

This Week’s Lineup:

- Champagne problems in the locker room

- Project Runway: Minor League Baseball

- Tristan Peters’ 18-pitch at-bat and the White Sox’ “dumb stuff”

- The Immaculate Inning and the Abhorrent Inning

- Crochet ramping up; Needlepoint shut down for season

- Building the lore of the new Women’s Pro Baseball League

What’s This?

Every few weeks in “Slap Hits,” Ted and I cover whatever has delighted us from present-day baseball (or sometimes things even further afield) in a lightning round.

There will be news (of a kind), opinion, banter when we agree, and arguing when we don’t. We’re looking at items big and small, obscure or viral, we’re going quick, and we’re not stopping to fact-check.

Got a Slap Hit?

Send us an amusing, baseball adjacent item (interpretation is up to you) you’d like us to mention, bonus points for weird and obscure. Listen to a few episodes of “Slap Hits” and you’ll get the sense of what we like to cover, and it’s often things that don’t get covered elsewhere that delight us the most. If we use it, we’ll credit you for the submission during the show!

Email tips and suggestions to clearthefieldpod@gmail.com or leave a comment on Substack or YouTube.

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

When it was over, the umpires retreated to their dressing room under Yankee Stadium and locked the door.

“I’ve never seen it as bad as it’s been the past three days,” third-base umpire Tim Welke said.

The first-base umpire, Durwood Merrill, had more than 30 years of experience. “That was the first time in my entire career I feared for my safety. There’s just too many people coming at you, and you have no idea what they’re thinking.”

“It’s getting ridiculous, really ridiculous,” Drew Coble, the crew chief, said. “What are you going to do, put a security guard at every seat in the front row? These idiots will still find a way to get on the field.”

One day earlier, on September 17, 1993, nine fans, eight men and one woman, made a mad dash onto the field at Yankee Stadium, interrupting the game between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Most were looking for 15 seconds of fame, but few got that many before pursuing security officers brought them down. But every trespasser was a person of unknown motives, charging in the general direction of the exposed backs of the umpires and the players. It took a toll.

Coble said Buck Showalter, the Yankees manager, felt it too. “We talked about it before the game. He says he worries about coming out of the dugout on the nights the Yankees lose. I told him, ‘Buck, at least you can stay in the dugout.’”

Not everybody out there was fun-loving. A fight would break out in the stands and ripple outward. There were six such disturbances on September 17, some of which drew in an entire section of seats. The game was a fiasco.

But it was nothing compared to what happened the next day. From the umpires’ perspective, September 18 was a disaster.

“What happened out there today killed a great game,” Merrill said. “It leaves a hollow feeling. We busted our butts and now we’re in here feeling bad.”

Coble cut him off. “It wasn’t our fault. We did the best we could. If this game was played in Boston and it happened to the Yankees, we would’ve called it the same way.”

Tim Welke had borne the brunt of it. “It’s a shame it had to end like this,” he said, slouched in a chair. “All because of one fan.”

Coble laughed. “One fan? There were two of them. You didn’t even see the other one, did you?”

Athletes like to take care of their own business and not worry about the scoreboard. This is what the first-place Toronto Blue Jays were doing in the last few weeks of the 1993 season. The reigning world champions ripped off nine straight wins between September 10 and September 21.

The New York Yankees, on the other hand, needed help. As recently as September 5 they had been tied with the Blue Jays atop the American League East, but they dropped their next four games right around the time Toronto forgot how to lose. When the Red Sox beat them on September 16, the Yankees were three games back with 14 to play.

On September 17, as fans scampered hither and yon and security personnel churned up the turf chasing them down, the Yankees won a seesaw game on a fielder’s choice hit by third baseman Wade Boggs, who commented on the night’s track and field events. “Boy, there were some good open-field tackles tonight. Some of those [security guards] ought to play defensive back.”

Buck Showalter, the Yankees’ professionally nondescript manager, saw nothing worth admiring. “I’d like to comment,” he said, “but I’ll pass. It’s really not funny.”

The Yankees got a much-needed win—especially as the Blue Jays “W” was already up on the scoreboard—that kept them three games back with 13 to play, with a head-to-head series against Toronto looming in late September. Until then, all New York could do was hang on and hope for a break. The Blue Jays notched another quick win against Minnesota on September 18, putting the Yankees back on the brink.

The second biggest crowd of the year packed Yankee Stadium on a cold, wet afternoon in the Bronx. New York had their ace, Jimmy Key, starting against a Boston rookie named Nate Minchey. Key gave up a two-run home run to Mo Vaughn in the first inning, ensuring the Yankees would have to come from behind. The game was held up for an hour due to rain—more time to watch the scoreboard.

Key issued a bases-loaded walk in the third, and all the Yankees could do against Minchey was a seventh inning home run by right fielder Paul O’Neill. O’Neill also made the last out of the eighth, striking out against Greg Harris, a right-handed Boston reliever.

The score was still 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth. Harris got the first two batters to ground out to shortstop, putting the effective end of the Yankees’ season one out away. Harris hit second baseman Mike Gallego with a pitch. Showalter pinch-hit with his best available hitter, catcher Mike Stanley. Stanley fouled off the first pitch and took the next one for a strike. Harris’ third pitch was a very good curve ball, and Stanley took the bait, lofting a harmless fly ball into left field, where Mike Greenwell camped underneath it and made the routine 27th out.

At least, that’s what it looked like if you were watching the ball. Third-base umpire Tim Welke wasn’t watching the ball. He was watching the fan.

Around the time that Greg Harris threw his third pitch, two young men vaulted over the barrier at two different spots and raced toward the middle of the field. Security personnel jumped out of their chairs and started after the intruders. Welke saw a kid wearing a maroon cap streak in front of him, past Clete Boyer, the Yankees’ third-base coach. “I threw my hands up and yelled ‘Time,’ before Harris could begin his windup, but it was so loud he couldn’t hear me.”

Perhaps sensing that he had jumped the proverbial gun, the kid’s eyes darted toward the scene at home plate. In his baggy mid-90s uniform (the oversize t-shirt over the long-sleeve shirt is a classic) and with his eyes and legs pointing in different directions, he slipped on the wet infield grass and went down, easy pickings for four pursuing security personnel. The Red Sox players had initially started leaving the field, thinking, reasonably, that the game was over, but Welke was vehemently signaling that it was not. As soon as Welke saw the fan, he’d called time, before Harris threw. Anything that happened after he waved the game off didn’t count.

“When the fan got to the coach’s box, I’m waving my arms, trying to be demonstrative,” Welke said afterward. “The first-base umpire was also calling time. This wasn’t even close. It was unfortunate, but it was obvious.”

“Yeah, out of the corner of my eye I saw somebody running down the steps,” Mike Stanley said. “You usually don’t see that, but with all the fans on the field yesterday, I guess I was conscious of it.” But he also denied that the distraction made a difference. “It’s the same swing I would have taken. I can make an out of that curve any day of the week. But there was a distraction.”

Butch Hobson, the Red Sox manager, ran out to argue the game should be over. He and Harris insisted it was. “That’s the [bleeping] worst call I’ve ever seen,” Harris said. “They say Welke put his hands up, but the ball was already three-quarters of the way home. I already threw the ball. He said he called it before but there’s no way.”

The decisive testimony came from Scott Cooper, the Red Sox’ third baseman: “I did hear the umpire…it scared me. It all happened so fast, but I don’t believe the ball was out of Harris’ hand yet.”

Cooper, Boston’s MVP for integrity, told his manager as much and Hobson stalked back to the dugout. The Yankees’ public address maestro, Bob Sheppard, passed on the good news: “Your attention please…ladies and gentlemen…the game is not over.”

Boston players who had briefly raised their hands in celebration went back to their positions with the look people make after an imminent sneeze veers off at the last second. Hobson’s path briefly crossed with the young fan in the blue shirt, who was being led away via the dugout tunnel. Hobson reportedly hurried him along “with an earful of abuse.” Greg Harris climbed back up the mound, looking for another out.

He never found one. Mike Stanley singled through the left side on the next pitch. Wade Boggs hit a bouncer up the middle but the second baseman couldn’t make a play. Dion James worked a long count and walked. Calling the game for CBS alongside Greg Gumbel, former pitcher Jim Kaat marveled at the liminal space the trespassing fan had opened. “A game that ended twelve minutes ago is still not over. How do you explain that?”

Dion loaded the bases for the Yankees’ captain, Don Mattingly. Historically, this was good news. “Donnie Baseball” thrived under pressure, which was why New York loved him. More immediately, however, Mattingly had been scuffling, hitting .200 down the stretch. He was 0-for-4 that day. “A week ago they wouldn’t have wanted me up there,” he observed. But no one was hanging onto the Yankees’ slim playoff chances more grimly than Mattingly, in the twelfth season of a career almost perfectly placed in the longest postseason drought in team history.

He hit a shot up the right side. The ball bounced once in the dirt and escaped into the grass. “I knew I hit it hard, and when I looked up, it was through.”

Two runs scored, turning an extra out into a walk-off, season-saving win. Mattingly and right fielder Paul O’Neill celebrated so hard they butted heads, leaving O’Neill with a bloody nose to go with his pleased grin. “If you buy season tickets, these are the ones you pay for.”

Closing out the broadcast, Greg Gumbel struggled to sum up the night’s complexities, but he got there: “Life’s not always fair,” he told the audience. “Sometimes it’s a little weird.”

The Yankees left the delirious crowd and whooped and fist-pumped their way into the clubhouse. Given the way they won, staying three games back felt like first place.

Mattingly was pumped up enough to agree it might have been “the biggest hit” of his career:

At least, I can’t remember any of the other ones. Everybody dreams about getting a hit in that situation. Things like this, these are the things you miss when you quit playing. I don’t think you get this high any other way.

Mike Stanley was toasting the kid whose criminal trespass started it all:

We were all trying to get the fan in here to thank him. We’re ready to pay his fine if he needs to be bailed out of jail. As far as we’re concerned, that fan was the most valuable player of the game.

The Red Sox’ October fate had already been sealed, but in this rivalry there is always plenty of pride on the line. Boston’s players felt cheated, none more so than Mike Greenwell, who gloved the 27th out-that-wasn’t.

“We beat the Yankees,” Greenwell said, “but then an idiot ran on the field.” He wanted the Yankees to pay a price. “This is the perfect time to set an example. The home team should be punished. I think the Yankees should be punished. It sure as hell wasn’t a Red Sox fan out there.”

Stanley had to agree that if the same events had played out at Fenway and an interfering fan had given the Red Sox a victory, ”we’d be trying to find him…and not to buy him a beer.”

The NYPD’s 44th Precinct maintained a substation in the lower level of Yankee Stadium. The fan was taken there after he was removed from the field, and sitting in the cramped office seemed to have scared him straight. While the madness he unleashed played on a small TV on the wall, the kid pleaded for mercy. He assured the police he’d never do anything like this again. Tears were shed. When Don Mattingly hit the walk-off single, the fan seemed to hardly notice until the officers congratulated him.

“Usually we get adults,” one of the officers told a reporter for the New York Daily News, “drunks. They’re really wild. This one was different.” The kid was sober and sorrowful. “He just really wanted to be out there on the field.”

Reports vary, but according to the Daily News account, the kid with convincing tears was released without charge. He walked out with his friend, who had stayed on his feet and slid into second base without upending a pennant race.

Since he was 15 years old, the police wouldn’t give the now-famous fan’s name. “Nothing we can do,” one of the officers said, suppressing a smile. “It’s a serious infringement of the rules, but he’s a minor.” Plus, all the cops were Yankees fans.

The circumstances around the kid’s trespass seemed to demand forgiveness. Some invisible power had asserted itself out there and transformed stupidity into serendipity. The universe was talking, and Mike Stanley, for one, was listening.

“A lot has happened this year to make me feel like we might win it all,” Stanley said. “It seems to be some sort of destiny that we win this division.”

Buck Showalter said he wasn’t the type to pay attention to “whimsical things.” “I’m sure there are things we don’t understand, but in my job, I can’t get involved in fate or destiny.”

“I try to look for the positive in people,” Mattingly said, “and I don’t think these fans are out to hurt anyone.” A chaotic moment created an opportunity, and the players had capitalized. That was their job. Even so, the Yankees’ captain said he was open to more whimsy, down the road.

“If we win it all, it’s a game of destiny.”

Unfortunately for New York, the Toronto Blue Jays’ destiny was more straightforward. On September 19th, the first-place Jays won their eighth game in a row, and the Red Sox beat the Yankees, 8-3. Four games out with 11 to play. The team hadn’t been that far back since June.

Another fan took the field that day, making a brief circuit in the outfield before being apprehended. When the “nitwit du jour” was led off the field through a left-field gate, past a fence in front of the Red Sox bullpen, the relievers stared him down. Paul Quantrill said, “We were hoping they would bring him by so we could slap the crap out of him. It’s lucky they didn’t take him off through the dugout. Somebody might have killed him—probably Butch.”

New York lost its next two games against Minnesota, and that was it. Destiny had nothing on math.

The Red Sox made as big a stink as they could In the aftermath of the 28-out spectacular. “The game should have been over,” Lou Gorman, the Red Sox’ general manager, said. “The home team did not control the fans. This is obviously a problem they need to address here, and we should not be penalized for that.”

Looking to have the Yankees’ win overturned, the Red Sox lodged an official protest with Bobby Brown, the president of the American League. Gorman explained their case:

There’s a league rule that requires the home team to control the fans in the ballpark. Our position is that they did not do that, as indicated by the eight or ten fans who were in the field the night before and the fans on the field at that crucial time in the ballgame yesterday.

It was a long-shot argument, but the protest gave the league an opportunity to reckon with the impact of trespassers and send a signal to teams to crack down and get their houses in order. Instead, Brown followed a hallowed tradition of league presidents and managed to squeeze his whole person behind the smallest technicality, ruling against the Red Sox essentially because they didn’t properly file their paperwork.

“Talk about ducking the issue,” Thomas Boswell railed in the Washington Post. “This isn’t a murder trial. It’s just baseball. Don’t split hairs. Get it right.” In “the age of the empty suit,” Boswell complained that the inmates had been left in charge of the asylum. “Wandering teenagers are influencing who wins the pennant.”

After a few days of hearing her son alternately lionized and condemned as a “jerk,” the fan’s mother gave a radio interview. The cost of giving her unconvincing defense—“You know how thrilling it must be for a teenaged boy to get out on that field; you know how boys are.”—was her son’s anonymity. Reporters began calling the family home. The hate mail from New England began arriving soon after.

It’s hard to know whether the Yankees’ deflating end helped the kid or hurt him. If New York had made the playoffs and won it all, generations of baseball fans would have kept his name on an eternal list of notorious ticketholders in New York and Chicago and elsewhere. He might well have become the most infamous fan, immortalized for a youthful lapse in judgement and persona non grata north of Connecticut. On the plus side, free drinks for life in at least four of the five boroughs.

When the postseason drought continued and the furor died down, the fan got his own do-over. He got to keep his privacy and he even got back into Yankee Stadium, but he never took another shot at second base. He’d given his promise to never try anything like that again. That, and the fact that the stadium security guards started carrying Tasers.

What constitutes a “baseball name”? I still haven’t pinned it down. It’s more than just what a player has on their driver’s license; a good baseball name has snap, verve, intrigue, a special something that catches the eye or pleases the ear.

My go-to resource for baseball names is the downloadable dataset at Baseball Reference, a file containing biographical information on every major-league player in history and many minor-leaguers as well. The list encompasses all major leagues, not just the two that comprise Major League Baseball today. The recognized Negro Leagues are represented, as are the old American Association and the upstart Federal League. With a list of tens of thousands of players spanning 150 years, you can find nearly the breadth of human diversity in the list of baseball names. Anything, really—except women.

The most famous women’s professional baseball league, the mid-century All-American Girls Professional Baseball League is not recognized as a “major league.” Neither are the shorter-lived American Women’s Baseball League or Ladies League Baseball or the Women’s Adult National Baseball Association. Thousands of women pitching overhand from 60 feet, running 85-to-90-foot basepaths, using wooden bats, but none of them have made the list. This summer, a new professional women’s league is trying to force their way onto the pages of baseball history.

The Women’s Pro Baseball League consists of four teams, nominally aligned with four American cities, playing several dozen games out of Robin Roberts Stadium, the WPBL’s rented base of operations, in Springfield, Illinois. On Saturday, my family and I made the trip to see a game between the Boston Hunters and the Los Angeles Queens.

The Queens won, 10-6, but it never felt that close. Los Angeles batted around in the top of the first, punishing the Hunters’ early defensive mistakes. Boston made two errors and starting pitcher Alli Schroder issued three walks in stifling conditions (Springfield was still above 85 degrees after sunset). Los Angeles scored six runs before Boston made an out, and when the inning ended the score was 8-0 and Schroder was pulled with 50 pitches. Both teams contributed to a hitting exhibition that night, spraying balls all over the park and moving aggressively on the bases without being reckless. Several players shined, and everyone looked like they belonged.

The WPBL has offense figured out. It is overly simplistic to say that batting is the same in softball as it is in baseball, but it’s clearly close enough, and there is a deep pool of women who can hit. On pitching and defense, however, there is work to be done. The larger dimensions of a baseball field demand instant reactions from defenders, and on many occasions the outfielders seemed just a step or two behind the balls dropping in for hits. And the pitchers who have made it this far have come essentially on their own. The professional development pipeline for women baseball pitchers in the United States—as distinct from softball pitchers—is practically nonexistent. A significant number of Japanese pitchers and others from around the world are filling in the ranks, but as the WPBL inaugural season ends, of the 11 pitchers with more than 15 innings pitched, only one has an ERA under 3.50. More on her in a moment, but in general the WPBL has an arm problem.

As a dabbler in baseball history, I was struck by how much the WPBL game I watched had in common with early baseball in the late 1800s, when the pitchers didn’t throw as hard, defensive miscues were much more common and high-scoring games were common. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Those men were professional players only a few months every year, playing without the benefit of decades of development and specialization that future players would have. The first professional baseball players had to play their way into excellence. Well over 100 years later, the WPBL players have done the hardest part. They’ve started something great—which might one day be excellent—and given us a whole new set of “baseball names” that already are.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Boston Hunters

Boston has the best uniforms in the league and it’s not close. Big 1990s energy and look at this alternate logo:

Read more

This Week’s Lineup:

- Why they sell a Cubs-themed parrot at Wrigley Field

- Broadcast shenanigans in Houston

- Recapping Pope Hat Night and tipping our mitres to the supreme homer

- Brand-new old gloves

- Travis Bazzana brings cricket into baseball—succeeds

Support Us

If you’re a fan of the podcast, nothing says it like becoming a paid subscriber at Project 3.18. Paid subscribers receive some special newsletter perks and help us build on what we’re doing with Clear the Field.

Subscribe now

You can also follow the show for free on your favorite platform:

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

If you enjoyed an episode on a platform like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, can you give it a quick rating and let folks know? A 5-Star rating helps our podcast appear as suggested and helps people find us.

Here on Substack, restacking an episode is one click that really helps us, so if you had fun, please click that button up there on the far right of the episode that has two circling arrows on it.

Email

If you have comments or details that add to our stories or ideas for future installments, send us an email at clearthefieldpod@gmail.com. Gentle corrections are also welcome.

Warning: If a comment is particularly enlightening and/or funny, we might read it during a future episode.

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

In 1880, New York’s Polo Grounds hosted its first professional baseball team, the Metropolitans. In 1963, the New York Mets—no relation—were closing the place down.

In September, the Giants, the old ballpark’s former tenants, kicked off the final homestand, followed by the Houston Colt 45s and the Philadelphia Phillies, who would help turn out the lights on September 18. Throughout these final home games, the Mets kept busy trying to distract from the team’s 47-97 record.

On September 10, the team held a fan contest to determine the “most valuable Met1,” a title obviously awarded on a curve. The winner would receive something called an “Amphicar,” described as “an auto which operates on both land and water”…and we just had to follow up on this:

Next the team honored Duke Snider, the 36-year-old former Dodger who was raging against the dying light of his storied Brooklyn/Los Angeles career in altogether different circumstances. At one point that season Snider had admitted he was having a hard time playing for a team that was eternally five runs behind. “I realize this isn’t the proper attitude to have, but that’s the way I feel. At my age, it’s not easy to generate enthusiasm over lost causes.”

On September 12, the Mets feted him anyway, bringing back nearly all of his retired Brooklyn teammates (plus a telegram from Pee Wee Reese: “Never thought I’d live to see the day when they have a night for you in the Polo Grounds.”)

Among other prizes, the exiled Duke of Flatbush got a 1964 Thunderbird, a color television, and a trip to literally anywhere in the world. His Mets teammates got him a golf cart. The baseball writers gave him a typewriter. Juan Marichal of the Giants gifted Snider two strikeouts on the way to shutting out the the Mets on four hits. “It was a fine night,” Snider said, “until the game started.”

So it often went for the Mets at the old Polo Grounds. The goose egg they laid for Marichal was the start of another terrific run of futility: they were shut out three games in a row, twice by the Giants and once by the Colt .45s2.

That third shutout was the Mets’ 28th of the season, putting them in second place behind the 33 shutouts of the Deadball-era 1905 Giants. They’d make it a race by getting shut out twice more, but in the end the 1963 Mets couldn’t even be historically bad; they were just terrible.

Most fan-bases would have rejected a team like that, but New York’s still-shattered National League fans were still on the rebound in the early 1960s—and willing to forgive pretty much anything.

In 1962, the Mets’ abyssal 40-120 inaugural season scandalized baseball and demonstrated that there were still some kinks of expansion in need of working out. Searching for a workable narrative, commissioner Ford Frick, a former newspaperman, said the Mets served to “illustrate the frailties of humankind.”

That was good enough for New Yorkers, who embraced their below-replacement players with religious fervor. The more inept the performance, the louder the cheers. Such fervent, unconditional love was new in baseball, and Mets fans were dubbed “the New Breed.” In their unique fandom, people didn’t root for the team’s success as much as they rooted, ardently, for their continued existence, and every day the Mets showed up for work was a thrill.

It was a thrill for some of the Mets’ players, too. If not for the league’s expansion from eight to 10 teams, many of them surely would not have had major-league jobs, and they knew it. Asked what was great about being a Met in 1963, one rookie, Larry Bearnath, answered earnestly: “There are so many positions open here.”

If anything, the fans seemed to love the Mets even more after their appalling first season. In the summer of 1963, a stumped Washington Post writer sought out Dr. Wladimir Eliasberg, an accomplished New York psychiatrist, seeking to understand how grown men and women could celebrate a team as bad as the Mets with such passion.

“It is mass suggestion,” Dr. Eliasberg explained.

It is as contagious as a disease. When a group stands up and yells wildly—as the Mets fans do—no one dares not to follow suit. Failure to do so would mean ostracism. It is characteristic that masses latch onto a cause that is apparently destined for defeat. With them there is no such thing as frustration.

Only this fanbase had reconstituted itself from the ruins of two others. The doctor believed the Mets were the unlikely beneficiaries of that unique pain and suffering. “This is the mechanism of rejection. When the Giants and Dodgers left New York [after 1957], their fans felt like orphaned children.”

The Mets were a shiny new toy, and once-bereft New Yorkers were determined to embrace the team and be seen embracing it. It was affection with an edge of wounded spite, directed at their West Coast betrayers.

The Mets were little better in 1963, but symptoms of what writer Jimmy Breslin dubbed “Metsomania” continued. The old Polo Grounds increasingly echoed with exploding firecrackers, mostly underneath or behind the stands, but onto the field, too. After a while, the crowds greeted each bang with a rousing cheer, as if explosives had become the New York equivalent of a rousing bugle charge.

New Breed fans also seemed partial to throwing stuff, usually food and paper trash. During a game on May 12, after the public address announcer warned fans to stop throwing trash on the field or risk a forfeited game, the trash-throwers obligingly pivoted to pelting one another. No rule against that.

The Polo Grounds’ outdated layout often required a large portion of the crowd to exit onto the field and out through a large center-field gate, but after the food fight a crowd of several hundred people lingered near the gate, which was also directly below the Mets’ second-level clubhouse. They chanted “We want Choo Choo,” calling for catcher Choo Choo Coleman—who notched a game-winning single against the Reds—until Coleman finally stepped onto the landing and waved. When the applause died down, the fans called for Duke Snider and Ed Kranepool, seemingly going down a list of the day’s contributors. In the clubhouse, Casey Stengel, the manager, saw where this was going. “Tell them I’ve left town,” he said, making for the safety of the showers.

Whether he liked it or not, Stengel, the universally lauded skipper of a Yankees’ dynasty, was now at the head of a sectarian religion. Dr. Eliasberg said Stengel was “very important” to the fans’ misplaced enthusiasm. “This venerable figure offers the added comfort of a father, a leader, who knows and can do all.” Back in reality, the 73-year-old Stengel cut a comic figure in orange and blue, still hale but increasingly wizened and eccentric. Age had taken his curious patterns of speech to new heights. He became the easiest interview in the world: journalists had only to stick a microphone in front of the manager, ask a single opening question, and capture the resulting torrent of Stengelese.

During a typically stream-of-consciousness monologue for a promotional film at the end of the season, Stengel promised the club would be better in 1964. They had to be. “We’ve got to repay the money we’ve taken from the fans.”

But until a new season and a fresh start in their new ballpark in faraway Queens, William A. Shea Stadium, the Mets had to find other ways to express their gratitude. On September 15, 1963, they used words of affirmation.

Mets fans exhibited a need to express themselves from the beginning. In addition to cheers and chants, they used the written word, scaled up and painted on pillow cases and bedsheets, or printed on professionally designed placards.

“They make up wonderful placards,” Stengel said in his end-of-year monologue. “The placards are terrific.3 I even have to stop and look at them. I think I made fifteen mistakes this year reading the placards instead of watching the pitcher or watching the hitter.”

The fan-made “plackerds” Stengel admired were generally positive, boosting the team, patting themselves on the back, often tinged with a little gallows humor:

“Fifth place or bust”

“World Series tickets on sale HERE”

“All our bets are on the Mets.” (Seeing this one, a journalist warned readers that betting on the Mets was “not only illegal, but also the height of fiscal irresponsibility.”)

When vitriol was displayed, it was usually pointed west, at the Giants and the Dodgers and their scoundrel owners, Horace Stoneham and Walter O’Malley. O’Malley, perceived as the chief architect of New York’s National League-trauma, was in no danger of being forgotten:

“O’Malley is a FINK. May His Dodgers to the Bottom Sink”

As much as Mets fans wanted the world to know they’d moved on, some banners were little more than scars mounted on cardboard:

“The Bums Went Away But the METS Will Stay”

While the Colts and Mets fought to keep out of last place in the National League in their mid-September series, the baseball world was focused on a decisive clash between the Los Angeles Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals. So consequential was this series that Don Drysdale was going to try and pitch through a serious attack of shingles which left him feeling “like I swallowed a blow-torch.” Against programming like that, a September “Battle for the Basement” at the Polo Grounds needed all the help it could get and the Mets designated September 15 as “Banner Day.”

The promotion helped draw nearly 10,000 fans despite unseasonable weather. Cool temperatures and sharp winds seemed to signal the Mets to prepare for hibernation; this team wasn’t built for autumn baseball, and wouldn’t be for quite some time.

The crowd that day was described as “impeccably behaved.” Throughout the game there was stamping and chanting. Bugles blew, accompanied by the clash of trash can lids repurposed as cymbals and the occasional snap of a firecracker in the outfield.

New York used the first six innings to run their scoreless streak out to 38 innings, but third baseman Pumpsie Green hit a two-out single in the seventh and accidentally ignited a full-blown rally, capped by a two-run home run by the scuffling but no-less-beloved Choo Choo Coleman. The score was 5-4 at the end of the inning and Mets fans had high hopes, but Colts pitcher Turk Farrell wisely (and correctly) dismissed the big inning as a fluke and proceeded to strike out New York’s last six batters.

In the fifth inning, the public address blared: “Will all those entered in the banner contest please report to the press gate in right field.” More than 400 fans gathered up their paintings and poetry and formed ranks for the parade in which their work would be judged.

The contest was loosely broken into single, double, and four-person efforts. The individual placards were usually paper or cardboard mounted on wooden picketing sticks, the two-person jobs were usually hand-printed on tablecloths and bedsheets. Some of the four-person banners measured 30 to 40 square feet.

When the parade began, the contestants re-entered the park through the center-field gate and proceeded down the lines to the blaring sounds of a George Gershwin march. A handful of beat writers serving as judges took notes from an infield platform. One of these, Newsday’s Stan Isaac, said he was looking for messages displaying the specific “joie de vivre” of the New Breed: the conviction that there was always something to celebrate if you lowered your standards far enough.

The line was so long, it took a half-hour for the last contestant to re-enter the park. The judges conferred and awarded first, second, and third place in each category. Top finishers received a season ticket to Shea Stadium’s opening season. Runners-up got four tickets to Opening Day, and bronze medalists took home an autographed baseball.

The large, four-person banner contest was won by a group borrowing from Charles Schulz’ Peanuts, depicting Charlie Brown and his friends pleading for improvement with the obligatory “Good grief…” The Mets and the Peanuts’ baseball team did have similar on-field struggles, and Schulz made more than a few references to Casey Stengel in his extensive body of work.

The runners up:

“You May Be Down on Your Cans, But You’re First with the Fans”

"I pledge allegiance to the Mets
of the National Baseball League
And to the Polo Grounds, for which it stands.
One team, under Casey, indivisible, with fun and excitement for all."

The two-person award went to a college student studying graphic design. His winning entry showed the wry humor that always went over big at the Polo Grounds.

“There is no explaining why that sign is good,” Isaacs, one of the judges, said. “It just is.”

At least the artist could explain his process: “Everybody said it was my dumbest idea, so I made it.”

Generally, the more elaborate the effort, the less it resonated with the judges. After all, there was nothing polished about the Mets. Crude, heartfelt optimism did better:

“Casey for President”

“Up the Tree in ‘63, Off the Floor in ‘64”

“Let’s Beat the Bolts off the Colts”

And if criticism wasn’t rewarded, it was at least permitted:

“Have Mercy, Don’t Play Choo Choo”

After the contest ended, the Mets marched onto the field, each player carrying a large posterboard placard. They lined up in center field and one by one turned the cards over, revealing their own message:

Polite applause became a roar when a stooped figure belatedly jogged out of the dugout carrying a final card. When he reached the end of the Mets’ line, Casey Stengel raised the day’s final placard:

“!”

One writer called the demonstration “a triumph for the Mets.” In spelling and punctuation.

Several players reportedly didn’t appreciate being conscripted into participating. Choo Choo Coleman was among them (perhaps he’d seen the fan-made sign urging his benching). “We’re here to play ball, not to carry signs,” the catcher grumbled.

This was a strange hill on which to make a stand. After a rough-but-promising 1962, Coleman spent most of 1963 batting below .200 and looking profoundly uncomfortable behind the plate. He had that home run in the first game, but also made two errors. His batterymate, Al Jackson, added three wild pitches.

In the second game of the doubleheader, the other Mets mustered only three infield singles off a 19-year-old rookie only a year out of high school. Chris Zachary had never won a game in professional baseball until he met the Mets. It was another shutout loss for New York, whose ball-playing credentials were very much open to impeachment.

Stengel hated losing to the Colts, who were supposed to be the Mets’ peers in expansion-era misery. The manager called it “a disappointing, disgusting day. We had terrible fielding, poor hitting. Sure, they have good pitchers. [Zachary] wasn’t throwing up softballs, you know.”

Stengel was irritated with his men, especially those who had quickly dressed and hightailed it out of the park. “Some of them get out of here faster than they go on the field,” he complained. Stengel said he would have ordered extra practice for the next day, but the Mets were using the Polo Grounds for a tryout event. “I don’t want to ruin those tryouts. We might get some players.”

As far as Stengel was concerned, the day had one redeeming virtue: “The banners were terrific.”

Banner Day became an annual tradition for the Mets. The team held the second iteration at Shea Stadium on August 23, 1964. There was a confused, hopeful air in the new park that summer—between August 16 and August 21, the Mets had tied a club record by winning five straight games. Deeply held truths seemed open to question. “Is the Mets’ dynasty crumbling?” one placard asked. The Mets won both games against the Cubs that day, suggesting that perhaps it was.

In between the games, after a banner parade with over a thousand participants, six Mets players marched out on the field and unrolled a banner 100 feet long:

“To All Of the Mets’ Fans: You Are The Greatest.”

Another nice, grammatically accurate sentiment, but without a Stengel exclamation point, the message lacked a certain something—until the player bringing up the rear slipped and fell, taking a large chunk of the banner down with him.

Whether a staged pratfall or a happy accident, the day’s crowd of 27,000 cheered Rod Kanehl’s tumble harder than they had cheered anything all season. It seemed a sign that the Mets’ hapless dynasty would last a little longer—

—and that was fine with them.

One More Thing:

We enjoyed this jam-packed segment of the promotional film “Let’s Go, Mets”, featuring testimonials from fans on the street, Casey Stengel’s cracked end-of-year review, and footage from the first Banner Day.

Here’s the first part of the story, in case you need it:

Episode Highlights:

- The fiercest wolves in baseball

- The difference between cute projectiles and ugly projectiles

- One fan, one hundred glass bottles thrown

- Ted gives this week’s baseball poetry reading

- A forfeit swaps one kind of Phillies loss for another

- The unsportsmanship of the malletheads

- A mysterious orange mixture and ballpark concessions in the late 1940s

Support Us

If you’re a fan of the podcast, nothing says it like becoming a paid subscriber at Project 3.18. Paid subscribers receive some special newsletter perks and help us build on what we’re doing with Clear the Field.

Subscribe now

You can also follow the show for free on your favorite platform:

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

If you enjoyed an episode on a platform like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, can you give it a quick rating and let folks know? A 5-Star rating helps our podcast appear as suggested and helps people find us.

Here on Substack, restacking an episode is one click that really helps us, so if you had fun, please click that button up there on the far right of the episode that has two circling arrows on it.

Email

If you have comments or details that add to our stories or ideas for future installments, send us an email at clearthefieldpod@gmail.com. Gentle corrections are also welcome.

Warning: If a comment is particularly enlightening and/or funny, we might read it during a future episode.

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

This is the second part of our story on pitcher Kevin Hickey, who went from softball on Chicago’s South Side to a walk-on tryout to a professional contract in less than a year. We pick up after three lean seasons in the minor leagues, when Hickey earned an invitation to spring training in 1981 and resolved to make it count.

Here’s Part 1, if you missed it.

On February 25, 1981, Kevin Hickey turned 25 years old on a cot in the clubhouse at Payne Field.

It had been a week since Hickey accompanied the White Sox’ equipment manager, Johnny McNamara, from Chicago to Sarasota in a rattling truck loaded down with gear. Short on cash, the pitcher had offered to help drive the team’s bats and balls south in exchange for a free ride (and a refund of his team-issued plane ticket).

When the truck arrived in Florida, there were still two weeks until the team’s block of motel rooms opened up, but Hickey hadn’t come so far so cheaply to splurge out-of-pocket on a motel bed. He borrowed a cot from somewhere and set it up in the small, wooden ballpark clubhouse.

Waiting for camp to open, he worked out with a few players who lived in the area in the offseason. Other times he got up early, put on his major-league White Sox uniform, and exercised alone, running sprints in front of 4,000 empty seats and dreaming.

Everything about Hickey’s journey to professional baseball had been unconventional, but by this point he was happy to embrace it. Without ever pitching in AAA, he was determined to make the major-league club. Why not?

I have talent and I want to put it to use instead of saying, “I could’ve done this, I could’ve done that.” I can always say that I tried. The White Sox have been very fair. They won’t lose me in the shuffle. I think I can make it. It will take hard work and breaks, but it can happen.

Since he first picked up a hard ball, Hickey had been a starting pitcher, but the White Sox rotation was full and his only chance to make the roster was as a reliever. So, he relieved. On March 15, Tony LaRussa called Hickey into a 2-2 game against the Boston Red Sox. The first two batters were bit players in the Red Sox’ system; Hickey dispatched them easily. The next batter was Jim Rice, a right-handed boogeyman. The major leagues were full of Jim Rices, and LaRussa wanted to see how Hickey handled one.

“I had butterflies, I admit it,” Hickey said, seeing that particular batter digging in against him. In 1977, when Hickey tried out for a minor-league contract, Jim Rice was an All-Star. “But you can’t worry that it’s Jim Rice up there. You have to have confidence in yourself.”

He threw a slider inside and Rice stroked it to left for a single. Hickey maintained his composure and got the final out, passing the test. When the White Sox scored in the bottom of the inning, he received his first win at the major-league level. LaRussa put him in another relief spot a few days later, also against the Red Sox, and he shut them out for three innings.

Logically, the manager reasoned, Hickey was looking at a year in AAA Edmonton. “Not many guys jump from AA to the majors.”

Thanks to general manager Roland Hemond, who was forever collecting lottery-ticket arms, Hickey had plenty of competition in camp. “Let’s face it,” another bullpen candidate said, “there are too many good pitchers here. Somebody is going to be unhappy.”

One thing he had going for him: the White Sox needed a left-handed reliever, and the incumbent, Guy Hoffman, was falling apart, giving up 12 runs in 14 innings. Meanwhile, Kevin Hickey was the best-performing pitcher in camp.

“He just kept surviving,” White Sox pitching coach Ron Schueler said. “One by one every left-hander ahead of him fell by the wayside. Kevin only had one bad outing, and we did everything we could to get him rattled.”

LaRussa warned reporters not to be fooled by Hickey’s inauspicious beginning:

People always ridicule the tryout camp, but we signed him right off the dad-gum1 camp. [His delivery] was very crude, he needed a lot of work, but he had the ability. He’s made a lot of improvements. It’s a tough nut to crack, but it’s not a situation where there’s no way he can make it. He can.

By April the crowded practice fields began thinning out. Eight pitchers, including four starters, were seen as certain to make the Sox’ roster. All four of the relievers in that group were right-handed. “I was the ninth pitcher,” Hickey said, “and the only way I was going to make the team was if they carried nine pitchers.”

LaRussa was reluctant to make a decision. Maybe he could get by with eight pitchers, for a few weeks, at least. He wanted to see how Hickey handled this home stretch of purgatory. Three days before the White Sox opened their season in Boston, Hickey had a 0.53 ERA, still the best number in camp. In 16 and ⅔ innings, he allowed seven hits and one earned run.

On April 7, after a practice, Ron Schueler pulled him aside. “Hick, stick around. Tony wants to see you.”

Hickey had seen some of the fringe guys cleaning out their lockers, put out of their misery by a grim-faced manager. He blanched. “Am I going down?”

“Just stand here,” Schueler said.

Hickey studied the coach’s crossed arms and stern expression. “I thought that was it. I’m going down.”

LaRussa came over, unsmiling and nonchalant. “Get your bags packed. You’re going north with us.”

The ninth and final White Sox pitcher ran circles around the practice-field mound for a minute and then peeled away to find a phone and call his parents. “He was like a three-year-old at Christmas,” Schueler said.

“This is the best feeling in the world,” Hickey said. “I’m getting to go home and play for the White Sox at the same time. It’s nice to be packing for the big leagues.”

Watching Hickey celebrate, LaRussa might have smiled. “When the spring began, people called him a dark horse, but that was a little too favorable.”

In his first major-league bullpen, at Fenway Park, Hickey was constantly in motion, tapping his foot or slapping his glove, looking everywhere and talking a mile a minute. “He made me nervous,” Schueler said. Hickey got warmed up once but was not called into either game in Boston. Tony LaRussa, noted sentimentalist, probably wanted to let the kid debut at home.

On Sunday April 12, Hickey’s brothers, Jimmy and Tommy, picked him up from the airport in Chicago. The three went straight to Mr. Mike’s, the neighborhood tavern that launched Kevin Hickey’s career as a 16-inch softball star. His picture was taped up in a place of honor on the mirror behind the bar and banners were strung up welcoming him home. The crowd inside gave him a standing ovation.

Over beers (he had a club soda with lime) there was much talk of the Milwaukee Brewers, likely to be the first team Hickey faced as a major leaguer. He mentioned hitters Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper, both left-handed: “They can really crush the ball…” He said that more than once.

The next day he borrowed his brother’s car to drive to practice at Comiskey Park. Returning to the family home in Brighton Park for dinner, 50 kids intercepted Hickey in the driveway. He signed autographs but the crowd never got smaller. He missed dinner.

The morning of the home opener was sunny and mild, with temperatures in the 50s. The old ballpark had a fresh coat of paint and a host of new faces. The White Sox had been overhauled; only two players, outfielders Chet Lemon and Harold Baines, returned to the positions they’d left at the end of the previous season. Roland Hemond had acquired outfielder Ron LeFlore and power bat Greg Luzinski, another Chicago-area native getting a chance to come home and play. The White Sox had even made their first big splash in free agency that offseason, signing former Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk to a five year, $3.5 million dollar contract.

Fisk’s deal was the work of the White Sox’ new owners, partners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn. Their predecessor, Bill Veeck, had sold the team after the 1980 season. Veeck had made a career of running teams on a shoestring and occasionally outsmarting the rest of the pack, but free agency had exploded his business model. In a bidding war, Goliath always won. Veeck spent most of his retirement warning of the ruinous effect of money on the national pastime (and sitting shirtless in his “outdoor office” in the of Wrigley Field).

Unlike Veeck, Einhorn and Reinsdorf had preexisting fortunes to draw on, and signing Fisk signaled a new era at the majors’ oldest park. The high-priced catcher made a grand entrance, opening the season against his old team at Fenway Park and hitting a three-run home run to seal a (White) Sox win.

With the excitement over Fisk and the team’s other acquisitions, Einhorn was hoping for a record turnout on the day of the home opener, and he got it. 51,560 people came to see Fisk, Luzinski, LeFlore, and Kevin Hickey, whose Brighton Park neighborhood was well represented down the left field line.

Hickey arrived at the park at 9:30 a.m. With time to spare, he checked to make sure the tickets for his father, mother, and two siblings were in order. He dressed and shagged fly balls in left field. When the Brewers appeared for their on-field workout, he drifted over to the stands, which seemed to be filling up with people he knew or remembered. He spotted an old English teacher who’d once given him a failing grade.

Hickey had spent many afternoons of his own youth on the other side of the same low brick wall, trying to catch a player’s attention and get an autograph. He never got one, so now he worked the crowd like an alderman, signing whatever he was handed and waving to familiar faces further back. A kid pressed in to introduce himself. “I’m from the neighborhood,” he said with evident pride. Just like you. Hickey solemnly shook his hand.

Don and Kathleen Hickey had only seen their son pitch (overhand) once before, for the semi-pro Midlothian Cardinals. Now Don was in and out of his seat, smoking and worrying. The White Sox had given out 40,000 miniature American flags for the game; Kathleen wrung hers back and forth in her hands until it fell apart.

Luzinski hit a two-run single in the third inning. In the fourth, the White Sox’ bats torched Brewers starter Pete Vuckovich, whose day ended when Carlton Fisk hit a grand slam.

With all that run support, White Sox starter Ross Baumgarten sailed along, limiting the Brewers to one run in the first eight innings. By the standards of the time, his performance meant that despite having already thrown over 120 pitches, he’d have first crack at the ninth.

In the bullpen, Ron Schueler told Hickey to “pop 10,” throw 10 full-effort pitches. The pitching coach was careful to not imply Hickey was going to get in the game, which Baumgarten looked poised to finish. “I didn’t want him to get all nervous.”

Eagle-eyed fans near the left field bullpen cheered when Hickey stood up. “They’d had a few beers,” Hickey said. “I just figured I’d get loose and that would be it for the day.”

But Baumgarten couldn’t finish his game. He gave up a double and then a home run to Gorman Thomas, who blasted a mistake out of the park. LaRussa jogged out. The next three Brewers batters were all right-handed, but no matter. He tapped his left arm.

As he exited the bullpen and headed for the mound, Kevin Hickey heard the roars. It seemed like the biggest ovation a middle-reliever had ever gotten. He looked for his family behind home plate but couldn’t spot them. A few more warm-up pitches, and then his first batter, third baseman Don Money. With a 1-1 count, Money hit an easy grounder to short.

The next batter, Edgardo Romero, hit a soft comebacker. Hickey was an excellent fielder. His softball days had trained him to come off the mound with both hands up, ready to defend, and he threw Romero out with no trouble.

The final batter of the game was none other than Paul Molitor, but Hickey didn’t let himself worry about that. Hickey got ahead in the count and it seemed like the whole South Side was up and screaming. Molitor popped up to second base, where Tony Bernazard made the routine catch. Hickey jumped into the air and slapped his glove against his thigh. Bernazard handed him the ball. He’d earned it.

Two months later, on July 10, the White Sox led the New York Yankees, 6-4, at home. With no outs, the Yankees had runners on first and second in the top of the ninth. A dirty inning, a high-leverage situation, and two left-handed batters coming up. New York broadcasters Phil Rizzuto and Fran Healy didn’t recognize one of the pitchers warming in the White Sox’ bullpen.

Tony LaRussa called for Hickey. Revering bunted, a bad choice against a former mushballer, who was always ready on defense. Hickey scooped up the ball and got the runner at second. Graig Nettles hit a sacrifice fly. LaRussa went to the closer, Ed Farmer, who got the last out.

Hickey earned his fifth hold, and the next day he’d get two batters in two different innings to earn his sixth. LaRussa had used him carefully that spring, but now it was summer and the training wheels were coming off.

The manager was getting tired of people underestimating Hickey (and, by proxy, his decision-making). “He’s got a major-league fastball that sinks,” LaRussa bristled. “He’s worked harder than anybody on the team. And we needed a left-handed reliever.”

LaRussa conceded that Hickey had “a hell of a story” to go along with his serviceable major-league arm. It was just a few miles from the neighborhood softball fields in Burroughs Park to Comiskey, but the diamonds might as well have been on different planets. Only person had managed to make the trip.

We think New York Times writer Ira Berkow put it best:

“If there were a longer shot than Kevin Hickey, it would have to be from Mars.”

A week after Kevin Hickey’s pivotal outings against the Yankees, the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike. The work stoppage wiped out more than a third of the season between June 11 and August 10. Hickey and teammate Ed Farmer reportedly kept loose during the strike playing catch in the alley behind the Hickey family home, drawing appreciative crowds.

When the strike ended, the White Sox’ pitching faltered and the team slipped from second to third place and stayed there. Hickey finished his first major league season with a 3.65 ERA in 44 innings and three saves, but as a reliever in his mid-20s, the strike cost him crucial development time, a loss he never really got over.

There’s more to say about Kevin Hickey and his remarkable life in baseball, but for now let’s leave him here at the top of the mountain in Chicago. Roland Hemond always felt this was Hickey’s defining moment, when “a South Side kid got the most out of his ability” and used it to make good.

Over on Clear the Field:

Is it “pop,” “soda,” or “coke”? Does it really matter when you’re an umpire and a glass bottle of said carbonated beverage is being thrown your direction? In our latest episode, Ted and I set up a particularly fizzy baseball forfeit.

In 1949, a team of showboating umpires tangled with the last group of fans still being served (non-alcoholic) drinks in glass bottles. It didn’t end well.

Episode Highlights:

- The Philadelphia Phillies’ mid-life identity crisis

- Three performative umpires

- Ted tries to make “Pafko” happen

- Shibe Park: No booze, but projectiles welcome

- History repeats itself and Richie Ashburn lights a fire under the toughest crowd in sports

We’ll be back next week with the conclusion, when the worked-up crowd causes enough chaos to drive at least one umpire into retirement and prompts some much-needed changes to beverage distribution procedures at Shibe Park.

Support Us

If you’re a fan of the podcast, nothing says it like becoming a paid subscriber at Project 3.18. Paid subscribers receive some special newsletter perks and help us build on what we’re doing with Clear the Field.

Subscribe now

You can also follow the show for free on your favorite platform:

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

If you enjoyed an episode on a platform like YouTube or Apple Podcasts, follow/subscribe to the show, and if you really want to support our work, can you give it a quick rating and let folks know? A 5-Star rating helps our podcast appear as suggested and helps people find us.

Email

If you have comments or details that add to our stories or ideas for future installments, send us an email at clearthefieldpod@gmail.com. Gentle corrections are also welcome.

Warning: If a comment is particularly enlightening and/or funny, we might read it during a future episode.

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

Welcome to Project 3.18, where a fan-first writer tells strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.

If you enjoy what you read today, please subscribe to receive our free feature stories in your inbox. And if you’ve been here for a while, we could really use your support as a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive access to exclusive content and help keep this publication going and growing.

Subscribe now

The Chicago White Sox were in the midst of a prolonged slump in the summer of 1978. A year earlier, the South Side Hit Men had successfully covered up the team’s pitching deficiencies and homered their way into a thrilling season (and lucrative free-agent contracts elsewhere). Without the money to pay their stars, Bill Veeck, president of the White Sox, and his general manager, Roland Hemond, went back to the drawing board.

In May, during a particularly rough stretch, one frustrated fan tried to help out, paying for an unauthorized ad in the “Job Guide” section of the Chicago Tribune:

Interested parties were encouraged to apply via a local advertising agency and nearly 100 people did. Their applications, silly, sad, and serious, were forwarded to the White Sox. Bill Veeck promised to give them a look.

The White Sox owner was always game to “fool around,” and beyond appreciating a good gag, Veeck said he’d learned prospect due-diligence the hard way. He claimed that back in his time in Cleveland, in 1948, a friend of a friend moonlighted as a scout for the Indians, “just as a hobby.” Veeck said one day he got an urgent call from this bird dog, who said he’d turned over an unpolished, 16-year-old, power-hitting gem playing on a semi-pro team in Oklahoma.

“I gave our scouting people the name and told them to look him over,” Veeck recalled, years later. But the scouts doubted the substance of the tip and were slow to act. “By the time they saw the kid, he had signed with another club. His name was Mantle. Mickey Mantle.”

Whether or not that story was true, in 1978, Veeck and the White Sox were taking no chances on missing the pitching equivalent of the Commerce Comet. The owner swore he had nothing to do with the ad in the Tribune, but he and the Sox scouts sifted through the responses and came up with 46 serious applications: 39 righties, six lefties, and one man who claimed to be ambidextrous. All were invited to an in-person June tryout at Comiskey Park. If nothing else, it would be good publicity for the team.

Tom Renz, age 23, did prove to be ambidextrous. Alternately throwing left-handed and right-handed, he pitched off the mound of the left-field bullpen and some of his pitches (from either hand) even made it over the plate. There was just one problem: none of them hit 50 miles-per-hour on the radar gun doing most of the evaluation.

Renz had a good attitude about his performance: “Switch-pitching worked fine for me back home. I had to switch arms to keep the ball in the park. We had a short left field. Of course, that was in wiffle ball.”

Nearly all the candidates were White Sox fans (or the rarer “Chicago fans”—Renz, from Indiana, was planning to take in a Cubs game after the tryout). Otherwise, their backgrounds were as varied as their attire. Some wore baseball and softball uniforms representing recreational and semi-pro teams across the South Side and the suburbs. Others wore sweat pants, cutoff shorts, or jogging outfits. The oldest candidate was 39 and the youngest was 13. We’d like to imagine Veeck himself pushed that latter application into the “maybe” pile. No harm in giving a young fan a great memory in Comiskey’s left-field bullpen.

When all had shot their shot, none of the 47 “pitchers” who showed up proved of immediate interest. “On a scale of 1 to 10,” White Sox scout Steven Vrablik said, “I’d give everyone who showed up a 10…for courage.”

Vrablik said the team would follow up with a few marginal cases to offer developmental advice and stay in touch, but mostly the scheme had failed, as such tryouts nearly always failed. The days when a major-league-caliber player could be plucked off the sandlot or the factory field were long gone. By the late 1970s, the world was too small.

Veeck’s White Sox had been running their own tryouts for several years. The participants were a combination of people who’d written the team asking for a look and local players who had come to the attention of regional White Sox scouts, some of whom made the rounds between various well-regarded semi-pro teams, just in case. When a player piqued their interest, the scouts made introductions and invited him to a tryout.

In 1977, a lefthanded pitcher named Kevin Hickey received such an invitation. That summer, Hickey, 21 years old, had starred on a local semi-pro team, the Midlothian Cardinals. He was 6’ 1” and 170 pounds, with skinny, whip-like arms. He worked second shift as an arc welder at a local steel plant. Because of his job, he only pitched on weekends, but his manager tried to use him whenever he knew scouts were lurking nearby. That summer Hickey won nine games as a weekend warrior, striking out 86 batters in 71 innings. He even threw back-to-back no-hitters. After the second no-no, a White Sox scout appeared with an invitation.

Wearing his Cardinals uniform, Hickey showed up to Comiskey Park on August 17, 1977. His expectations for the tryout were mixed. On the one hand, he imagined a small affair, maybe 20-30 real contenders, giving him a chance to stand out. On the other hand, “I was told they never sign anyone from these tryouts,” he said. “I figured my chances were two—slim and none.”

Tryout camps were cheap to run and a reliable source of local goodwill, but Roland Hemond, the White Sox general manager, conceded the odds were long: “It’s a distinct rarity for an eventual major leaguer to come out of one of these camps, but you never know.”

Expecting a few dozen hopefuls, a dismayed Hickey joined a line of 200 other “prospects” aged 18-29. All shapes, sizes, and colors were represented. Some of the others were wearing jeans and sneakers. He spotted more than one plastic-looking glove. “They gave us each a paper number to pin on our back. I became very skeptical. I thought the whole thing was a big joke.”

He almost turned around and left, but when an early number was pinned on his back, he decided to stay.

I was the second guy scheduled to pitch. I remember the first guy vividly. He was a real hot dog. He did wind sprints in the outfield before he took the mound. And he kept juggling this leaded ball. He threw exactly three pitches and they told him to take a hike.

Then it was his turn on a major-league bullpen mound. A handful of anonymous men with clipboards regarded him blankly. One half-heartedly aimed the radar gun in his general direction.

“I just went out there and threw fastballs,” Hickey said. “I didn’t have any style at all—I was too upright in my delivery. But after a half-dozen pitches, I noticed the scouts were making notes on their clipboards and looking at each other kind of funny.”

They were also looking at the radar gun. The skinny-armed kid’s fastballs were hitting 95 miles-an-hour.

Hickey threw about 30 pitches. Toward the end, one of the scouts said, “Let’s see your curve.” Hickey threw what he thought was his curve. “That’s a slider,” the scout said. Hickey had to take his word for it.

Finally one of the men called a halt. “Thanks for coming in,” he said. “We’ll contact you.”

Inwardly, Hickey sighed. “I thought, ‘Sure you will.’”

Kevin Hickey was born in the White Sox’ shadow. He and his parents and four siblings lived on the 2700 block of West 36th Street in Brighton Park, a transportation hub and ethnically diverse neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. As a free-range kid, he became a regular visitor to Comiskey Park, just a few miles straight east from his home. “I couldn’t afford good seats, so I’d usually sit behind a pillar in the left-field bleachers.”

Hickey started throwing against a brick wall in his backyard and grew into one of the most athletic kids in the neighborhood. He played baseball until his freshman year of high school, but dropped it to take an after-school job. After high school, he found work at the Ryerson Steel Company, and like tens of thousands of other Chicagoans, he nourished his soul playing 16-inch softball.

“Slow pitch” softball is serious about velocity. Instead of whipping the ball, which is softer and larger than the ball used in fast-pitch, pitchers must lob it, and any pitch coming in too fast is an automatic ball.

The sport was invented in the Chicago area and became a regional phenomenon. It grew in popularity among workers without the time or skills to succeed in baseball who still wanted to play, and it required only a ball and bat to play—no gloves. By the late 1970s the Chicago area alone had approximately 250,000 players. On the lakefront, sprawling Grant Park and its 16 diamonds were in constant rotation, each hosting two performances of “the greatest game on dirt” almost every day.

One of the best teams on the scene was the Chicago Bobcats. The Bobcats formed in 1951 and dominated the local competition by becoming the softball equivalent of the modern-day Dodgers, collecting the best players by offering them the opportunity to play with the best of the rest. When a national 16-inch tournament started in 1964, the Bobcats won 11 of the first 15 titles.

Skeptics liked to say slow-pitch softball was to baseball as ping pong was to tennis. “Writers who weren’t involved used to classify [softball] as guys running to second base where there was a beer waiting for them,” Eddie Zolna, the Bobcats’ player-manager, told a reporter in 1980. And softball was that, but it was also something else. “Although this is a simple game to play, it takes a great amount of ability to play it exceptionally well.”

Kevin Hickey played it that way. After high school, Hickey hooked up with a softball team sponsored by his neighborhood bar, but his superior range and agility were quickly flagged. By the mid-1970s, Hickey was playing center field for the Bobcats, and sometimes taking freelance assignments for other teams, so long as the opposition didn’t recognize him and protest. He batted cleanup and did a lot of that. He once hit four home runs in one game off famed Chicago columnist Mike Royko, a 16-inch devotee. In 1976, Hickey pitched the Bobcats to another world championship.

Hickey’s softball career was derailed soon after that championship run. His job reassigned him from the first shift to the second, 4 p.m. to midnight, and the Bobcats were too serious to roster part-time players, even talented ones. A police officer who had watched Hickey play recommended he try the semi-pro Cardinals baseball team, which was open to more flexible arrangements. After whipping all those softballs in from the outfield, throwing a baseball from the mound was nothing for the newest Cardinal, who broke out as a hardball pitcher.

It’s possible the Sox scouts said, “We’ll be in touch,” to all the hopefuls who threw during the tryout at Comiskey Park, just to keep the line moving. But only one candidate actually heard back. On August 18, Hickey’s phone rang. It was the White Sox, asking if he’d be around that afternoon. Word went round the neighborhood from house to house and by the appointed time a small crowd was loitering around the front porch of the Hickey family home. Two White Sox scouts arrived with a professional contract.

“These guys came in and I thought it was a gag,” Hickey recalled. But there was a bonus of $500 on the table, and if he signed his name, he’d join the White Sox for spring training and be assigned to a farm team in 1978. Hickey and his dad huddled briefly and he signed.

When news of Hickey’s contract broke, Bill Veeck’s assistant, Charlie Ervanian, put it in context:

It’s been done before, but the chances are slim. This is the fourth tryout camp I’ve been at and this is the first boy I saw signed. There were other kids we still want to follow but he’s the only one we wanted to grab up quickly.

Hickey had beaten “one in a million” odds by coming away from a walk-on tryout with a professional contract, but he was still at the wrong end of the probability tables. Only five percent of minor-league players ever reached the majors. But compared to one-in-a-million, one-in-twenty must have seemed downright roomy.

The White Sox’ newest prospect was invited to spend the remainder of the 1977 season at Comiskey Park and use his live arm to throw batting practice to the major-league players. He reported to Payne Field in Sarasota, Florida the following March. His alphabetically assigned locker was between major-leaguers Ralph Garr and Chet Lemon. He got a uniform. An ugly uniform, to be sure, but it was real.

Hickey encountered the first bump in his developmental road almost immediately. The Sox had planned to assign him to a rookie-league team based in Sarasota after spring training, but the club folded and the organization had more raw pitchers than it could cram into A-level Appleton. Hickey was not chosen for placement. The team told him to go home, keep pitching BP, and bide his time. “They said, ‘We’ll find a place for you, somewhere.’”

In limbo at Comiskey Park, “I would throw for about a half-hour,” Hickey said. “When somebody like [Angels pitcher] Frank Tanana was pitching against [the White Sox], they would have me throw hard in batting practice. Then I’d do my running and shag flies in the outfield.”

The team soon established a relationship with a new rookie league affiliate, the Highlanders of the Appalachian League, based in Paintsville, Kentucky. Hickey vividly remembered the un-PC moment when he received his first assignment: “When they sent me there, they asked me if I could speak ‘hillbilly.’ I said, ‘No, but I can learn.’”

Hickey struggled in Paintsville, giving up 37 hits and 23 walks in 33 innings. He told a local newspaper it was hard to adjust to small town life. “I was homesick. There are no bars or discos here.” Remember, this was 1978, when disco was practically everywhere.

He’d given up a full-time job to play baseball for next to nothing. He called home collect, asking whoever answered if they could help him out a little. His four siblings and parents all pitched in. “I’m sure my wife wrote checks I didn’t see,” his father, Don Hickey, said, “but I’m also sure she doesn’t know about the money I sent.”

With his family backing him, Hickey stuck it out. In 1979, he was promoted to the Appleton Foxes, but his performance wasn’t much better; he gave up 122 hits and 74 walks in 121 innings.

Roland Hemond said it wasn’t all bad—Hickey was averaging 2 strikeouts per 3 innings pitched. After 1979, he participated in a fall instructional league and pitching instructor Ron Schueler taught him how to throw a change-up.

“He picked it up in ten minutes,” Hemond said. “That’s quick for anybody, even major leaguers.”

Having a functional off-speed pitch let Hickey to dial down his fastball to a place where he knew where it was going. He issued only four walks and had an ERA of just 1.45 over 31 innings and got another invitation to spring training.

“He wouldn’t be coming if we didn’t think he could make it,” Bill Veeck said in 1980. “We were very impressed with him in the Florida Instructional League. For the first time, he got the ball over the plate.”

Hickey’s story had been lost in the lower minors, but in spring training he was back in the spotlight, and now his chances of actually reaching the majors were much better than five percent, adding even more interest. As always, Veeck was the sage.

“A lot of people will be surprised if Kevin makes our team this year,” the owner said. “But I will not be among them.”

In the end, Hickey didn’t make the team, but he was promoted again, to the AA White Sox in Glens Falls, New York. His numbers as a starter remained mixed, but the walk numbers were coming down, and he did much better against lefthanders.

The cash-strapped White Sox were rebuilding and needed left-handed relief help. Schueler told Hickey he might have a shot to make the team in 1981, but “I don’t think he believed me.”

Hickey believed enough to spend the winter before 1981 working out with two big-league White Sox pitchers, Ken Kravec and Ross Baumgarten. He didn’t have a car, so his brother Tom drove him to Comiskey Park every day. Still living in the family home in Brighton Park, he did his evening stretch work in the living room.

As a crucial spring training neared, Hickey was desperately short on cash, but he thought of a way to stretch things out. Knowing that the first White Sox equipment truck would head south several weeks before the players did, he went to talk to Roland Hemond.

Hemond and Veeck had different styles, but they both cherished an underdog. Veeck loved the story, but Hemond saw an edge. Over the course of his many decades working in major-league front offices, Hemond was consistently drawn to baseball’s “unfortunates,” believing they were likely to work harder. “You pick players who have been stymied,” Hemond said in 1990. “They need a chance. I like that method.”

A month before spring training in 1981, Kevin Hickey approached Hemond, asking if he could cash in his team-purchased plane ticket and help drive the equipment truck from Illinois to Florida. Hemond’s radar went up. Here was a player who needed a chance, doing everything he could to hang on long enough to get one.

Reflecting on his time in the minors later, Hickey said, “I probably would have given up once or twice, except no one ever came up to me and said, ‘You can’t do it.’” Now it was Roland Hemond’s turn to keep his peace. The general manager could have let this cash-strapped marginal AA pitcher down gently, right there and then.

Instead, Hemond refunded Hickey’s plane ticket and found him a seat on the truck.

In the conclusion, Kevin Hickey goes from a one-in-a-million to one-in-twenty to one.