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

On April 8, 2026, Shohei Ohtani threw his first pitch of the game against the Blue Jays. The pitch was very low, an obvious ball. Ohtani adjusted his cap, and Will Smith, the Dodgers’ catcher, issued a rather head-scratching challenge.

On April 11, New York Yankees first baseman Ben Rice struck out looking. Rice tossed his bat away, the sign of a batter who knows he’s been beaten, and as he began to retreat from the plate he touched the top of his helmet. The home plate umpire, Dan Bellino, saw the gesture and interpreted it as the signal to challenge. Rice protested, saying, yes, he’d touched the top of his head, but not like that, but Bellino persisted and the Yankees lost a challenge.

The same day, in Chicago, Pirates pitcher Bubba Chandler had an 0-1 count when he threw a close pitch to the Cubs’ Moisés Ballesteros. Chandler had no apparent issue with that pitch being called a ball, but he did have a problem with his cap, and he moved his hand upward and put it on the back of his head to straighten things out. That was enough for the home plate umpire, Alan Porter, who initiated a challenge review. Chandler mildly protested but quickly stopped—it turned out he’d actually thrown Ballesteros a strike, so he won the challenge he hadn’t made.

All of this begs the question: Why is the symbol for an ABS review a gesture that players make all the time for completely unrelated reasons?

It is hard to imagine that this issue did not come up during the system’s extensive minor-league testing. Baseball players are notoriously twitchy and fussy. Ichiro Suzuki might be the most famous of this crowd, but 1970s infielder Mike Hargrove got the best nickname out of it: his routine of tics during a plate appearance earned him the nickname “the Human Rain Delay.” So why pick one of these same tics to serve as the challenge signal?

There must have been a reason. If you know it, please enlighten us in the comments.

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In any case, all of these recent hijinks suggest a revision of the challenge signal may be in order. The internet is full of interesting suggestions:

• “Why not point at the ump?” – Too confrontational, though we suggest the wagging finger of shame, best performed by Seinfeld’s Babu Bhatt, might be a fit for players with the dexterity to pull it off:

• “Cross the forearms to make an ‘X’” – Too much like professional wrestling, and hard for a player holding a bat to do safely.

• Speaking of professional wrestling: “Do the ‘crotch chop’ like D-Generation X.” – If we were going to give anyone that rude gesture, it would be the umpires, who could use it to signal that their original call was correct.

Others have suggested the scornful rasberry of John Cleese’s smug soldier on the ramparts from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the ear-cupping headset pantomime baseball managers make for a play challenge (again, bats may cause difficulty), or drawing a square in the air, which is apparently something they do in soccer.

We suggested players must say “Challenge!” to confirm their order after a head-tap, but our podcast partner, , a former college catcher, warned us to avoid relying on any verbal signal, which maliciously compliant umpires might use to turn any mutter or grumble into a wasted challenge.

The good news is that further iteration is possible and will, hopefully, lead to players making some jaunty “finger guns” or another unmistakable signal instead of patting their heads. We’re still in the shakedown phase of the ABS rule, and as field testers, major-leaguers are second to none. They certainly showed that 58 years ago this week, when they put a new rule through a similar wringer, and that’s our story today.

With pitchers increasingly throttling hitters around the major leagues in the mid-1960s, a group of managers and general managers convened in Mexico City in November 1967 to discuss what could be done. One of their targets was the spitball.

While technically illegal, the existing rules banned the sneaky pitch without prohibiting the more obvious motions required to throw one, making them as effective as an arms-control treaty that banned nuclear weapons but invited nations to keep as much enriched plutonium around as they wished for recreational purposes.

Under those conditions, generations of pitchers had discreetly used wetted pitches to flourish. Some of these successes were getting out of hand: In 1966 Gaylord Perry went 21-7 and picked up his first All-Star nod with the spitter, but most offenders were less showy about it. Some managers, like Gene Mauch of the Philadelphia Phillies, estimated that as many as a quarter of the National League’s pitchers were loading up the ball in the mid-1960s.

Mauch was among the Mexico City group who agreed to try and get a handle on the spitballers with a new rule. That rule, 8.02 (A), got more explicit about banning the most obvious action a pitcher would take if he wanted to cheat:

A pitcher shall not bring his pitching hand in contact with his mouth any time while he is within the 18-foot circle surrounding the pitching rubber.

The new rule included a new sanction. Any time a pitcher brought his hand to his mouth on the mound, the umpire was to call his next pitch an automatic ball. Rule 8.02 (A) seemed straightforward enough, but it didn’t even make it through its first spring training unscathed.

The first assault came from the California Angels. After a ball was called on one of their pitchers for going to his mouth on the mound, the officials explained to the Angels that the pitcher had to step off the mound in order to do that. The “step off” provision was intended to give pitchers a safe harbor if they had a facial itch that needed scratching, but the Angels’ pitching coach moved quickly to abuse this kindness, ordering his pitcher to step off the mound after every pitch. The umpires threatened to eject everyone involved “for making a travesty of the game,” always a no-no. After that, the rule was amended to limit step-offs.

Making a travesty of the game was old hat to the Chicago Cubs’ manager, Leo Durocher. Durocher became curious if the new rule might actually be useful as a means of intentionally walking a batter without requiring the pitcher to throw. To test his idea, Durocher gave one of his pitchers a very specific order in a spring game. Once he got on the mound and the opposing batter stood in, the pitcher very demonstrably lifted his hand to his face and licked each of his four fingers one by one.

After a brief consultation the umpires sent the batter to first base.

Rule 8.02 (A) was quickly updated again. Henceforth, a batter could not reach base because of a hand-to-mouth violation. This neutralized Durocher’s finger-lickin’ idea but left other questions unanswered. If a pitcher did commit four straight violations, what would happen? No one could say.

Until May 2.

That night, Gene Mauch and his Phillies were in New York, playing the Mets at Shea Stadium. The big story of the game through seven innings was the pitching of an 21-year-old Nolan Ryan, whose fastball compared favorably to those thrown by Sandy Koufax and Bob Feller. That night Ryan had struck out 10 Philadelphia batters in seven shutout innings. Most pitchers in this situation would have been left in to finish the game, but Ryan’s control was as notorious as his heater. He had walked seven Phillies and as a result thrown more than 130 pitches.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, with his team down 3-0, Mauch decided to replace his own starter, Woodie Fryman, with a fresh arm, and he called for a right-handed pitcher named John Boozer

Boozer pitched for the Phillies between 1962 and 1969. He was a pretty unremarkable middle reliever for most of that time, better known, it seems, for being willing to eat anything on a dare and for spitting his omnipresent wad of chewing tobacco at the dugout roof in hopes of making it stick up there. While likely a poor dinner-party guest, he was a good-natured character, and before May 2, 1968, he had never been ejected from a game. That streak was about to come to a surreal end, courtesy of his manager.

As he prepared to enter the game, Boozer set about his warm-up routine, which began with “some preliminary landscaping” on the mound. One of his Philadelphia bullpen mates remembered, “Boozer had a habit of wiping the rubber off with his fingers to get it clean.” Home plate umpire Ed Vargo watched impassively as Boozer tidied up his workspace.

Boozer’s pitching hand became smudged with dirt, but he had a habit for that, too: Before he began his eight warm-up throws, he brought his hand to his mouth to clean it off. Now Vargo’s eyes narrowed, like a police officer coming upon an unsuspecting graffiti-sprayer preparing to sign their name on the side of a public building.

While the Mets’ batter, shortstop Bud Harrelson, waited in the on-deck circle, Boozer threw his first warm-up pitch to his catcher, Clay Dalrymple. Vargo had all he needed.

“Ball one!” the umpire cried, charging toward the mound. It would be hard to say who was more confused, Boozer, throwing to no one, or Harrelson, nowhere near the batter’s box. Gene Mauch leaped out of the dugout as if scalded from behind.

“What do you mean, ‘ball one’?” Mauch yelled.

“He went to his mouth inside the eighteen-foot circle of the mound,” said Vargo, “and that’s a ball any time.”

“How can he be charged with a ball on a warm-up pitch?” Mauch said.

“Show me where it says warm-up pitches don’t count,” Vargo said.

The manager went from pink to red. “Common sense tells you that!”

This was Ed Vargo’s version of “malicious compliance.” The rule said nothing protecting warm-up pitches and was equally silent on the application of common sense. Boozer had put his hand to his mouth on the mound before throwing a pitch. By Vargo’s understanding of Rule 8.02 (A), that was ball one.

But whose ball one? Harrelson’s, apparently. Mauch was outraged. “Next thing you know they’ll be calling it in the bullpens.” Or on the bases. Imagine an umpire ruling a runner out in the first inning for failing to touch a base during batting practice.

Mauch asked Vargo what would happen if he ordered Boozer to wet the ball again.

“I’ll call another ball,” said Vargo.

“Do it,” Mauch told Boozer. The pitcher had to wait while Mauch went back to the dugout and Vargo to his spot behind the plate. When all were in their places, the bewildered pitcher wet his hand and threw Dalrymple the ball.

“Ball two!” yelled Vargo. The parties returned to the mound. “One more and Boozer is out of the game and so are you,” the umpire warned.

“Wet it again,” Mauch said. Boozer complied.

“Ball three!” Vargo yelled, beginning to sound hoarse. “You’re out, Mauch, and so are you, Boozer.”

“What if the next pitcher does it?” Mauch asked.

“I’ll forfeit the game to the Mets!”

Boozer departed for the bench. His only contribution to the game records that day was his removal. Mauch replaced him with Dick Hall, variously described as “an elongated underhand thrower” and “a giraffe on roller skates.” As Hall arrived on the scene, not having any idea what had transpired, Vargo cautioned him to keep his hand well clear of his mouth during his warm-ups.

Mauch objected. “I’ll handle my pitchers and I’ll tell them what to do.”

The manager decided he’d gone far enough. He planned on making an official protest of the game, “and if the umpires forfeit, my protest has no chance. So I didn’t have Hall do it [a fourth time].”

Hall completed his eight warm-up throws without incident. Vargo summoned Bud Harrelson into the batter’s box and reminded everyone the count was 3-0. It was the first time in history a batter had begun with such a handicap. Harrelson used it to take two strikes and ground the ball weakly back to the pitcher.

A master of pitch placement despite his unorthodox delivery, Hall retired the next five batters he faced, but the extra scrutiny took a toll: “I just kept thinking, ‘I can’t go to my mouth, I can’t go to my mouth.’ It made my mouth water just thinking about it.”

After the game, Mauch exercised his God-given right to complain. “It’s a silly rule,” he said. “It just gets in the way of the game. I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen managers over-manage, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen umpires over-umpire.”

Despite having participated in its creation, Mauch believed the hand-to-mouth rule was flawed in empowering the umpires like Vargo to treat all players and violations the same. There was something darkly ridiculous about a justice system where petty theft and murder followed the same sentencing guidelines.

“It’s weak-kneed and wishy-washy,” Mauch said. “Seventy-five percent of pitchers in the game today don’t have any intention of cheating. Everybody knows who the other twenty-five percent are. Punish the man who tries to cheat.”

Young Nolan Ryan offered some advice to Boozer, Hall, and the other pitchers struggling to keep their hands out of their mouths in baseball’s new era of law and order: pickle juice. The Mets’ trainer had prescribed pickle brine to treat blisters on Ryan’s throwing hand, telling him to keep his ailing finger in a jar of the stuff as much as he could.

“I don’t like pickles,” he said, “but the brine is doing the job. But I really don’t like the smell. It bothers me, especially when I bring my hand to my mouth…outside the eighteen-foot circle, of course.”

It had been a strange experience for the crowd of just under 10,000 people, most of whom didn’t know what all the trouble had been about. For 15 minutes, instead of watching baseball, they had watched a series of umpire conferences, some heated, with nonsensical outcomes.

Then as now, the cardinal rule of umpiring was to stay out of the spotlight. If no one knew who umpired a game, that official did a good job. Whether or not Ed Vargo had intentionally turned the seventh inning into a farce to bring attention to the problems with the new rule, he had created a scene one columnist, Bob August, swore came right out of a Marx Brothers comedy, “in which logic is turned inside out and dignity trampled.”

He pointed to poor, blameless John Boozer, ejected for throwing to an empty batter’s box: “[Vargo] couldn’t have done better comedy with a seltzer bottle and baggy pants.”

If playing rules were to apply while the game wasn’t being played, for the sequel, August suggested “disqualifying a horse from the Kentucky Derby for impeding another horse’s progress in the parade to the post, or penalizing a football team for holding during the pre-game handshake.”

Warren Giles, the National League president, didn’t laugh when he read the report of the game. “He probably doesn’t like the Marx Brothers, either,” August said.

On May 3, Giles rewrote Rule 8.02 (A) for a third time. “Vargo was correct in his translation of the rule as written,” the weary executive said, “but I am quite certain the rule was not intended to work that way.”

The president sent a clarification to the National League’s five umpire crews with some updated language:

Rule 8.02 (A) as amended states that any time a pitcher touches his mouth while inside the 18-foot circle, the ball penalty shall be called. The rule does not apply while the ball is ‘dead’ as when the pitcher is taking his preparatory pitches.

He also clarified that there was no forfeiture clause in the spitball rules—Vargo had simply made that part up. Well, what would happen, someone asked him, if a pitcher (or pitchers) threw four straight illegal pitches to one batter? Giles offered an alternative that was as clear as the mud used to rub up the league’s baseballs:

Had Dick Hall violated the rule for a fourth time, Giles said, the umpire should have let him pitch. But, if Harrelson made an out, that pitch would have been “disallowed,” and Harrelson would have been returned for another 3-0 chance. Before the 1968 season ended, this business of “disallowed” pitches would lead to another farce:

Maybe the league president was a fan of the Marx Brothers after all.

Many rules are extensions of logic, but the former is not a substitute for the latter. Relying only on the rule and disregarding the underlying reason often leads to nonsense, which in turn leads to revision of the rule. It would be years before MLB landed on a version of the spitball rule that could stop Gaylord Perry and the legions of other spitballers, but the process was moving.

Hopefully it won’t take as long of a process to land on a better signal for an ABS challenge. How about pointing at the scoreboard where the challenge result will appear? It would be fun to let every player have a chance to “call his shot,” and just as amusing to see him end up being wrong.

Give us your best suggestion for a new challenge signal in the comments—after all, we’re just spitballing here.

This week’s lineup:

- A Minute of Actual Baseball Information (and why we’ll never discuss the Astros again)

- Ted Reports from an Out-of-Print Baseball Book Paradise

- Brad Lidge’s Second Act:

- Enjoying the Origin of the Immaculate Grid on My Baseball History

- Pokemon Gloves:

- Appreciating the Home-Run Fakeout:

- Alva Noë and the Philosophy of the Strike Zone

- ABS Update: Itchy Heads and Accidental Challenges

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 here on the episode.

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

Today we’re finishing the story of a four-game showdown between Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. The Tigers lost the first two games, but the head-to-head competition between the two stars was roughly a draw. But Detroit had made Babe Ruth mad, and that was a mistake.

Here’s the first part of the story.

On June 13, 1921, Babe Ruth played the “grudge game” of his career.

The day before, the Babe had been “publicly flouted and humiliated before 30,000 admirers.” His tormentor was the second-most famous baseball player in the world, Ty Cobb. Before the game, “in no uncertain terms and in effective pantomime, the sprightly Cobb derided the contour of the Babe’s piquant nose and the rather too bulky waistline that encircles his frame.”

In other words, Cobb had called Ruth a gorilla, and had later mocked Ruth after a particularly exaggerated strikeout. Cobb and Ruth continued jawing back and forth throughout the game, and according to the Buffalo Courier, the umpires and the Yankees’ manager had to step in to prevent a “violent onslaught against the offending Cobb.” A game-tying home run in the sixth hadn’t mollified Ruth, nor had the Yankees’ victory, which sent the Tigers into fourth place. Still feeling Cobb had gotten the better of him, Ruth decided that bludgeoning the Tigers’ pitchers with home runs was too indirect a form of retribution, as Cobb didn’t pitch.

Ruth, however, did.

By dawn on the morning of June 13, Ruth’s broiling anger had chilled into a plan. He was the first player into the team’s clubhouse that morning and he went straight for Miller Huggins, the manager.

“Let me pitch against Detroit,” he said to Huggins. “You may not think I’m in pitching shape, but I am. And I want to whip Ty Cobb and show him up.”

Ruth the hitter arrived in New York in 1920, but Ruth the pitcher stayed behind in Boston. With one exception: On June 1, Ruth started (and batted fourth) for the Yankees against the Washington Nationals.

A costly error behind him led to two unearned runs in the first, but Ruth worked three clean innings after that. When the first two batters in the fifth inning walked and doubled, Huggins banished him to the outfield, but he left with a 12-2 lead, and when the day was over the Babe had his first pitcher win in 15 months.

A year later and a year older, he now wanted to challenge Cobb, one of the most accomplished hitters of the past, present, and future, in baseball version of single combat.

Ruth proposed to take the place of Carl Mays, the Yankees’ best pitcher that season, giving the ace at least a few innings of rest during a summer of slugfests that was taking a toll on the starters and relievers. “If they make the ball much livelier, pitcher battles will become a thing of the past,” one writer lamented.

Huggins was reported to have “pounced” on the idea of letting Ruth pitch, which is a little hard to believe, but perhaps this was a showdown even he couldn’t resist.

The plan came together so late that the 12,000 fans at the Polo Grounds that Monday afternoon expected to see Mays warming up on the mound, but an unmistakable figure appeared in his place. When Ruth was announced as the day’s pitcher, the crowd sounded like many more than they were. Not wishing to leave any reader out of the excitement, reporter W.S. Farnsworth wrote:

For the special benefit of that lonesome Laplander who may have floated into [New York] from some end of the world where they don’t know about our Babe, it must be explained that Ruth, in addition to being the greatest batter of his day, is now an outfielder and not a pitcher.

Seeing Ruth back on the mound, the Tigers mostly stood around, “pop-eyed,” but one of the Detroit coaches—apparently not at all superstitious—hooted: “What? You are going to pitch?” Ruth just smiled.

The first mano-a-mano moment arrived quickly, as Cobb batted third in the Tigers’ lineup. Ruth got the first out then walked Donie Bush, and facing Cobb for the first time, walked him, too. Ruth made the next two outs to end the inning.

On offense, he and his teammates got to work on the Tigers’ starter, Howard Ehmke, manufacturing a run in the first inning and adding two in the second on an inside-the-park home run hit by Ruth’s center field stand-in, Chicken Hawks.1

Ruth and Cobb hooked up again in the third. This time there were two runners on base, but Ruth got Cobb to fly out. Buoyed by that victory, Ruth batted in the bottom of the third and hit his 20th home run into the upper-deck stands in right field. The Yankees’ third baseman, the veteran Home Run Baker2, hit a two-run shot later in the inning.

When the Tigers came to bat in the fourth, they were losing, 6-0, and after a leadoff walk Ruth retired the side.

He’d had success, but Ruth the pitcher began wear out. He faced eight batters in the fifth as the Tigers broke through with the help of an error by Baker at third. By then the Babe was “a perspiring, overheated Behemoth, looking as if he had just come out of the surf.”

In the middle of that inning, Cobb and Ruth faced off again. Ruth brought everything he had and gave Cobb the “whipping” he’d been trying to land all day, striking Cobb out. Cobb became Ruth’s only strikeout victim that day. Ruth was so happy to have retired his rival that he gave up four runs and let the Tigers back in the game, 6-4.

Detroit’s embers of dignity were extinguished when the Yankees immediately answered with four runs of their own. With the cushion restored, Huggins sent Ruth back out in the sixth, but when he gave up a single and a walk, the manager ended the experiment and summoned Carl Mays to take over. Ruth, worn out and with all his revenge boxes ticked, made no protest. He caught his breath out in center field while Mays retired the side.

The Yankees led 11-5 when Ruth batted in the seventh. In line for a win and having fanned the great Ty Cobb after a year off from pitching, Ruth seemed to have found something even better than a grudge: he was at peace.

During that at-bat Ruth spotted a dawdling pitch from Ehmke and batted it away with an effortless swing. The crowd watched the ball travel into center field, a no-mans-land at the Polo Grounds.

Ruth had always said he’d hit one out there, but Ruth always said a lot of things. In fact, no one had ever hit a home run into straightaway center field at these Polo Grounds, where the wall was 460 feet from home plate: “It’s so far out that bleacher fans there ought to get paid to sit there because there is precious little they can see.”

Ruth’s 21st home run sailed over that deep wall. The New York Herald reported, “The ball fell into the exit stairway of the bleachers and then down under the benches, where a mob of boys had a free for all for the prized memento.”

“Folks who have never seen the Polo Grounds haven’t the slightest idea what a hectic clout this was,” a San Francisco newspaper, the Bulletin, told its Pacific Coast readership. “Most of Ruth’s homers at the Polo Grounds go into right field, an easy drive, but the bleachers…whoops my dear!”

“It requires more than a pea blower to belt the agate where Ruth deposited it this afternoon,” a Detroit writer glumly observed in the quirky parlance of the time.

The record-setting blow moved Ruth 12 days ahead of his 1920 54-homer pace. Newspaper graphics departments got busy illustrating what a blast this was. Here’s a modern version we appreciated:

As Ruth “romped homeward,” he allowed himself a pause near second base, turning to the small figure out in the deepest part of center field and “sending out a shrill and mocking laugh.”

The Yankees’ superweapon had hit five home runs in four days. He had done the same thing in 1918, setting a record he jointly held with old-time Cleveland great Bill Bradley, who did it in 1904.

Ruth’s pitching “was not of the airtight variety,” the Herald reported, “but who is pitching airtight ball in these days of the ‘jackrabbit’ leather?” He had shaken off a year of rust to pitch four decent innings and in his only bad inning, he struck Ty Cobb out. June 13 was the day Cobb’s 1921 batting average dropped below .400 and Babe Ruth presided over the occasion.

The Tigers kept scratching, scoring three runs in the last two innings, but despite scoring 24 runs in the series, they fell to 0-3.

“When the day was over,” Farnsworth wrote, “Cobb seemed crushed and his shoulders slumped. The spotlight rays had passed from him to Ruth once more and he was left in darkness, prostrate in the dust of the Babe’s hefty heels.”

On June 14, Ty Cobb continued to abuse his thoroughly broken Detroit pitching staff by insisting they pitch to Ruth, who was having the time of his life. The next sacrificial Tiger was a right-handed pitcher named Hooks Dauss. When Ruth came up in the bottom of the first, the Tigers shifted to the right side to try and catch anything Ruth didn’t hit out of the park. Not only did Ruth not give their shift a chance, he hit Dauss’ off-speed pitch over the top of the left field wall. His 22nd home run bounced off a train car idling momentarily on the tracks beyond the Polo Grounds. Two runs scored, but Cobb refused to yield.

“Every time Ruth came to bat,” the Herald reported, “he looked out toward center field where Cobb stood backed against the fence. Every time the Babe laughed as Dauss, the non-deceiving, tried to baffle him.”

In the third inning, Dauss tried a fast one and the combination of the ball’s speed and Ruth’s timing and aim produced a perfect parabola on which the ball “rode into the great beyond” of center field. This one left the park right over the top of Ty Cobb’s head, landing five rows deep in the bleachers. Another two runs scored.

The crowd knew they were witnessing feats they’d be telling children and grandchildren about, and they showed their gratitude in hats:

Had some enterprising gentlemen thought of it, they could have laid in a supply of straw hats to provide a large population for several years. The zone in front of the grandstand from end to end was strewn with summer head gear that came like a snow storm.

The Stadium’s groundskeeper reckoned that ball went nearly 500 feet, erasing Ruth’s record from the previous game before the ink even had a chance to dry.

He had hit seven home runs in his last five games, and here old Bill Bradley saw himself out. Ruth’s 22nd and 23rd home runs put him 16 ahead of his 1920 place. “When the season opened it was speculated whether Ruth could even approach his 1920 mark. Now they are wondering where the battering ram will stop. What’s the limit?”

In the seventh, Ruth appeared for the last time and he smiled out to center field again. By this point he had accumulated 10 home runs off of Hooks Dauss, more than he had off any other pitcher.

Cobb signaled Dauss to walk the Babe.

The Tigers never stopped trying, and their manager wasn’t too proud to change tactics himself. Down 5-0 in the sixth inning, Cobb himself hit “a sweet wallop,” the ninth of his 12 home runs that season. In the eighth, the rest of the Tigers assembled a five-run rally. Rarely had a four-game sweep elicited such respect from the writers:

No manager fought harder than Tyrus to overcome the mighty and uncanny batting that greeted his pitchers during his four-day stay. The Jungle Men did their share with the willow, but it was not enough. The Yankees always seemed to have a few more killing blows up their sleeves in time of need.

The Yankees’ 9-6 victory finished the sweep. Ruth’s biography, already populated with sensational moments, seemed to be bursting at the seams, and the hype around his exploits reached Biblical proportions:

If the Babe is human, then Adam started something which deserves far wider publicity and greater credit. If this crashing Titan truly is human, we have arrived at the physical superman, and Ruth is writing a remarkable postscript to Genesis.

If the series was a showdown between Cobb’s way and Ruth’s, the Tigers’ icon made a fine accounting of himself, going 7-for-18 at the plate with two doubles. He had three RBI, scored four times, and even hit a home run. But Ruth, “the Swatting Demon,” went 9-for-12, hit two doubles, drove in 12, scored nine runs himself, and hit six home runs.

It was the same story for the Tigers as a unit. They scored an average of seven runs per game in that series and still got swept out of the Polo Grounds, a grisly fate that could be mathematically traced back to Cobb’s insistence that his pitchers challenge Ruth despite his obvious moment of transcendence. Daring Ruth to hit the ball was a strategy “beyond the reasoning of sound judgement.”

“Where do the Tigers expect to get off,” the Detroit Free Press demanded, “if they—out of bravado or just the thought that some act of Providence will protect them—play with the battering Bambino? It’s like touching a match to a fuse in a bomb and holding the weapon in your hand.”

It would be narrative exaggeration to claim Ty Cobb left the Polo Grounds a beaten man, or to say that Ruth’s single-handed defenestration of Detroit’s pitching staff ended their season, but after losing four games to the Yankees, the Tigers went to Boston and lost four games there, too. In less than two weeks they went from third place to fifth place. By the time the season ended, Cobb’s Tigers were 27 games back of Ruth’s Yankees, who won the American League pennant for the first time in the club’s history. More would follow.

In a recap of the series, The Sporting News described it as a match between “the bull and the locomotive.” The magazine did not say who was what, but the Tigers had taunted Ruth and left the series thoroughly gored, so there’s that.

The cost of Cobb’s stubbornness became a warning to other teams who, with the jeers of their own fans in their ears, might be tempted to reach for their courage: “Ruth defies all laws and principles of pitching.”

Before that season, a former Boston teammate, Pinch Thomas, was more philosophical:

I am not so certain now that Babe is human. At least, he does things which you couldn’t expect a mere batter with two arms and legs to do. I can’t explain him. Nobody can explain him. He just exists.

In an era of newsprint hyperbole, the Babe hit, and therefore he was. He hit 59 home runs in 1921. That record stood until 1927, when he broke it again.

Two More Things:

1. “The home pastimers collected a trio of markers in the opening spasm…”

So begins a typical paragraph of 1920s baseball journalism, when the type was microscopic, the chronological narrative frowned upon, and every sportswriter fancied himself a Jazz Age Shakespeare.

Giving a full written play-by-play of games, reporters apparently held onto their sanity by making no two sentences sound anything alike, which is how “the home team scored three runs in the first inning” became something that barely qualifies as the King’s English.

But the worst part is that sports journalism at the time did not often involve talking to the athletes about what had happened that day and publishing their comments. Perhaps we could find some material if we devoted our lives to the task, but it is a fact that no major New York or Detroit newspapers printed any reaction from Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb during their Homeric clash at the Polo Grounds in 1921.

No one asked Babe Ruth how it felt to hit the longest home run in Polo Grounds history on the same day he broke his pitching sabbatical and struck out Ty Cobb. No one asked him what all had happened in the various arguments the day before. And no one seems to have even asked Ty Cobb why on earth he kept pitching to Babe Ruth during the heater of his life.

2. Three years later, Ruth and Cobb got into it again at Detroit’s Navin Field. A routine plunking sparked a brawl, but this time the fans got involved and thousands of people swarmed the field and ripped their seats out and started throwing them. Can you guess what happened next? That’s right, the game ended in a forfeit!

Of course Project 3.18 will cover that one at some point in the future, but not now. Too much 1920s newsprint gives us a headache.

Okay, Three More Things, Because This JUST Happened:

Yeah, but how was Mike Trout’s pitching?

Over on Clear the Field:

Our unexpected series on baseball true crime takes us back to 1900, when a couple of shady characters wired up Philadelphia’s ballpark and ran a sign-stealing operation that still seems sophisticated today.

In 1900, high-tech cheating involved a board, a telegraph, and a very long length of wire.

Episode Highlights:

- Christy Mathewson explains sign-stealing

- Morgan Murphy and Pearce Chiles, baseball’s Butch and Sundance

- An anonymous informant tells the Reds to follow the wires

- A puddle, a board, and a telegraph buzzer

- The only King Ralph reference you’ll hear this week

- Schemes proliferate throughout the “noble” National League

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On Social Media

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Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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

For baseball fans in 1921, it must have been impossible to imagine that Babe Ruth could get any better.

In 1919, his last year with the Boston Red Sox, Ruth pitched in 17 games, mostly at the start of the season, compiling a 9-5 record. But as the Red Sox fell out of contention, Ruth wanted to focus on hitting and playing the outfield, where he’d had some success. The offensively focused version of Ruth hit 29 home runs to set a new single-season record.

Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees before 1920, and that fateful transaction effectively ended his career as a pitcher. The Yankees wanted a slugging outfielder, and it became apparent that they had gotten a pretty good one. Ruth immediately assaulted and pulverized his own record. Despite not hitting a home run in the first two weeks of the season, he finished with 54 of them. Baseball fans today, appreciating the game in our context of Ruth, Mantle, Maris, Aaron, and Ohtani, simply cannot reproduce the experience of baseball fans in 1920, who watched Ruth reshape not just a sport but perhaps even the laws of physics.

But one unicorn player did not a champion make: Ruth’s first Yankees team finished in third place in the American League, just a few games behind the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox. Those three teams each finished with 95 or more wins, and the rest of the American League was essentially kindling.

That included the Detroit Tigers. After three straight pennants between 1907 and 1909, the Tigers spent the next decade bouncing around the middle of the league. Most of the stars of those teams were gone, with the exception of Ty Cobb, who remained an offensive force, regularly flirting with a .400 batting average and 200 hits a season, and Donie Bush, a steady, productive presence at shortstop. After the Tigers finished in seventh place in 1920, Frank Navin, the team’s owner, dismissed long-time manager Hughie Jennings, whose whistling, whooping tactics no longer inspired as they once had. Seeking a new manager, Navin was inspired by the success of the 1920 Indians, who made their best player, center fielder Tris Speaker, the manager and promptly won a world championship under his direction.

Cobb, understanding that he was not a “people person,” did not particularly want to become the Tigers’ manager, but Navin made him an offer he could not refuse, raising his salary from $20,000 to $33,000 to take the helm (this move saved the tight-pocketed Navin money because giving Cobb a raise was still cheaper than hiring a standalone replacement). The job didn’t make Cobb any friendlier, but he was an earnest teacher with plenty of wisdom to impart. Feared by some and respected by nearly all, Cobb got his first Tigers club off to a strong start in 1921.

On June 10, the “Tygers” were 29-25, in third place and looking like a contender. Detroit was in the midst of an extended road trip necessitated by the train-dependent schedules of the era. When teams left town they often visited all seven of the other cities on the circuit before returning home, and after playing in Detroit for most of May, the Tigers were mostly on the road in June and early July. They began their road trip well enough, taking 3 of 4 from the Philadelphia Athletics and splitting a four-game series with the Washington Nationals. Next up: New York and the 29-21, second-place Yankees.

There was no Yankee Stadium in 1921. The Yankees had been renters since 1913, sharing the Polo Grounds in Manhattan with their landlords, the New York Giants. The Polo Grounds layout in 1921 wasn’t as strange as it would become a few years later, but it was plenty quirky, with shorter distances down the lines and a center field wall, as much as 483 feet away from the plate, that was thought to be practically unreachable.

The series opened on June 11 in front of 28,000 fans. Coming into the game, Ruth had hit 17 home runs, which was roughly on pace with his 1920 performance. Many newspapers (and not just in New York) devoted an entire section of their sports coverage to Ruth, tracking his season’s round-trippers, the pitchers he victimized, and how his progress compared to the year before. So far, so good.

In the seventh inning of the game, the Tigers were winning, 6-3. Cobb had been a nightmare all day, scoring two runs and driving in two. He lashed two doubles, a single, and walked twice, making every at-bat a misery. Cobb knew that the home run ball was revolutionizing the sport—1920 is generally considered the first year of the “modern” or post-dead-ball era—but he wasn’t going to tinker with what had been, for him, a tremendously successful formula. While others hammered away, he continued cutting opposing teams to pieces. Despite taking over the responsibilities of manager, Cobb was still hitting over .400, an implacable, thrumming engine that drove the Tigers’ offense from station to station.

Two Yankees reached in the bottom of the seventh, bringing up Ruth, who represented the tying run. For the other six teams that might face Babe Ruth in this situation, a clear protocol had already been put in place: walk him. Ruth’s 150 walks in 1948 set a record, and opposing teams were mocked for what was deemed a lack of courage. In St. Louis, a scornful local newspaper reframed a series between the Browns and the Yankees as a chance to “pay a dollar and see Babe Ruth walk.”

There was serious discussion about a rule change that would somehow “force” teams to pitch to Ruth, but until somebody came up with something workable, the law of the land was clear: If the Yankees’ slugger had a chance to tie the game or take the lead, put him on base and let somebody else make you regret it.

Ruth had walked in the first and the sixth, but these were probably relatively competitive walks issued by a pitcher, Jim Middleton, who was nibbling at the corners. There were two outs in the seventh when Ruth came up again, and Cobb came in from center field to give Middleton his orders. This time he was to “pitch his head off” to the Babe.

No doubt feeling a little silly, Middleton challenged Ruth with his best stuff, and the hitter “gratefully slugged the ball into the stands in right,” tying the game. The cheers at the Polo Grounds “took on the proportions of an earthquake,” and many fans tipped their caps to Cobb for creating an unforgettable moment. The Yankees scored a final run in the bottom of the ninth to walk off the Tigers and take the first game of the series, 7-6.

It was inevitable that Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth would dislike each other. When Ruth transitioned to the outfield around the same time that the Leagues seemed to introduce a livelier baseball, the so-called “jackrabbit ball,” he was essentially opening a new, exciting restaurant across the street from the diner Cobb had run successfully for more than 15 years. Not many people possess the strength of character it would have taken Cobb, in that position, to welcome such a newcomer in the neighborhood.

Even at the time, it was clear that Ruth was replacing Cobb as the avatar of the game, a new brand of baseball he was forging with his mighty, clubbing swings. This process didn’t erase Cobb and his legacy: any baseball fan today remembers Cobb, which is kind of remarkable when you consider he did his best work well over a century ago. But almost anyone today—whether or not they know much about baseball, sports, or history—can still tell you at least a little about Babe Ruth.

According to Robert Creamer’s biography, The Babe, Cobb hung onto an early rumor perpetuated by Ruth’s teammates in Boston, claiming that the then-pitcher didn’t regularly change his underwear. Long after Ruth’s rise to greatness, Cobb liked to greet Ruth with the same line: “You fellows smell something around here? Oh, hello, Babe.”

Cobb said much the same thing in his autobiography: “Whenever I’d pass near him on the field, I’d make some little remark or gesture, such as, ‘Seems to me there’s a polecat around here.’”

Cobb also indulged in one of the other popular tactics for razzing Ruth, mocking his striking physical appearance. The top-heavy Babe, a refrigerator on sticks with a big head, round face, and a flat nose, was hardly the perfect specimen of athleticism, and many players delighted in comparing him to a gorilla in a flannel uniform.

Where Cobb was exacting and repetitious with insults, Ruth preferred to improvise, and Cobb recalled with grudging admiration that Ruth was a virtuoso with profanity, with a repertoire of epithets and curses that left scorch marks in the most uncouth dugouts. And while Ruth didn’t seem to ever stay angry for long, he could hold on to offenses long enough to weaponize them. Playing angry did not suit Cobb’s ruthless, cerebral style, but grudges made Babe Ruth swing harder.

July 12 was a warm Sunday in Harlem. 34,000 souls (a New York Tribune writer, Charles Taylor, insisted the fans could be fans on weekdays, but on Sundays they were “souls”1) came for the rivalry and a Ruth home run and no one left disappointed.

The first pernicious domino was pushed over during batting practice before the game. According to the Detroit Free Press, the trouble seemed to have been a resentful photographer, who asked Ruth if he would pose for a picture with Cobb. Ruth was apparently mad about some verbal shot Cobb made the day before, and he refused the photographer “in some unkind way.” With no photo to take, the photographer headed Cobb’s way and made sure to mention what Ruth had said. From that point on, “the dispositions of both men were aflame.”

The slighted Cobb approached the Yankees’ dugout, where he “illustrated the best way he knew what a gorilla looks like,” including pushing up on his nose. Ruth unleashed that famous purple vocabulary, and the two men drew closer until the umpires, Tommy Connolly and Bill Dinneen, intervened, sending the two stars back to their separate corners.

There was a regular chance for the two rivals to follow up during the game: they were both playing center field and often passed near each other when the teams changed sides. During these changeovers, Ruth and Cobb were observed “making faces” at each other and continuing their verbal sparring, Cobb with his needle and Ruth with his cudgel. It’s possible that the two enjoyed the back-and-forth, but their teammates were watching the combative behavior and taking notes.

The scoring began in the top of the third, when the Tigers scored two off New York starter Bob Shawkey. Ruth led off in the fourth, facing a soft-throwing Detroit pitcher named Harvey “Suds” Sutherland. The Babe hammered a 2-2 pitch foul into the right field stands, but Sutherland fooled him on the next pitch, tempting Ruth into taking a vicious cut that missed. A piercing whistle and mocking shout rang out from deep center field.

Ty Cobb disdained the “swing-crazy” style of baseball Ruth was popularizing. To the Tigers’ manager, baseball about intelligence as well as physical skill. A savvy ballplayer took whatever the game gave him and turned it into something useful: a bunt, a stolen base, an intentionally placed line-drive single. Cobb had painstakingly built a towering career from these bits and pieces. He felt Ruth was dumbing down the game, bulling his way every through every at-bat: ball come, swing hard. Cobb and other purists believed no batter with Ruth’s strikeout numbers could be considered a truly great hitter.

In the bottom of the fifth inning, the Yankees came to life. New York’s catcher, Wally Schang, singled, and Shawkey, the pitcher, laid down a bunt. The Tigers tried to get Schang at second base, and may have done it. The shortstop, Donie Bush, said he tagged Schang when he momentarily came off second base. Dinneen, the umpire, wouldn’t go for it and left Schang where he was. By modern standards, Bush lost his mind in the ensuing argument, “waving light jabs” at the umpire’s stomach and jaw. The Free Press characterized this as “playful remonstration,” and maybe it was, because Bush was not ejected for assaulting an official. One batter later, the Yankees’ shortstop, Roger Peckinpaugh, cleared the bases with a triple.

Now Bush renewed his argument, and this time he apparently threw a baseball in anger at Dinneen. For this, at last, he was thrown out. Umpires today certainly don’t have it easy, but umpires “back when” had things so much worse.

Next up was Ruth. Some reports say Sutherland tried to walk the Babe, throwing three outside pitches and intending to throw a fourth, only to miss and put it through the strike zone. Ruth had never given up on the at-bat and he pounced, swatting the ball into the right field upper deck. It was his 19th home run, his third in three days, and he was now ahead of his record 1920 pace.

Cobb ran in, arguing that the ball was foul, to no avail. He changed gears and went after Sutherland, berating him for the costly mistake. Perhaps as punishment, the manager left Sutherland to his fate and returned to center field. The pitcher gave up four more hits before getting three outs, and the Yankees built an 8-2 lead.

Ruth given his answer to Cobb’s earlier mocking whistle, and as the sides changed again, the two stars had another frank discussion on the merits of their respective offensive philosophies. This one nearly ended in blows. “They glared at each other and lifted their arms to a sparring position,” but Bill Dinneen, no doubt breathing hard by this point, and a few players separated the two before any punches were thrown.

Sutherland (and Cobb) had dug Detroit into a deep hole, but they kept clawing. In the sixth inning, the Tigers’ first baseman, Lu Blue2, hit a two-run home run, but in true dead-ball fashion he kept the ball in the park the entire time he rounded the bases. When the inning ended it was 8-5, New York.

Ruth batted again in the sixth and doubled with the bases empty. He was thrown out trying to steal third. It was often said of Ruth, even in his prime, that he was faster than he looked but not as fast as he thought he was.

For whatever reason, Ruth and Cobb appeared to have a friendly interaction in the seventh, but by then the rest of the players were stuck in “fight” mode. In the top of the eighth, the Tigers scored three runs to tie the game at eight apiece. After the tying run came home, there was a collision at home plate, involving Schang, the Yankees’ catcher, and another party we can’t quite pin down. The blow-up drew all the players off the benches “like smoke out of the funnels of a trans-Atlantic ocean liner.” Schang removed his mask, a sure sign he meant business, and advanced on Lu Blue, the runner at first. The ragged umpires intervened, but this battle was quickly forgotten when, behind the pitcher’s mound, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb found each other again.

Ruth apparently started this one, as Cobb tried to keep his player, Blue from tangling with Schang. Cobb’s anger flashed as Ruth unleashed more of his Baltimore industrial school vocabulary and the conflict grew so serious that Miller Huggins darted in between them.

It was humorous to see Huggins, half as big as Ruth and weighing about 50% of what the slugger does, trying to budge the Babe. Huggins sunk his spikes in the dirt for a plunge and hit Ruth headlong without so much as budging him.

Ruth brushed his diminutive manager off but by then Dinneen was in his ear, dispensing some “fatherly advice.” One writer tipped his hat to Huggins for “preventing a riot,” but fights were now cropping up everywhere, as random players like Eddie Ainsmith and Ping Bodie began issuing open challenges to all comers. The verbal battles only ended when Lu Blue agreed to fight one of the Yankees’ coaches, in a trial by combat under the grandstands after the game.

The Yankees scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth to break the tie. Peckinpaugh hit the decisive home run, and Ruth doubled and scored to build up the 12-8 New York victory.

The game had been a jackrabbit’s holiday, with 21 hits by the Yankees and 19 by the Tigers. Ruth had a home run, two doubles, and a walk. Cobb finished with two singles in five at-bats, keeping his batting average at a respectable .401.

But the extracurriculars were the story, leading to a delay-filled game that took two hours and 50 minutes to decide, forever by the standards of the era. Only two things were missing, the New York Times wrote:

A keg at third base, as the contest bore all the other markings of a game between the married and the single men at the firemen’s clam bake. And a 24-foot ring which would have sped many quarrels along.

Capitalizing on the other side’s leaky pitching, both Ruth and Cobb had played up to their billing in the first two games of the series. Cobb’s Tigers had lost twice, but they still seemed to be in the thick of things, both in the four-game series and in the standings. What they didn’t yet know was that the events of the second game had doomed them.

No punches had been thrown that day (except at the umpire), but the sting of Ty Cobb’s relentless needling didn’t fade when Babe Ruth left the park. The Yankees’ star laid awake that night in his hotel residence, seeing red. After two more games trapped in the Polo Grounds with Ruth and his grudge, the 1921 Tigers would never recover.

In the conclusion, Babe Ruth takes his hurt feelings out on the record books. Bring a tape measure.

This Week’s Lineup:

- A Minute of Actual Baseball Information

- Tatsuya Imai’s “Wrong-Way” Slider

- Ketel Marte and Freddie Freeman Hug It Out

- Nelson Cruz’ Very Fine Display

- The Brewers’ Clubhouse “Turtle”

- A Home Run Call Legacy

- Pittsburgh’s Blue-Collar Home Run Celebration

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 here on the episode.

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

Have you ever seen a news report on a rescued fisherman, found days or even weeks after his disabled boat got swept out to sea? He’s starved, bedraggled, and defiantly, triumphantly alive. In the 1970s, the San Diego Padres were that guy.

Geography was against the Padres from the start. While teams like Boston and Atlanta could claim a whole geographic region for their fanbase, San Diego was hemmed in: Mexico to the south, fortress Los Angeles to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the west, desert to the east, all the way to Phoenix. It shouldn’t have worked, and it almost didn’t.

By 1973, the Padres’ first owner, C. Arnholt Smith, had given up. Since entering the National League in 1969, his team had never won more than 63 games and annual attendance seemed hard-capped around a half a million. After four years of futility, Smith realized his pockets weren’t deep enough to sustain a bad team in a tiny market.

At the same time, civic leaders in Washington D.C. wanted to get back in. Washington had lost the Senators at the end of 1971, when another spurious owner, Bob Short, rustled the local team and fled to Texas. When Smith made the Padres available, Washington interests were quick to raise the city’s hand.

The two parties reached an agreement. The 1974 National League schedule was drawn up with the assumption that the Padres would be in Washington. Things went so far that one of the Padres’ pitchers, Dave Freisleben, was enlisted to model a new Washington uniform design:

In reality, it would have been almost impossible to wrest the Padres out of San Diego in 1974. The team was still entangled in an expensive, multi-year lease at San Diego Stadium and the city was preparing a legal offensive designed to inflict maximum pain on Major League Baseball for moving the team. The Washington agreement was doomed, but the Padres faced a grim, uncertain future.

Reading the newspapers on his yacht off the coast of Florida, Raymond A. Kroc followed the Padres’ messy plight with increasing interest. Kroc, the chairman of the McDonald’s Corporation, was transitioning into a part-time role with the company he founded and looking for a multi-million-dollar hobby. Baseball had always interested Kroc, a longtime resident of the Chicago area who came of age in a Cubs heyday in the late 1920s, admiring stars like Riggs Stephenson, Kiki Cuyler, and Hack Wilson. Kroc made several attempts to acquire the Cubs, but the only thing more powerful than new fast food money was old chewing gum money, and the Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, rebuffed him.

Kroc saw the floundering Padres as an easier mark in a city with better weather. He arranged a meeting with Smith. The conversation between the man with limitless resources and the man in over his head was brief:

“How much do you want for the team?”

“Twelve million dollars.”

“Done.”

The two shook hands, snuffing out Washington’s hopes for another 30 years.

“Ray was a great guy and a great man,” recalled Padres pitcher Randy Jones, who won the 1976 Cy Young Award in San Diego. “If it hadn’t been for him, we would have been in Washington. Everything at the ballpark was packed up until he bought the club.”

Kroc was a celebrity during his first visit to the Padres’ spring camp in Yuma, Arizona. 72 years old, slightly hard of hearing, and worth somewhere around $500 million, Kroc gave a welcome address to the team as they sat cross-legged in the outfield grass.

“He gave us incentive,” catcher Fred Kendall said. “In the past, ownership has been so weak financially that we’ve felt like poor relatives to the teams we’ve been playing. Mr. Kroc told us he didn’t intend to throw money away, but that it was there if we earned it.”

Someone asked Kroc: “Why would you want to buy the worst team in the National League?”

“Well,” he said, “McDonald’s wasn’t very big at one time, but it’s pretty big now.”

There were other reasons for excitement that spring. The Padres had a new manager, John McNamara, hired away from a coaching job in San Francisco. Kroc had retained the Padres’ experienced baseball leadership, the father and son duo of Buzzie and Peter Bavasi, who had acquired a few aging “name” players over the winter, including former Cubs infielder Glenn Beckert and Willie McCovey, the Giants’ slugging first baseman. Despite two arthritic knees, the 36-year-old McCovey practically frolicked in Yuma, setting such a pace that even the younger players couldn’t keep up.

But even in baseball’s season of perpetual hope, there were warning signs. The Padres committed 22 errors in 10 exhibition games and gave up 22 unearned runs. This was the kind of play that led the 1973 Padres to 102 losses, but the newcomers tried to stay positive. “Fortunately,” McNamara said, “most of the errors have been made by people who won’t be playing for us regularly.”

The fans seemed willing to buy that argument, and after five moribund years, interest—and season ticket sales—showed signs of life.

The Padres opened the 1974 season on the road, with a three-game series against the Dodgers, a rising power in the NL West. The Dodgers made quick, authoritative work of the Padres, sweeping them 8-0, 8-0, and 9-2, but the new owner dismissed the early returns. “They’re snake-bit,” Kroc said of the team, “and they’ve got the yips. They’re overanxious, trying too hard, too tense. We’ll get it straightened out.”

On April 8, the night before the Padres’ home opener, Kroc was feted at an annual preseason dinner. “That was a lost weekend,” he told the crowd of civic boosters. “Our season opens tomorrow night.” He urged patience. “These men are professionals, and they’re going to win for us.”

Kroc’s rescue had inspired San Diego, and 39,083 people bought tickets to the opener on April 9, the second-largest baseball crowd the city had ever produced. In an on-field ceremony before the game, the feisty owner addressed the fans, buoyed by the full park and the standing ovation he’d received.

“All I can tell you,” he said, “is with your help and God’s help, we’re going to give them hell tonight!” Hell was indeed given, but not in the manner Kroc predicted.

San Diego’s woes continued against the Houston Astros. The starter, Steve Arlin, recorded just three outs in two innings and gave up six runs before being pulled. Three (regular) players, including McCovey and Beckert, committed errors. The Padres loaded the bases in the fourth but the inning ended when Matty Alou, another veteran, got doubled-up off first base, thinking there were two outs when there was only one.

The score was 7-2 in the eighth inning when the Padres’ fifth pitcher of the day, Mike Corkins, gave up three hits and the Padres’ third baseman, Derrel Thomas, made the team’s third error. Two more runs scored and it looked like the Padres might open the season 8-0, 8-0, 9-2, 9-2. As soon as the top of the eighth inning ended, Ray Kroc gave them hell.

The owner went to the park’s public-address booth and told the announcer to put him on. The announcer flipped on the microphone and informed the crowd Ray Kroc had something to say. One booth over, the Padres’ longtime lead broadcaster, Jerry Coleman, told his producer to pick the announcement up on a field mic so listeners at home could also hear from the new owner.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Kroc said, “I suffer with you.” There were cheers and laughter.

Before the owner could explain his suffering, a naked man, a streaker, appeared in the outfield, dashing toward an open tunnel entrance on the other side of the park. A roar went up from the crowd, and Kroc raged over the public address system.

“You damn streaker! Get him out of here! Throw him in jail!”

The runner was gone after a few seconds, with puffing security guards trailing in his wake. Kroc composed himself and resumed his version of FDR’s “Day of Infamy” address:

Ladies and gentlemen, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we outdid Los Angeles for an opening night crowd. They had 31,000 fans and we have 39,000. I thank you.

And now the bad news: I have never seen such stupid ballplaying in all my life.

The field microphone picked up more laughter and a hearty cheer. Kroc rose and left the booth.

Still on the air, Jerry Coleman could only manage, ”That was Padres owner Ray Kroc.” Coleman admitted it wasn’t his most articulate moment. “I just didn’t know what to say.”

Before Kroc decided to address the fans, he and Buzzie Bavasi had been sitting together in the nearby executive’s suite. Bavasi got a phone call: one of the clubhouses had sprung a leak. He excused himself and as he got on the elevator he heard Kroc’s voice on the PA, thanking the fans for turning out. “I thought, ‘That’s nice of Ray.’” The elevator doors closed and he missed the rest.

When the leak was dealt with, Bavasi returned to the skybox-level and only then did he learn how Kroc had concluded his remarks. “I was stunned,” Bavasi said. “I talked to him immediately, but there was nothing we could do.”

The players had never been put on blast before, and their shoddy play continued. With two outs in the bottom of the eighth, the Astros’ third baseman, Doug Rader, made a costly error, allowing Derrel Thomas to redeem his earlier mistake with a single that scored a run. Cito Gaston doubled to score two more. The score was 9-5, and it almost seemed like Kroc’s tough love was working, but the Astros got out of the inning and both sides faced the minimum in a scoreless ninth. The Padres had their fourth-straight loss and a lot to think about.

After the game, McNamara closed the clubhouse and held a brief meeting with the players, who quickly dressed and left the stadium. Only Willie McCovey remained behind.

That spring, McCovey had been elected the team’s representative to the players’ union, the MLBPA. By then the players had learned (the hard way) that the job of player rep was best suited to the biggest star with the largest contract. Lesser-known player reps had a tendency to disappear, released or traded on some pretense by resentful front offices. McCovey made $140,000 and he wasn’t going anywhere. The other Padres had decided he would respond to Kroc’s comments on their behalf:

I’ve played baseball for 19 years and I’ve never been called “stupid” before on the PA system by the owner. None of us appreciate being called stupid. I have nothing but respect for the man, but we’re professionals, and we deserve better than that.

I don’t think this has ever been done in the history of baseball. I’m shocked and disappointed that it happened and I wish, somehow, that it could be taken back.

I think there will be some kind of meeting between the players and the front office, or the sting of that statement is going to be on the players’ minds for a long time to come.

The Astros, who didn’t need Kroc for job security, were less tactful. “I’ve managed in Latin America under owners that were nuts,” Preston Gomez, the manager, said, “but I’ve never seen anything like this happen before. Mr. Kroc is good for keeping baseball in San Diego and I congratulate him for that, but somebody has to talk to that man.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” pitcher Claude Osteen said. “He’ll have to learn that you can’t buy success in this game. At least it’s never been done before.”

But the line of the night, one which would come back to haunt him, emerged from the uncareful mouth of Houston’s Doug Rader, a noted “flake,” which was baseball slang for someone with impulse control issues. “What a bunch of horse****,” Rader said. “He thinks he’s in a hamburger convention dealing with a bunch of short-order cooks.”

The entire baseball world reacted to Kroc’s verbal broadside. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, delegated: “President Feeney is handling this matter with Mr. Kroc.”

Chub Feeney, the president of the National League, legislated, decreeing that henceforth, only a team’s public address announcer would be permitted to use the stadium microphone.

And Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, ran for his typewriter and hammered out a vicious scolding:

The action of Mr. Ray Kroc demeaning the players over a public address system at the ballpark is resented by the players, the players’ association, and I am sure by baseball fans.

The players who were castigated publicly as “stupid” by the baseball owner whose expertise is based on a grand total of four games as an owner are entitled to a public apology. The players of the San Diego and Houston clubs have demonstrated by their restraint in the face of Mr. Kroc’s inexcusable insults that their intelligence far exceeds his.

Press opinion, as dried-out and crusty as the last French fries left in the warming tray, tended to favor Kroc, lauding him for his “candor” and for calling out his underperforming employees. Why did Kroc owe an apology to the team that led the league in losses and finished dead-last in batting with a .244 team average in 1973? “The Padres have been palming themselves off for years as a major-league baseball team,” one Team Kroc columnist grumbled. “Who owns this ballclub, anyway? If an owner can’t criticize his own team, who can?”

Damage control began the next night. Kroc had left town on a “preplanned” trip back to Florida, but he was accessible by phone. If the Bavasis hadn’t set Kroc straight in the wake of his outburst, his wife, Joan, certainly did. “I phoned home after the game,” Kroc said, “and my wife gave me hell. I never should have gone on [the microphone]. We were playing bad ball. We weren’t giving the fans the kind of show we wanted to give them. I think my statement was misconstrued. What I mean was, well, sometimes you have a partner in golf who goofs one. You give him the needle. It was an impulsive thing.”

Kroc admitted the night’s exhibitionist had given him the needle. “The streaker just added gas to the fire. It was so frustrating.”

The owner promised an apology to the players was forthcoming. “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. I hope the fans will understand and I want the ballplayers to support me, too.”

Before the game on April 10, the Bavasis held a clubhouse meeting with the players. “It was something that was needed and I believe it helped,” Willie McCovey said. The Padres went out and lost, 9-1, in front of a sparse crowd of 7,800 people who weren’t mad, just disappointed.

Kroc got in touch with McCovey over the phone and made what the player deemed an earnest apology. “The players are satisfied, and the matter is closed,” McCovey said. “We want to get down to the business of winning ballgames for Mr. Kroc and the fans of San Diego.” The Padres went out and lost, 9-1, again.

By the end of April it was clear that Ray Kroc’s first year in baseball was going to teach him the humility that franchising restaurants never had. The Padres lost 13 out of their first 16 games and committed 24 errors along the way. Blowouts were common, and the owner continued to offer rather colorful commentary.

“I bought the team to have some fun,” he said, “but it’s proving to be about as enjoyable as a wake—my own.”

“The pitching hasn’t been good,” Kroc went on, “but in most of the games we would have lost anyway, even with great pitching. You still have to get some runs, you still have to support the pitcher with fielding, you still have to run the bases like somebody other than a knothead.”

After the Cincinnati Reds dropped 10 runs on the Padres in the first game of an April 21 doubleheader, Kroc was back at his wits’ end. “You can’t sit idly by and let this continue.” He called Buzzie Bavasi and told the executive to do something—anything. Bavasi called McNamara, and told the manager to do something—anything. McNamara had an idea. He ordered the team to discard their new white shoes and put on the black shoes they’d worn in 1973. In more familiar footwear, the Padres won the second game against the Reds, won the next two games after that, and went on an 11-3 run.

Obligatory:

Kroc had gotten off to a bumpy start with the players, but the fans seem to have gotten the message. The owner was a fan, and every self-respecting fan had, on at least one occasion, lambasted their team. Kroc just happened to have access to a public address system when his meltdown moment came. With an owner that passionate, many people in San Diego felt new hope.

“Ray was one of the best owners I ever met,” Buzzie Bavasi said in 1990. “Actually, I think we made some fans that night.”

From that point on, Kroc tried to keep a lower profile, but with a team that lost 102 games, the same as the year before, it wasn’t easy. In a visit to spring training the next year, Kroc told a reporter that his first season as an owner had taught him patience and tolerance. He had hardly finished speaking when the Padres’ center fielder misplayed a low, sinking liner, leading to a triple. The owner, still on the record, threw up his hands.

“That was a stupid way to play that ball,” Kroc said. “Why didn’t he dive for the ball, the way Hack Wilson used to?”

Spoken like a true fan.

Over on Clear the Field:

The fuss over the new ABS challenge system has exemplified what Mark Twain cited as history’s tendency not to repeat, but to rhyme. In our latest podcast episode, Ted and I discussed a rhyming moment from 1976 when an electronic video scoreboard and instant-replay sent the umpires running for cover.

In 1977, a new-fangled technology had the umpires hunkered down.

Highlights

- A game for Luddites

- Ted Turner’s wonderful toys

- Ask for permission or forgiveness?

- Why we didn’t replay balls and strikes for 50 years

- The fallible machine

Support Us

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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

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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

Marge Schott looked out her bedroom window on the morning of April 1, 1996 and cursed the snow. Hardly any grass showed through the overnight accumulation, which smothered the early spring flowers and left Schott, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds, in a foul mood.

It was Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, and that meant the Reds were playing at home. The Reds always opened at home, a tradition honoring the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional club in baseball history. The Red Stockings won their first game 45-9 and went 57 games without a defeat, but the team disbanded two years later—it turned out paying the players was bad for business. The modern Reds weren’t direct descendants of those Red Stockings, but the colors were right and Cincinnati still declared Opening Day a city holiday and threw a big parade.

The Findlay Market Parade featured fire engines, marching bands, and a celebrity grand marshal, winding from the Findlay Market in the city’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood through downtown. The wintry weather in 1996 added some complexity. “We’ve had snow before,” the parade organizer said, “but not 1.5 inches at six o’clock in the morning.”

It could have been worse. The snowstorm that grazed Cincinnati hit Cleveland head-on, wiping out the Indians’ home opener. A writer once said of Ohioans: “They do not consider Opening Day just as Opening Day. They consider it one small notch below Christmas.” Perhaps so, but this was taking it too far:

Since buying the Reds in 1985, Marge Schott had embraced the Opening Day traditions, but this one felt extra important, because in 1995 there was no Opening Day in the traditional sense. Instead there was a baseball strike, entering its second season. The strike lasted 232 days, obliterating the second half of 1994 and the first three weeks of 1995 before it was ended by court order. With the dull gray bunting of the strike finally pulled down, Opening Day in 1996 could be a revival. All they needed was some decent weather.

Schott made her way to Over-the-Rhine, accompanied by her omnipresent St. Bernard, Schottzie 02. She noticed the crowds in and around Findlay Market were smaller than in years past. Some of that was the cold, but the owner feared the lasting damage from the prolonged work stoppage. A year later, some fans still hadn’t come back to baseball. Who knew if they ever would.

She drove her worries from her mind, determined to give Reds fans a wonderful day despite the weather. She worked the line of bundled-up parade-goers, pinching cheeks, shaking hands, and showing off the dog. When it was time to start the parade, Schott sounded a siren and grand marshal Sparky Anderson, the beloved manager of the Big Red Machine, led the procession with aplomb. The sun broke through the leaden skies and began melting the snow, lifting Schott’s mood as she headed to the office.

The party continued at Riverfront Stadium. Schottzie bounded onto the AstroTurf while a marching band performed. Draft horses led wagons in a circuit around the park and bunches of balloons danced in the crisp air. Sparky Anderson threw out a ceremonial pitch, caught by his former player, Ray Knight, who had been named the Reds’ new manager during the offseason. An elephant passed Anderson the ceremonial ball. Marge Schott loved elephants.

John McSherry loved baseball, and he loved being a major-league umpire. He was supposed to have a doctor’s appointment on April 1, but he put it off. Maybe he didn’t think it was a good idea to get a checkup on April Fool’s Day.

A National League umpire since 1971, McSherry’s crew was in Cincinnati for Opening Day, but his irregular heartbeat, a chronic arrhythmia, was bothering him enough that he scheduled a doctor’s appointment on the road. But when McSherry woke up on April 1, he was feeling better. He decided to reschedule his appointment for the following day, an off-day. His crew, Tom Hallion, Jerry Crawford, and Steve Rippley, were concerned, but McSherry didn’t want to miss Opening Day. “I’ll be here today,” he told them, “and I’ll get that (the doctor’s appointment) taken care of tomorrow.”

With 25 years of major-league experience, John McSherry was a familiar face to the Reds and their opponents that day, the Montreal Expos. When he arrived in the National League he was the youngest umpire on the circuit, but that was thousands of games ago, and his body of work showed him to be dedicated, fair, and particularly collegial.

He was named a crew chief in 1988, and he’d been given the honor of working one divisional series, seven league championship series, and two World Series. McSherry was behind the plate during Game Six of the 1977 World Series, giving him the best seat in the house for Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October” triumph. “It was like being part of all your dreams when you were a kid,” he remembered. He’d seen his share of lowlights, too, like the time in 1984 when he got caught in the middle of a hot beanball war:

The players consistently rated McSherry as among the best umpires in the game. Working behind the plate or on the bases, handling disputes, interpreting and explaining the rules, he was passionate but not overzealous, tough but respectful. His character made him an ideal example for umpires coming up through the ranks, and he taught at the instructional school run by Harry Wendelstedt, another NL umpire, and took part in umpiring clinics in other countries.

Managers were reluctant to argue with him, but when they did, he responded with more forbearance than some of his peers. “You had to say an awful lot of bad things before he would throw you out of a game,” Tommy Harper of the Expos said. “You could have your say with John.”

Ray Knight, the Reds manager, remembered how McSherry taught him—in advance—the universal signal umpires would give an arguing manager to let them know their floor time was up: a little tap on the leg.

Despite being lauded as an “umpire’s umpire,” McSherry had come under increasing criticism for his increasing size. In 1996 he was six feet two inches tall and weighed somewhere north of 350 pounds. With measurements that more than exceeded the medical criteria for obesity, McSherry was one of several umpires labelled as unacceptably overweight for their job, no matter how well they did it. McSherry’s size never damaged his reputation, but he had left several games over the years because of dehydration or heat-related illnesses, and spent parts of six off-seasons working with a weight-loss clinic affiliated with Duke University.

McSherry never denied his weight was a concern, but in a time with far fewer treatment options for obesity, in a job that made it all but impossible to prioritize consistent, healthy eating habits, he was doing the best he could. In 1995, at age 50, he said he hoped to continue umpiring until he maxed out his pension at 57.

“But that will probably depend on my health,” he told his hometown newspaper. “I battle my weight all the time. You never know what that’s going to do eventually.”

The umpire was in good spirits as the game got underway. He was so eager to get started that he trotted to home plate after the Canadian national anthem was played, forgetting there was another anthem to go. He joked with the Reds’ catcher, Eddie Taubensee. “He said, ‘Eddie, you call balls and strikes the first two innings and we’ll be all right.”

The game began at 2:07 p.m. McSherry’s joke to Taubensee seemed a little less funny after the first pitch from Cincinnati’s Pete Schourek. “It was right down the middle,” Schourek said. “He called it a ball. It shocked me for a second, but he seemed fine after that.”

The Expos’ leadoff hitter, Mark Grudzielanek, popped out on the next pitch. Second baseman Mike Lansing struck out swinging on three pitches. The next batter was center fielder Rondell White. The count was 1-1 when McSherry unexpectedly stood up.

He motioned to Steve Rippley, the second base umpire, clearly summoning him in to take over behind home plate. Then he turned and walked with his head down, toward the gate leading to the umpires’ dressing room. A few steps from the gate he wobbled and fell to his knees, then pitched forward, sprawling on the artificial turf.

The trainers from both teams, always watching for signs of trouble on the field, were moving before McSherry reached the ground, the other umpires on their heels. The Reds’ team doctors, an ER doctor and an internist arrived. The two paramedics on duty brought the emergency defibrillator. Two more doctors leaped over the fence and raced to help however they could.

“The doctors just came in waves,” Greg Lynn, the Reds’ trainer, said. With so many capable hands they took turns administering CPR continuously until McSherry was placed into an ambulance waiting in the stadium tunnels. Lynn said they had a pulse, at first, and they fought to keep the umpire breathing. “We all tried.”

As the medical personnel knotted around McSherry, the crowd of 53,000 deflated as confusion was replaced with dismayed understanding.

“What’s going on? What’s wrong? What’s happening?” Marge Schott went on that journey in the owner’s skybox, accompanied by a Cincinnati Enquirer writer, Richard Green, who was shadowing her for Opening Day. A few minutes later, Schott found out.

An aide took her on the long journey to the umpires’ dressing room. Tom Hallion had followed McSherry to the hospital, leaving the remaining officials, Jerry Crawford and Steve Rippley, to figure out what to do about the game. Schott joined the Reds’ general manager, Jim Bowden, and the managers, Knight and the Expos’ Felipe Alou.

Though shocked and disturbed, the umpires said they could continue. They seemed to feel McSherry had all but asked them to do so, summoning Rippley as he had. The teams agreed and Crawford update the waiting reporters, telling them, “We felt this is the best thing to do with the emotion.” At 2:40 p.m., the crowd was told the game would resume at 3:15.

A little after three o’clock, a telephone in the umpires’ dressing room rang. Crawford picked it up. It was Tom Hallion. Everyone who saw McSherry lying on the field had feared the worst, and Hallion told Crawford the worst had happened. John McSherry had died.

As the news of McSherry’s death spread through Riverfront Stadium, Crawford and Rippley told the teams they still intended to play on. Having already agreed to proceed, the stunned umpires were moving on inertia. The game would resume in 30 minutes. To Schott, that felt like too long a delay. “What about the fans who are waiting?”

Crawford stared at her. “We’ve got a guy who just died here.”

Bowden ushered Schott into an elevator. “Did he die?” she asked the general manager, as if it all might be some elaborate April Fool’s Day prank.

“Yes,” was all Bowden could say.

“I don’t believe it.” Schott said. “Snow this morning, and now this. I don’t believe it.”

Ray Knight couldn’t believe the umpires were planning to go forward. “I think the umpires felt it was their obligation to John. For a little while, I was struggling…I didn’t feel right about it.”

The manager took Crawford aside. “I want you to know right now you do not have to worry about not playing this game and I’ll support you 100%.” Crawford assured Knight they could go on, but his ashen face told another story.

“He was crushed,” Knight said. “We were all crushed. Jerry was walking about and didn’t know what to do.”

The manager entered a distressed Reds clubhouse. “We’re not handling it very well right now,” Taubensee, the catcher, said. “It’s the same as if it happened to one of us out there.”

Knight gathered the players and told them the plan was to continue. The players gently rebelled. Shortstop Barry Larkin, a clubhouse leader, was one of the first to say, “enough.”

According to Knight: “Barry told me very quietly and with very much emotion: ‘Out of respect for life, I can’t go out there.’”

“It was a no-brainer for me,” left fielder Eric Davis said. “If you had seen the umpires, you would have known they weren’t there. Those guys have worked with Mac for years and years. They weren’t going to say that Mac wouldn’t want us to play.”

Knight, Larkin, and Davis went to the Expos’ clubhouse and found a similarly shaken unit. Both teams understood what they had to do, the only decent thing to do, no matter who was going to be disappointed.

“There’s no way we could go out there and play baseball,” Expos pitcher Jeff Fassero said. “It wouldn’t have been fair to put [the umpires] through it.”

Larkin and Davis went to see the umpires in their dressing room. A few minutes later Crawford announced the game would be postponed. “It’s probably too traumatic,” he said.

“As players and umpires we’re at each other’s throats all the time,” Davis said. “But unity is more important right now than balls and strike calls. We’re in it together.”

Jim Bowden brought the news up to Marge Schott in her box. The Reds’ owner was distraught—over the wrong thing.

—“Why can’t they play with two umpires? What does it matter?”

—“He’s a baseball man. Wouldn’t he want us to play?”

—“We can play it in his honor.”

How about a moment of silence? A loudspeaker prayer? Schott, who owned a series of car dealerships, wanted to know what it would take to put the stricken umpires in her baseball game.

Bowden tried to talk her down, but she insisted on calling the National League office, where she spoke with a league official, Katy Feeney.

“Katy, this is screwy, I’m telling you. You can’t imagine the boos that are going on here. Why can’t we play the game? This man wouldn’t want to disappoint 50,000 fans. We don’t need to go against the fans anymore.”

Snow this morning, and now this.

Nearly an hour and a half after John McSherry collapsed and 20 minutes after he died, an update flashed on the stadium message board:

Due to the unfortunate circumstances during today’s Reds-Expos opening day game, the game has been canceled.

There were some muted boos, but most people were quiet, wondering what had happened to the umpire and where he was. And then the American flag at Riverfront Stadium was lowered to half-staff, and they knew.

Marge Schott watched the crowd file out, her nose pressed against the glass window. “I feel cheated,” she told Green, the Enquirer reporter. “This isn’t supposed to happen to us, not to Cincinnati. This is our day.”

It’s easy to blame Marge Schott for getting the moment so callously wrong, but the other umpires, stunned and unmoored, nearly came to the same result from the opposite direction. “This was his life,” Crawford said at one point, explaining the decision to try and continue. “He loved the game of baseball.”

A few minutes after the players effected the postponement, Crawford and Rippley left Riverfront Stadium to join Tom Hallion at the hospital. “They were relieved,” Knight said of the umpires. “They were giving consideration to playing because of the large crowd and their respect for the game, but we knew it wasn’t right.”

The manager reflected on his strange, sad managerial debut, shuttling from dressing room to dressing room, setting an early record for closed-door meetings.

“I saw tremendous compassion,” Knight said of the players, “tears that I hadn’t been sure were there. I saw a group of men who understand caring and loving. And it will make us stronger.”

The game was made up the next day. There was a moment of silence and a prayer. About half the fans came back, but all three of John McSherry’s umpire crew returned to work the game shorthanded.

Jerry Crawford took over behind the plate. “I just tried to stay as focused as I could on calling the pitches.” He teared up. “I think it was probably easier for me than it was for the other guys. They were out on the bases, and when you’re out there, unless there’s a runner on, there’s not a whole lot to do except think about what was going on.”

The Riverfront fans gave the three umpires a series of standing ovations. Crawford said it was the first time in 20 years as an umpire that he’d been cheered by a crowd.

“It’s nice to see you’re viewed as a human being,” Tom Hallion said. “I know with our profession, sometimes it’s overlooked.”

Thirty years ago this week in Cincinnati, no one knew what to do. Groping through the awful moment, they went down different paths: Marge Schott’s frantic self-pity and bargaining for normalcy. Crawford and Rippley’s commitment to duty and the dignity of work. The players’ decency in slowing down the onrushing world long enough to let the umpires catch up to their grief.

Looking back on it, the players got the moment right. There is no map for dealing with a sudden, public loss, but decency is a reliable compass. In giving a little grace to the friends and crewmates who survived him, the players found a fitting way to honor John McSherry, an man admired for his uncommon humility:

“He was one of the only umpires in the world,” one of the Reds’ players said, “who would come and tell you, ‘Hey, I missed that one.’”

This Week’s Lineup:

- A Listener Introduces Us to New York’s Panfluencer

Thanks to NYY expert Jeff for introducing us to the incredible Freddie “Sez” Schuman. Here’s a little clip of Freddie in action:

- Baseball and the Quiet Mind

- Checking in on Ballpark Stunt Food

- Remembering Fantasy Baseball’s Good Old Days

- Candy Bar WAR

- ABS Update: Don’t Flinch

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 here on the episode.

In 1979, Pat Santarone, the groundskeeper at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, battled Earl Weaver in a produce showdown for the ages.

Highlights

- Pat Santarone, a feared and fighting groundskeeper

- Two competitors find each other in the minor leagues

- The ballpark as a nursery: more light, more water, and more beer

- The Tomato Wars claim Boog Powell and Billy Martin

- A Spectacular secret ingredient for growing tomatoes

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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

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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

Today’s story was inspired by a recent piece by fellow Substacker , which spotlighted the Reggie! Bar, a late 1970s candy phenomenon famously named after Reggie Jackson, a baseball player of some renown.

The Retroist

The Reggie Bar

Growing up, the Yankees were not exactly welcome in my family's house, even though we lived so close to New York City. My family had been New York Giants fans, and when the team moved to San Francisco they shifted their loyalty to the Mets. Rooting for the Yankees was viewed as a personal failing and said something suspect about your character. Like ma…

Read more

2 months ago · 42 likes · 14 comments · Retroist

We were surprised to learn the secret origin of the Reggie! Bar, which was marketed as a brand-new product when it was released. But no matter where it came from, after the events of April 13, 1978, the confection belonged to Reggie Jackson, and that’s our story today.

In early October 1975, as the Oakland A’s prepared to face the Boston Red Sox in the American League playoffs, a New York Daily News writer named Phil Pepe interviewed Reggie Jackson.

It wasn’t hard to get a few minutes of the right fielder’s time. In the cramped A’s clubhouse at the Oakland Coliseum, his teammates joked that Jackson was the only one who wanted the locker by the door, the better to greet incoming reporters. If that was true, the feeling was mutual, because Jackson was one of the best “quotes” in any sport.

In their conversation, Pepe observed that Jackson had been an all-or-nothing hitter in 1975. His .253 batting average was below par for the times, but his 78 extra-base hits, including 36 home runs, more than made up the difference. “In many ways,” Pepe wrote, “Jackson typifies the A’s. They don’t hit often, but they hit when it counts; and when they hit, it counts.”

Jackson’s power production was all the more notable because he played half his games in the Oakland “mausoleum,” the worst stadium in the American League for home run hitters. Pepe suggested that if he’d played in a more slugger-friendly park, his numbers might have been even better. Jackson nodded in agreement.

“If I was in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.”

The offhand comment, teed up perfectly by Pepe, was quintessentially Reggie: clever, bombastic, ambitious, and a little arrogant. It was also meaningless. Free agency didn’t exist in October 1975, and the A’s owner, Charles O. Finley, would have traded his beloved pet mule before he’d let Reggie Jackson go.

Candy was a billion-dollar industry in the 1970s, and though “new and improved” was a selling point in most businesses, Americans generally insisted that their sweets stay the same.

Nobody wanted to drive the same car their grandparents drove, but candy consumption was practically hereditary. In 1978, the most popular candy bars were Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Milky Way, and Three Musketeers. Some of these products became best-sellers before the Great Depression, and they may even be familiar to readers today, another half-century on.

Around those towering milk-chocolate behemoths lay the discarded wrappers of decades of upstart products with splashy gimmicks that failed to make a dent in American snacking habits. In the early 1970s, the Quaker Oats Company paid $3 million to finance a film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in exchange for the rights to market actual products using the names and likenesses of candy shown in the film. It seemed like a can’t-miss promotional springboard—we still get hungry watching Charlie Bucket eat his precious Wonka Bars—but it struggled to find an audience. Quaker’s Wonka product line failed to challenge any of the market heavyweights, and their chocolate bar never even made it to mass distribution.

If Willy freakin’ Wonka couldn’t make it in the candy business, manufacturers were going to be much more cautious about a new candy marketed around Reggie Jackson, even if he was one of the most fascinating and well-known athletes in the country. And since he didn’t play in New York, the whole thing was a flight of fancy.

In December 1975, two months after Jackson’s now-famous hypothetical, an arbitrator’s decision initiated the series of events that led to baseball’s free agency. The open market for players didn’t appear overnight, but a year later Reggie Jackson was among the first small group of players with the right to sell their own services.

The New York Yankees didn’t necessarily need a left-handed bat, but the team had been swept in the 1976 World Series and the owner, George Steinbrenner, had gone a little mad. Determined to make the biggest, loudest purchase he could in the first round of free agency, Steinbrenner brought Jackson to New York and let the city work its magic. On November 29, 1976, Reggie Jackson signed a five-year, $2.9 million dollar mega-contract. A few months later, a candy company called.

Chicago-based Standard Brands produced the Baby Ruth—the “candy bar” Jackson had indirectly referenced back in 1975—and the Butterfingers. Those two brands made up about eight percent of all candy bars sold in the country at the time, making Standard Brands a serious player but fringy enough to risk a big swing.

It would be some time before Jackson’s candy bar hit the market. Early reports said it might be called, “Hey Reggie,” but Standard Brands still had to come up with a suitable product and prepare an extensive marketing plan. Ron Cappadocia, the company president, explained the challenge: “You can mix chocolate, caramel, nougat, and nuts in different proportions, but it’s hard to come up with something really different.”

Some of Jackson’s acerbic Yankees teammates rolled their eyes. Nodding to the outfielder’s oft-criticized defense, Graig Nettles said the bread companies had missed an opportunity: “They ought to name a loaf after him, not a candy bar.”

Cappadocia acknowledged that Jackson was a “controversial figure,” but he said that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “It does increase awareness, anyway, and we want awareness.”

On October 18, 1977, in Game Six of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, Reggie Jackson gave Standard Brands all the awareness they could ever hope for.

The Yankees escaped Los Angeles up 3-2 in the series, returning to the Bronx for a sixth and potential seventh game, but Yankees manager Billy Martin made a point of telling reporters, “We’re only going to need six.”

Game Six is its own story and then some, but in lieu of the full account, here are two immaculate paragraphs from Roger Angell, the greatest baseball writer of the 20th century:

Reggie came up to bat in the fourth inning (he had walked in the second) and instantly pulled Burt Hooton’s first delivery into the right-field stands on a low, long parabola, scoring Thurman Munson and putting the Yankees ahead for the rest of the game and the rest of the year. Jackson stepped up to the plate again in the next inning. “He’s going to hit it out of here on the first pitch,” I announced to my neighbors in the press rows, and so he did…It was a lower drive than the first and carried only four or five rows into the same right-field sector, but it was much more resoundingly hit; at first it looked like a double, or even a loud single, but it stayed up there—a swift white message flying out on an invisible wire—and vanished into the turbulent darkness of the crowd.

I did not call the third homer. One does not predict miracles. This one also came on the first ball pitched—a low and much more difficult pitch, I thought, from knuckleballer Charlie Hough. The ball flew out on a higher and slower trajectory—inviting wonder and incredulity—this time toward the unoccupied sector in faraway center field that forms the black background for hitters at the plate, and even before it struck and caromed once out there and before the showers of paper and the explosions of shouting came out of the crowd, one could almost begin to realize how many things Reggie Jackson had altered on this night.

In hindsight, October 1977 would have been the perfect time to flood convenience stores across America with Reggie! Bars, but greatness arrived on its own schedule. “It sure would have been beautiful if we had the bar on the market now,” a Standard Brands official said, “but we don’t.”

A New York marketing executive was sympathetic. “Who expected [Jackson] to have that kind of a Series? He was a bum in the first few games.”

Jackson’s World Series heroics certainly set the marketing team back. Whatever work might have been done, the company immediately threw it out in favor of a plan to make the candy as much about the moment as the man. “We’re tying our marketing very closely to [Game Six],” Cappadocia, the company president, said. “That event will live on no matter what Reggie does. It was one of the greatest feats in sports.”

The Reggie! Bar debuted on February 22, 1978. George Steinbrenner was on hand—the Yankees had signed their own partnership agreement with Standard Brands—and loudspeakers filled the Terrace Room at New York’s Plaza Hotel with the sounds of a crowd chanting the slugger’s name. On one side of the room was a Plexiglas case containing the baseball Jackson had hit off of Charlie Hough to tie Babe Ruth’s record for home runs hit in a World Series game. The ball had its own security guard and someone asked if the ball belonged to Jackson. “Oh no,” the guard said, “this belongs to Standard Brands.”

Cappadocia and Jackson tugged on a golden rope, raising a curtain to reveal an oversized mock-up of the Reggie!, officially described as “Chocolaty-covered caramel and peanuts.” A quartet of musicians struck up a Dixieland tune while young women wearing Jackson’s #44 surged into the ballroom, passing out free samples and framed, autographed candy wrappers.

“The bar is chewy and sweet,” one early reviewer said, “and sets off the appropriate alarm bells about teeth in the conditioned mind. The taste is pleasant but not unfamiliar.” The bar was packaged in a bright orange and blue wrapper oddly evocative of the crosstown New York Mets. The wrapper showed Jackson in his swing follow-through; thanks to the deal with the Yankees, the pinstripes of his uniform and the logo on his cap were visible, but only just barely, so as not to deter fans in other markets.

The strangest thing about the Reggie! was its flat profile and circular shape. Cappadocia said this was a design decision that would make it possible to add “trading cards, statistical information, and other announcements” in the future. Jackson had big plans for his candy bar. “He feels it goes beyond baseball.”

The 1978 Yankees began the season 1-4, losing series in Texas and Milwaukee, but it was too early to worry about any of that. It was also too worry about Jackson, who had yet to hit a home run despite swinging very hard. The day before, in Milwaukee, he’d struck out four times.

April 13, 1978 was a particularly special homecoming for the Yankees, last seen at the Stadium on the night they won the World Series. Jackson himself had last been seen fleeing through a stampede of wild, triumphant New Yorkers who had invaded the field and forced the players to run for their lives. Six months later, they’d celebrate properly.

The players would get their World Series rings before the game against the Chicago White Sox, and the fans would get to see the 1977 World Championship pennant raised by two Yankee Legends, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. Mantle was a frequent VIP, but Maris, embittered by the treatment he received after breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961, had not come back to the Stadium since being traded to St. Louis after 1966.

Reggie Jackson and Roger Maris had plenty to talk about. “He sympathized with me,” Jackson said. “We talked about how tough it is to play in New York. I understand that.”

1977 had been a year of whiplash for Jackson. The thrill and excitement of signing in New York, the cold shoulder from teammates, alienated by his salary and his own oblivious, self-aggrandizing comments. Benchings and battles with manager Billy Martin and finally the storybook ending of Game Six, writing his name in history with three swings of his mahogany ash bat.

“Seeing the flags flying and those two great players made me feel it was the World Series,” Jackson said before the home opener. “It was my first time back here and of course I had to be thinking about last year.”

Jackson said he felt things would be different with his teammates in 1978. “I think they feel I have earned my pinstripes.” he said. “I’m relaxed now, socially and mentally. This year’s going to be a much better year. And more fun. It’s sad the way they ran a guy like Maris out of here, with all the pressure they put on him. Well, they almost ran me out of here, too. But that’s all in the past.”

He also wanted to make sure people didn’t expect too much of him, saying his three home runs on three consecutive October swings were “a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Standard Brands wasn’t going to let Jackson’s Yankee Stadium return go unmarked. The company hired 18 young women, “models and airline stewardesses” according to crusty New York Times sportswriter Red Smith, to distribute a complimentary Reggie! Bar to every fan entering the park that day. 44,667 aerodynamic treats were passed out. “For reasons best known to themselves,” Smith wrote, “the recipients stowed thousands in pockets instead of stomachs.”

The White Sox had the honor of waiting around while the Yankees’ received their jewelry. When the festivities were complete and the golf cart bearing Mantle and Maris had disappeared, the game began with Ron Guidry, embarking on the season of his life, on the mound for New York. Guidry finished the top half of the first without much trouble, and the top of the Yankees’ order faced Chicago’s starter, Wilbur Wood.

Wood was nearing the end of a long career, which he’d extended by becoming a knuckleballer. The tricky pitch had served him well for most of the past 10 seasons, but in 1978 it was not as perplexing or obedient as it had once been. Second baseman Willie Randolph walked. Center fielder Mickey Rivers singled through the left side of the infield. Catcher Thurman Munson struck out.

Reggie Jackson walked to the plate, looking nonchalant as the crowd gave him a warm welcome. He had a friendly exchange with the White Sox’ catcher and then settled in, gripping the bat with a bare left hand and a gloved right, feet spread apart under his dangerous upper body. He took two outside pitches from Wood, never lifting the bat off his shoulders. On the third pitch, he uncoiled.

“Wood was just trying to throw a strike,” Jackson said. “He was behind in the count and still trying to get loose. I think I got loose before he got loose.”

Jackson hammered the pitch into center-right field. The White Sox’ center fielder, Chet Lemon, took off after it, racing to the blue wall. Lemon made an impressive leap, but the ball left the playing area inches over his glove. It was October in April as Jackson made it four in a row at Yankee Stadium.

As he circled the bases, two bright orange packets landed near home plate, tossed like miniature frisbees. Standard Brands had invented a perfectly throwable candy bar and then given thousands of them to rambunctious Yankees fans; now the fans knew why.

Reliever Sparky Lyle wrote, “It took the rest of the fans about ten seconds to realize the beauty of that act, and from the bleachers, from the mezzanine, from the upper deck, from the box seats came thousands of these Reggie Bars. They covered the outfield and home plate like a lawn overgrown with dandelions.”

Returning to the dugout, Jackson first held his hands up in a gesture of helplessness, as if he didn’t know what to do with the orange outpouring. But then he smiled. He realized he’d given New Yorkers a World Series encore, and now they were throwing their flowers.

After the game, both the Yankees and Standard Brands had to deny it had all been somehow prearranged—the candy, the home run, and the candy again. While the field certainly looked like some advertising agency’s magnum opus, the fans had done it themselves. “I got a free commercial out of it,” Jackson said.

The umpires halted the game and the grounds crew began picking up thousands of Reggie! Bars one by one, tossing them into buckets. Meanwhile, some kids in the crowd realized this was as close to a scene from a Willy Wonka story as they were ever going to get, and a few dozen of them hopped over the low walls near the dugouts and began picking orange dandelions. “At twenty-five cents each, they did pretty well for themselves,” Lyle said.

The Yankees’ eternal public address announcer, Bob Sheppard, administered a kindly scolding. “Please stay in your seats,” he urged, but the child labor was speeding things along, so nobody interfered. With their help, the cleanup was done in five minutes. Jackson watched from the bench, looking, according to Red Smith, “fairly immortal and altogether benign.”

Asked what he thought of the candy shower, Jackson said he appreciated it. “It was a nice gesture by the fans.” Tribute could take unusual forms at Yankee Stadium, but as long as the people were happy, Jackson was happy, too, but he warned that only the first Reggie! was free:

“The next time it will cost them a quarter to do that.”

We’ll have a lot more to say about Reggie Jackson’s stormy 1977 in our book. Speaking of our book, we’re going to be off next week, finalizing the manuscript!

It’s called The War at Home: Stories From the Decade When Baseball Ran Amok. One chapter per year from 1970 to 1979, each a deep dive into a wild on-field moment from that season, with the larger story of baseball’s 1970s labor revolution as a through-line. We cover Ten Cent Beer Night, Disco Demolition, and many lesser-known fiascos that haven’t gotten their fair share of lasting infamy—until now.

If you know any literary agents (this is Substack, after all) who might be interested in a Project 3.18-style book of baseball riots and labor battles, drop us a line. We’re seven months away from what is shaping up to be baseball’s most significant work stoppage since the 1970s, and this history has never been more relevant and compelling.

This Week’s Lineup:

- Team Randy or Team Cal?

- Daikin Park Name That Guitar Instrumental

- Hall-of-Fame Photographers

- Ballpark Thin Lizzy

- Reviewing the World Baseball Classic Policy on Musical Instruments

What’s This?

and I decided we couldn’t do a baseball podcast without discussing present-day baseball, so we’re mixing in a new format. We’ll still have our “A format,” where we tell a sideways story from baseball history, but every few weeks in “Slap Hits,” Ted and I will share 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. The first one was a lot of fun to make, and we hope you enjoy listening.

Got a Slap Hit?

We’d also love it if some of you listening out there send us an amusing, baseball adjacent item (interpretation is up to you) you’d like to see us cover, 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.

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

On March 10, 1933, the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs played an exhibition game at Wrigley Field. The spring weather that day was perfect, as it nearly always was, because this Wrigley Field was in California.

Los Angeles didn’t have a major-league team until the Dodgers came in 1958, but the Pacific Coast League was a pretty good league in its own right, regarded as a near-peer of the National and American Leagues, whose territory ended at the Mississippi River. One PCL team, the Los Angeles Angels, was owned by William Wrigley Jr., who also owned the Chicago Cubs. Wrigley used his chewing gum money to build the Angels a fine ballpark in South Los Angeles in 1925, which he named after himself. He liked the sound of it so much that in 1927 Chicago’s Cubs Park became the second Wrigley Field.

In the 1930s, Southern California was an emerging center for major-league spring training. The Cubs trained on Santa Catalina Island, just off the Los Angeles coast, the Chicago White Sox trained at Pasadena, 11 miles northeast of the city, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were relatively nearby in Paso Robles. The New York Giants were the new guys in 1933, training at Wrigley Field in downtown Los Angeles for their second season (and forcing the Angels to couch-surf).

For one month each spring, Los Angeles was a major-league town. The teams played a few dozen games during their stay, against each other and a motley crew of local minor-league and semi-pro clubs. On March 11, for instance, while the Cubs and Giants tangled again, the White Sox were scheduled to play a team organized by the Pasadena Merchants Association. The full slate of exhibitions gave Los Angelenos and other Californians an up-close look at baseball’s best, and the clubs enjoyed a month in paradise.

The Giants won the March 10 game against the Cubs by a 5-3 score. After the players cleared out, Willie Schafer, the Giants’ trainer, indulged in some precious personal time, disappearing into a hot shower in Wrigley Field’s clubhouse.

The players mostly headed back in their hotels. The Giants and Cubs were staying at the same Los Angeles hotel, the Biltmore, while the White Sox were at a Pasadena hotel, the Maryland. With a few hours to kill before dinner, they drifted into various activities.

Charles Berry, a catcher for the White Sox, was getting a massage. Four White Sox were playing an intense game of rummy. Pitcher Milt Gaston remembered having a great hand: “three kings, three queens, and two aces.”

One Cub, name withheld, said he was enjoying a surreptitious glass of “South Carolina corn in toddy form,” which was Prohibition-speak for moonshine.

Bill Terry, the Giants’ first baseman and player-manager, was talking with several of the coaches in his room on the 10th floor. At 5:54 p.m., the electric lights over their heads flickered and went out. There was a sound, which Easterners described as “a peculiar roar.” And then the shaking started.

For one of the White Sox, the earthquake felt like being encased in gelatin. Another witness felt the hotel shift in one direction momentarily, only to reverse course and head back the other way, like “the snapping of a whip.” Some of the Giants staying on the 11th floor of the Biltmore said it felt like “being in a houseboat in a heavy sea,” as if the building was rocking several feet back and forth. Multistory public buildings like the Biltmore were usually designed to give three feet in every direction and now they gave their all.

Hung pictures appeared to dance and shelves emptied as if their contents had sprouted wings. Tables leapt toward diners. It came all at once and stayed long enough for confusion to give way to realization and alarm. People leapt up, prepared to run without knowing where to go, only to be thrown off their feet. A New York sports writer traveling with the Giants, Charles Houston, described his first earthquake as “eleven seconds of pitching and praying.”

Californians who’d been around for more than a few years knew to fight the instinct to run. They crawled under tables and desks or braced themselves in doorways. Lew Fonseca, the White Sox’ manager, was from San Francisco, where he had survived the devastating 1906 earthquake. In his estimation, this one wasn’t as bad, but that didn’t stop him from crawling under the bed in his hotel room.

Al Simmons, then an outfielder for the White Sox, was in a barbershop at street level, getting a shave. “When the main disturbance occurred,” he recounted, “I ran for the street without waiting to argue.”

It might be safer outside, but getting to safety risked the greatest danger. Near the epicenter of the earthquake, unreinforced structures began shrugging off their facades like snakes shedding skins. Even buildings that managed to stay intact dumped a lethal rain of bricks, plaster, masonry, and plate glass. Simmons was far enough away from the epicenter that he was able to reach the open skies safely.

At the Maryland Hotel in Pasadena, the White Sox were mostly in their rooms. When it stopped shaking the players all opened their doors. Many were Easterners who had never experienced an earthquake, and they were still comparing notes when a half-dressed older woman passed them on her way to the stairs. “Earthquake, earthquake,” she called, poking her head into each room and motioning for the occupants to follow her down.

Some of the hotel staff were less than helpful amid the crisis. Berry, the catcher, was facedown on the massage table and didn’t know what was happening. “We better get out of here,” the masseur said, but apparently he was using the editorial “we,” because he fled without telling Berry where to retrieve his clothes. Berry emerged from the hotel entrance wrapped in a sheet, “without a friend in the world.”

In Los Angeles, where the earthquake was felt more strongly, Cubs coaches John Schulte and Johnny Corrigan had only sat down in the Biltmore dining room when the shaking began, causing patrons to “absorb their soup externally.”

“Somebody tells me the shake only lasted eleven seconds,” Schulte said. “Well, if it did, you are looking at a guy who ran two hundred yards in that time, which makes me the world’s fastest human.”

But that title surely went to Willie Schafer, still showering in the clubhouse at Wrigley Field. When the earthquake hit, the clubhouse shelves, full of glass bottles of medicines and tinctures, suddenly evacuated their contents. Schafer said he didn’t recall much of what happened after that, but the next thing he knew he was standing on second base in the empty park, stark naked. He recalled looking up at the six-story clock tower built into the grandstand. An enormous crack ran down the entire structure. The clock had stopped at 5:55.

In the minutes after the initial shaking, a few of the traveling press went looking for Terry, the Giants’ manager. They found him in a room on the eighth floor, shaving. The reporters asked Terry if he wanted to make a statement.

“Tell the public to have confidence. We are pulling through this very nicely and I thought that all things considered we had a good crowd out there today. We have proved we can beat the Cubs and we will beat them again.”

There was a confused pause.

“No, Bill, a statement about the earthquake.”

“Oh, so that’s what it was?” Terry said. “I didn’t know if we were supposed to mention it. If it’s all right to speak about it, I think this hotel is wonderfully constructed.”

Locals told the players the earthquake had been strong, but not a catastrophe. The “wonderfully constructed” Biltmore experienced only superficial damage. As a whole, Los Angeles fared relatively well. It would take some time for reports to begin arriving from points south, especially the city of Long Beach, 22 miles away. In Long Beach, the earthquake was a catastrophe.

At first the players were inclined to laugh off the experience and resume their evening. The initial quake, while frightening, had come and gone as a novelty.

As little as the players knew about earthquakes, they knew even less about aftershocks, but in the coming days they would learn. The Long Beach earthquake was really a series of dozens of seismic events of varying intensity. An Associated Press report after the first day documented 13 noteworthy shocks in the next six hours alone, employing some compelling descriptions:

5:50 - Jarring quake
5:55 - Severe shock
6:06 - Severe, but less intense
6:10 - Major shock
6:12 - Shock swayed area
6:16 - Another, lessening in intensity.
6:28 - Strong quake
7:25 - Strong quake
8:40 - Extremely heavy shock
9:10 - Even more violent than the first
9:19 - Another violent one
10:12 - Another quake
10:30 - Strong shock
10:59 - Buildings seemed to swirl

In California, buildings could swirl.

By around 6:10 p.m. (“Major shock”), the continuing tremors drove nearly all of the Cubs and Giants out of the Biltmore and into nearby Pershing Square. No one had told the players that earthquakes…kept going. The hotel shrugged off shock after shock, but many of the men were too afraid to go back inside. Terry tried to coax them, but he was met with crossed arms and planted feet. He couldn’t really blame them:

When the first wallop hit us, I was inclined to take it for a joke, and I remember making some crack about the shock of the Giants’ finally winning a game being too much. But when I started getting reports of how bad the thing really was, I’ll admit I was plenty scared.

As the hours passed, the temperature dropped, and a cold wind came up off the nearby coast. Many of the players were without coats. By this time Willie Schafer had joined them, and somehow the Giants’ players got Schafer to go inside and collect everyone’s outerwear. The elevators weren’t working, but Schafer, obviously a saint, made four trips up into the hotel tower, reappearing each time with armfuls of coats and sweaters.

Even in layers, the night sitting on the edge of a park brought “considerable discomfort” and strange sights. During one aftershock, Hughie Critz of the Giants saw water slosh out of a park fountain like a bowl of soup spilled by a clumsy waiter. It was the depths of the Great Depression and the financial crisis had gotten so bad that on March 6, the federal government had ordered all banks to close for at least four days until they could be assessed for stability and safely reopened. Looking around the shaken district, one of the Giants pointed out that the earthquake had managed to open at least one nearby bank by shaking out all its windows.

It was near midnight when somebody had the bright idea to shelter in the clubhouse at Wrigley Field. It would be warmer there than trying to sleep on the street. Wondering why they hadn’t thought of it sooner, the players hailed a fleet of taxis and made for the friendly confines of the ballpark.

The players spread out. Some played cards all night, too shaken to sleep. Others lay down on the benches to try and sleep. When those filled up, some went onto the field and lay down on the grass. It felt warmer there, and the night was clear, illuminating the field with the light from stars. It might have been pleasant, except for the shocks. They camped in the outfield, far away from the damaged clock tower, which occasionally released a sickening sound they described as “crackling.”

In California, concrete buildings could crackle.

There was baseball on March 11. The Cubs and the Giants played another game at Wrigley Field, and the White Sox even kept their appointment with the Pasadena Merchants Association. As reports filtered north from Long Beach, where there had been enormous destruction and loss of life, the game went on.

The players were exhausted and literally rattled, “wondering from which direction the next blow would fall.” At least, for those that had spent the night in the park, the commute wasn’t bad. Despite the circumstances, 700 spectators showed up to watch the day’s game. They had their choice of seats, except for a central section of the concrete grandstand, which had been roped off after several unsightly cracks were discovered.

The game was played amid the continuing aftershocks. The umpire, Beans Reardon, decided the proper course of action was to call “time” until the ground stopped moving. Reardon’s family had lived in Los Angeles since he was 14, and he was described as the most relaxed person in the park. The writers in the press box wrote their copy as the structure “shimmied and swayed.”

The Cubs showed they were more tolerant of what locals called “earthquake weather.” Babe Herman hit a grand home run off Depression-era great Carl Hubbell, the ball “as well-kissed as a movie star,” and Kiki Cuyler tripled.

The Giants managed only five hits off two Cubs pitchers, Guy Bush and Charley Root. They lost, 4-1, but Bill Terry was willing to give them some grace. “Most of them got very little sleep last night, and I certainly couldn’t blame them, for I didn’t sleep any too comfortably myself.”

Things had settled down enough on March 11 that the players were persuaded to return to their upper-story rooms at the Biltmore, which had come through the tremors as sturdy as ever. Some of the men opted slept in their clothes, ready to make a quick escape. Charlie Berry was certainly among those so dressed.

At 5:15 a.m. on March 12, another aftershock, one of the most violent since the initial earthquake, sent everyone tumbling out of their beds and down the stairs once more.

Bill Terry almost moved the Giants out of Los Angeles right then. He asked Schafer how long it would take to get everyone packed up and cleared out. The manager decided to wait on the team secretary, Frank Tierney, who was returning from a barnstorming game in Santa Cruz. Tierney seemed to side with the manager:

Our sole purpose for being here is to get the players in shape for the opening of the championship. But how can that be done with such disturbances as we have been having ever since Friday night? Some of the players are not eating or sleeping at all. If this condition continues it would be practically impossible to get the team into shape.

After conferring with the Giants’ owner, Charles Stoneham, they decided to give California one more chance. “One more shock like that and we’re on the way,” Terry vowed. “The Giants will do the rest of their spring training in Phoenix, Arizona.”

The Cubs were showing strain, too. Second baseman Billy Herman had experienced “a nervous collapse” and was out of the lineup for the first time since 1931, and several others had reportedly not had more than a few hours’ of sleep since they went to bed on March 9.

Many players were reported to be losing the battle against their anxiety, saying they were so twitchy they didn’t expect to get another hit in California. That was all right for the regulars to say, but the Cubs’ fringe players didn’t have that luxury. Realizing they might be transferred to the Los Angeles Angels if they didn’t make the Chicago team, they redoubled their efforts to punch their ticket to safety.

The players handled the strain in different ways. Some were reported to have been “knocked right off the wagon,” looking for relief in illegal “snake-bite.”

Cubs right-hander Pat Malone went in the opposite direction. “I thought I wasn’t afraid of anything,” Malone said, “but that quake has taught me a lesson. It has made a Christian out of me.”

The original earthquake series concluded on March 13. A 9-7 New York win drew the teams even, an outcome that seemed fitting given all they had gone through together. The tremors had finally halted before the clubs went their separate ways. They scraped together various games with the White Sox, Pirates, and the local PCL teams until March 24, when it was time to head back east to begin the regular season.

The Chicago Cubs returned to their training camp on Catalina Island until 1947. The White Sox stayed in Pasadena through 1953. The Pirates stuck around, too. The Giants did not.

In 1934, Bill Terry brought his team to new spring quarters in Miami Beach, Florida, which they found much more to their liking. The Golden State had its charms, but after their bumpy visit in 1933, the New York Giants’ organization decided California wasn’t a good fit.

We intentionally wrote this story from the limited perspective of the baseball players who experienced the Long Beach earthquake from a relatively safe distance. The players departed unscathed (with some colorful stories to tell folks back East), but closer to the epicenter near Long Beach, between 120 and 140 people lost their lives. Nearly $1 billion (in 2026 dollars) of property—including nearly every public school building—was damaged or destroyed.

At least the earthquake became a galvanizing event in the modernizing California. The state went on to pass legislation mandating stricter standards for earthquake-resistant construction. If you’d like to learn more about the bigger picture of the earthquake, here are two suggestions:

Overview with first-person snippets and photographs

Archival footage with narration:

Over on Clear the Field:

Ted and I debuted two all-new stories on the podcast—it’s the first CtF world exclusive! The result is an All-Star lineup of tomato stories, the subgenre we never knew we needed. Grab some salt and pepper and dig in.

Featuring three moments when nature’s most famous nightshade made an impact at the ballpark.

Highlights

- Back to the (18)90s, complete with a Friends reference

- Angry Ladies Day in Cleveland in 1940

- Where all the ballpark fruit and vegetables come from

- A bench ruling on tomatoes

- Gardening on the warning track at Tiger Stadium

- Miracle tomatoes promise to change Detroit’s season

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Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

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Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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

This is the second part of a spring training story featuring a pioneering American aviator.

Here’s Part 1, if you need it.

When we left off, Wilbert Robinson, manager of the 1915 Brooklyn Dodgers, had made a manly boast, claiming he could catch a baseball dropped out of an “aeroplane.” In earlier years this would have been idle talk, but in the spring of 1915 Robinson and the Dodgers were working out in Daytona Beach, Florida, just down the street from a genuine pilot, Ruth Law, with her own plane and a demonstrated affection for stunts. Law agreed to help Robinson back up his words and the Dodgers’ trainer, Frank Kelly, volunteered to fly up and do the throwing.

On March 13, Law and Kelly hustled to her beachside hangar. Rainy weather had cleared the pilot’s schedule and the Dodgers’ game had been cancelled. Law had been flying for several years, but this would be the first time she flew in the rain; we wonder if Kelly knew that when he volunteered to go up in her single-engine biplane.

At the hangar, Law and her mechanic got the plane and passenger ready to fly. Preparations were nearly complete when the party realized they didn’t have a baseball.

In a 1958 account of what happened, Law said the ball was accidentally forgotten (though she herself seems to have forgotten Frank Kelly was even there). She told her mechanic about the snag, which threatened to derail the whole operation. The unnamed mechanic, a natural problem-solver, looked around the workshop and found a replacement in lunch sack. “Here,” he told Law, “you can use this. It’s about the size of a baseball.”

He tossed her a grapefruit.

Several Brooklyn newspaper accounts from the next day back up most of Law’s recollection. These sources said that Kelly had genuinely forgotten to bring a ball up with him. One account said Kelly “found” a grapefruit in the plane, which is absurd, as the Wright Model B had no fruit storage compartment. The other account said Kelly was “handed a large grapefruit as a substitute for the ball.”

Neither of those accounts suggested Robinson was the victim of a premeditated prank. Intending to drop a baseball but without one on hand, Law and Kelly pivoted to citrus.

Law pushed off and soon had her plane up in the air. She banked toward the ballpark and ascended up to at least 500 feet up. Some accounts said higher, but 500 seems right. Robinson would have known that it was possible to safety catch a baseball dropped from that height, because others had done it. Above that, no one knew.

The old catcher had borrowed somebody’s gear and had his big mitt with him. The target was the pitcher’s mound, and the Dodgers grouped loosely around the diamond, scanning the skies.

Law approached at around 45 miles an hour. She had to keep both hands working two different control levers at all times, so it would have been difficult for her to line up a careful throw. That made Kelly an early bombardier, and he turned out to be a pretty good one.

Law circled over the park so Kelly could get a sense of how things moved underneath him. Once he had a decent gauge of this, Law moved off to line up a bombing run.

Robinson extended his his arms, searching for a target. He saw something drop and began running in tightening circles underneath “in great style.” He shouted at the knots of players. “Stand back, give me room!” The pea-sized object descended on a straight line into the pitcher’s box, a bullseye for Kelly. It swelled up to intimidating size as it got close. Robinson braced his legs and stretched his glove arm out to make the catch. He almost got it.

Robinson had gauged the ball’s path correctly, but he stopped just short of committing to the catch. Casey Stengel said he saw Robinson pull his catching arm back at the last second. Most accounts say the “ball” impacted on his left wrist, just past the portion covered by his mitt, and exploded, spraying his face and chest with unexpected pulp and juice.

The force of impact threw him backward into what was described as “a neat little somersault” as he tumbled to the ground, thinking, quite reasonably, that he had been maimed. The acid of the juice stung his eyes and he was covered in soft, fleshy chunks. He ended up seated on the diamond, feeling for the hole the “ball” must have bored into his chest.

Robinson eventually managed to clear his eyes and look down, seeing that he was covered in fruit. He was clutching his stomach and feeling gingerly through the yellow pieces of broken grapefruit and burst rinds when the Brooklyn players reached him. He looked up at them in anguish.

“Good God, it’s punctured my belly. Look, here’s the grapefruit I had for breakfast!”

Overhead, Ruth and Kelly congratulated each other on a successful mission. Daytona Beach’s resident aviator tipped the plane’s wings and flew off, leaving Wilbert Robinson to his fate.

The players howled with laughter, a callous sound in their manager’s ears, as he awaited the bitter end. They helped him to his feet and tried to explain that what he thought was his life’s blood was actually grapefruit juice. It took some time for this to sink in, but when it did, the great sports writer John Lardner said Robinson gave a “famous speech,” in the tradition of great American orators like Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln. Lardner recorded Robinson’s words for posterity: “XXX!!!XXVW!!-X”1

The players scattered, chased away by some of “the most blistering language ever heard” in the region. Kelly got more of the same when he returned to camp.

Stengel said that once Robinson figured out he’d been had, he pointed the finger in the outfielder’s direction, accusing Stengel of a plan to deceive him from the start. As best we can tell, this was not the case, but it began Stengel’s long and erroneous association with the stunt, which he eventually embraced.

“It was a good thing it was a grapefruit and not a real baseball,” Stengel pointed out, “or else it might have killed our manager. He would have liked it even less if it had been a ball.”

Robinson stalked off, wiping grapefruit off his face and muttering darkly. Some accounts say that he eventually realized the substitute spheroid had saved his life, but others said that for the rest of his life he insisted that if he had been thrown a ball, he would have caught it properly. Either way, there were no follow-up experiments that spring. One attempt was enough.

It’s a great story, and it’s absolutely true. You can quibble over the details of the operation or whether Robinson was pranked on purpose or by accident, and different versions of the story end in different punchlines (“...the grapefruit I ate for breakfast!” is by far our favorite), but the record clearly shows that Ruth Law (and Frank Kelly) went up with a grapefruit and threw a 500-foot bullseye to the unsuspecting manager waiting below, who, covered in yellow2, citrusy viscera, assumed he was dead.

But, is this really how Florida’s Grapefruit League got its name? Many latter-day accounts say yes, couched with qualifying language—“legend has it,” “the story goes,” etc.—but we’re not convinced. We weren’t able to find any sources that did more than circumstantially link the term to this story, and “Grapefruit League” doesn’t start showing up in the print record until nearly a decade later.

The first usage we found in a periodical appeared in 1923, in a nationally published article by John B. Foster, a pretty big name in sports writing at the time. In a March 15 report from Orlando, Florida, Foster mentioned that baseball’s commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was touring baseball’s Florida-based clubs, which the writer referred to as “the Florida orange and grapefruit league.”

The name trickled into regular use after that, but never in connection to the story of Robinson and the grapefruit. It would be wonderful if the Grapefruit League was named in honor of this ridiculous escapade, but the truth is probably more pedestrian. There are a lot of grapefruits (and oranges) in Florida, making a pretty good emblem for an association of Florida-affiliated teams. Someone, perhaps John Foster, put two and two together.

The Dodgers seem to have gotten more comfortable availing themselves of Ruth Law’s flying service after the grapefruit incident. Several players were reported to have gone up with her on the afternoon of March 14. A few days later, the Daytona Daily News said 18 members of the club had taken flight.

Wilbert Robinson was not among them. He offered his free trip to the manager of the visiting Birmingham Barons, Carlton Molesworth, who also passed.

“Fifteen dollars is a pretty stiff price for a fellow to pay for a three-minute trip,” Molesworth said, “but I had one offered to me for free and I still turned it down, slick as a whistle. This gravity business that draws the people back to the earth with a sudden bang is a little too strong to suit me. I wouldn’t go up in one of those things if some kind friend should offer me fifteen spots to make the trip.”

One hulking Dodger prospect was seen climbing aboard on a Sunday afternoon. By the look of him, Bill Goodbread “wouldn’t be afraid of a whole cage of lions,” but his lip had a noticeable quiver and he admitted to a fear of heights.

Law “reassured him,” saying she would fly low and bring the plane down as soon as he gave a thumbs-down. Goodbread lasted about 100 yards before turning an alarming shade of green.

The parties soon went their separate ways in history. Robinson and the Dodgers left for a fine season in Brooklyn, while Ruth Law wrapped up her time as the Hotel Clarendon’s pilot-in-residence. The pay was steady—she might have been the first woman ever employed as a pilot—but taking tourists and terrified first basemen on short, routine flights left her unfulfilled. She sold her Wright Model B and purchased a new plane, a single-seat Curtiss Model D.

In November 1916, Law flew her Curtiss 590 miles from Chicago to New York, breaking the record for fastest nonstop flight by a man or a woman (“by any pilot,” Law liked to say). Long-distance flights were tremendously difficult in early aircraft. Law had to keep her left hand on the left stick that controlled the plane’s pitch at all times, and the right stick required only a little less attention. There was no practical way to consult a handheld compass, let alone a map, so she marked her compass readings on her flying gloves and cut her maps into small strips, wound into a special case that she could quickly unroll and consult while bracing the right stick with her knee. Backed by a strong wind blowing to the east, she averaged about 100 miles an hour at an altitude of 6,000 feet.

When the United States entered World War I, Law pushed the army to accept women as combat pilots. She wrote a passionate op-ed for an aeronautics magazine, pointing to what she and other female aviators had accomplished as proof they could contribute to the cause.

She wrote that if President Woodrow Wilson told her to “go get the Kaiser,” she would feel “a little remorseful at having to end a life,” but for the most part she would be all business, “watching my motor, dodging German planes, jockeying, dipping, darting to the spot where I would release my bombs.”

Law got all the way to France, but was not permitted to enlist or take a combat assignment. The military did give her plenty of work. She dropped Liberty Bond pamphlets and participated in exhibitions raising money for the Red Cross and Liberty Loans. To boost her visibility, the Army authorized Law to wear the uniform of a non-commissioned officer during these exhibitions; she was the first American woman to do so.

After the war, she started “Ruth Law’s Flying Circus.” Three pilots, three planes, and some breathtaking stunts. In one showstopper performance Law would unstrap herself from a plane’s passenger seat and creep out onto the wing, where she stood upright while the pilot went into three consecutive loops. The centrifugal forces kept her in place. Spectacles like that helped her earn up to $9,000 a week, though her fee was negotiable. She once did an exhibition for a woman’s suffrage campaign in exchange for a chocolate cake.

In the spring of 1919 she battled with another pilot, Raymonde de Laroche, in a back-and-forth altitude competition. On June 10 Law flew up to 14,700 feet, claiming the world record for a female pilot from de Laroche. The French pilot reclaimed her crown two days later, reaching 15,748 feet.

It was all in a day’s work for Ruth Law. In the late 1910s and early 1920s she was a household name in America and in Europe, heralded as the greatest woman stunt and exhibition flier, admiringly styled as “the Queen of the Air.”

On February 24, 1922, papers across the country announced that Her Royal Highness was retiring.

“People have lost interest in flying,” she was quoted as saying. “Besides, I have decided that it is better to be listed as a great ex-aviator than having my friends mourn my death.” Those fatalistic comments came as a surprise to many Americans—including the person who had supposedly made them.

In fact, the retirement announcement and the quote attributed to Law had been written by her husband and manager, Charles Oliver. Oliver did not so much as discuss the message with his wife before, or after, transmitting it. Ruth Law learned of her retirement at breakfast when she opened a newspaper.

In what must have been quite the confrontation, Law found out that Oliver, who had never been fully at peace with her life in the air, was nearing a breakdown. He told her that watching her crawl out on the wings of planes had become unbearable.

We try to be mindful of our biases here at Project 3.18. People deserve to be considered in the context of their own lives and times. Still, Charles Oliver’s behavior seems inescapably outrageous, a breach of his partner’s trust and agency. Even in 1922, his method seemed to raise some eyebrows. A few weeks later, Law gave an interview to a writer in Chicago, clearly on a mission to protect her husband and confirm that she was really retiring. Even with our biases at arms-length, some of it is tough to read.

“It’s my husband’s turn now. I’ve been in the limelight long enough. I’m going to let him run things hereafter—and me, too.”

“I’ve been married for almost ten years to Charlie Oliver,” she said, “and scarcely anyone knew who he was. And the poor boy was so worried about me all that time that every time I went up he lost a pound. It was a matter of choosing between love and profession. Of course, I’m just crazy about flying, but one’s husband is more important.”

She’d considered keeping a small plane for personal recreation but ultimately decided against it. “Mother earth is the best place to be. Flying steels the nerves and all that sort of thing, but there is such a warm and comfortable feeling when on the ground.”

The interviewer asked what must have been a pretty forward question for the time: Was Law retiring in “obedience to her husband’s command?”

“Mercy, no,” she said. “Husbands these days don’t ‘command.’ They request.”

Ruth Law lived at a time when women could more easily slip the bonds of gravity than those of cultural subordination. In the context of 1922, it was possible for Law, an advocate for women’s suffrage and gender equity, to lose a tie vote within her own marriage. Law went along with what her husband wanted, but she wanted people to know that somewhere in that mess, she had made her own choice.

The couple moved to California. Law participated in a number of civic and national organizations, including the Early Birds, a group supporting early aviation pioneers. She served on the board of the National Aeronautic Association. And she stayed on the ground.

What Charles Oliver did with his “turn” is not known today. He died in 1947.

In 1958, an aviation trade magazine caught up with Ruth Law. Then 71, the nearly forgotten Queen of the Air acknowledged that she walked away from flying out of concern for her late husband and rarely looked back. According to the interviewer, “Law’s early colorful career seems to her now as though it had happened to someone else.”

She had not forgotten, though. When prompted, she recalled a certain episode involving some baseball players and a grapefruit. She remembered swooping low between tall buildings, soaring over the trenches in wartime France, taking her plane through plumes of exploding fireworks, and racing automobiles around a track. Those races stuck with her. “I could always beat the autos on a half-mile track, but on a mile track they often won. It was really exciting to fly that low.”

Back in September 1921, six months before she consented to a surprise retirement request, Ruth Law, ringmaster of her own flying circus, wrote a series of autobiographical articles for a Michigan newspaper. She was 35, a wealthy business-owner at the top of her profession. The final article in the series tackled a question she got all the time: Would women “make good” in aviation?

When girls came to her seeking advice on becoming a pilot, Law confessed she was torn. Examining her own career, she saw challenges, disappointments, brutally hard work, and no small amount of what she perceived as luck. Given the headwinds these girls would face as pilots, Law wondered if she should advise them to stay on the ground, but she always ended up inviting them to try.

I would realize that perhaps this girl is capable and willing to work just as hard as I did. What one woman can do, there are bound to be other women who can do the same thing. What right have I to discourage them?

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The only description of the grapefruit that hit Robinson was a color: “yellow.” This suggests it was not the common pink/red grapefruit, which has an orange rind. It was probably a white grapefruit, a more boutique variety today. Despite the name, white grapefruits are predominantly yellow.

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

When the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, flew the first true “aeroplane” in December 1903, they opened a new chapter in human history. With Orville at the controls, the first engine-powered, heavier-than-air flyer took off, flew for 12 seconds, and landed in a world that would never be the same.

Only a handful of people saw that first flight. News from Kitty Hawk was slow to get out and initially downplayed. The brothers were notorious for refusing to let journalists or large audiences observe their tests. It would take them years to iterate their way to an craft that was capable of sustained flight and reliable enough to market and distribute. As a result, most Americans in the 1900s saw as many airplanes as they saw dragons.

Pilots were even harder to make, requiring months of expensive training at what was initially just one Wright-backed school. It was not until the 1910s that there were enough planes and pilots to bring the skies of America to life.

Around that same time, the Wrights added a new feature to their machines: a passenger seat. What had once been the exclusive domain of inventors, mechanics, and daredevils opened up to anyone with sufficient bravery and the right connections (or sufficient cash).

The white-glove Hotel Clarendon, perched on the edge of the sands of Daytona Beach, Florida, immediately saw the potential in that second seat. In 1912, the resort contracted with the Herring-Burgess aircraft company, renting both an airplane and someone who knew how to fly it. The plane was a Burgess-Wright Model B. Mass production was still a long way off—the Wright Company factory could produce just a handful of planes each month—and the brothers got around the bottleneck by leasing their designs to companies like Herring-Burgess for a cut of the profits.

The company built a hangar facility a half-mile south of the hotel, and one of the owners, a designer and early pilot named Starling Burgess, tested the plane five times. Surviving this, he declared the craft fit for commercial use, handing it off to a pilot-in-residence named Phil Page. The plane, equipped with both skids and wheels, could take off from and land on the beach itself.

The Wright Model B was nearly nine feet tall with a wingspan of 39 feet and weighed 800 pounds before passengers. It had a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour but cruising speed was closer to 40. The plane had a range of 110 miles, but Daytona exhibition flights tended to stay much closer to home.

There was no cockpit or windscreen. Just a few years later planes with noses and front propellers would make earlier efforts like the Wright B obsolete, but between 1910 and 1914 the sawed-off craft owned the skies.

Riding as a passenger on a Wright B was a stunt in and of itself. Passengers were literally strapped on top of the wing, next to the pilot. They weren’t going to fall off, but it was a little like riding a horse without a saddle. Women going up had to have their long skirts and dresses tied around their legs for purposes of modesty.

An excursion in the hotel’s rented plane was extremely expensive by the standards of the day. A 20-minute ride up to around 500 feet cost $15, about $500 today, but the hotel guests, mostly ultra-rich snowbirds spending their winters in Florida’s gentler, fruit-bearing climate, could afford to pay. The flight attraction was a success, but three years later, in 1915, there was a new pilot at the controls:

As a kid in Massachusetts, Ruth Bancroft Law played hard. Born in 1887, she was determined to keep up with her older brother, Rodman, whose amygdala was slightly undercooked. Rodman grew up to become a parachutist and a pioneering stunt performer in the fledgling film industry. Topping that career would take some doing, but Ruth Law saw a way to do it. Instead of going down, she would go up.

Law applied to the Wright Flying School in Long Island, New York, but Orville Wright himself reportedly turned her down, feeling that a woman could not possess the necessary mechanical aptitude for the job. She’d just been rejected by one of the most famous men in America, but Law had extensive practice ignoring authority figures. “The surest way to make me do a thing is to tell me I can’t do it.”

Some of the School’s earlier graduates were more accommodating, perhaps because they needed the cash more than the Wrights did. Law received both flying and mechanical training from two pilots, Harry Atwood and Arch Freeman, who ran their own flight school in Massachusetts.

The mechanical aspect of the instruction was as important as taking off and landing; many early pilots had no support crews, especially when they were away from their base of operations. They had to know what was wrong with their planes and how to fix them. The good mechanics lasted longer.

Law was an excellent mechanic. She could diagnose a potential problem with a plane’s engine by ear. “An old German mechanic taught me a lot about engines,” she told a writer in 1958. “He had me grinding valves until my hands blistered, and it seems I was always taking a magneto apart and putting it back together. When something went wrong with our struts, we wouldn’t send to the factory for a new one. We’d just sit down and whittle it ourselves.”

She was also daring, even more so than the baseline for her profession. During a training flight with Freeman she took their craft, another early Wright model, up to 7,800 feet before the instructor realized how high they were and put the nose down. Still a student, Law had come within 300 feet of the altitude record for a female aviator and taken Freeman up higher than he had ever been.

Law earned a pilot’s license in November 1912. She and her brother bought their own plane and she traveled around the eastern half of the United States performing exhibition flights. By 1914 she had taken over the wintertime operation at Daytona Beach.

In addition to giving rides, Law also gave flying “demonstrations,” in the same manner that Evel Knievel would later demonstrate how to ride a motorcycle. In a 1915 exhibition Law announced she was going to attempt an inverted vertical loop for the first time. A large crowd watched from the beach, half-terrified, half-enthralled. She completed the trick, then did it again.

Law was married by this point, to a man named Charles Oliver. Oliver was too nervous to try piloting himself, so he acted as Law’s manager, a job which would become more important in subsequent years. Though he helped his wife build a career as an aviator, he never quite got comfortable with it. The day she looped the loop in Florida, Oliver reportedly looked none too happy.

There was another act in Daytona Beach in the spring of 1915. The Brooklyn Dodgers had relocated their spring training camp from Augusta, Georgia, to Florida, making the move to join a loose but growing confederation of major-league teams working out relatively near each other in the Sunshine State.

The 1915 Dodgers are a deep cut of dead-ball era baseball. The youngest regular in the lineup was a 24-year-old outfielder named Casey Stengel, who is much more famous for being an elderly manager. They had a future Hall-of-Fame outfielder in Zack Wheat and a former Chalmers Award winner (MVP) in first baseman Jake Daubert, but the team’s strength today comes from its outstanding lineup of old baseball names, anchored by Hi Myers, Gus Getz, and George Cutshaw. The pitching staff was anchored by standout (names) like Nap Rucker and Wheezer Dell. The 1915 Dodgers came with 100% more Wheat, as Zack’s brother, Mack, a catcher, joined the club.

The Dodgers’ manager was as famous in 1915 as any of the players. Wilbert Robinson, 51 years old, was in his second year at the helm of a rising team that would win 80 games. Brooklyn would win the pennant in 1916. That same year the team was officially renamed the Robins in honor of their manager.

“A stout, tobacco-chewing veteran of the baseball wars,” Robinson managed the Robins for 18 years and won two pennants, in 1916 and 1920. Like many successful managers, he was a former catcher, who played for the famed Baltimore Orioles teams of the late 1890s. Robinson possessed legendary toughness; he once caught five official games played in two days—a tripleheader followed by a doubleheader. He began the practice of always setting up just behind the hitter, no matter the situation.

While modern analytics have not been kind to Robinson, and many other dead-ball era catchers, he played in 1,371 games and helped Baltimore win three pennants. That, plus his 2,818 games (setting aside ties, he finished exactly one game over .500) and two pennants as a manager, is surely enough to merit the place in Cooperstown “Uncle Robbie” was awarded in 1945.

Robinson and his fledgling Robins would train at a ballpark that had been renamed “Ebbets Field” in honor of the team president, Charles Ebbets, whose vanity seemed to be growing by the year. The Dodgers’ major-league park in Brooklyn had opened in 1913 and it, too, was called Ebbets Field. To keep the spotlight where it belonged—on himself—Ebbets decided that he would have the honors of throwing out the first pitch of the spring. And he’d do it from an airplane.

It wouldn’t have taken long for the Dodgers and Ruth Law to cross paths in Daytona Beach. She was already a local celebrity and would have been flying in the vicinity of their playing field all the time. Surely they would have wanted to meet the woman at the controls, and surely she would have wanted to meet a troupe of compellingly named ballplayers.

By early March the two parties were acquainted enough that Charles Ebbets had his big idea. The scheme to use Law to throw out a first pitch might have been inspired by another stunt the aviator had recently facilitated. A sporting goods salesman or manufacturer had used his $15 ride to drop golf balls onto Daytona Beach during the flight and get some publicity out of the unique giveaway. The Dodgers’ players heard about this (they may have seen it), taking particular interest in what kind of crater a dropped golf ball left in the sand. As with the golf balls, Ebbets’ idea was merely to drop a baseball down into the ballpark. Nobody was talking about catching anything. Not yet, anyway.

The spring “season” was to open on March 8 with a game against the baseball team from nearby Stetson University. There would be a parade of the players, a marching band, a flag raising, and “other interesting features,” according to the Daytona Daily News:

“President Charles Ebbets is to make an aeroplane flight with Ruth Law, if air conditions are right, and drop the first ball from the flying machine.”

It seems as though air conditions ended up wrong. A small report on March 10 says Law was unable to fly due to high winds. She and her husband retreated to the hotel’s on-premises bowling alley. The ceremonial first pitch was thrown by the mayor, Henry Titus, who surely had never been such a disappointment as he was that day.

The Stetson game was played the next day and the weather seemed to be better. Ruth Law was back in the office, treating customers to a grand view. “She drove her aeroplane directly over the center of the park amid the cheers of the spectators, and returning banked the machine in plain view of the grandstand,” giving the several hundred people there a free show.

The game was “very much of a joke.” The Stetson players were badly outclassed and the Dodgers seemed able to score at will. In the rare event that a Stetson player reached base, the Brooklyn catcher’s snap throws picked them off easily. After two innings of this Robinson halted the competition and declared the Dodgers would spend the seven remaining innings scrimmaging amongst themselves.

Ruth Law and her Wright B had not been able to take part in the opening festivities, but an idea had been planted, and it grew quickly.

On March 12 the Dodgers were still waiting for action. Real competition was coming in the form of the Birmingham Barons, an upper-minor team in the Southern League, but in the meantime Brooklyn had to play “a team composed from the hotel employees.” That game went about as you’d imagine, but afterward the players got an intriguing offer. Among the elites wintering at the Clarendon was George Johnson, a millionaire shoe magnate. Johnson was so delighted to have baseball practically at his cottage doorstep that he decided to buy every Dodger player and staff person a ride in Ruth Law’s airplane.

There was hardly a stampede to the hangar. Robinson was offered the first trip and turned it down flat. Shortstop Ollie O’Mara (solid name) also declined. A majority of the players were reported to be hesitant or on the fence. “It appears as if Miss Law stands a poor chance of collecting any fees from Mr. Johnson,” the Daily News observed.

Casey Stengel would go on to fly thousands of miles in his life in major league baseball, but early flying was a different matter, he recalled. He described the Wright Model B as “a kite made out of a shirt material, pasted with glue and held together with wires.” This is pretty much what it was. So tentative was a pilot’s hold on the sky that the vertical and horizontal controls required constant handling.

At least one person among the Dodgers’ party was eager to fly, and he may have been the first one to do it. The team trainer, Frank Kelly, seemed like a natural. Many of Law’s passengers were so nervous they required her gentle assurances that she would fly low and land as soon as they requested. Kelly, on the other hand, climbed up next to Law and invited her to fly as high and fast as she wanted to go. Law took the plane out to sea, flying about a mile over the Atlantic Ocean before turning back.

March 13 brought grey and rainy weather. The day’s game against the Barons was canceled, but Robinson had the Dodgers working out at the ballpark that morning, practicing their hitting and fielding and ironing out the system of signs they would use that year.

Kelly was present, too, and as the players took batting practice the conversation around the batting cage (if there was a cage in those days) turned to flying.

The conversation also turned to stunt-catching. One account says the players were inspired by what was then the most famous stunt-catch in history: Gabby Street’s 1908 grab of a ball tossed off the Washington Monument.

The final ingredient might have been Law’s earlier stunt with the golf balls. A later account says Robinson and a group of players were out on the beach when Law’s passenger dropped the balls from the plane. Coming on one of these souvenirs, Robinson was not impressed with the crater it left in the sand. He also fancied himself “the greatest pop-fly catcher in history.”

“If somebody threw a baseball out of a plane,” he said, “I bet I could catch it.”

The players laughed, but old Oriole was serious. “Maybe not from as high as that plane was, but let somebody drop a ball to me from about four hundred feet and I’ll catch it.”

“If the ball hit you on the head it would smash your skull,” someone, perhaps Frank Kelly, observed.

“I never got hit on the head with a baseball,” Robinson said, “and I wouldn’t get hit on the head with one even if it was dropped from that plane. You wait and see.” It was a bet.

As he seemed to be the only one comfortable with the idea of flying, the parties agreed that Kelly would accompany Ruth Law and try to drop a ball down on the park’s pitcher’s mound, where Robinson would be waiting.

Perhaps by virtue of being the most recognizable name on this Dodger roster, Casey Stengel was often named as Law’s passenger in later accounts. For a period of time Stengel seems to have allowed that story to circulate, perhaps even spreading it himself. However, in every original account the passenger is Frank Kelly. Stengel set the record straight in 1956, saying, “for forty-one years I have received credit for an ‘achievement’ I didn’t accomplish.” He admitted that he had not wanted to go up and that Kelly had been “the patsy” who agreed to do it.

Stengel recalled that Ruth Law loved the idea of the plane catch. “She wanted the publicity, too.”

Flying in the 1910s presented one opportunity after another to do something that had done before and get your name attached to the feat. Other Wright B pilots became the first to deliver commercial goods (two 50-pound rolls of silk), the first to carry a skydiver, and the first to drop live bombs, in a demonstration for the Army. Being involved in the first plane-to-ground baseball catch would have appealed to a young aviator trying to burnish her reputation.

The plan came together in a rush, perhaps because Law was so booked for subsequent dates that it was now or never. Her calendar that day had been freed up by the wet weather. It was still raining on and off, and Law had never flown in the rain before–ever–but she decided this was as good a reason as any to check that box. She and Kelly made the trip to the hangar where her aircraft was waiting, ready to make some esoteric history. There was only one problem…

In all the excitement, nobody remembered to bring a baseball.

In the conclusion, the flyers improvise, a league gets its legend, and Ruth Law’s career soars to incredible heights before being brought down by friendly fire.

Over on Clear the Field:

In the interest of giving equal time, Ted and I tell a story from Arizona’s Cactus League. In 1971, spring training was the cradle of revolutionary thinking and poor execution, all courtesy of baseball’s chief instigator, A’s owner Charles O. Finley.

In 1971, the ambitious and erratic owner of the Oakland A’s went all-in on changing the number of balls for a walk from four to three.

Highlights

- A “wildly eccentric” owner goes to the library and gets a history of the base-on-balls

- A visiting Nippon Professional Baseball team beats the A’s at their own game

- The A’s owner puts words into the commissioner’s mouth to force the Angels to play

- Charlie Finley pivots to somebody else’s idea, the designated hitter rule, and finds what he was looking for all along

Further Reading

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

Today we’re serving up some beer-broiled true crime from Wisconsin, where a great time occasionally tips into self-parodying scandal. Today is the 13th anniversary of one such misadventure, centered on a famous ballpark sausage. We’re going to tell that story, but the thing with ballpark sausages is, having one isn’t enough.

Having two might be too many, but that’s a problem for later.

Being from the Chicago area (Wisconsinites have a name for people like us but we’re not going to repeat it), we have fond memories of Randall Simon. When an August 2003 trade brought the part-time first baseman and pinch-hit specialist to the suddenly contending Chicago Cubs, Simon seemed like a genial bench guy and, more importantly, he brandished a clutch bat. He helped the Cubs make a deep playoff run and we fell in love with baseball for good.

Outside of Chicago’s North Side, Randall Simon is better remembered for an unprovoked attack on a sausage. He had worried that would happen, and he was right.

On July 9, 2003, Simon was with the Pittsburgh Pirates, who were in Milwaukee playing the Brewers. At the end of the bottom of the sixth inning, the score was tied, 1-1, and it was time for a beloved local tradition: the Sausage Race.

A staple of Brewers’ home games since 1993, the Sausage Race—do we really have to explain this?—featured four costumed contestants, Italian Sausage, Polish Sausage, Hot Dog, and Bratwurst, running a V-shaped race along the Miller Park foul lines. People get so into it that the Brewers maintain a sausage leaderboard1 on their website.

The race took place between the sixth and seventh innings. On the night of July 9, Randall Simon, due to pinch hit in the seventh, was waiting by the top of the Pirates’ dugout fence, watching the race and holding a bat. The four runners passed third base and headed for home. They were bunched closely together but one contestant, Italian Sausage, had pulled slightly ahead.

The people inside the sausage costumes were not—how do we put this?—professionals. The racers were typically members of the Brewers’ on-field promotional staff, part-time employees who helped with fan-engagement work during the games, with the occasional surprise guest.

That day the part of Italian Sausage was played by a 19-year-old University of Wisconsin student named Mandy Block. It was her second summer working as an on-field promotions assistant. A veteran of a dozen or so prior contests, Block, five feet, three inches tall, was wearing a seven-foot costume that limited her peripheral vision and did strange things to her center of gravity. She preferred to run as Italian Sausage because she liked the mustache.

In that day’s race, taking a meandering route that felt right for the character, Block ran on the outside, closest to the Pirates’ dugout fence. As the group approached the dugout, Simon loomed, his bat still up in the air. “I saw the bat before I got to him,” Block said. “I thought he was just going to fake me out.” As she passed Simon, Block seemed to lean in his direction, perhaps offering a little head-fake in the spirit of improvisational comedy.

“I thought at the moment they were trying to play with us,” Simon said the next day. “They were running right next to the players.” As Italian Sausage ran by, just inches away, Simon brought his bat down on the back of the foam costume. “I was just trying to give a tap for her to finish the race.”

“It wasn’t that big of a blow,” Block said. “I think it’s just because I’m so small and it’s such a big costume that I tumbled.”

Italian Sausage went down, taking Hot Dog, portrayed by another promotional assistant, Veronica Piech, with it. Inside, Block was slow to get up. The nearby Pirates, including Simon, didn’t move. They might have initially thought the racers were performing a scripted pratfall.

Inside the costume, Block hadn’t seen or felt Simon’s “tap.” At first she thought she tripped. One of the other runners that day said the fact that Block fell didn’t mean that Simon had hit her hard. “These things are so top-heavy that it doesn’t take much.”

Block wasn’t hurt, but the Sausage Racer’s Handbook had not covered rising from the prone position. “The reason I couldn’t get up right away is because I couldn’t get up.” Showing true character, Polish Sausage abandoned the race and went to Block’s aid, but it took a minute. The handbook hadn’t covered how to kneel, either.

Bratwurst, played by a 16-year-old running in his first race, turned and momentarily surveyed the carnage. Unsure what else to do, he ran for the finish line, earning an uncontested victory. Block didn’t hold it against him. “Somebody had to win.”

Simon belatedly moved to help the fallen sausage, but by then it had been on the ground for more than five seconds. Polish Sausage got its comrade back up and the two headed for the finish line. Mandy Block might have just lost the most notorious race in sausage history, but she finished under her own power.

Randall Simon was booed when he took his at-bat in the top of the seventh. He grounded out and wondered how bad things were about to get.

Block and Piech were extracted from their costumes and assessed by medical staff. It was only in the first-aid station that Block learned the reason for her fall. Band-aids were applied to a few scrapes while Block, to whom laughter came easily, laughed about the situation. From that first moment, her message to the world was that she was fine and Simon’s tap had been an improvisational mistake.

“I don’t think he did it intentionally,” she said the next day. “I think he was doing it as a joke.” The costume had made it look worse than it was. “I am little and I didn’t take the blow very well.”

The problem for Randall Simon was that nobody but Block seemed to want to laugh. Deputies from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office approached him after the game. He had not even taken off his mustard-yellow throwback uniform when the officers took him to a police substation at Miller Park. One report said he was handcuffed in this process. The player was arrested and processed for a misdemeanor account of battery and ordered to report to a district attorney’s office the next morning to give a statement.

A Brewers executive vice president called Simon’s action “one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen inside or outside a ballpark. It sickened me to see it.”

Bud Selig, baseball’s commissioner and part-owner of the Brewers, said the league was reviewing the incident. He added that Simon’s conduct was “anathema” to baseball’s brand of family entertainment.

Replays of Italian Sausage going down led off every sportscast in America. Once Block identified herself, reporters and late-night talk show producers began calling with such intensity that her family had to unplug their phone. It was a full-on media circus, and while smoked meat jokes abounded, the coverage seemed to leave the door cracked for outrage. More than one account suggested Simon’s motives were, at best, “unknown.” Newspapers ran photographs of the player emerging from the DA’s office, subjecting him to something approximating a perp walk.

Block was dismayed. She talked to a few reporters, trying to extinguish the rumors that she had been hurt or that Simon’s tap had been malicious. “I’m just a sausage, guys,” Block told an interviewer from Michigan. It was an unusual way to plead for sanity. “It’s not a big deal. I’m fine.”

Detectives visited her home to photograph her scraped pinkie. The district attorney called. Reporters taped segments on the edge of her yard. She stopped talking.

“After a week, I realized it was a narrative that I had no control over,” she told Matt Monagan of mlb.com in 2022.

There was a certain story they wanted and I resonated with the funny part of it. I understood the part where you had to be more serious and understand we don’t hit people with costumes on. But I didn’t really want to play into that other story so much because it was getting into uncomfortable territory. They were criminalizing [Simon] and I didn’t feel like that was fair. I didn’t want to be a part of that.

After interviewing Simon and at least one sausage, the district attorney’s office concluded that while there had been plenty of poor judgement, there was no intent to injure. He was cited for disorderly conduct (fair enough) and fined $432. The reputational costs of the sausage-tap were far greater.

Simon was a journeyman major-leaguer without many blue-chip baseball moments to his name. Now he had one, and he knew it. “It’s a lesson,” he said. “As a player you don’t want those types of things that might change your career. This might change not only me, but every other player in the big leagues. From now on, I’m going to be checking before doing those types of things.”

Simon wanted to apologize. Mandy Block wanted the bat. A Pirates public-relations person put them in touch, and Simon promised to leave her the same bat that had brought her down, autographed. A tourism organization in Simon’s native Curaçao offered Block an all-expenses-paid trip to see the best of their country. She took her mom.

About a month after his ill-fated attempt at prop comedy, Randall Simon was traded to the Chicago Cubs in a fringy, “why not?” type of deal. There is nothing to indicate the trade was motivated by Pittsburgh’s desire to distance itself from the perpetrator of the Italian Sausage Job, but the change of scenery helped him. In 33 games as a Cub he was three times more useful than he’d been in 90 games for Pittsburgh, earning the appreciation of yours truly for his genial attitude and some clutch late-season hits.

On September 6, Simon, now a Cub, made his return to Miller Park. The fans saw through the disguise and booed him lustily during his first plate appearance. They probably weren’t happy to see him hit a two-run home run in the third, or a diving catch in the sixth. Then came the Sausage Race.

Mugging for the cameras, his Cubs teammates restrained Simon in the dugout while the manager, Dusty Baker, guarded the bat rack. A few minutes later the scoreboard announced that Simon was treating a randomly chosen section of Miller Park fans to Italian sausage sandwiches. He paid his fine before the Cubs left town and never got in trouble again.

We only wish we could say the same thing about Italian Sausage.

It wasn’t the crime of the century. It wasn’t the crime of the decade, the year, or the month. But today is the 13th anniversary of what was at least the crime of the day on February 16, 2013.

For the Famous Racing Sausages, the early Aughts a Golden Age. Randall Simon had not played in MLB since 2006, and, as he had predicted, other players learned from his experience, and gave the sausage racers a wide berth. The race was more famous than ever. Knock-off races popped up in all corners of professional baseball, but the sausages were supreme. They ran, they waved, and they did promotional work.

We should explain that last one. The sausage costumes were technically owned by the race’s sponsor, which at that time was the Milwaukee-based Klement’s Sausage Company. The costumes were made available to the Brewers for every home game, but when they weren’t competing, Klement’s rented them out.2

Thanks to capitalism, anybody so inclined could host one or more anthropomorphized meats at their next work or community gathering. Anywhere between one and five costumes could be rented (for a modest per-sausage fee) but performers were not included.

Organizers of a Winter Festival in Cedarburg, Wisconsin rented at least two sausages to make appearances on February 16, 2013. Volunteers suited up that morning and worked an outdoor event.

Later that evening, at least the Italian Sausage costume was brought to another event, a fundraiser for the new Curling Club facility on the Cedarburg Fairgrounds. A big crowd turned out and whoever had brought the costume concluded that the hopping party didn’t need a Very Special Guest after all. They left their rented sausage costume unattended in an unsecured back room. Never do this.

Around 7:45 p.m., eyewitnesses said Italian Sausage did make an appearance, walking right out a side door and into a cold, clear Midwestern night. It was surely a crime of opportunity, but it was a crime. The Italian Sausage costume cost $3,000, and its cultural value was beyond price. The police were called.

Regular readers will recall that we have reported on more than one Stupid Baseball Crime in this space, and most SBCs have historically gone unsolved, even when the perpetrators are burgling major-league dressing rooms or air-dropping sacks of flour onto in-progress Dodgers games. Given the somewhat lesser stakes of this particular SBC, we braced ourselves for yet another clean getaway.

We had drastically underestimated the resources, the determination, and, perhaps, the relative availability of the Cedarburg Police Department.

It helped that a seven-foot sausage costume stood out. And for these thieves, being seen was in fact the point. Around 8:45, eyewitnesses reported the sausage moving south, when it was spotted at another bar, T.J. Ryan’s, among a group of individuals consuming cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon lager, a choice of beverage that told police the thief was a local.

The bar’s eponymous proprietor, Tim Ryan, described a confusing scene. “He was kind of…he started dancing3 with some of the women patrons,” Ryan said.

Watching the sausage leave at approximately 9:40, Ryan saw it wipe out in the icy, slushy parking lot. “He must’ve hit a patch of ice or snow out there,” Ryan said, ”being all big and tall as he is. He was laying out there for a while.” The person inside the costume was learning what Mandy Block had learned 10 years earlier—sausages did not land on their feet. At least this person didn’t have to learn on camera.

The sausage made it to one more venue, the Cedarburg Roadhouse, where it joined a local cover band for a few songs, revealing a skill the Brewers had never utilized.

After that first, eventful night on the run, the sausage dropped out of view. Jeff Vahsholtz, the Cedarburg police detective assigned to the case, said there were no leads despite the mountain of evidence accumulating on social media. “Either nobody’s saying or nobody knows.”

A week went by. News of the crime broke nationally, and the story was everywhere, turning up the heat underneath the missing sausage its kidnappers. Stuck at home, they were reduced to hiding the costume in a wood-paneled basement, wearing it to perform the then-popular meme-dance the Harlem Shake. There is video of this.

A mustard company offered a year’s supply of mustard to anyone who returned the costume. Not to be outdone, another Wisconsin-based company with the distinction of being “the world’s largest manufacturer of sauerkraut,” offered a year of…you guessed it. “[The racing sausages] are a statewide treasure,” the sauerkraut guy said. “This can’t go unpunished.”

An outraged columnist described the sausages as a cultural institution, “right up there with Vince Lombardi, Friday night fish frys, and brandy old-fashioneds.” What were the police doing? Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

With more public appearances out of the question, the perpetrators began looking for a way out. On February 27, two individuals wearing hooded sweatshirts pulled low over their faces entered T.J. Ryan’s with the costume. They left it propped next to the bar rail. “You didn’t see anything,” one of them said to the bartender.

“Like I didn’t just see two guys plop a sausage on a bar stool,” she said. She called the police, who retrieved the costume. A representative from Klement’s picked it up the next day. Italian Sausage was reported to be in “fair condition,” with its chef’s hat and bow-tie in place and superficial salt stains on its backside. The detective, Vahsholtz, declined to say if his department was still investigating the theft. Not only were they still investigating, they were closing in.

The Brewers were still in Arizona when the sausage was recovered, but their promotions team was ready to meet the moment. On March 8, the Brewers honored the recovered mascot with a bobblehead night. On April 3, before the third game of the regular season, Klement’s threw a party for their celebrity sausage. Fans who showed up to the tailgate-style soiree outside Miller Park got a free sandwich, two drink tickets, and free entry to the game between the Brewers and the Colorado Rockies.

That celebration might have been the end of the story if not for the tenacity of law enforcement professionals like Jeff Vahsholtz, who was determined not to close this particular case without an oversized collar.

On April 16, officials confirmed that a brother and sister, aged 32 and 26 (so, grown-ups), had been charged in connection to the case. They too eventually agreed to a civil penalty for disorderly conduct. They also paid Klement’s $858 dollars to cover the costume’s cleaning costs. Such was the price of 15 minutes of fame.

To paraphrase Randall Simon, when there’s a lesson, it’s good to pass it around. Here was another one worth remembering:

Never bet against the police in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

And whatever you do, don’t run afoul of the law there. No matter how fast you are, in Cedarburg, justice will inevitably catch up.

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

On February 8, 1942, a baseball game featuring two very talented groups of players, some of them major-leaguers, was delayed. The visiting team had arrived on time, the weather was clear and fair. Given the Northern California setting, an earthquake was a possibility, but the actual cause was even stranger.

This game—played inside Folsom California State Prison—was delayed for two hours on account of a prison break.

Elvia “Doc” Mead, 43, originally of Los Angeles, was the brains behind the escape. Mead was either convicted of first degree murder or robbery, which seems like a pretty big discrepancy. Either way, he was doing a life sentence at Folsom. The second escapee was Phillip Gardner, 35, also of Los Angeles, doing “five years to life”—for burglary.

Taking advantage of the distraction generated by a major event on the prison’s social calendar, Mead found a way to cut through a metal fence and slip by three concentric rings of guard surveillance to escape the prison grounds.

Mead jumped into a manmade canal connected to the nearby Folsom Dam, swimming across the treacherous, fast-moving water. From there he had to scramble 130 feet down a rocky and perilous embankment to the American River. To help manage this Mead had fashioned a rope made of knotted socks, but he had apparently underestimated the distance and the rope ended before he reached the bottom of the steep slope. He skidded the rest of the way, injuring his leg.

Back inside the prison, Gardner stared at the hole in the fence for a long time before he found the “courage” (is that the right word to use in this context?) to crawl through. He survived the canal and clambered out and helped himself to Mead’s rope, still secured at the top of the embankment. Gardner was trying to make his way past the final guard perimeter near the prison’s Tower 14 when he was caught skulking behind a pile of rocks. A guard informed Gardner he had a rifle trained on him. “Come out or I’ll fire.”

Mead got further, picking his way south along the American River as the prison staff began a manhunt. Their break came an hour later when three teenagers from nearby Orangevale spotted a “mysterious man” in a natural recreation area a few miles south along the river. The boys had come to the Mississippi Bar (as in sandbar) to hunt blue jays1, but when they spotted a man resting by the water’s edge in what were obviously prison pajamas they put two and two together and went to find a guard.

The injured Mead was probably waiting for the inevitable when the boys spotted him. He was quickly apprehended and did not put up a fight. Some later accounts of these events mistake the Mississippi Bar for the kind of bar that serves drinks. It would be a much better story if Mead gave up on his flight for freedom at the first prospect of a cold beer, but as usual you only get the facts from us here at Project 3.18. Mead didn’t get any alcohol before being recaptured, but maybe he saw a blue jay.

Folsom California State Prison first opened its solid steel doors in 1880. It was the second mass incarceration facility built for the state, after San Quentin. The prison land was donated by a family who made a deal with the state to use convict labor in the building of a hydroelectric dam across the nearby American River. The facility was built within the Folsom city limits but when the prison received its own post office in the 1890s the mailing address was affixed to nonexistent city: Represa, California. “Represa” is “dam” in Spanish.

In those early years the conditions at Folsom mirrored those of Northern California during and after the Gold Rush, with human comforts being an afterthought at best. As the state grew up so did the people running its prisons, and reformers promoted humane conditions that would better prepare inmates to lead productive lives upon their release.

Folsom had organized baseball as early as 1894, when a notoriously strict but progressive warden named Charles Aull organized several intramural teams inside the prison, with games being played on a diamond on the recreation yard on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. A kind of “varsity” squad emerged from the four initial clubs, and this group had enough talent to challenge some regional competition. To avoid confusing their brand with any teams affiliated with the city of Folsom, the inmates called their club the Represa Eagles or the Represa All-Stars.

The baseball program got a true champion in 1913 when a former railway worker named William Ryan took a job as a guard at Folsom. Ryan, then 29, was a Sacramento baseball nut who seemed to draw endless satisfaction from arranging baseball and other sporting activities for the prisoners. He established a Fourth of July event that brought in professional athletes from basketball to boxing to tennis, and forged ties with the minor-league baseball team based in nearby Sacramento. Ryan soon became the prison’s first official athletic director.

By 1928 it was clear how much the philosophy of mass incarceration had changed. According to the warden at the time, recreation was the big thing:

We have a concert band of 36 pieces that would compare favorably with the best musical organizations in California. We also have a splendid twelve-piece orchestra. We have all kinds of track and field athletes, boxers, and wrestlers. The Represa All-Stars are considered one of the strongest semi-pro teams in Northern California.

Semi-pro teams were paid to play part-time. These teams were frequently organized by the company the players worked for; other clubs were backed by a professional or trade organization. The Folsom team was so good that it was periodically loaned out to fill out various semi-pro regional leagues when another team unexpectedly withdrew. Inserting the Represa club helped keep more than one league going, and the teams that made the trip inside Folsom often showed their gratitude by donating equipment to help the inmates refresh their well-used bats and balls.

The full-time Represa players sometimes ran circles around these weekend warriors. In 1926, for example, the Eagles’ record was 30-2-1. “Of course,” a local writer noted, “the Represa nine has the advantage of home grounds for all games.”

It was around the mid-1920s that Folsom athletic director Bill Ryan found a partner on the outside. Charlie Clark was a Sacramento baseball organizer, instrumental in setting up various teams and leagues in the region. Clark wanted to do something special for the talented players inside Folsom. His idea was use major-league and AAA Pacific Coast League players who lived in the area to play an off-season game against the Eagles. Clark found lots of players willing to make the trip.

The participants received no money for their appearance and they had to make their own travel arrangements—many carpooled. Some players signed up for the “adventure” of a visit inside Folsom’s four-foot thick walls, but many kept coming back for years, long after the thrill had worn off.

“Bringing a little light into an otherwise drab life is a good deed well done,” a 1941 editorial in The Sporting News said of the major league players helping out inside the prison, “and those who have lent their time to these games deserve merits in the scorebook of life.”

Charlie Clark stepped back from arranging the Folsom game in the late 1920s and the job went to his apprentice, a Sacramento businessman named Bill Morebeck. Other than playing baseball as a kid, Morebeck had no ties to the sport. He ran a flower shop and put the game together in his free time, a process which took about 10 months each year. Morebeck inherited Clark’s contacts and also greatly expanded them through his initiative and enthusiasm. In 1940 he secured the services of 24 major leaguers. The teams played as the “Bill Morebeck All-Stars,” and there were a decent number of actual All-Stars among them.

In 1941 he nearly got a San Francisco native named Joe DiMaggio to come. DiMaggio told Morebeck he wanted to participate but unfortunately didn’t arrive back in the area in time. In 1942 Joe’s brother Dom seems to have been offered up by the family as a consolation2 prize. That same year Morebeck heard from another big-name player, Brooklyn’s Dolph Camilli, who was in the area and interested in helping out, but apparently had no equipment to use. Morebeck found Camilli a suitable glove, shoes, and a uniform that fit.

That 1941 team was regarded as Morebeck’s triumph, representing “some $400,000 of baseball talent.” Earlier and later squads often made do with a “sprinkling” of name players but the 1941 crew even featured a future Hall-of-Famer, Cincinnati Reds catcher Ernie Lombardi. That team would have been good enough to beat any big-league club on any given day.

As for the Eagles, their best might have been the 1943 squad. On February 21 of that year Represa held Bill Morebeck’s All-Stars to six hits and beat them, 6-4. While World War II had already diminished the quality of the visiting teams, a number of enlisted professionals were made available from nearby Mather Field, a training base for the Army Air Forces. There weren’t nearly as many big leaguers on that club, but that surely did not keep the Represa players from cherishing memories of that win for the rest of their lives.

It is not clear whether Mead and Gardner’s escape delayed, interrupted, or ended the much-anticipated 1942 Folsom game. We tend to think it was the former. Baseball games at Folsom always began at 11:00 a.m., during the inmates’ recreation time, and there was a strict four-hour curfew. For understandable reasons, the prison officials did not tolerate the prospect of rain delays or having a yard full of inmates after the sun began to set. Whatever the exact sequence of events, the crisis ended quickly enough to allow seven innings to be played before the curfew time.

Morebeck’s All-Stars romped in the shortened game, scoring 24 runs. In some years it had been the practice to “loan” the Eagles a professional pitcher and catcher3 to somewhat level the playing field, but on this day the prisoners seem to have thought they had enough pitching, and clearly they were wrong:

• Eddie Lake, a major leaguer unsigned that year, walked four times, got a hit in three official at-bats, and scored five runs in the leadoff spot.

• Gus Suhr, who played in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia between 1930 and 1940, hit five singles in six-at-bats. Suhr was a dedicated supporter of the annual game, participating in at least 11 consecutive years.

• Joe Marty of the Phillies was another regular participant, and he went 3-4. Marty was a “fan favorite” at Folsom. A few years earlier he had accepted an assignment as a major-league correspondent for the prison newspaper.

• Dom DiMaggio was the biggest name among the players in 1942, a fact that did not stop the Sacramento Bee, which published a box score, from spelling that name wrong. “DiMago” got a hit in the game and his glasses make him easy to spot in a group photo:

The Eagles did pretty well at the plate, under the circumstances. The first pitcher they faced, Tiny Bonham (6’ 2”, 215 pounds, in case you were wondering) of the New York Yankees, would win 21 games that year. The other pitcher, Manny Salvo of the Boston Braves, would also have a good season. Both pitchers regularly took part in these games, and they may have been going easy on the prisoners, nearly all of whom got at exactly one hit off a big leaguer that afternoon, enough to secure bragging rights forever.

Neither the escape attempt nor the 24-5 final score kept those involved in the game from having a great day. Afterward the players were hosted and toasted in the prison’s officer commissary, which was much fancier than it sounds. Folsom’s grounds included significant plots of working farmland, and the postgame meal featured a bounty of farm-to-table delicacies.

A menu for the 1941 game lists ten courses, featuring dishes like “celery en branche4,” “young tom turkey with sage stuffing,” and “small club steak persillade.” Hopefully the players saved room for dessert, which included three different kinds of pie, all served a la mode on cedar planks.

Major leaguers had been playing inside Folsom for nearly 15 years, and no one involved would let a little thing like a prison break end that streak. Many of the players around those commissary tables would return in 1943 and regularly thereafter. There was something about the experience they found fulfilling, and it wasn’t just the pie.

Bill Ryan was promoted to Associate Warden in 1944. He eventually spent over 40 years with the men inside Folsom. When he started in 1913 the inmates wore black-and-white striped uniforms and there wasn’t much recreation beyond breaking rocks. He spent his life changing that.

Folsom could be a brutal place, and brutal things happened there. In 1937, a year after Ryan became the guard captain, a group of inmates rioted and took the warden, Clarence Larkin, hostage. In the ensuing chaos Larkin was stabbed to death. Ryan was stabbed seven times but recovered, in part thanks to an inmate who volunteered for an emergency blood transfusion.

After being released from the hospital Bill Ryan allowed himself two weeks off. Then he was back at work full-time inside the prison. Less than seven months after the riot Ryan and the new warden arranged for the AAA Sacramento team to come to Folsom to play the Represa club.

When Ryan retired in 1954 he was 70 years old and the oldest state prison employee. The inmates threw a “Bill Ryan Day,” gave him a custom-made rocking chair, and put on a vaudeville show acting out his life.

Writing a farewell salute to Ryan, a Sacramento paper observed that he had been at Folsom long enough to see prison theory “change from rock-breaking to modern industrial training and rehabilitation programs.” In fact these changes were made by people like Ryan, who refused to think of prisons solely as places of punishment. On his last day at Folsom he gave a speech to to the inmates and described the responsibility of his work:

There have been bad days and there have been good days. But when I think back on it, most of them have been good. It may, from your point of view, be hard to understand that remark. You may say it is another world for those of us who go home at night. You would be right. Nevertheless, let me say this to you: Going home at night doesn’t mean I forgot about this place. I did not. Wherever I was, your welfare, your well-being, your protection, and your interests, were always uppermost in my concern.

Rehabilitating incarcerated people is a game of failure, too. Many inmates would never get out, and others would walk through the gates only to return, again and again. But Bill Ryan knew that some of the men he met inside the prison had the potential to lead better lives. He believed sports could help give them the tools they’d need to escape for good.

The long odds and high stakes may have struck a chord with the players who kept coming back to play at Folsom. They all owed their professional lives to someone in their past who had given them a chance to show they could succeed despite errors, bad at-bats, cold stretches, and down years. Baseball was a hard and unforgiving game, but one hit at the right time could be all it took to win. Every chance mattered.