In 1980, a fed-up Detroit executive closed the outfield seats at Tiger Stadium to teach unruly fans a lesson.

Episode Highlights:

- The biggest bleachers in baseball

- The most infamous beer belly in Michigan

- “Riot night” at the Corner

- Jim Campbell, the heart of the Tigers

- Bleacher Anthropology 101: Jerks, Their Manners and Habits

- A twi-night doubleheader goes bad

- Be sure to tip your center fielder!

If you spent time out in the bleachers at old Tiger Stadium, we’d love to hear your memories…or how you hid your rum:

Leave a comment

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

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

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In case you missed it, last week Project 3.18 added a paid tier. Wow! After two years, four months, and one week on Substack, we’re building for the future with our Project 3.18 Partners.

And what better way to ease our discomfort at asking for money than by rolling out a stack of baseball stories and podcasts related to currency, labor, and, in today’s finale, coinage!

In July 1952, a new era in ballpark entertainment dawned in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Joe Engel, the team president of the Class AA Lookouts, famous for his giveaways, was going to give out the one thing everyone wanted, as described in the Chattanooga Daily Times: “Joe is going to give some lucky fan all the money he or she can carry unassisted.”

With Engel, there was always a catch, a gimmick, or a gag, and so it was with this latest inspiration, sometimes called “Cash and Carry” and other times “Pot o’ Gold (or Silver)”:

Engel has promised to place a tub of $2,000 in coins—dollars, half-dollars, quarters, dimes, and nickels—no pennies—in the pitcher’s box and let the fortunate person take a shovel and fill a bag with as much of the cash as he or she can carry off the field.

The Lookouts’ president had enlisted a banker (the suitably named Tom Rich) to test the weight of coinage and estimate how much a person could lift. Rich figured a strong man might heft as much as $1,200.

Engel didn’t announce when exactly the new promotion would debut, inspiring fans to buy tickets for a suite of home games over the course of the month in the hopes that they’d get lucky in more ways than one.

Studious Engel watchers predicted July 19 would be the night. The Atlanta Crackers, the Lookouts’ main rival in the Southern Association, were in town, and the teams were essentially tied for first place. When the gates opened at 6:00 p.m., long lines had already formed. The park quickly filled up to capacity, but the fire code never stopped Joe Engel. When the gates finally closed, fans were draped over signage and stashed along the foul lines and outfield wall. A few were even deposited inside the organist’s booth.

It was the largest crowd the entire Southern Association had drawn that season and the second-largest weeknight crowd Engel had ever brought in. Among that throng was Archie Nale, a resident of Daisy, Tennessee and a father of seven. When Engel called out the number on Nale’s rain-check ticket, the 41-year-old machinist emerged stoically from the overflow crowd along the right field foul line.

Cash and Carry lacked the frenzied energy of later “money scrambles” (a later Engel invention). Instead, this stunt relied on suspense. There was no time limit; the conflict here was man vs. self, with Engel standing nearby and giving color commentary into a public address microphone.

Nale walked to the pitcher’s mound, where an armored truck had deposited a large silver washtub full of coinage. He was required to physically pick up and carry is winnings as far as an exit near the Lookouts’ dugout, and Engel had him sign a waiver at the mound, releasing the club from responsibility for a “strained back, fallen arches, or any other injuries.”

Described as “a husky fellow,” Nale later said his goal was to lift his approximate weight: 200 pounds. He periodically stopped scooping to lift the sack up onto his back experimentally. When he set the sack back down and shoveled in more coins, the crowd roared its approval.

After a final straining assessment, Nale made a powerful hoist and took the bag over his shoulder. Buoyed by encouraging cheers, he walked, “as straight as a soldier,” to the appointed exit. He even gave a postgame interview. “The only thing I regret is that I never got down to the big silver.”

Engel had not missed a trick; the tub’s silver dollars and half dollars were at the bottom, buried under several protective layers of perpetually backfilling nickels. “I couldn’t get my scoop through that stuff,” Nale said. Still, his 200 pounds of metal became $684 worth of paper, or $8,500 in 2026 terms. Not bad.

For Engel, Chattanooga’s minor-league maestro since 1929, Cash and Carry Night was a triumph. The Lookouts beat the Crackers in a twelve-inning walk-off thriller and took over at the top of the league standings. Even better, the ticket proceeds from 14,000 fans made the pot o’ gold look like the chump change it was. “It was a good stunt for the ball club,” he said, “cheaper than giving away those automobiles that cost us $2500 or more.” Engel put on many cringey stunts, some of which have aged like fine milk, but this one had a little bit of genius, weaving an Icarus-like drama from the relatable avarice of the common man.

Before he became the “Barnum of the Bush Leagues” (or, from the less charitable, the “Baron of Baloney”), Joe Engel was a little bit of everything. Engel’s father, William, was a German emigrant who dropped the “von” off his surname and became a successful entrepreneur in Washington D.C., running several bars. These included Engel’s Beer Garden, where his children, including young Joe, regularly encountered reporters, politicians, and local baseball players. These absorbing formative experiences apparently didn’t help Joe put down roots, because he claimed to have run away to the circus at age 13.

He drifted to vaudeville, where he once shared a stage with acclaimed stage performer Al Jolson, but by the late 1900s he was back in Washington and had leveraged his earlier baseball connections into a job as the batboy for the Washington Senators. That seemed to set him on a path, and he later attended St. Mary’s College and flourished as a four-sport athlete.

In 1912, Engel was pitching in a semi-pro league when his father persuaded Clark Griffith, the new manager of the Senators, to give Joe a look. Griffith liked what he saw; he signed Engel and (in what would prove an ironic decision) brought the 19-year-old directly to the majors.

Modern statistics report that Engel’s contributions as a player were essentially nil, but his career was good for the regulars at Engel’s Beer Garden, where drinks were on the house whenever Joe pitched a scoreless inning. Engel recalled one occasion where an unscrupulous and/or thirsty reporter told William Engel that his son was pitching when in fact the Senators’ starter was his teammate, Walter Johnson, far likelier to put up zeroes. “Joe” pitched a 13-inning shutout that day, nearly putting William’s saloon out of business.

The real Engel struggled with wildness, and in 1915 Griffith had him arrange his own trade to a mutual acquaintance who managed a minor-league team in Minneapolis. Griffith saw it as almost a joke, but Engel negotiated a good deal, impressing the Senators’ manager. The pitcher spent a few years in the minors, made unsuccessful make-good attempts in Cincinnati and Cleveland, and returned to Washington in 1920 for one final appearance. After that, Griffith hired Engel as the Senators’ first full-time scout.

Engel excelled at scouting, signing many players that contributed to the 1924 and 1925 World Series teams, earning him full World Series shares and a $10,000 bonus from Griffith. In the winters, when there was less scouting work, Engel branched out. He worked on riverboats moving grain to Southern markets and managed a vaudeville baseball act anchored by two former pitchers turned renowned baseball clowns, Al Schacht and Nick Altrock. “They were always squabbling,” Engel recalled of his clients. “But they were so funny that you could forgive them.”

In the late 1920s, Griffith decided to purchase a minor-league team and use it as a proving ground for future Senators. This was before farm teams became standardized, and the independent minor-league teams weren’t necessarily interested in a major-league overlord. To get around that resistance, Griffith sent Engel south to act as the buyer of record and de facto team owner. After a failed attempt to purchase the Atlanta Crackers, Engel set his sights on another Southern Association team, this one in Chattanooga, one of the weakest franchises in one of the smallest cities on the circuit.

Engel was allowed to purchase the Lookouts. The other owners were suspicious of his ties to Griffith, but the duo quickly showed the power of patronage. Engel dumped a poorly performing Lookouts team and used his scouting talents to rebuild the roster, while Griffith passed along $150,000 to build a state-of-the-art new ballpark. The name for the new park was chosen by a poll of grateful local fans.

Engel Stadium became a staging ground for nearly every decent player Washington could claim in the 1930s and 1940s, but it would be several years before the Lookouts could stand on their own competitively. In the meantime, the former vaudeville man gave away houses, staged fanciful historical reenactments, and chased headlines.

In April 1931, Engel staged one of his most enduring stunts. He also ran a traveling women’s team, the Engelettes, and just before an exhibition game against the Yankees, barnstorming their way north after spring training, Engel signed a 17-year-old Engelette pitcher named Jackie Mitchell to a contract with the Lookouts. He promised Mitchell would pitch against the Yankees, drawing newsreel cameras to his little ballpark in Appalachia. The game, we should note, was initially scheduled for April 1, but weather delayed it until April 2.

The story of what really happened when Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (and walked Tony Lazzeri) is a rabbit hole we can’t dive into today, but whether staged or legitimate, Mitchell’s performance achieved exactly what Engel had intended, drawing enormous regional and national attention. It was soon said of Engel Stadium: “If it didn’t happen there, it didn’t happen.”

Two decades later, another Engel promotion, Cash and Carry, began drawing national interest, and for the second staging, LIFE magazine was on hand to capture the action. This time the honors went to Ray Cox, a 25-year-old electrical student who weighed, by his account, approximately 130 pounds. He decided to split the pot with a friend who did the shoveling, and somehow Cox got his deceptively strong arms underneath 195 pounds of change.

LIFE followed the winners home, where nine people were still counting coins at 3:30 a.m. When the sun rose, the pair split $930, including seven silver dollars, $49 in quarters and half-dollars, and nearly 17,500 nickels. Still, money was money, and money rarely went further than it did in the 1950s: Cox planned to use his $450 to buy a whole house, while his friend put down a deposit on a gas station.

Boosted by the success of three Cash and Carry Nights (and, to be fair, a pennant-winning team on the field), the Lookouts led the Southern Association in attendance in 1952 and drew more than a quarter of a million people, the club’s all-time record. While far from perfect, Engel’s run of success with a minor-league team was practically unique. Chattanooga regularly finished second in attendance to Atlanta, a city more than twice its size, and the Lookouts were the rare farm club that did not require cash infusions from the parent team to keep its doors open.

Engel’s money promotion returned for 1953, when he finally explained the genesis of both his stunt and of course alcohol was involved:

A bunch of us were in New Orleans one night and we’d been having quite a time on the town. We were just turning in when we ran into a couple of fellows in an armored car. They were putting sacks into a truck. I stopped and asked one of the fellows what he had in the sack. He said it was full of nickels. One word turned into another and it turned out he was an old ball player and I noticed the sack was pretty heavy for him. That gave me an idea.

He said his favorite time running the stunt featured a husband and wife duo. In that installment, the wife had helped with the loading, but the husband was required to do the carrying, a dynamic which produced the kind of interpersonal conflict that adds so much to professional wrestling:

I’m standing out there with them and holding the microphone over their heads, and they don’t know they’re on the air. The wife tells him he’s overloaded and will never make it to home plate with that sack, and he says, “You let me handle this, will ya?” His wife then tells him, “Don’t forget your hernia operation last month.” The crowd is roaring. He makes it to home plate and gets a big hand.

Engel’s mic work was what made the stunt shine. He expertly played the role of a jovial, Southern-fried emcee, genially ribbing the contestants and their efforts to amuse the crowd. Three other cities in the Southern Association eventually put on Cash and Carry Nights of their own, but all of them used Engel, a rival club president, to do it. Of all the various “Barnums of baseball,” from Bill Veeck to Charles O. Finley, only Joe Engel had real stage experience, and he ran his baseball circus like a practiced ringmaster.

By 1955, the Senators, still Chattanooga’s major-league parent, had fallen on hard times. The latest last-place Washington team drew just 425,000 fans, and Clark Griffith, the driving force of the club since 1912, died at age 85. Griffith had never minded the way Engel stunted his way to profitability in the bush leagues, but the major leagues were something else. The Senators’ owner enjoyed the baseball-centric antics of an occasional coach-turned clown, but the gates to Griffith Stadium had long been kept closed to Engel and his circus.

After Clark Griffith’s death, the franchise passed to his adopted son, Calvin. Calvin and Engel were former co-workers; the younger Griffith spent several seasons running the Chattanooga Lookouts in 1937, while Engel was put in charge of expanding the Senators’ insufficient three-team farm system. At the time, 25-year-old Calvin was said to be exasperated by the way Engel did things: “How in the hell can you spend $2.01 and bring in $2.00?” Griffith cut back on promotions to save money, and Chattanooga’s fans made themselves scarce until their free-spending prince returned.

Nineteen years later, Calvin had a better appreciation for what had kept the Lookouts in good shape through depression, war, and, worst of all, a proliferation of entertainment alternatives.

“You can’t run a baseball club any more on the seat of your pants,” Engel said. “Time was when the game was a staple. Everybody was interested in it and it was the one game they knew. And most had played it. Now you have all sorts of competition. You’ve got to hustle.”

It was time for the Senators to let go of some of old Griff’s hang-ups. “[Clark] was the club’s public relations all by himself,” Calvin Griffith said. “I’m not the ‘public relations’ that he was, so we have to go out and do a little more promoting than in the past.”

In August 1956, with the team in seventh place and attendance trending even lower than the year before, the Senators got to hustling, starting with a convertible parade of “Miss Washington” pageant contestants wearing Senators caps. Press accounts assured readers that the women were all “tastefully attired.”

Clark Griffith had run his stadium as a dry venue for decades, but in 1956 the Senators finally applied for a liquor license. Beer was sold inside the park for the first time on August 9, but only in one designated section in the left field stands. Strict rules required spectators to be seated when drinking, and guards were posted to enforce the rule. The “beer pen” had a capacity of just 170 people.

And what was a circus without a ringmaster? In a gesture of evident respect, Calvin Griffith called up the man his father had long ago sent down. “The Senators,” one commenter said, “could use a little from the pot o’ gold themselves.”

On August 11, Joe Engel ran a major-league “Cash and Carry” event before a game between the Senators and the Boston Red Sox. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” the Washington Post explained. “The record is only $930.”

The lucky winner that night was Sandy Eubanks, a D.C. resident who worked as a gas station attendant, married with a five-year old son. Eubanks left his upper grandstand seat and joined Engel in front of the mound, where the familiar washtub of hard currency was waiting. The promoter kept up a running commentary as Eubanks shoveled and tested. Finally he closed the bank sack, tied it, and tried to lift it onto his shoulder.

It seemed like Eubanks might have bitten off more than he could chew. He teetered dangerously, struggling to stabilize the sack. Joe Engel milked the moment for as long as he could before leaning in to give Eubanks a friendly boost. He knew people wanted to watch a struggle, not a failure. The encumbered fan veered right and left, but finally found his footing. Watching Eubanks stagger for the safety of the field gate, Engel was satisfied. On Cash and Carry Night, the money went to one fan, but each halting, determined step became a reward for everyone in the crowd.

And because this was the big leagues and not the bushes, Eubanks’ worries were over once he stepped off the grass. The Senators counted the coins ($820) and sent him home with a check.

Over on Clear the Field:

Ted and I travel to the 1970s to continue the story, and instead of a tub of change, it’s paper bills strewn all over major-league parks from Houston to Philadelphia to Cleveland, featuring some showmanship that would make Joe Engel proud.

This Week’s Lineup:

- Paul is the new Etsy Witch

- What you get for catching a foul ball in a major league park

- The origins of the ABS head-tap

- Ted wonders at the WooSox

- Aaron Judge and the power of a few “choice words

- Hazardous jewelry

- The perfect custom jersey idea

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

On February 2, Project 3.18 turned two years old, but the big day slipped past me. It’s been two years (and four months) since I emailed 20 bewildered friends and relatives a baseball story:

Can you believe I started off with the Mets?

That risky move appears to have paid off; there are many more readers here now and none of you seem bewildered.

I’m sorry I missed the big day, but turns out there’s another anniversary coming up: June 16 marks three years since I became a writer (again). Permit me to start with that story today.

I hate to brag, but I’ve been in this business for a long time. When I was seven, my collection of observational A/B rhyming poems wowed the judges of a state-wide writing contest. I recently rediscovered my copy of the award-winning Poems, Poems, Short and Long and flipped through it for the first time in 35 years. No poems about baseball, but here’s a representative meditation on rocks:

    Rocks, rocks,
hard and round, 
those big things
don't make a sound.

A few years later, I discovered prose and never looked back. Thirteen-year-old me wrote a short story set in the far future: the year 2020. I’d describe this story as “Die Hard…in a mall…on a freakin’ space station.” This high-concept pitch earned me more district-level accolades and a plaque which remains in my office:

Fast-forward to 2008, when I finally found my niche: baseball history. That year, I submitted a few pieces to ESPN.com and two of them ran on Page 2.

Somebody made me a source on the Wikipedia page for Ten Cent Beer Night. When that happened, I was sure my career was taking off. And it was—just not the one I was thinking about.

That same year—2008—I took a full-time job at the college where I was a graduate student. I needed the job to keep up with the college’s tuition and the hiring department desperately needed a warm body. From that low-stakes beginning, I rose through the org for the next 17 years. I loved that place and my six progressively responsible jobs there.

I got married and had two daughters in the 2010s, and the blur of parenting finished what the job had started. Between 2013 and 2022, I wrote recreationally just once, and then only because my mother asked me to write something, anything, as her birthday present. Sally Jackson carried a lonely torch for my writing dreams long after most people—including me—moved on. My book will be dedicated to her.

I was 39 years old when my mid-life crisis arrived early and I belatedly learned, the hard way, what should be everyone’s first lesson of external employment: No matter how much you love a job, it is not going to love you back. Thus, the upcoming anniversary: June 16, 2023 was my last day in a place I once thought I’d never leave.

When I told my wife that I wanted to change careers and spend a year writing, she had my back—and took a lot of responsibility on her shoulders. Well, it’s been 36 months. The book will be dedicated to her, too.

Project 3.18 is what changed the timetable. What started as a trial run on Substack blossomed into a full-time enterprise, and with your help, I’m hoping it might become a future.

Before beginning what would become Project 3.18, I made one cardinal rule:

Do not half-ass Project 3.18.

I vowed to approach this newsletter like any other job I’d loved and give it my all. In this hectic world, I knew making my best offer had to include my best effort, every week. Looking through the archives, I see I’ve given that.

Each week I select a topic; 90% of the time I don’t know much before diving in. The delight of discovery is a big part of my fun and something I try to pass on in my telling. But going in cold means research, hours of sifting through tiny, crowded newsprint and period idioms—so many idioms. What does it mean that Tom Seaver “threw a dinner salad game,” or when Jackie Robinson “went out to the opera”?*

Then comes the notetaking and writing and rewriting and hunting typos as the clock races. Sometimes I feel sure the clock is going to win, but here we are, 117 weeks and 135 on-time posts later.

Now, three years into this journey, I’m asking for your financial support to help me keep Project 3.18 going and growing.

As of this week, Project 3.18 has a paid tier. If you’ve been a longtime reader or you eagerly open this newsletter every Monday, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber, a Project 3.18 Partner.

Substack is the place for championing independent creators, and I’m as independent as it gets. Your support, roughly $1.04 per issue on an annual $50 subscription, will go a long way here.

Plus, I’m going to do some special things for Project 3.18 Partners, things any fan of this newsletter won’t want to miss:

• Partners-only Postscripts, shorter stories that follow up on an earlier feature

• Feature Footnotes (regular readers here know how much fun I have in the footnotes) will be for Partners only

• Every December, I’ll finish the year with a multi-part saga exclusively for Partners. I might turn this into a “basebrawl” feature, going deep into some of baseball’s most epic bench-clearing rumbles, as I did with “The Battle of Atlanta” in early 2025; or dwell on a favorite topic, like I did 1940s head protection in last winter’s “Arms and Armor.” Whatever it is, it will be epic…and just for paid subscribers

I expect the list of perks will grow, but that’s what I can promise right now. Maybe I’ll even share those award-winning poems.*

PLUS If you sign up in the next month, I’ll send you a secret story from baseball’s World War II-era carnivals. A link to this story, “Baseball Backs the Attack,” will be sent to paid subscribers on sign-up.

To be clear, the weekly feature story, usually on Mondays, will continue to be free and unlocked. I believe history is for everyone, and I believe that baseball is for everyone. If you share those beliefs and enjoy my work, I hope you will consider contributing $50 a year to support what I do.

I get it—I’m a paid subscriber in some places and a free subscriber in others. If you aren’t able to become a paid Project 3.18 subscriber right now, or you’re new here, I hope you’ll continue being a free subscriber. You can still help me: by sharing or restacking stories and contributing memories and conversation in the comments or on Notes, Instagram, or Facebook.

Whatever you do—thank you.

Now, let’s get to that baseball story. I’ve been saving this one, and it really is about the dignity of work.

Proving, once again, that there’s a baseball story for everything.

Postscript: Revenge of the Hamburger People

Recommended Reading:

On April 9, 1974, Ray Kroc, owner of the San Diego Padres, jumped on the public address microphone at San Diego Stadium to fry his own team, telling the crowd, “I’ve never seen such stupid ballplaying in my life.”

Kroc, the Chairman of the Board of the McDonald’s Corporation, had acquired the Padres only months earlier. He was famous for taking the fast food assembly line invented by brothers Richard and Mac McDonald and building a franchising empire, but San Diego’s four-game losing streak to start the 1974 season was the opposite of “Speedee Service.”

Kroc’s tantrum shocked the baseball world. To the skeptics, it showed just how out of his league he was. Other than being an ardent Cubs fan, Kroc had no connection to the game until the day he swooped in and bought 4% of it. He swiftly apologized, but the faux pas continued to simmer in the public discourse.

The Houston Astros were on the field when Kroc held his personal Open Mic Night, and his criticism applied to them, too. Several Astros players pushed back afterward, led by infielder Denis Menke, the team’s representative to the MLB Players Association.

“You may be able to do something like this at McDonald’s,” Menke began (already off to a bad start). It got worse:

So you criticize somebody and he quits and you get another manager or something. You can’t do that in baseball. It takes so long to bring along a player to the major leagues.

He isn’t dealing with hamburger people, he’s dealing with professional athletes.

Denis Menke, you see, was a steak man:

Other Astros offered similarly snobbish remarks, negating any sympathy they might have earned in a war of words with one of baseball’s richest owners. The insinuation that fast food employees might deserve the kind of castigation and public humiliation Kroc had dished out was properly named and shamed. “So what makes a professional athlete any more immune to criticism than ‘hamburger people’?” one writer demanded.

Menke’s comments were all the worse for their thoughtfulness. The player rep had clearly considered what he wanted to say, and he said it. But some players’ comments came right off the cuff, and a one-liner tossed out by third baseman Doug Rader became the headline:

What a bunch of horse****. He thinks he’s in a hamburger convention dealing with a bunch of short-order cooks.

On April 11, a man named Andy Nagy became the first short-order cook to offer a public retort. The owner of Andy’s Diner (a Seattle institution for 25 years) told a paper there he found Rader’s statement “tasteless,” and demanded an apology on behalf of short-order cooks everywhere. The wire news services eagerly amplified his criticism until it could be heard nationwide.

With no Instagram to flood with nastiness, unhappy food service professionals avoided the middleman and called Rader’s home telephone. On April 13, the fully scorched player followed in Ray Kroc’s footsteps and offered a public apology for his impulsive, misguided remark. “I was only trying to make an analogy,” Rader said. “I certainly didn’t mean to say anything bad about short-order cooks.”

In doing the right thing and apologizing, the Astros’ third baseman created a perfect public-relations opportunity for the Padres, who were eager to smother the outrage over Kroc’s intemperate scolding. What better way to do that than by turning the whole thing into a joke?

In what was almost certainly a product of the agile mind of Padres president Buzzie Bavasi—who had been turning the tables on baseball players in contract negotiations for decades—the Padres announced that on June 28, when the Astros returned to San Diego Stadium, the team would host “Short Order Cooks Night.”

Bavasi’s marketing staff sent 9,000 ticket vouchers to 1,500 local restaurants, along with the letter below. Any person in possession of a voucher and a chef’s hat would be allowed in for free on June 28, to populate a special section of seats immediately behind Doug Rader’s post at third base. More than 1,000 culinary professionals accepted the Padres’ invitation.

Bavasi called Rader to give him a heads-up on the promotion, and the Astros’ third baseman understood he had to wear this one: “Kroc was completely in the wrong, so he put it on my back. I’m not going to let that bother me.”

Before the game, Rader asked Preston Gomez, the Astros’ manager, for permission to attend the home-plate meeting with the umpires and deliver the team’s lineup card. Initially Gomez didn’t think much about the request. “Sure, why not? You’re the team captain,” he said. Later, as he walked down the tunnel from the clubhouse to the dugout, Gomez realized he might have erred: “There was Doug, wearing this funny hat and putting on an apron.”

Rader was also armed with a frying pan, and as he approached the umpires at home plate, he flipped the lineup card like a flapjack, drawing approving roars from the crowd. “What’s your pleasure?” he asked the officials. “Rare, medium, or well-done?”

Rader said he’d considered wearing a sign promoting rival chain Burger King or dressing up like Colonel Sanders, but the simple attire of the cook seemed a better way to make amends.

The 1,300 cooks in attendance still booed him when he ran onto the field between innings, but Rader’s costume had effectively turned the tables on the table-turners. “The fans were good,” he said. “Sometimes in a thing like this the people can act like animals. It can get out of hand.”

Rader gave the cooks rooting against him a lot to cheer about that night. He popped up, struck out, made an error, and was thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double. “I didn’t have much of a night out there but at least I pleased the cooks,” he said afterward.

With two outs in the top of the ninth inning, Rader had a final chance to turn the tables on the table-turners. With the tying run on second base in the 5-4 game, he took the Astros’ final at-bat…and flew out, sending the cooks and everyone else home happy.

In the 1970s heyday of baseball promotional gimmicks, opportunistic teams like the Astros, Phillies, Indians, and Padres dumped money on the field and invited fans to have at it.

Episode Highlights:

- The Houston Astros make money by giving it away.

- Bill Giles’ Philadelphia Phillies lean into boz woz.

- Cleveland scrambles for a million fans in 1974.

- Paul submits a dark-horse candidate for greatest moment in baseball history.

- A surprise winner of a fake money contest in San Diego.

- Giving away tiny amounts of money falls out of favor in cash-strapped America.

- The end of the line—in Canada.

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

On June 19, 1909, “electric light ball” came to the Palace of the Fans, the neoclassical ballpark of the Cincinnati Reds. That night, the infield and (in theory) the outfield were illuminated by 14 arc lights erected on five “mammoth” light towers set up by a Massachusetts inventor named George Cahill, eager to test what he hoped was a workable system of ballpark illumination. The Reds’ owner, Garry Herrmann, signed off on the demonstration, but not the use of his team. Instead, clubs representing the Elks Lodges of Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky were used as major-league stand-ins.

The lights were shut off as 4,500 curious spectators filtered into the ballpark and groped for seats, but at the appointed time Cahill threw the switch and the crowd made what became a familiar sound in the years to follow, a collective “Ohhh!” that was surely music to the inventor’s ears.

The fans watched the Elks teams play seven serviceable innings without missing a pitch or a play. The outfield was not directly lit, so the players out there had a more adventurous time, but somehow they chased down every fly ball successfully.

While Cahill’s work wasn’t quite ready to be called up to the big leagues, the Reds’ influential owner was impressed. “Night baseball has come to stay,” Herrmann said after the exhibition. “It needs some further development, but proper lighting conditions will see the night sport become immensely popular.”

In August 1910, Cahill tried again, this time at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, which had opened just a month earlier. It was reported that George Comiskey, the White Sox’ owner, was ready to throw his weight behind night baseball and Cahill brought out his biggest guns to close the sale, arraying 20 lights, each one the equivalent of 137,000 candles, around the field.

Two Chicago City League teams, the Rogers Parks and the Logan Squares, faced off on August 27. Unfortunately, Cahill had overcompensated; the lights were too powerful, at least at first, throwing off a glare that half-blinded the players. Even more damaging, the electrical grid couldn’t keep up, and the lights steadily dimmed over the course of two hours. The Logan Squares won, 3-0, but after the literally lackluster event, the Sox’ owner lost interest.

Seventeen years passed before the next test. On June 24, 1927, teams from Lynn and Salem, Massachusetts, played on a recreational field owned by the General Electric Company, which had equipped their facility with state-of-the-art lights. Among the 8,000 spectators were members of the Boston Red Sox and Washington Senators, who had played in Boston earlier that day. The equipment worked perfectly and the players praised the field’s visibility. After that, professional baseball teams began placing orders.

In the 1930s, most minor-league teams lacked the financial support of a major-league club. The stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression imperiled many teams, especially those in the system’s lower levels which already operated essentially paycheck to paycheck. At the same time, hardening labor expectations kept daytime customers away.

“The average man still likes baseball but would rather take a dose of castor oil than go to his boss and ask for an afternoon off to see a ball game,” The Sporting News explained. Many jobs required employees to work six days a week, Monday through Saturday, and those lucky enough to be employed were afraid to make waves, knowing they could be easily replaced.

The Kansas City Monarchs, then an independent team in the Negro Leagues, were likely the first to accommodate their customers’ need for after-hours entertainment. In late April, 1930, the Monarchs staged a night game using portable 50-foot light towers. That same month, permanent lighting equipment was installed at two Western League parks at Independence, Kansas and Des Moines, Iowa.

On May 2, a night game between the Des Moines Demons and the Wichita Aviators attracted 12,000 people in a season where the Demons had been averaging 600 fans for daytime games. Seeing the turnout, the Demons’ owner declared that thanks to night baseball, the imperiled minor leagues “will now live.”

Other leagues lined up for salvation. The upper-level International League was soon awash in electric light—and cash. “I figure [night games] increased attendance about 400% throughout the circuit,” the league’s secretary reported in 1935. By the middle of the decade, 67 teams across the minors were playing under the lights, including a majority of upper-level clubs, and none had any regrets.

In February 1934, Sidney Weil, the unlucky owner of the Cincinnati Reds, threw in the towel. Weil had lost most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and the Reds of the first half of the 1930s were abjectly terrible, finishing in last place every season. Powel Crosley, Jr., an inventor, engineer, and industrial mogul whose businesses produced radios, refrigerators, and more, bought the flailing Reds. The new owner had previously started a powerful radio station to sell more radios, and in the same spirit he quickly changed the name of Redland Field to Crosley Field.

In acquiring the Reds, Crosley also obtained the services of the team’s vice president and general manager, Larry MacPhail, a red-headed human dynamo who came to Cincinnati in 1933, by way of Columbus, where he had rehabilitated the Red Birds of the American Association. MacPhail dived into night baseball headfirst in Columbus and doubled attendance there between 1930 and 1932. Brought to Cincinnati to engineer a similar turnaround, MacPhail successfully convinced Crosley to join him.

MacPhail wasn’t alone in his determination to bring night baseball to the major leagues. Sam Breadon, the president of the St. Louis Cardinals, extolled the financial benefits of night games, reminding his peers that Sundays, when most workers were off, had long been teams’ best opportunity to make money. Night baseball, Breadon said, “makes every day a Sunday.”

By early 1935, the National League had completed a careful study of the results of night baseball in three minor leagues, comparing players’ nocturnal and diurnal performances. The impact on play was minor—batters were slightly worse at night, but fielding was a little better. The impact on attendance and revenue, on the other hand, was profound.

Armed with this data, MacPhail browbeat the skeptics into submission. The eight NL teams agreed to a limited trial of night games in 1935, allowing individual clubs to schedule a maximum of seven, with strict limitations. No Sunday games, no holidays, and no team could be forced to participate in night games against their wishes.

Despite the unanimous vote to proceed (the New York Giants abstained), teams continued to vacillate. In a bit of historic irony, the Chicago Cubs were rumored to be among the teams which would put up lights immediately. In fact, Wrigley Field stayed dark for another half-century. And while the Philadelphia Phillies were among the teams initially stating they would not participate in night games, MacPhail apparently won them over, because three months later, on May 23, 1935, they would join the Reds in the first-ever major-league game under lights.

Informed by his experience in Columbus, MacPhail consulted with several different firms to come up with an illumination system worthy of baseball’s best. The resulting plans arrayed eight double-banked light towers around Crosley Field, bristling with 632 high-powered arc lights. The system would essentially double the light output of Columbus’ Red Bird Stadium.

General Electric won the contract and promised to deliver 60-70 foot-candles of light to each of Crosley’s 137,000 square feet. Most minor-league parks delivered 50 foot-candles, to the infield only, and night football games were played in even dimmer conditions. MacPhail required the outfield to be as well-lit as the diamond and boasted that it would be possible to read a book four blocks away from each tower. The lights cost the Reds approximately $50,000—$1.2 million in 2026 dollars—to install and $250 to run each night. The system paid for itself in less than a year.

Most of the teams holding out caved as MacPhail hyped his new toys. Every team except the Giants eventually agreed to play a night game in Cincinnati in 1935. The Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, seemed to eschew night games on principle alone, declaring: “Baseball is a daytime game.” What more had to be said?

The Reds scheduled the first of their seven night games for May 23, featuring the once-reluctant Philadelphia Phillies. Thousands of tickets were sold in advance, and baseball executives from all over the Midwest made travel plans. The Reds invited the executives of their various farm teams and both Ford Frick, the NL president, and his AL counterpart, William Harridge.

MacPhail even solicited the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, to throw out the first pitch. When Roosevelt couldn’t attend in person, MacPhail devised a ceremony in which the President would press a button in the Oval Office to transmit the signal to hit the lights in Cincinnati.

The Reds got their first taste of the future on the evening of May 22. They’d won a game against the Brooklyn Dodgers that afternoon, and MacPhail arranged for a local press organization to buy the players a nice dinner. After the meal, the Roaring Redhead gave a short motivational speech in which he told the team, then in sixth place, he was supremely confident that if they set their hearts and backs to the task, they could finish the season in fifth.

Then it was back to the ballpark, where the Reds’ manager, Charlie Dressen, led the team in their first nighttime practice. The light system was fully turned on for the first time at night and the Reds practiced for an hour, with many of the Brooklyn players filtering in to watch from the stands.

Glare from overhead lights had been a major concern with earlier systems, and some night-inclined teams had distributed special long-visored caps to help the players shield their eyes. The Reds now gazed upward, trying unsuccessfully to dazzle themselves. Several players threw off their standard caps and played bare-headed. They said it was like taking batting practice in the afternoon. Some tried using a fungo bat to hit a ball high enough to escape the bowl of light. None made it out.

If the weather hadn’t interfered, MacPhail probably would have had a sellout, but May 23 was unseasonably cold and light rain fell for hours in the morning, portending a miserable night for such a grand occasion. The teams quickly announced a postponement and moved the night debut to May 24. MacPhail wired the White House to see if the President could accommodate the change and received a warm reply within minutes from the Fan-in-Chief: “Am sticking with you. Will be glad to do my part tomorrow night.” The button wasn’t going anywhere.

The park gates opened in daylight on May 24, at 6:30 p.m. Early arrivals watched the teams take batting practice, and several drum and bugle corps performed. Officials took the novel step of lowering the American flag before the game, as the musicians played the bugle standard “To the Colors.”

At 8:30 p.m. the park was steeped in gloom. The public address announcer informed the crowd that President Roosevelt was preparing to give the signal. After a longer-than-expected delay, the light towers blazed to life and the crowd “Ooooh”-ed in a voice that sounded like a soprano in one writer’s ears. On cue, the Reds’ players sprang into a lively infield practice. It was a brilliant scene, according to one witness, “with the trim little figures running about on the field, as if it was a new baseball game board in the window of the corner drug store.”

20,000 people turned out for the rescheduled “floodlight inaugural,” looking like a football crowd, stuffed into top coats and bundled under blankets. It wasn’t a sellout, but it was the Reds’ third-largest crowd of the season. “Anything that would draw so many people to watch the Phillies and Reds play must be conceded to be worth cultivating,” The Sporting News declared. “If played in the afternoon, this game would have done well to attract 2,000.” Sure enough, the same two teams played in daylight on May 25 and the paid attendance was a scant 2,085.

The Reds pulled every string to ensure the first game went smoothly. They sat most of their veterans, including catcher Ernie Lombardi, a budding star, in favor of rookies. In this scenario, the greenest players had the advantage of experience, as they were fresh out from the minors, where night baseball was commonplace.

These experts had no complaints with GE’s setup, and there were no errors or lost balls. Many observers felt the ball was easier to see in the lights than in daytime. James Golden, Jr., a writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer, marveled at watching a high pop fly reach its apogee, seeing it hesitate, and begin to fall again.

The ball shone through the thin clouds like a bald head in a steam room, and when there was no mist the sphere stood out against the sky like a pearl against dark velvet.

The night was cold and increasingly damp, and smoke from locomotives passing near the park drifted over the field and settled in the chill, creating a Gothic atmosphere. “Night games,” the correspondent for The Sporting News wrote, “will be better when played in warm weather.”

The Reds’ best pitcher, Paul Derringer, and the Phillies’ Joe Bowman pitched impressively, relying on “speedballs” to miss bats. The Phillies’ manager, Jimmie Wilson, insisted his players could see Derringer’s pitches fine—they just couldn’t hit them.

The game turned into “one of the most brilliant battles of the season,” featuring exciting catches, even deep in the outfield, where the Reds’ center fielder, Sam Byrd, crashed into the wall after making a running catch. Byrd stood plastered against the boards long enough to show he had the ball, before crumpling to the ground. The center fielder was the only of Cincinnati defender who had never played under lights in the minor leagues, but he got up to speed quickly.

The Reds scored in the first inning on a double and two groundouts. Singles in the fourth yielded another run. The Phillies manufactured just one run against Derringer in the fifth. The brisk game ended in under two hours, a 2-1 victory for the Reds. The park lights were still blazing when the last of the crowd filtered out of the park; President Roosevelt had apparently forgotten to turn them off.

Even the skeptics left impressed. Will Harridge said it was “the best spectacle I’ve seen in years.” Harridge’s American League had overwhelmingly voted against night games before the season—one owner reportedly voted “nay” because he held a regular card game in the evenings. It would be several more years before any AL teams actually tried it, but in 1935 at least one influential owner, Clark Griffith of the Washington Senators, began warming to the possibility1.

In a classy touch, the Reds had invited George Cahill, who orchestrated the first Cincinnati night game in 1909, to attend the second one as their guest. Cahill’s attempt was feeble by modern standards—each one of GE’s light towers produced more illumination than Cahill’s entire 1909 rig—but he’d continued his work and established a successful firm, installing lights from Forbes Field to Madison Square Garden to Wembley Stadium in London. Cahill saw validation in the first regulation night baseball game in the majors, declaring he’d had the right idea, 25 years early.

The fans were near-unanimous in their approval. In a survey taken later that season, 99% of respondents were in favor of making night games a regular feature at Crosley Field. The collective enthusiasm was best captured by another VIP who attended the May 24 game as the Reds’ guest. Charles Rieckel, of Cynthiana, Kentucky, had watched every Reds’ home opener dating back to the 19th century. Months away from his 100th birthday, Rieckel gave night baseball his stamp of approval and challenged doubters to get on board:

“If an old bird like me can see it, I guess the rest of you ought to.”

The Reds had hoped night baseball would attract 100,000 customers and return the club to profitability after years of losses—MacPhail had made waves by announcing his team had lost $200,000 in 1934. In August, after more than 30,000 people jammed into the park (with a capacity of 24,000) to see a night game between the Reds and the defending champion Cardinals, the team began renovating the outfield to add 6,000 additional seats.

When the final count was taken, 130,000 people had paid to stay up late, a greater number than nearly any other team at the time could draw with any seven day games on the calendar. When the season ended, the sixth-place Reds had gone from 206,000 fans in 1934 to 448,000, and even with the expense of the lights, the club made a $50,000 profit.

It would be wrong to characterize the Reds’ embrace of night baseball as a daring leap of faith. The practice was already endemic in the 1930s, spread as vulnerable teams sought protection from the pummeling forces of the Great Depression. By 1935, the 16 major-league parks were about the only places in America where fans couldn’t see the principal tenants play after dark.

Night baseball showed how far the Reds had come as pioneers. Under Larry MacPhail (and Powel Crosley) Cincinnati went from a “conservative stronghold” to “the proving ground of the major leagues.” MacPhail’s volatile restlessness put a charge into stagnating baseball like it hadn’t had in decades. From radio to air travel to arc lights and—later—protective head gear, MacPhail shoved the old-time game together with various amenities of the modernizing world and forced them to shake hands. Mostly they ended up getting along.

MacPhail and the Reds ended an argument in which both sides were right. Baseball was a daytime game—MacPhail ardently believed that and said so. But he and other trailblazing executives in the minor leagues and Negro Leagues saw opportunity in the darkness, and they flipped on the lights to see what might be out there.

Baseball, it turned out, was a night game, too.

This Week’s Lineup:

- Paul’s unplanned solo podcasting career (3 mins)

- Ted “inadvertently” joins Emo Night in Seattle

- Paul Skenes and the quiet mind of the modern ace

- The joy of the family reaction shot

- The Minnesota Twins’ war on nostalgia (prepare to be outraged):

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

As disappointing seasons go, the experience of the 1969 College of the Holy Cross varsity football team is hard to top.

On September 23, four days before the Crusaders’ season began, the first player, sophomore Bob Cooney, became ill with what would become familiar symptoms: extreme fatigue, nausea, prolonged fever, and, the giveaway, a yellow tint to his skin and eyes. Jaundice.

Cooney’s panel of test results made it official: he had hepatitis. On September 27, Holy Cross played their first game against Harvard and looked terrible, dragging to a 13-0 loss. After that players began dropping in handfuls. The outbreak peaked on October 4, the day of the team’s second (and final) game against Dartmouth. Several of the remaining players got sick right on the field.

Mass testing showed all 26 members of the football team had what was then called “infectious hepatitis,” which today we refer to as Hepatitis A.

But that’s not all—public health officials in Massachusetts tested every member of the Holy Cross football program, 97 people, including players, coaches, and support staff. 90 people tested positive. A third of them were asymptomatic, but these individuals could still spread the disease.

There was no cure for viral hepatitis, and each of the stricken players were in for a long recovery. The Crusaders had been wiped out to a man; the remaining eight games of their season were canceled, and the players went into quarantine.

The Hepatitis A virus thrives when people gather together in close quarters with sub-par sanitation. It’s a foodborne virus, which means it spreads primarily via contaminated foods or liquids. Swift, wide-spread hepatitis outbreaks often begin in communal living spaces like military bases.

It was appropriate, then, that Major League Baseball’s first case of Hepatitis A in 1970 presented in Dodgertown, in Vero Beach, Florida, the spring training home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Dodgertown was built on the bones of a United States Navy base vacated after World War II. The then-Brooklyn Dodgers moved in in 1953.

Veteran reliever Pete Mikkelsen arrived in Dodgertown in mid-March feeling run-down. A few weeks later he was down for the count. On March 29, tests confirmed that Mikkelsen was ill with infectious hepatitis. While the disease was extremely unlikely to prove fatal in a healthy person, severe cases could be debilitating for weeks and there was no treatment beyond measures to make the patient comfortable in the mean time. Mikkelsen was confined in a Florida hospital for two weeks and doctors warned the Dodgers he would need another four weeks of recovery at home.

A lone case of any communicable disease immediately sparks great interest in its past and its future. Where and how had Mikkelsen contracted hepatitis? Before spring training he’d been in Mexico on vacation, participating in a hunting trip, and he began feeling ill soon after reporting to camp. Who was most at risk of getting it from him? Two of his teammates, catcher Bill Sudakis and his roommate, pitcher Roy Lamb, were given inoculations of a compound called gamma globulin, which could lessen the severity of acute hepatitis and perhaps stave off infection.

On March 30, the New York Yankees visited Dodgertown to play an exhibition game, and Mel Stottlemyre, the Yankees’ best pitcher, wanted to visit Mikkelsen, a former teammate, at the hospital. His counterpart on the Dodgers, Bill Singer, offered to drive him.

Singer was not especially close to Mikkelsen and the two hadn’t spent much time together that spring outside the Dodgers’ clubhouse. At the hospital, some protective measures were in place; visitors weren’t allowed inside Mikkelsen’s room, but they could stand in the doorway to converse. “I didn’t go in the room,” Singer said. “I was out in the hall. We weren’t allowed any closer than that.”

Singer, a six-foot-four right-handed starter was often compared favorably to Don Drysdale, possessing a “bulldog” mentality and a determination to take the ball every fourth day no matter what. The Dodgers were increasingly happy to give Singer that chance. In 1969 he won 20 games, struck out 247 batters, and sported an ERA of 2.34. With Drysdale now retired, Singer was a big piece of the Dodgers’ pitching plans in 1970.

Hepatitis A has an incubation period of two to six weeks, and when the 1970 season began on April 7, Singer felt something amiss. The Dodgers opened the year at home with series against the Reds and the Padres. “The whole homestand I was running laps and getting more tired all the time,” Singer said. “I was thinking, ‘Gee, maybe I’m running too much,’ and then I’d cut down and I’d get exhausted running even less.”

On April 12, dealing with the effects of what he thought might be a flu, Bill Singer nonetheless pitched nine shutout innings against the Padres. Bulldog indeed.

The Dodgers headed out on a wonky, grueling road trip, playing two games in four separate cities. The first stop was Houston, where Singer got on a scale and was surprised to find he had lost 10 pounds in the preceding three days. “I mentioned that to the trainer.” The trainer apparently took no further action. The team continued to Cincinnati, where Singer was scheduled to make his next start on April 16.

By this point, Singer was so fatigued he did not leave his bed—until it was time to go to Crosley Field and get ready to pitch. Feverish and nauseous, he pitched into the third inning. “Then I ran out of gas. I was completely exhausted. Gone. Shot.”

Singer finally told the team of his “discomfort.” The Dodgers should have put two and two together that day, but perhaps they were fooled by Singer’s uncommon toughness. He managed to stay on his feet and travel to Atlanta, then on to Montreal, where at last he could go no further, begging off from pitching on April 22. He had lost 15 pounds in a week. “Whatever this is, it’s getting worse. It’s an effort to get up.”

“I don’t want to believe that this is anything worse than the flu,” Dodgers manager Walter Alston said. “Until we get the tests back, I don’t know what else to say.”

The Expos’ physician made the call: likely infectious hepatitis. The Dodgers made arrangements to fly Singer back to Los Angeles and he was admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

“That first day in the hospital I could hardly talk,” Singer said. “I had to force the words out. I took a bath one night—the next day I couldn’t get out of bed.” He lost 20 pounds before doctors stabilized his weight with intravenously administered glucose and vitamins. The Dodgers’ team physician, Dr. Robert Woods, later explained how sick Singer was:

There are various tests that we give people with hepatitis. One tells us about the liver so far as swelling and impaired functions are concerned. The normal test reading is 100 to 150. Bill’s was up to 2,750. Then there’s a test that measures jaundice. You shouldn’t get over a three on this test. Bill got a nine.

Losing Pete Mikkelsen was one thing, losing Singer was another. “It seems insurmountable,” Gene Mauch, the Expos’ manager, said of the Dodgers’ plight. Still, Mauch noted that things could be worse:

“Bill Singer with hepatitis would still be the ace of my pitching staff.”

In the wake of Singer’s diagnosis half of the major leagues went on epidemic watch. The Dodgers returned to Los Angeles at 5 o’clock in the morning on April 23, and the players were instructed to report to Dodger Stadium that same afternoon to receive gamma globulin shots.

But why hadn’t this step been taken sooner, say, as soon as Singer reported symptoms? “There was thought given to mass immunization,” the Dodgers’ trainer said, “but the decision was made against it. … I’m not at liberty to say who made that decision.”

In all likelihood, the trainer was covering for Al Campanis, the Dodgers’ vice president and day-to-day head honcho. “The doctors told us there was no need to immunize the whole team,” Campanis told reporters. He also made sure to implicate Singer’s good deed: “I have heard he visited Mikkelsen in the hospital after the entire team was warned against it.”

Contact tracing began in earnest. Mel Stottlemyre and the Yankees were notified and he was the next up for a shot. The California Angels had played the Dodgers in the “Freeway Series,” a preseason exhibition, and attended a press banquet with them. Shots for everyone, including anyone with access to the Angels’ clubhouse.

Other hot spots flared up. A secretary who had traveled with the St. Louis Cardinals that spring fell ill. Another team inoculated.

The defending champion Mets had the closest scrape, when their primary catcher, Jerry Grote, became sick. By coincidence, the Mets were in Los Angeles in late April when Grote began complaining of chills. Woods, the Dodgers’ physician, checked his temperature: 103 degrees. Off to St. John’s, probably a room or two away from Singer.

While they awaited a diagnosis, the Mets began to spiral, asking the team officials when they could expect their shots of gamma globulin. “They ought to do it,” said Ed Kranepool, the team’s union representative. “Heck, I’d rather take a dozen needles than take a risk of catching something.”

Tests showed no sign of the hepatitis virus in Grote’s system. He turned out to have a run-of-the-mill kidney infection. He was released from the hospital on May 1 and returned to action just days later.

Hepatitis was a waiting game. Infected people typically didn’t show symptoms until for weeks, and they were capable of transmitting the virus well before those symptoms appeared. There was no Hepatitis A vaccine in 1970; that would not become widely available in the United States until 1995. Cases ebbed and flowed, but in 1970 it seemed to pop up everywhere. More than 100 cases were reported every week.

In late May, the Pittsburgh Pirates, who received their inoculations around the time of the Grote scare, became the next team to play the waiting game when one of the team broadcasters went to the hospital with suspicious symptoms.

There was so much smoke that spring, but what would have happened if there was a real fire?

“Many have paused to wonder the consequences should a professional baseball team be leveled during the height of the season,” a prominent sportswriter named Melvin Durslag wrote.

Like other major sports, baseball had long had grim procedures for “re-stocking” a team in the event of what Durslag tidily described as “a traveling disaster,” but there were no rules for “simple incapacitation.” If the Dodgers went down, as the Holy Cross football team had, the AAA Spokane Indians would have to be called up wholesale.1

The Dodgers’ outbreak ended with Bill Singer, but that was small consolation to the stricken pitcher, who turned 26 years old in the hospital. “I can’t do any walking. I have to stay in bed all the time. I can get up and go to the bathroom and that’s about it.” On the worst day, just turning his head left him dizzy. He’d never experienced helplessness like that in his life.

Singer listened to Dodgers games on the radio, hearing best wishes delivered by Vin Scully, who had famously dubbed him “the Singer Throwing Machine.” When he felt strong enough to read, the pitcher sifted through his correspondence, which was piling up.

You hear guys talk about when they get sick and how they get all these get-well cards and stuff. I thought it was a bunch of baloney, but not now. There’s a lot more Dodger fans than I thought.

Singer was released from the hospital on May 7 and “back at zero” in terms of his strength. “Hepatitis really knocks a person out,” Dr. Woods explained. “It’s like pulling the plug out of the bath tub. Everything is drained out of you. Bill may not get back all his old strength for a year.”

The virus attacked the liver, and made it more difficult for that underappreciated organ to perform its many important functions, including the removal of certain toxic materials, such as alcohol. “I can’t drink for a year or two,” Singer said, still wrestling with the news. “Not even a beer after a ball game.”

People recovering from hepatitis learned that the liver covers up many vices. Chocolate was out. So were fried and fatty foods. Vegetables were okay.

Dr. Woods estimated eight or nine weeks before Singer might return to the field. Pete Mikkelsen, the Dodgers’ Patient Zero, was activated in late May, three months after he began showing symptoms. In New York, Mel Stottlemyre never tested positive, and partly because of this, Singer was increasingly of the belief that he didn’t catch the disease from Mikkelsen.

“An epidemic of hepatitis hit Florida this year. It had something to do with the Gulf Stream. Mikkelsen is supposed to have picked up the disease in Mexico, but he doubts it. He feels he got it in Florida, too.”

It was easy to blame Florida (or Mexico), but the true source of the Dodgers’ brush with calamity was never pinned down. Viruses do better when they maintain a little mystery.

Around the time Mikkelsen was activated, Singer was cleared to begin exercising. There were no rehab facilities or minor-league rehabilitation assignments then, so he came by Dodger Stadium to pick up his gear and took it home. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to get back. “It probably depends on me. I know in the past when I’ve gotten illnesses, I’ve always recuperated rapidly.”

He began throwing in early June, and on June 10 he threw 28 minutes of batting practice at Dodger Stadium. “I thought I pitched well.”

Walter Alston agreed, deciding Singer would return to the rotation on June 14 against the Chicago Cubs. “I’ll just see how many innings he can go comfortably,” Alston said. “I’m not going to push him and I’m not going to use him in relief.”

After 52 days on the Disabled List, Singer’s start against Chicago was rocky. He gave up four runs in two innings, but the Dodgers rallied and came away with the win. His next start was better; he went five innings in Cincinnati and allowed just two hits, earning his second win of the season.

On June 23, on a humid Atlanta day with temperatures in the 90s, Bill Singer took a no-hitter into the eighth inning. No one was more surprised than he was. “When I was warming up, the ball felt as heavy as a shot put. But once the game got started, it was one of those days when everything was there.”

Alston said the plan had only been for Singer to go five or six innings, but the unwritten rules were inviolable in those days: “When he had the chance at the no-hitter,” Alston said, “we had to let him go.”

As soon as third baseman Clete Boyer singled with two out in the eighth, Alston pulled Singer, and the Atlanta Stadium crowd gave the opposing pitcher a standing ovation. Alston then showed a dry wit by calling for Pete Mikkelsen. The reliever who might have gotten Singer into so much trouble now saved him, finishing the eighth and allowed only one hit in a scoreless ninth. The recovered pitchers combined for a two-hitter and a 7-0 Los Angeles victory.

“The Big H got ‘em!” Singer shouted afterwards, throwing his arm around Mikkelsen’s shoulder. “Just call us the Hepatitis Twins.”

After such an impressive showing, Walter Alston wondered if perhaps the Dodgers had discovered a new opportunity in an old virus:

“Send a case [of hepatitis] to all my pitchers.”

In the fall of 1970, a year after the first Holy Cross football player fell ill, Massachusetts public health officials revealed the remarkable cause of the hepatitis outbreak that leveled the Crusaders. On August 28, 1969, during a spell of hot weather, a group of four children, siblings, who lived near the team’s practice field, decided to turn on the irrigation sprinklers and cool off. All four were infected with hepatitis at the time. When they failed to completely turn off the system after their play, contaminated water pooled around the ground-level sprinkler heads.

The next day, August 29, a fire at a cafe two miles from the Holy Cross campus required water from Worcester’s fire hydrant system to extinguish. The use of the hydrants caused water pressure in the area to drop precipitously, and design flaws in the Holy Cross water supply system caused the water sitting around the sprinkler heads to be sucked back into the pipes via negative pressure. Some of this contaminated water made it back to the spigot from which the entire football team got its drinking water. The hypothesis was essentially proved by the fact that two players who got cut from the team on August 28, the day before the fire, were the only Crusaders who never tested positive.

With evident admiration, the lead investigator, Dr. Leonard Morse, described the Holy Cross outbreak as a perfect chain of “freak happenings.” If the late summer weather hadn’t been so hot or the children had turned the sprinklers off or the fire hadn’t happened, not a single player would have gotten sick. Instead, they all got it.

Some disciplines are relatively unaffected by luck. Architects, plumbers, graphic designers, to name just three. On the other end of the spectrum are the jobs where luck is both essential and sometimes determinative. For all its scientific underpinnings, public health is as much a game of luck as pitching is.

Most viruses are caught or controlled, but public health officials go to work each day knowing that despite their best efforts, a pathogen might take a freak bounce and slip through the defense. When that happens, sometimes all they can do is buckle down and try to stave off the big inning. In 1970, they did—

—here’s hoping they do it again in 2026.

Over on Clear the Field:

Ted and I try to avoid moralizing on our podcast, but the story of Rocky Colavito’s 1961 ejection for fighting in the stands at Yankee Stadium inevitably leads to an important message about putting family first:

Episode Highlights

- The Colavito family reunion

- The case of the odd, old-fashioned hat

- Rip Collins, conscience for the Tigers

- Thrown out for a most unexpected reason

- The Yankee Killer strikes (it’s not who you think)

- Baseball Ethics 101

- A father’s tough love

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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.

Today is the 49th anniversary of Ted Turner’s managerial career, which began and ended on May 11, 1977. In between last week’s Part 1 and today’s conclusion, Turner passed away at age 87.

This story isn’t about Turner the billionaire or Turner the philanthropist or Turner the egomaniac. It’s about a 38-year-old go-getter who succeeded at everything he did until he got his hands on a major-league baseball team. Dave Bristol, the manager Turner briefly replaced, said his boss “burned a different kind of gas than the rest of us.” That’s what this story is about: a different guy at a wild time.

When the Hall of Fame inducted its second-ever class in 1937, one of the enshrined, Connie Mack, was wearing multiple (straw) hats.

Mack had managed the Philadelphia Athletics since the team formed in 1901, and he soon purchased a minority stake in the franchise. By 1913, Mack owned 50% of the club, and in 1937, the same year he was elected to the Hall, he acquired enough additional shares to take controlling interest of the Athletics. He did double-duty until retiring in 1950.

For most of that time, Connie Mack was the only owner-manager in the major leagues, but a handful of others came and went. In 1925, for example, there were three owner-managers. In addition to Mack, Branch Rickey managed the St. Louis Cardinals, a team in which he had a financial stake, and Wilbert Robinson managed the Brooklyn club, which had become so entwined with its manager that the team took on his name.

Mack, Rickey, and Robinson have three things in common: the tools of ignorance, plaques in Cooperstown, and sprawling baseball careers in which they started at the bottom—as players—and worked their way up, first to managing, then to ownership.

But there were others who took the Turner route: entering baseball as owners without any dugout experience until the day they succumbed to temptation and put on a uniform.

One of these audacious pioneers made his mark in the 19th century. Between 1895 and 1897, Chris Von Der Ahe, a brewer who bought a baseball team to sell more beer, made regular appearances as the manager of his St. Louis Browns.

Field managers didn’t last long under Von Der Ahe, who had a pretty high opinion of himself—three years into his baseball career, the owner had a statue of his likeness installed outside the ballpark. Between 1895 and 1897 the Browns burned through 10 managers, and Von Der Ahe took several turns. He went 1-0 in 1895, 0-2 in 1896, 2-12 at the end of 1897, but after that his beer and baseball empire collapsed. Within a few years he’d lost everything, including the Browns, and went back to tending bar. The team thoughtfully held onto Von Der Ahe’s statue, and when he died in 1913 (cirrhosis of the liver), it was installed over his grave.

The most prolific top-down owner-manager was another Braves’ owner, Emil Fuchs. Commonly referred to as “Judge”—he served as a New York magistrate for one year in 1917 but kept the title for life—Fuchs, a lawyer by trade, became the principal owner of the Boston Braves in 1923.

In 1928, the team’s rookie manager quit early in the season and Fuchs replaced him with Rogers Hornsby, the Braves’ star second baseman. Despite Hornsby’s typically stellar hitting (he batted .387 that season) the Braves lost 103 games and finished seventh in the eight-team National League. Fuchs decided the team couldn’t afford Hornsby’s $40,000 salary and traded him away. The judge had only played one year in a fringe minor league back in 1897, but he decided to manage the 1929 Braves himself to keep costs down. Fuchs’ brainstorm was apparently encouraged by friendly Boston baseball writers, whom he referred to as “my board of directors.”

“I don’t think we can do any worse,” he said at the start of his managerial career. Well, yes and no. With Fuchs at the helm for the entirety of the 1929 season (except for most of May, when he left the team to argue a court case in New York), the Braves won more games but finished in eighth place.

Despite the dreadful results, the players were content with their new manager. They hadn’t expected to win anything, anyway, and the judge was charming, happy to sit on the bench smoking cigars and spinning yarns. He seemed a marked improvement over Hornsby, one of the most disagreeable individuals in the National League.

The distracted, chatty Fuchs stretched the title of “field manager” to its limits, rarely glancing in the direction of the field. A popular anecdote told of a Braves hitter batting with a 3-1 count. Johnny Evers, the team’s third base coach, looked in to see if the judge would make the “hit” or “take” sign, which Evers would relay to the batter, but Fuchs was in the middle of telling a story and not paying attention.

Evers called time and walked to the dugout. “Judge, it’s three and one,” he said. “What do you want him to do?”

Fuchs quickly assessed the situation and made the tough call. “Oh, tell him to hit a home run.”

After that the players mostly ran things themselves.

Fuchs’ “board of directors” must have had a change of heart after the team’s 1929 performance, because in 1930 Fuchs opened his wallet to hire Bill McKechnie, a respected manager.

From then on, the rest of baseball’s owners (save Connie Mack) kept well clear of the dugout benches. Until May 1977, when another novice manager took the helm of another struggling Braves team.

On May 11, 1977, the day Ted Turner managed the Atlanta Braves, an enterprising newspaper editor tried calling commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s home phone number to get a comment on Turner’s latest sacrilege. Alas, “Mr. Kuhn will be out for the rest of the evening.”

In fact, Kuhn and Chub Feeney, the president of the National League, were conveniently together, in Columbus Ohio, dedicating a new minor-league ballpark there. In this era, the individual leagues were separate and semi-autonomous, and Kuhn was glad to delegate when it came to disciplinary matters that did not involve money or cheating. That made Ted Turner Chub Feeney’s problem.

Speaking to reporters in Columbus, a cross-looking Feeney said Turner’s managerial move came as an extreme shock. “Let’s put it this way: it’s never been done before.1”

The Braves’ series with the Pirates concluded on May 12. Going into that game, Atlanta had lost 17 in a row. Sixteen of those losses were credited to manager Dave Bristol, now in seclusion at his home in North Carolina. The 17th loss went to “acting coach” Turner, who had every intention of returning to the dugout on May 12 to try and get back to .500 as a manager.

Turner donned his uniform as soon as he arrived at Three Rivers Stadium that morning. A reporter noted (without telling Turner) that the owner had put his socks on wrong, and he wondered aloud whether it was appropriate to wear sunglasses in the dugout: “No, I don’t think I should.” One of the Braves’ coaches, Chris Cannizzaro, filled out the lineup card and Turner signed it.

Chub Feeney got in touch about two hours before the start of the afternoon game, wanting to know what the heck Turner thought he was doing.

“It’s only a temporary deal,” Turner told Feeney. “Nothing’s going to happen to the Atlanta franchise. It’s going to be better over the long haul.”

Feeney asked Turner how he’d gotten around the contract requirement; Turner said he’d signed one, to be a coach. He promised to have Bill Lucas, the Braves’ general manager, fly to New York that morning to deliver the contract and prove that all was in order.

“It’s not the contract itself,” Feeney said, “but a relatively inexperienced man managing the team. I need time to mull this over.”

Feeney asked Turner to watch from the stands that afternoon, ostensibly so he’d have time to “mull,” but really to give him a few hours to search for a regulation that could forcibly keep Turner out of the dugout.

Crestfallen, Turner wandered onto the field and joined pitcher Andy Messersmith to run laps and work off some frustration. The jogging pace helped him dodge the gathering reporters, microphones, and television cameras. “I wish I could hit somebody,” he told Messersmith, “but there’s nobody to hit.”

The pitcher, who owed Turner for signing him off the owners’ unofficial blacklist, ardently defended him to the press:

He’s the best owner in baseball, and the other owners are trying to blackball him out of the game. They’re sticking it to him every way they can.

They’re just loving this nose dive we’re in because they can say, ‘See, you can’t have fun playing baseball, you can’t be loose, you can’t be interested in the fans and the players before profits.’ Ted may be off-the-wall, but he’s genuine. His word is good. Brother, in this game, that’s unique.

After the Braves’ pregame workout, Turner met with the players to explain that third base coach Vern Benson was taking over. His one day in uniform seemed to have softened Turner’s earlier “fight like men” sensibilities. In his last act as manager, he encouraged the players to “have fun.”

For once, they did.

The Braves turned their hopes over to a converted reliever named Max León, who cut through the Pirates as no pitcher had done that year, chipping in a sacrifice fly in the third. In the eighth inning, the Braves scored four times, including a two-out single from León that scored two runs. Call it the Max León Game. Why not?

In the mostly empty stadium, Ted Turner’s congratulatory bellows carried everywhere. He was back in his usual spot behind the dugout, dressed in an open-necked shirt, slacks, and his Braves cap, spitting Red Man tobacco juice into a paper cup in between outbursts. After León’s eighth inning hammer blow, the owner leaned over into the dugout to slap the pitcher on the back.

“Managing isn’t all that difficult,” Turner observed as he settled back into his seat. “Just score more runs than the other guy.”

When the game ended in a 6-1 Braves victory, the owner jumped out onto the field and shook every hand in reach. “Alll riiiiigggghhhttt!” The losing streak was over and the clubhouse party was on.

One of the veterans, outfielder Jeff Burroughs, had ordered cases of beers and chilled champagne in anticipation of the moment. “Let’s play again right now,” Burroughs yelled. “We’re hot.” The stereo volume was cranked up.

“We’ve been snake-bitten and depressed,” Burroughs said, taking a pull from a champagne bottle. “But mostly we’ve just gotten our brains clobbered in day after day. It’s been pretty humiliating. After a while, it’s like being in the Twilight Zone.”

Ted Turner opened a beer and looked around wistfully. “I’d wish I’d been down there to take some of the credit for this.”

The owner eventually excused himself from the party to call Chub Feeney. At least one writer, Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, seems to have gotten Turner’s permission to listen in on the conversation. Turner dialed Feeney’s office and his secretary picked up.

“Hey, give me the chief, please,” Turner said. “Tell him it’s the little Indian from Atlanta.”

A pause, and then the NL president came on the line. “Hey, Chuberoomboom,” Turner half-shouted. (Boswell did his phonetic best with that greeting.)

Feeney was ready, armed with a rule so old, dust wafted out the phone as he read it. Turner listened, then put his hand over the speaker. “He says there’s some rule against a person managing or playing for a team that he owns stock in.” He rolled his eyes. “They must have put that rule in yesterday.”

In fact they had put it in 50 years before—because of Rogers Hornsby.

In 1926, Hornsby had his weakest offensive season of the decade, hitting just .317 while he managed the St. Louis Cardinals to a World Series. By then Hornsby had acquired $60,000 of stock in the team, quite a sum compared to his annual $30,000 salary. But he had worn out his welcome in St. Louis, and even his status as a minority owner didn’t free Hornsby from the iron hands of the reserve clause. After the 1926 season the Cardinals traded him to the New York Giants.

Hornsby’s stock in the Cardinals created a clear conflict of interest, and the National League president at the time ruled that Hornsby the Giant must divest from his former club. Sam Breadon, the Cardinals’ controlling owner, offered to buy Hornsby’s stock back at $45 a share, the same price he’d paid for it.

Hornsby demanded three times that. Was he supposed to believe the Cardinals’ value hadn’t moved at all, even after he helped the team win a World Series? He accused Breadon of trading him to engineer the cut-rate stock buyback. The impasse threatened the integrity of the reserve clause; St. Louis could trade Hornsby, but they couldn’t make him sell.

The Giants, understanding that Hornsby’s drawing power sold tickets in every park he visited, proposed that the other, uninvolved clubs chip in to buy the stock back at Hornsby’s preferred price. Amazingly, all six uninvolved NL teams agreed to pay, averting the fiasco, but the owners were determined to avoid any more like it. In 1927, Major League Rule 20, Section E went on the books, the Hornsby Rule:

No manager or player on a club shall directly or indirectly own stock or any other proprietary interest or have any financial interest in the club by which he is employed except under an agreement approved by the commissioner.

Hearing Feeney recite the rule, Turner seized on its soft spot immediately. “Well, let’s ask the commissioner, the old super chief, for approval for me to manage this team of mine.”

The conversation continued as Boswell captured the side he could hear, word for word.

“Sure I want to do it. It’s my team. The worst that can happen is I lose some games, and I’m already losing plenty of them.”

…

“No, I don’t want to fight, Chub. Asking isn’t fighting. I just want you to ask the big chief. You’re the league executive. It’s your job.”

…

“I’ve only had one beer. I’m drinking Rolling Rock Premium.”

Feeney told Turner to wait 45 minutes and think it over, and then call back. Turner hung up, grinning. “Poor Chub. I think he really likes me, but the other owners give him so much grief he can’t show it.”

Exactly 45 minutes later, Turner called back.

“Yeah, Chub, I still want you to ask the super chief.”

…

“No, I’m being a good boy. No more lawsuits. I’m sick of court. I just want to get along with all the big chiefs.”

Turner hung up, shaking his head. “What’s the difference between the seats and the dugout bench—twenty feet? They take it all so seriously.”

In what we think was half a compliment, Boswell wrote that Turner seemed “as anarchic and creative as a child.” The owner was certainly childlike in his reaction to hearing “No.”

“I want to manage even more now,” he said, “because they don’t want me to.”

In Andrews, North Carolina, Dave Bristol, the Braves’ manager-in-exile, tried to get away on May 12, spending the day riding horses at a friend’s house. At least one reporter tracked him down there, and he obligingly gave an interview in the middle of a pasture, waving flies away. The “scouting trip” had not materialized. “I think they just threw that in the other day as I was leaving,” Bristol said.

The reporter asked him about Turner’s on-the-ground assessment of the Braves as “snake-bitten.”

“I don’t know,” the manager said, “usually when a snake bites you he just bites once and then crawls away.” To Bristol, the 1977 season seemed more like a boa constrictor.

“I’m planning to come back,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do right now because there’s no precedent for this. I want to come back. I don’t feel I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. But if Ted gets back in the dugout and they win a few more games, he might still be managing when the grapes turn ripe.”

The Braves returned to Atlanta on May 13. As it turned out, so did Dave Bristol.

Early in the day, Bowie Kuhn completed a whirlwind review of Turner’s request to manage the Braves, which Feeney had prohibited under Rule 20 Section E. The rule was obviously intended to guard against conflicts of interest, and there were none in Turner’s case2, so Kuhn fell back to his shelter of last resort: the best interests of baseball. “Given Mr. Turner’s lack of familiarity with game operations, I do not think it is in the best interests of baseball for him to serve in the requested capacity.”

“He said I couldn’t even sit in the dugout as an observer,” Turner complained. “A good leader is with his men when they’re in trouble. They needed a fresh approach.”

Immediately after Kuhn’s decision, Turner said he wasn’t sure if Dave Bristol would return, but saner heads, probably Bill Lucas’, prevailed, and Bristol was back in the trenches that night. The Braves lost that game and the next one, but Bristol said he was nonetheless “thrilled to death” to be back.

Ted Turner said he did not plan to fight the decision barring him from the dugout. “One lawsuit at a time.” But he was disappointed and frustrated.

“If you lose a million and a half dollars a year, you should be able to do what you want with a ball club,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong in this game. It’s like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m either the only sane one around here, or the only crazy one.”

A few days later, he was neither. On May 19, a judge upheld Kuhn’s earlier decision to suspend Turner for the season for tampering in Gary Matthews’ free agency.

Barred from land warfare until 1978, the Braves’ owner returned the water. In the prestigious America’s Cup sailing competition that September, Turner redeemed his tarnished reputation as a skipper with a 4-0 sweep.

He even got to wear a uniform with sunglasses.

This week’s lineup:

- A teaspoon of loose bodies

- Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania is going to the Squonks: https://www.milb.com/lehigh-valley/team/theme-nights

- Ted’s idea for saving baseball

- A baseball Pokemon mystery

- Pittsburgh hosts the world’s most famous marmot

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.

Note: Two days after we released this story, Ted Turner passed away at age 87. We aren’t even done writing it, and it’s sad to know we’ve lost the main character. Turner’s legacy goes beyond baseball and far beyond a small, silly moment in 1977, but this moment is as good a window into the person behind the billions as any moment can be. We’ve all wanted to put on a uniform for a day. Turner could, so he did.

If May 11, 1977 wasn’t the worst day of Dave Bristol’s life, it surely must have been the weirdest.

Bad days abounded for Bristol that spring, because he was the manager of the Atlanta Braves, a last-place team in 1976 that looked even worse a year later. When the Braves lost to the Chicago Cubs on May 8, it was their 14th consecutive defeat.

On May 10, before a doubleheader against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Bristol held a team meeting to try and reach his increasingly depressed and disillusioned players. “I stressed that there were some young players getting a chance to show they can play,” he said of the conversation. “I said if it was too much for them, any of them could just whisper in my ear and we’d do something about it.”

It was, he felt, his best team meeting since joining the Braves at the beginning of 1976, and he saw the players pep up. Even though the Pirates were a much better team, “I felt good about those games.” The Braves might well have won that night except for Pittsburgh’s Dave Parker, who was scorching hot, hitting above .400, and doing his best work whenever he batted against the Braves. Losing by scores of 3-0 and 2-1, Atlanta’s futility streak jumped to 16 games.

On the morning of May 11, Bristol walked into the hotel lobby after a late breakfast and ran into Bill Lucas, the Braves’ Director of Player Personnel (essentially the general manager). Lucas looked troubled. “Ted wants to talk to you about some things.”

“Ted” was Ted Turner, the media mogul who owned the team. Turner, concerned by the ongoing losing streak, had left his preparations to sail a yacht in the upcoming America’s Cup races to come to Pittsburgh and diagnose what ailed his ball club. Now he wanted to speak with the manager.

Bristol “figured the jig was up right there.” He had been dismissed from managerial roles in Cincinnati and Milwaukee, and his Braves had not won since April 22. “I’d taken that walk before,” he said of the uncomfortable journey to Turner’s suite on the hotel’s eighth floor.

Turner was his usual self, fast-talking, energetic, and a little awkward. The owner was clearly excited about something, but he didn’t seem like a boss about to hand out a pink-slip. After some brief preliminaries, Turner showed his cards.

“I got a crazy idea,” he told Bristol. “I want to take over managing the club for ten days and then have you come back.”

Bristol was standing by a window, and for some reason all he could think to do was reach over and lock it shut. As he did so, Turner kept talking, but after that first sentence, the manager (?) struggled to follow the thread of the plan. He finally broke in.

“Now hold on a minute. Does this mean I’m finished as the Braves’ manager? Let’s get it out in the open.”

“No! No! No!” Turner shook his head. “It doesn’t mean that at all.” He and Lucas suggested that Bristol might “go around and see some games,” take a scouting trip, “while this was happening.”

“Ted, you know I’ve always given you my honest opinion,” Bristol said, “I don’t know if [taking over as manager] would be a good thing to do.”

“I know,” Turner said, “but the club is in trouble and I want to go down there and see what it’s like from the dugout.”

After discussing the mechanics of the handoff, the two shook hands and parted amicably. Bristol was dazed; as far as he could tell, he wasn’t fired, but he wasn’t especially employed, either.

When word of what was happening started to spread, a clever reporter somehow managed to track Bristol to the Pittsburgh airport. “I’d rather not answer questions,” Bristol said. “It’s a strange thing to happen to a man.” Undeterred, the reporter asked him where he was headed.

“I’m going home for a couple of days to take a long, hard look at Dave Bristol. If I’m in this position, I must be doing something wrong.”

When Ted Turner purchased the Atlanta Braves in January 1976, knowledgeable acquaintances warned him that baseball was unlike other businesses. A pocket dimension with its own rules of economics, more than one successful industrialist had come to regret buying into his boyhood dreams.

There was much to be wary about in Atlanta. Without Hank Aaron and his assault on Babe Ruth’s home run record, the 1975 Braves were merely a back-end team in the National League West division. Without Aaron, the Braves’ attendance fell by nearly 450,000 people between 1974 and 1975. Still, Turner went ahead and bought the team.

“I bought the Braves for two reasons,” he said in 1977. “One, to get an autographed ball without pleading for it, and two, to get good seats.”

Turner’s lack of baseball experience was increasingly common among owners in the 1970s, as old baseball families gave way to men writer Roger Kahn dubbed “new adventurers” from diverse economic backgrounds, sharing deep pockets and “a patriotic, Messianic complex.”

After Turner took over, the Braves’ organization leaned hard into the gimmickry that had taken root in other corners of small-market baseball. Braves games soon featured ostrich races, mattress stacking contests, cash scrambles, and events called “feeds” in which huge numbers of fans were served plates of spaghetti and ice cream. During a farm-themed event, Turner had Bristol, the last hire made by the team’s previous administration, take a turn milking cows.

When the team hosted a “mini-Olympics” featuring the Braves and Phillies, no one from the Braves would compete against the Phillies’ closer, Tug McCraw, in a race pushing a baseball from first base to home plate using only noses. Turner showed his tendency to step into the breach and raced McGraw himself. He lost, emerging with a lacerated nose and forehead and a bloodstained baseball he proudly showed off on his desk.

Wherever he sighted a baseball taboo, Turner increased to ramming speed. He threw parties for the players, regularly visited the clubhouse to mingle, and even held a small-ante poker game attended by a few of his uniformed employees. That drew Turner’s first chiding from Chub Feeney, the president of the National League.

“What do we have,” Turner complained, “two classes of people—players and owners—and no fraternization? We played poker. For a dollar limit. You played four hours, you could lose maybe thirty dollars. I feel you ought to be friendly with people and not be penalized for that.”

In addition to friendliness and penny stakes, Turner tried big money in various ways. He invested in the stadium, installing an expensive and problematic Video Matrix scoreboard. In 1976 he promised Bristol and the players a $500 bonus for every win over 81 (zero dollars were paid out) and a 5% salary bonus for every 100,000 fans over 900,000 that season (again, no money distributed). These were pretty unorthodox incentives at the time; in his Manhattan fortress, Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, shifted uncomfortably, but held his peace.

Turner broke the owners’ collusion against pioneering free-agent Andy Messersmith, whose December 1975 grievance exploded teams’ open-ended, unilateral control over their players. Messersmith was coming off an outstanding season and free to sign with any team, but the owners collectively managed to forget his number. Three months after he took over the Braves, Turner learned a talented pitcher was still available and promptly bid against no one to sign Messersmith to a three-year contract worth a million dollars, a breathtaking amount of money. Some of his peers never forgave Turner for wrecking their plans to turn the rebellious Messersmith into a cautionary tale.

Messersmith also featured in Turner’s first direct clash with baseball’s arbiters of taste. Turner got his start in business taking over his father’s billboard company, and as a callback to those days, he tried using space on Messersmith’s expensive back for publicity, assigning the pitcher the number 17, where Turner’s WTCG television station could be found on Atlanta dials, and printing “CHANNEL” instead of Messersmith’s last name. The human billboard didn’t stay up for long; Chub Feeney brought out his veto, declaring the nickname had to go.

Despite the addition of Messersmith’s live arm, the 1976 Braves never recovering from a 13-game losing streak in May. Turner spun as fast as he could. “I’m not losing,” he insisted. “I’m just learning how to win. You’re supposed to start on the bottom. We’re coming. We’ll get there. It’ll take better than these to get me down.”

When the Braves finished in last place again, Turner grew reckless in his efforts to hurry the journey along. He set his sights on San Francisco outfielder Gary Matthews, a top free-agent-to-be. A few drinks in at a cocktail party in the fall of 1976, Turner shocked Bob Lurie, the Giants’ owner, by promising to beat whatever offer Lurie made to keep his star. When the Braves signed Matthews for five years and $1.8 million, Lurie complained to the commissioner that Turner had tampered. Kuhn opened an investigation.

Over the course of several surreal conversations, including an extended Old-West-themed analogy in which Turner compared himself to George Armstrong Custer, the ill-fated cavalry officer, the owner begged the commissioner not to take Matthews away, offering to accept corporal punishment instead. In January, Kuhn suspended the Braves’ owner for the 1977 season and took away the team’s first-round draft pick.

Turner sued. “If Kuhn charged me with gross incompetence, with [the Braves’ record] I wouldn’t blame him,” he said, but the charge of tampering he vowed to fight. A judge enjoined his suspension while the case was litigated and the owner began the 1977 season a free man.

In Kuhn’s 1987 autobiography, Hardball, the then-retired commissioner devoted a chapter to Turner and their 1977 showdown. Kuhn spent his entire commissionership wrangling colorful characters, but even in that menagerie, Ted Turner stood out.

“To an outsider, Turner is incomprehensible,” Kuhn wrote. “With paper and pencil I can scarcely do more than scratch the surface of his personality.” Still, he tried, reaching for something—for the lawyerly Kuhn—that was almost poetic: “There was something unreal about Ted, as if he were not so much flesh and blood as a kaleidoscopic galaxy of swirling emotions.”

Kuhn pulled no punches in his book, listing several owners he disliked and one—guess who1—whom he despised. Despite their legal wrangling, he didn’t have such ill will towards Turner. Rather, the Braves’ owner’s impulsive, zesty approach to life seemed to fascinate the careful commissioner, always stuck being the adult in the room.

Turner’s expansive, almost child-like enthusiasm frequently pushed him into places where owners didn’t usually tread. He was often seen vaulting onto the field after games to congratulate winning pitchers and home run hitters. Dave Bristol didn’t seem to mind the encroaching presence of his boss’ boss, and he didn’t recall Turner as much of a meddler in 1976. However, one interaction seemed more like foreshadowing when an exiled Bristol reflected on it a year later:

“Now, one time, he did ask me if he could be the bat boy. But he never said anything about coaching.”

Around noon on May 11, 1977, Turner had pounded on Bill Lucas’ door. Inside, he told Lucas he’d decided to go “into the trenches” and manage the team himself.

“It’ll be a bombshell,” Lucas warned him. “People are going to be on us, especially the press.”

“So what?” Turner said. Could any publicity be worse than losing 16 games in a row? He’d already made up his mind. “If I had thought about it for a long time, I wouldn’t have had the guts to do it.”

During the conversation with Bristol, the manager told Turner that he had scheduled another closed-door team meeting for that afternoon, to try and rally the players after the encouraging signs of life they showed the night before. Now Bristol was gone, but Turner decided to keep the meeting and run it himself.

After addressing the minor change in org chart, Acting Manager Turner gave the team his version of a pep talk. Where Bristol had offered support, Turner was all performative machismo, telling the Braves to “get tough,” “get angry,” and “act like men.”

For some players, the approach seemed to work. “It was one of the most stimulating clubhouse talks I’ve ever heard,” infielder Jerry Royster said. “He laid it on the line. He told it like it should have been told. He never ceases to amaze me. Every time he opens his mouth, something good comes out.”

“For all his eccentricities,” Bowie Kuhn recalled, “or perhaps because of them, Ted generated loyalty in people.” The new manager gave the players what Kuhn would have considered a vintage Turner performance: “right off the top of his head, without calculation or premeditation2—spontaneous emotional combustion.”

The media bombshell Lucas had warned of detonated soon after that closed-door meeting. The clubhouse staff worked quickly to put the Braves’ owner in a suitable uniform, and every news outlet wanted that picture. Turner wore number 27, but unlike some of his other high-profile personnel numberings, this one had no significance.

“I’m not interested in uniform numbers,” he told reporters. “I’m interested in game-winning numbers. I’m sick and tired of people asking me why we weren’t winning. I kept saying it was injuries. Now I can see for myself.”

Because major-league rules forbade any unsigned party from participating in a game, Turner hurriedly signed an official contract for a coaching position with the Braves. Asked what he’d entered as his salary, the owner had a quick retort: “About two million dollars in losses.”

When it was time for batting practice, the press trailed the uniformed Turner like a cloud of flies. He took the manager’s usual position behind the batting cage and watched stoically, refusing to respond to shouted questions.

That night, 6,800 Pirates fans watched the first owner-managed game since October 1, 1950, the final appearance by the Athletics’ legendary Connie Mack. Ted Turner was no Connie Mack, but to his credit, he wasn’t trying to be. He relied on third base coach Vern Benson and bullpen coach Chris Cannizzaro on points of strategy, and while he signed the night’s lineup card, he sent Jeff Burroughs, the Braves’ right fielder, to deliver it to the umpires at home plate in the interest of avoiding a scene.

Normally a frenetic pacer, Turner forced himself to be relatively still. He mostly sat or stood at the dugout steps, encouraging the players in his usual fashion, clapping and shouting “Alllll riiiiiight.” Phil Niekro earned several such accolades in his eight strong innings, but the knuckleballer (0-6 to start the season) gave up a run in the first that put the Braves behind the eight ball again. Atlanta rallied in the second to tie the game, 1-1, but seeing such atypical signs of life in the Braves, Dave Parker uncoiled again with a solo home run in the third.

Turner’s busiest inning was the ninth. The score remained 2-1, and the Braves had a pinch-runner, Pat Rockett3, on first base with Phil Niekro’s spot coming up.

Cannizzaro emerged from the Braves’ dugout to consult with Benson, still coaching at third, on who to use as a pinch-hitter. Turner listened in. “We decided to use Darrel Chaney,” he said, “because he was our only right-handed hitter left.”

The collective decision was a good one; Chaney hit a booming double. Pat Rockett streaked like a…well, you know, and was sure to score and tie the game, except Chaney’s ball bounced off the springy artificial turf and exited the playing area six inches over the outfield wall. It was a ground-rule double, forcing Rockett to stop at third. Cannizzaro emerged again to talk to the umpire, and Turner followed, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. There was a brief discussion of the ground-rule double, and after the game a reporter asked Turner, essentially, if he knew what was going on at that point.

“Sure I know what a ground-rule double is,” Turner said. “I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid. The only stupid thing I’ve done is buy this franchise.” He looked around. “I’m just joking, fellows.”

With Rockett 60 feet away from tying the game and the winning run in scoring position, the Pirates brought in their best reliever, Goose Gossage, to get the last out. From the dugout steps, Ted Turner had a great view as the Braves’ losing streak grew to 17 games.

Seated shirtless behind the manager’s desk with an unlit cigar in his mouth and his first game under his belt, Turner seemed at ease as he gave the customary post-game interview.

“You know, when you’re snakebit, you’re snakebit,” he said. “What can you do? I was proud of the way the guys played and it looks like our pitching is coming back, the way Phil Niekro threw the ball.”

Asked if he had a good time in the dugout, Turner said, “It’s better than sitting in the stands. I can spit my tobacco on the floor in there.” In the stands, even the team owner was required to expectorate into a paper cup.

Turner assured the writers he’d be back to spitting in a cup soon enough. “Plans are for Bristol to come back a week from Monday. I’m not mad at anybody, I’m just mad at losing.”

He was determined to be the one to end the streak. “I’ll be back again tomorrow,” he declared. “I don’t want to be remembered as an 0-1 manager.”

Around the time Turner made those comments, someone called Bowie Kuhn, bringing the commissioner strange tidings from Pittsburgh:

In the conclusion, Ted Turner’s unfinished business and a brief history of managerial cosplay.

In 1925, one of the largest crowds in Comiskey Park’s history evaded some of the most sophisticated crowd control instruments then known to man.

Highlights

- An overflow crowd and the one rope to wrangle them all

- The seat cushion falls into the wrong hands once again (”the boys from the stockyards”)

- Joe Sewell singlehandedly finishes the baseball game

- Translating 1920s baseball idioms

- Ray Knode’s big moment in history

- The fans on the field party their way into a forfeit

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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.

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.

Leave a comment

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.