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On June 15, 1976, it rained in Houston. Thirteen inches of rain in about 13 hours. The kind of weather people still talk about 50 years later.

No place in the world could gracefully handle that much rain in such a short timespan. Bayous around the city overflowed and the water reached five feet in depth in some areas, especially the southeast part of Houston, where ambulance crews drove and then swam.

At 5:00 p.m., the Pittsburgh Pirates’ chartered bus left their hotel. It took the bus a half-hour, three times longer than usual, to make it to the Astrodome, but they got there. The Astros players made it in as well. While the teams got dressed and warmed up, Houston’s drainage capacity was overwhelmed and the water began pooling where it fell. Roads and freeways filled up. Many stalled vehicles were abandoned. One of those cars had tried and failed to bring the night’s umpires to the Astrodome.

A sportswriter named Gary Taylor tried driving to the stadium and gave up three hours later, abandoning his car to shelter in a cafe where the owner mopped ankle-high water out the front door and illegally served beer from his personal stock to several dozen stranded motorists, 50 cents a bottle.

Two hours and an unspecified number of bottles later, Taylor returned to his car to find the torrential water had relocated it from curbside to the precipice of a nearby drainage ditch. “Traffic on the streets and highways was unbelievable,” Taylor said. Working vehicles had to pick around cars “strewn at all angles across all lanes of traffic, abandoned by the thousands.”

Approximately 20 fans, “die-hards” taking that label far too literally, somehow navigated this post-apocalyptic traffic and showed up at the Astrodome. Conditions were reportedly “bone dry” inside the stadium, but its parking lots flooded, taking out many of the Houston players’ cars, at least for the night. Some ended up sleeping in their clubhouse.

The Astrodome had a chance to set a dubious record and host the smallest official crowd in major league baseball history (pre-COVID era), but the lack of umpires was a problem and the game lost half its viewing audience when the production truck responsible for beaming the game back to Pittsburgh packed up and fled while it still could. The players were in uniform and ready to go, but at approximately 7:15 p.m., 20 minutes before first-pitch, the game inside the Astrodome was postponed due to rain.

“We could have played,” Astros general manager Tal Smith said, “but if we announced the game was on, we would have been inviting misfortune. Many people would have tried to make it and would have become stranded.”

The two-dozen fans sheltering in the dome got a collector’s dream of a rain check and a free meal in the facility’s cafeteria. The players were treated to a picnic feast. Astrodome officials set up tables in the outfield behind second base and served both teams fried chicken and steak in the middle of the deserted “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

“The Pirates and Astros are sitting down to supper,” a team official said, eager to show off the Astrodome’s mastery of the elements. “It’s not exactly a rainout. It’s a rain-in.”

The festivities were slightly marred by one of the more ridiculous freak injuries in a game full of them. When the proverbial dinner bell rang, Pirates backup first baseman Bob Robertson was so eager to tuck in that he vaulted over a railing from the seating area onto the AstroTurf playing surface, landing wrong on his left ankle and tearing several ligaments.

The storms passed, the water drained, and on June 16 the teams concluded their Houston series with a 6-3 Pirates win. The teams had pushed back their scheduled starters. Doc Medich started that game for Pittsburgh while 22-year-old lefthander John Candelaria, in his first full season in the major leagues, got bumped back to Pittsburgh.

After an off-day on June 17, Candelaria and the Pirates beat…the Houston Astros, who had accompanied the Pirates back east. That series was shortened, too—the game on June 19, at uncovered Three Rivers Stadium, was rained out the old-fashioned way.

In 1982, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome became the indoor home of the Minnesota Twins. The Metrodome replaced Metropolitan Stadium, an open-air ballpark that had helped lure the Senators away from Washington in 1961.

While the Astrodome provided necessary protection from Texas’ subtropical heat, the Metrodome had to protect people from all four of Minnesota’s ferocious seasons. To do that, the building incorporated some cutting-edge technology, none more amazing than the roof, which was essentially a big balloon.

The air-supported roof was an engineering marvel. Two layers of fabric—an outer skin of Teflon 1/32 of an inch thick and an inner fiberglass liner 1/64 of an inch thick—were separated by a void of pressurized air that acted as cheap, all-purpose insulation. Ten acres of fabric weighing more than a million pounds were kept aloft by a sophisticated system of 20 fans that pushed 250,000 cubic feet of air inside the dome every minute.

By late April 1986, the last of winter had passed in the upper Midwest, not that that mattered to the all-weather Twins, who were hosting the California Angels. John Candelaria had been traded to the Angels in 1985, but he was injured early the following season, dealing with an elbow issue that would soon require corrective surgery. Pre-operation, Candelaria was along for the ride on this particular road trip.

Amid the wettest April ever, another storm front was moving through southeast Minnesota on April 26, with heavy rains and strong winds expected. The positive-pressure inside the Metrodome could be calibrated based on the conditions outside, and the facility managers heeded the forecast and set the fan system to prepare for 35 mile-per-hour winds.

Thirty-two thousand fans, the second-largest crowd of the year, were inside the Metrodome that night, watching Twins starter Frank Viola face the Angels’ abrasive Don Sutton. But there was something eerie about enjoying a pastoral game in an enclosed space while the roof quivered under the fury of the unseen storm overhead. Early in the game, pitcher Bill Latham and the Twins’ bullpen considered what they’d do if the roof came down as the structure overhead rattled uncomfortably: “Mark Portugal said he’d crawl under the bullpen bench. But we finally decided we’d haul it for the dugout.”

And haul they would. During the eighth inning, a measuring device on top of the Metrodome roof showed that a jump in the storm’s intensity, from approximately 12 miles per hour to 80 miles per hour in “an instant.”

The atmospheric equivalent of a haymaker slammed into the east side of the soft-bodied roof and distorted it so much that a piece of the inner liner tore off the frame and drooped above the second-level seats in right field. The overhead light banks and speakers swayed wildly as the roof began to deflate. Seeing 10,000 pounds of electrical rigging dancing was enough for the Twins’ bullpen to put their plan in motion. After that, “we were on our way to the dugout,” Latham said.

As the roof lost its shape, a series of emergency plugs popped open to mitigate the water pooling on top. Gravity guided the water down and out through permanent holes in the inner roof—and onto the heads of some unlucky fans along the third base line, whose tickets had not reflected the possibility of cataract views.

The Twins’ Mickey Hatcher was batting when the ceiling began to sag. He turned to Bob Boone, the Angels’ catcher. “Boone, does the ceiling look like it’s going to fall?”

Bob Boone gave the situation in right field a careful appraisal. “Yeah, it sure does,” he said finally.

The little-used Hatcher said he wasn’t surprised to find his at-bat interrupted by structural collapse. “That’s just the way the season’s been going for me.”

The Metrodome public address announcer read pre-prepared instructions asking fans in the upper deck to evacuate into the concourse in an orderly fashion. Most people managed to keep their cool.

Meanwhile, the facilities team discovered something of a technological misunderstanding. The wind spike hit the Metrodome so hard that the computer regulating the interior pressure detected the extra pressure and decided to shut off some of the fans to compensate. But the temporary wind pressure was on the wrong side of the dome, and without the fans, the roof began to deflate. Once the fans were cranked back up, the roof regained its shape in just nine minutes.

Stadium officials informed umpire crew chief Ken Kaiser that play could resume. Kaiser had misgivings, but he gave the go-ahead. “I figured we had just a few outs to go and it looked like everything was safe again. To tell you the truth, we don’t have this kind of thing in New York, where I come from.”

Playing closest to the busted flap, the right fielders were leery. “I kept my eyes on the speakers above me,” Minnesota’s Tom Brunansky said. “I made sure I was standing between them, so I would have a good head start when they came down.”

The Angels’ Wally Joyner was particularly reluctant to return to work in right field. “I wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want the ceiling to fall on us. I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought the umpires were going to call the game and that was perfectly fine with me.”

Frank Viola had been playing the Angels like a you-know-what before the interruption, and the Twins had a 5-1 lead when play resumed. Minnesota added another run but then Viola gave up a two-run home-run in the ninth and his replacement, Ron Davis, gave up two more two-run home runs, leaving Twins fans more deflated than the building. Wally Joyner conquered his fear and hit a cinematic go-ahead shot to take a 7-6 lead that held up.

The next day, Gene Mauch, the Angels’ manager, likened that ninth inning comeback to a modernized version of The Natural:

We were talking about how we would take this script to somebody and they’d say, “Sure [Joyner] did. Sure he hit a home run with two outs and a 3-2 pitch and the lightning’s flashing and the lights are swaying. Sure he did. Go sell that crap somewhere else.”

On June 27, 1991, a “flash storm” passed through Montreal, Quebec, knocking out power and knocking down trees. The winds of up to 100 km/h (you do your own conversions with this international story) were particularly hard on Olympic Stadium and its retractable roof—the most visually striking roof in the history of sports.

We never had the chance to see a Montreal Expos game at Olympic Stadium, and maybe that’s for the best, because few ballpark images give us the heebie-jeebies more than these shots, taken by a capable amateur photographer as Olympic Stadium’s Kevlar-fabric roof was lowered from its perch in the overhead tower and spread over the uncovered bowl of the playing area. Our first thought was, “Nope,” and now we know where filmmaker Jordan Peele surely got his inspiration for the otherworldly flying monster in his film of the same name.

Olympic Stadium was the obligatory architectural flex that accompanied Montreal’s successful bid for the 1976 Summer Olympics. After the world went home, the plan was to move the Expos from Jarry Park Stadium to the gently-used, state-of-the-art sports megaplex left over from the games.

The stadium and its over-complicated roof were designed by a French architect, Roger Taillibert, and while the roof visuals would be striking, to say the least, other architects warned that the untried system of pulleys and cables was a taxpayer-funded dice-roll to the tune of $154 million (Canadian).

Montreal bit off a little more than it could chew with its pièce de résistance. The stadium’s iconic slanted tower wasn’t completed in time for the games, and with no place to hook it to, the retractable roof couldn’t be installed. Instead, it sat in a warehouse in Marseille, France for five years, racking up $1.25 million in storage fees, just a sliver of the largesse and waste that contributed to Olympic Stadium’s eventual $770 million price tag. The roof eventually reached Quebec and was stored at the stadium. For several years, the structure’s roof was stored in the basement.

The roof was finally installed in June 1989. A month later, just a day before the roof was to be ceremonially dedicated, a storm over Montreal called it into service, except officials didn’t get it down quickly enough and by the time they wanted it closed, the winds were too high. Instead, the Expos had to do as they’d always done and wait for the weather to clear. In November of that year, 8,000 attendees at a truck and tractor pull were evacuated when a roof lowering went bad and left rips in the lining several metres1 long.

Two years later, the roof was working and used sparingly, mainly to guarantee indoor spaces for trade shows and other money-making rentals. The Expos kept the roof open as much as they could, to avoid difficulties from the low height of the ceiling when it was closed. The roof was closed on June 27, 1991, when that “flash storm” pushed through the area. The damage across the city was minor, but Tailibert’s Kevlar flower was shredded.

Huge gashes were torn above right field, each triangular hole about 30 to 45 metres wide. The sky was plainly visible through the gashes and any protection the roof still provided was outweighed by the risk of further debris separating and falling into the stadium below. The cable system seemed intact, so the morning after the storm, the engineers coaxed the broken roof back into its lifted position, where it was secure enough to allow the night’s game against the Pirates (there they are again) to proceed.

Claude Brochu, the Expos owner, was a pragmatic man: “We’re not concerned at all about the ripped roof,” he said. “From our point of view it doesn’t matter if the thing’s up two days, two weeks, two months—however long it is. We’re considering the ballpark to be like any other open-air facility.”

That week, a new entry appeared on the Expos’ list of injured players, prepared by the team publicist, Rich Griffin. “Kevlar Roof” had been added, his status reported as “left hanging.”

He was still up there when the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers came to Montreal on July 11, up five games in the National League West and winners of 7 of their last 9. The Dodgers’ pitching staff was second-to-none, led by Mike Morgan, Ramón Martínez, and Tim Belcher. This was a staff on which Orel Hershiser, 7-2 with a 3.46 ERA, was the number-five starter.

Down at the bottom of the Dodgers’ rarely used bullpen was 37-year-old John Candelaria. By 1991, Candelaria was well into his third decade in major league baseball, building up a journeyman’s resume worthy of your Immaculate Grid consideration. In between the Angels and the Dodgers, Candelaria pitched for six other teams, but he did not pitch in the first two games of the series, both of which ended in one-run Expos victories, sending spirits in Montreal soaring.

It rained on the night of July 13. Nothing awe-inducing, just gray skies and steady showers. It was the perfect night for a retractable roof, but the orange umbrella above Olympic Stadium wasn’t going anywhere. Kevlar Roof had been transferred to the 60-day DL, and the question was not when he would return, but whether he ever would. Repairs were estimated at $1.5 million over seven weeks and a total replacement remained a worst-case possibility. These were problems for the offseason.

“Our poor roof,” Montreal pitcher Tim Burke said. “It sure has spent a lot of time on the disabled list.” In fact, Olympic Stadium’s initial roof was only opened 88 times in its entire existence.

The teams waited under cover for several hours before making the decision to postpone. It was the first weather-related postponement at Olympic Stadium since 1986, several years before the roof was installed. We didn’t know Quebec had such excellent summer weather.

The Sunday finale became a Sunday doubleheader. The Dodgers’ Bob Ojeda shook his head. “You know how tough it is to take doubleheaders.” He looked up at the Expos broken umbrella, folded high overhead while the rain went on. “Even when the thing worked, it didn’t work.”

Burke agreed. “It seems to have been a mistake from the start.”

Mutterings about the Expos’ future were already audible in 1991. A long run of second-division finishes had dampened the spirit of what had once been an enthusiastic fanbase, and being a renter in a nine-figure national boondoggle hadn’t helped.

Mitch Webster, an outfielder who’d spent parts of three seasons with Montreal before being paroled to Los Angeles, said mismanagement was a big part of what ailed the Expos. “This has really got to make the taxpayers upset. At this point, if they lost this franchise, I don’t think it would make too many people mad.”

A Los Angeles Times writer named Bill Plaschke chatted with John Candelaria, just passing the time during the delay before the game was postponed. Candelaria had begun his career before the institution of free agency existed, and since then he’d been almost everywhere and seen everything. Still, Plaschke could hardly believe it when Candelaria mentioned that this was not his first run-in with precipitation inside a domed stadium. Or his second. “Now I’ve got three under my belt.”

The Expos won both games on Sunday, sweeping the four-game series away from the favored Dodgers. Sunday’s games became a sun-washed party, and Jack Todd of the Montreal Gazette said that the roof, “dangling like a wounded bird from its perch on the tower,” was better off where it was. If the team had lowered it for Saturday’s rain, Sunday’s game would have been played indoors. Instead, “the stadium rocked and rolled through 18 innings of sunlit baseball.”

“Trust me,” Todd said of the roof, “no one missed it.”

Today’s post spins off of our recent series on baseball’s best alliterative names. When we got to the letter “P”, there weren’t many contenders, but one name caught our eye.

Clarke Alonzo Pittenger was born in 1899. His formative years were spent mainly in Toledo, Ohio, and baseball doesn’t seem to have been a big part of his childhood picture there. Instead, Pittenger starred at basketball, playing forward at Waite High School and Toledo College, interrupted by a brief and timely enlistment in the United States Army. As luck would have it, World War I ended before Private Pittenger got anywhere near a troop ship, and he was discharged, free to return to school and sports.

By 1919, Pittenger was a two-sport athlete. He had discovered professional baseball and was good enough at it to be signed by a Class B team based in London, Ontario, the Tecumsahs. He hit above .300 in two seasons there and showed his fast-break speed on the basepaths. In the winter of 1919. he was also playing basketball, for an industrial team in Toledo. In a report on the team’s status that December, Pittenger was mentioned by a different name:

Suey Welch … has signed “Pinky” Pittenger for his basketball squad, declared by Toledo sports writers as the greatest play in that section of the country.

“Pinky,” eh?

Read more

This Week’s Lineup:

- Pete Crow-Amstrong’s Interview Range

- Walker on Walker at the Home Run Derby

- Muncy v. Muncy and a story of the time Connie Mack made his own pair of Socks

- Chase DeLauter, mountain mama?

- Marlins say “no-no” to Eury Perez’s perfecto

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.

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

Subscribe now

This is the second half of a whole-alphabet piece featuring outstanding alliterative player names. Project 3.18 is making the tough choices, handing out flowers, and calling out a serious lack of effort by the N’s.

Here’s the first part, in case you missed it:

M: 190 names

The most loaded letter of the alphabet.

Hall-of-Famers: Mickey Mantle, Minnie Minoso, Mike Mussina

Honorable Mention: Mason Miller, Michael Mimbs, Mike Minor

Runners-up: The Moxies

Moxie Manuel—Marquis (or Mark) Garfield Manuel was an ambidextrous pitcher who played for the Chicago White Sox in 1908. “Moxie” was a childhood nickname, earned for unspecified gutsy antics, climbing trees, eating bugs, that sort of thing. One of Manuel’s gutsier White Sox performances led to the “pitcher win” rules as you know them today. In the minor leagues he once tripped over a wheelbarrow playing the outfield and another time he actually hit the cover off a ball. This guy is his own entire post, but in lieu of that I heartily recommend the SABR biography of Mark G. Manuel written by…Mark G. Manuel. That’s a typo, right?

Mox McQuery—William McQuery was an 1880s player who apparently rarely went by the nickname forever assigned to him. He was a good hitter and had an outstanding mustache. After baseball, McQuery became a police officer and died in the line of duty in the year 1900, after being shot during the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a traffic stop gone bad.

Moxie Meixell—It took a village to bring us the purest alliterative name in baseball. It started with Meixell’s parents who purposefully named their child “Merton Merrill.” Later, Meixell’s friends or teammates gilded that lily with a fitting nickname. The result is an MMMM moniker that is both pleasingly snappy and a tongue-twister, depending on your needs.

Meixell played in three games for the 1912 Cleveland Naps. He took two at-bats, made one hit, and disappeared back into the minor leagues and obscurity, but if anyone deserves to have his name remembered on its own merits, make mine Moxie Meixell.

Winners: The Muncys

It’s fair to say that most of us missed the Golden Age of player names, an era that ended on June 15, 1958, when the last player ever to go by “Rube,” Rube Walker, took his last at-bat in the majors.

But the present has its wonders, too. All of us, right now, are living in the Muncy Age, when two different players named Max Muncy are active, playing the same position—third base—for California teams and having the same birth date, 12 years apart. These are the only two Muncys (or Munci?) in baseball history, and on June 29 of this year, they faced off in the major leagues for the first time, and third baseman Max Muncy hit a ground ball to third baseman Max Muncy. Wonders.

N: 90 names

Not a lot going on with N, which was a surprise and a disappointment.

Runners-up: Nick Neugebauer, Nelson Norman

Winner: Nyls Nyman

Nyls (pronounced “Niles”) Nyman Jr. wins a lackluster category. The White Sox outfielder’s mid-1970s career was derailed by shoulder injuries for which there were no treatments at the time. As far as I can tell, no one ever called him “Nails.”

O: 7 names

Runners-up: Ossie Orwoll, Ozzie Osborn1

Winner: Orval Overall

The name my podcast partner Ted was sure I was making up. Orval Overall was a big-time curveball pitcher for the 1900s Chicago Cubs, the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance championship teams which were all the North Side had to hold onto for more than a century. Overall’s given name needed no embellishment by his teammates, but the 6’ 2”, 214-pound pitcher was sometimes dubbed “Big Groundhog.” Can you guess the date he was born on?

P: 33 names

Runners-up: Parson Perryman, Pretzel Pezzullo, Pid Purdy

Winner: Pinky Pittenger

A 1977 obituary for Clarke Alonzo Pittenger, a reserve infielder with the Red Sox, Cubs, and Reds in the 1920s, described him as “a short-line-drive hitter and fancy fielder,” and stated that Pittenger “acquired his nickname from a comic-strip character in the 1920s” without specifying which one.

I took that as a challenge.

The hunt for Pinky’s comic namesake became a post of its own, and I’m making it a special Thursday postscript for Project 3.18’s awesome paid subscribers.

Q: 0 names

No surprise here. This one is on the parents. There are 61 player surnames beginning with Q and not one of them was named Quentin.

Winner: Wimpy Quinn

Here is an apologetic researcher trying to find something interesting to say about 1941 Cubs pitcher Wimpy Quinn:

R: 126 names

Hall-of-Famers: Robin Roberts, Red Ruffing

Runners-up: Ribs Raney, Rip Repulski, Roxey Roach

Winner: Randy Ready

Randy Max Ready was ready from an early age. At 13 years old he was living in Alaska where his father was employed in petroleum production, and young Ready was also working (extralegally?), performing odd jobs on those same oil fields. By the time he reached the major leagues in 1983, Ready was an unremarkable 5’ 11” and 180 pounds, measurements which gave him the advantage of surprise. “I don’t know what’s going on in that little man’s head,” teammate Tony Gwynn said of Ready, “but something is definitely clicking.”

Ready had his best year in 1987 with the San Diego Padres, while simultaneously dealing with the devastating aftereffects of a heart attack which left his wife Doreen permanently disabled. That season accounted for more than half of Ready’s total career value, but he spent 12 other seasons as a part-time infielder all around the major leagues. A gamer’s gamer who woke up scrappy and went to bed pesky, Ready became a minor-league coach and manager in the 21st century, tutoring a new generation of players in everything except launch angle.

S: 129 names

Runners-up: Sixto Sanchez, Skeeter Scalzi, Socks Seibold/Socks Seybold, Steamboat Struss

Winner: Sibby Sisti

A Brave for life, Sebastian “Sibby” Sisti joined Boston’s National League team in 1939 when he was 18 years old. During Sisti’s time with the team, it changed its name—from Bees back to Braves—and its home city, relocating to Milwaukee in 1953, a year before Sisti retired at age 33.

Despite a relatively niche career in Boston, the odds are that more people reading this have watched Sibby Sisti in uniform than any other player featured in this post. Sisti was living in Buffalo, New York in 1983, when a movie called The Natural began filming there. The retired player became a technical consultant, helping the production accurately capture his bygone era. In an acknowledgement of his contributions, Sisti got to don one last flannel uniform to play the sad-eyed Pittsburgh Pirates manager who calls in a fireballing lefty to face Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs in the film’s electric final sequence.

Telling the story of his movie career, Sisti promised he’d do things differently than his character if he was really calling the shots:

“This time, on the first pitch, Redford’s going right down on his ass.”

T: 77 names

Runners-up: Townsend Tapley, Taylor Teagarden, Tip Tobin, Twink Twining, Turkey Tyson

Winner: Touki Toussaint (TOO-key TOO-sahnt)

Dany Gilbert Kiti Toussaint, who pitched between 2018 and 2025, is of Haitian and Kenyan heritage. He got his called name from his family: It’s a portmanteau made from his parents’ surnames, “Toussaint” and “Kiti.” He never got a baseball nickname. If it ain’t broke, as they say.

U: 1 name

Winner: Ugueth Urbina

This was a tough one, because the name works but it turns out these awards need a “good character” clause. Urbina, a proficient back-end reliever for six teams, spent seven years in prison in his native Venezuela for participating in what was classified as an attempted murder of several people at his farm. Urbina did his time and after being released went back to pitching, playing with a Venezuelan Professional Baseball League team, the Leones del Caracas, as recently as 2023. At that time, Urbina was not closing the door on a future return to MLB. Can I close it?

Biography aside, Urbina’s alliterative name is a gem with one imperfection. His given names are “Ugueth Urtain” and “Urbina” is his paternal surname. But Urbina also has a maternal surname, “Villareal.” Let’s call that a disqualification and move on.

V: 7 names

Runner-up: Vito Valentinetti

Winner: Victor Vodnik

Colorado Rockies reliever Victor Vodnik wins his category more or less by default. Victor is his given name, and since no nicknames are indicated, I’m going to propose “Dr. Doom,” since he’s basically halfway to Victor von Doom already and it’s a great marketing tie-in with Avengers: Doomsday, releasing this winter. He’s even got a good villain stare.

W: 65 names

Hall-of-Famer: Willie Wells

Runners-up: Wild Bill West, Winfield Welch

Winner: Weldy Walker

On May 1, 1884, Moses Fleetwood Walker played catcher for the American Association Toledo Blue Stockings and became the first Black player to appear in a major league baseball game. On July 13, Moses’ brother, Weldy Wilberforce Walker, became the second, appearing in the Toledo outfield for the first of five times that season.

Progress had sprinted ahead with the Walkers, but prejudice caught up after 1884 and Black players were iced out of the American Association and the National League. It would be another 63 years before a third Black player played on an integrated major-league team. Guy by the name of Robinson.

Some minor leagues continued to allow integrated teams in the years after 1884, but the freeze was spreading. In 1887, 13 Black players including Weldy Walker were rostered in the Ohio State League. Before the 1888 season, the league reorganized, becoming the Tri-State League, and in the new configuration, an earlier by-law permitting teams to sign Black players was repealed.

On March 5, Walker wrote the Tri-State League’s president, a Mr. McDermitt, to protest and challenge the rules change. When he received no response from McDermitt, Walker took his letter to a national magazine, The Sporting Life, which printed the message in full. Here are the final three paragraphs:

X: 0 names

Winner: Leovigildo Xiqués

There is just one player on the entire roll of major-leaguers—again, a list of nearly 27,000 names—with a surname beginning with X. The distinction goes to Cuban outfielder Leovigildo Xiqués, who played three seasons with the Indianapolis Clowns in the mid-1940s. Apparently he was sometimes known by his maternal surname, Lugo, but there is no way I’m taking the only X in baseball history and shoving him in with the L’s.

Y: 3 names

Runners-up: Yasuhiko Yabuta, Yoshinobu Yamamoto

Winner: Yam Yaryan

Hailed (faintly) as “one of the greatest minor-league catchers of all time” and “the Babe Ruth of the Western League,” Everett Yaryan was signed by the Chicago White Sox, a team which did not need any catchers. Ray Schalk was in the middle of his Hall-of-Fame career and this was in the 1920s, when injuries didn’t exist and no one took days off, so Yaryan mostly caught batting practice. At least he got a nickname out of it—assigned by White Sox second baseman Eddie Collins. Collins said he wasn’t willing to call the catcher by his given name and couldn’t remember his last name. So he came up with something pleasingly memorable. Collins was lazy, but he had good taste in alliteration.

Z: 1 name

Winner: Zip Zabel

Three cheers for George Washington Zabel, dubbed “Zip” by someone who would have enjoyed this post, though his SABR biographer sniffs at the nickname and refuses to use it. Nevertheless, Zabel is both the only entrant and a deserving winner in this category.

Zabel pitched for the Chicago Cubs between 1913 and 1915. His greatest day in baseball came late in his major-league career, on June 17, 1915, when the Cubs’ starter, Bert Humphries, took a line drive off his hand and had to leave the game in the first inning. Zabel was called to replace him, and replace he did—for18 innings.

The Cubs and the Brooklyn Robins were tied, 2-2, when the game went into extras. Each team tacked on another run in the 15th, and the game did not end until the 19th inning, when the Cubs scored a two-out, walk-off run. Zabel got the win and a record for innings pitched in relief that is nigh unbreakable. Meanwhile, Zabel’s Brooklyn counterpart, Jeff Pfeffer2, pitched all 19 innings for the Robins and got only a loss for his trouble.

Arm issues cropped up after that (shocking, isn’t it?) and Zabel was sold to a minor-league team in 1916, ending his big-league career. That hardly bothered the scholarly Zabel, who used baseball as a means to pay for college. He became a renowned metallurgist, a materials scientist with a baseball record safer than Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

This post is dedicated to the legion of scholars who contribute to the Society of Baseball Researchers’ Baseball Biography Project, an invaluable resource for anyone exploring the history of the national pastime. While I do as much original research as possible for Project 3.18, the nature of this piece meant leaning on the dozens of diligent, committed writers who have generated thousands of essay-length biographies on players whose careers were in some cases shorter than the time it took to write them up. It’s heroic work, and I thank them.

Next week Project 3.18 will look at some of baseball’s strangest weather. The game has always lived and died by meteorological conditions, but in the second half of the 20th century, roofed ballparks promised to keep the weather out of the schedule. It should have worked, but one player seemed to have rain clouds following him wherever he went.

Even when he went indoors.

On July 27: “Rained In”

In 1977, the Chicago Cubs and New York Mets were caught up in a catastrophic power outage that sent Fun City back to the Stone Age.

Highlights:

- A blowout at Indian Point plunges Shea Stadium (and New York) into darkness

- Camaraderie lights up the town and the ballpark

- Jane Jarvis’ musical comedy soothes the sweating masses

- Ten minutes of phantom ball in the headlights

- The Cubs’ weirdest night at the Waldorf

- Scenes from New York’s darkest night

- Sorry, America, no sports news today

One More Thing:

On the show, I told Ted that former New York mayor Abraham Beame would fit right in on The Simpsons, and I stand by it:

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Earlier this week Ted and I welcomed a special guest on Clear the Field. joined us to celebrate a few of history’s great “baseball names.” We brought four or five excellent real names of current or former players…and everyone threw in a fake name to keep things interesting.

The names gave way to some amazing biographical details. For example, 1930s playboy pitcher Boots Poffenberger had a very specific fear of telephones. Would not use them or even acknowledge them, according to multiple sources. Marvelous. I hope you’ll check out the episode (and Gordon’s outstanding work on YouTube, where he is blowing up).

(We’re working on adding podcast episodes on YouTube for people who like to watch that way. I made this title card and I’m pretty proud of it!)

I decided that the best way to prepare for the show was to look at ALL the names. That meant consulting a dataset from baseball-reference.com containing a shade under 27,000 current and former players. I looked at given names, full names, and “called names,” the surname with which the player was most associated. For example, George Herman Ruth’s “called name” was “Babe,” so that’s the name you find at the top of his BR player page. He had other nicknames, of course, which are listed separately in their own section, but indexing the Alternate Nickname database can be a project for some other sicko.

Names are a tiny window into people, especially in the aggregate. You can see a little bit of the culture that might have produced a nickname, learn what names were popular and not, take a quick tour through names originating all over the world, in Ireland, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Japan. Long before the fraternity of players started bestowing ironic nicknames on their teammates, some of their parents were already riffing on their newborns’ birth certificates, and that tells you something about them.

Going through the list, I noticed a lot of alliterative names, and that made me happy. When neighboring words use the same sounds, usually at the beginning, that’s alliteration. There are 17 alliterative players enshrined in the Hall of Fame, but that’s just the head of a group of 1,600 professional players from Andy Abad to Willie Wynn.

So let’s have some fun today and honor the best alliterative name for each letter of the alphabet…and hopefully uncover what household appliances made them nervous.

A: 54 names

Runners-up: Al Alburquerque, Army Armstrong

Winner: Art Allison

With no standouts, we’re giving the win to baseball pioneer Arthur Algernon Allison, whose parents wanted to be sure their son’s name would appear at the top of every alphabetical list he might ever be included on. 177 years later, their plan is still working.

Speaking of firsts, Art Allison participated in what is considered the first-ever major league baseball game, on May 4, 1871, between the Cleveland Forest Cities and the Ft. Wayne Kekiongas1 of the National Association. Allison played center field for Cleveland and recorded the first strikeout and stolen base in major league history during that game.

B: 275 names

The largest number of contestants in any category.

Hall-of-Famer: Bert Blyleven

Runners-up: Boom-Boom Beck, Bob Blewett, and Buddy Burbage

Winner: Boardwalk Brown

Pitcher Boardwalk Brown beats out a crowded field because I wrote five interesting things about him, including the origin of his nickname, for an earlier piece. I’ll just leave a link to that and on we go.

C: 155 names

Hall-of-Famers: Charles Comiskey2, Candy Cummings

Runners-up: Callix Crabbe, Cupid Childs, Creepy Crespi

Winner: Choo-Choo Coleman

Mets catcher Choo-Choo Coleman was cagey about his nickname for a while, but eventually gave an anticlimactic explanation, saying he got it as a kid, “because I was fast.” Coleman appeared in a few games for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1961 before being selected by the New York Mets in the expansion draft that stocked the team, and he proved to be a great fit for the 1962 Amazin’s. His manager, Casey Stengel, remarked that he’d never seen a catcher as fast at retrieving passed balls as Clarence Coleman. Along with “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry, Coleman became an early standard-bearer for a team of beloved misfits, adored in New York for the simple and inarguable fact that the Mets were better than nothing.

D: 101 names

Hall-of-Famers: Dizzy Dean, Don Drysdale

Runners-up: Dell Darling, Daisy Davis, Dick Drago

Winner:

Dory Dean

Long before Dizzy and Daffy3, there was Dory. After the famous first professional team, the Red Stockings, left Cincinnati in 1870, six years passed before a new team, the Reds, stepped in to fill the breach. Dory Dean, an accomplished amateur pitcher in the area, became that club’s second pitcher, and then the club’s only pitcher when the first guy was released.

His stuff was hit hard in professional play, so Dean came up with a new delivery, “facing second base with the ball in hand, and then turning quickly, letting it come in the general direction of the stand, without any idea of where it really was going to land.” This novel approach didn’t do much to change his fortunes: He went 4-26 on a team that went 9-56, a record that led a reporter to remind the Reds’ bumbling owner that people paying to see major-league games expected to see actual major leaguers play. For all his innovative pluck, Dory Dean was not one of these.

E: 15 names

Plenty of potential wasted here, and it’s a shame.

Winner: Eddie Eayrs

I assume this surname is pronounced “Ay-ers,” but just in case it’s pronounced like “Ears,” Eddie gets the win.

F: 29 names

Hall-of-Famer: Frankie Frisch

Runners-up: Frank Fleet4, Frank Funk

Winner: Ferris Fain

Ferris Fain was one of the best hitters of the late 1940s and 1950s. He overcame poverty and abuse to find success, but his struggles left him quick to anger and ready to fight. Philadelphia reporters made Fain an easy winner in this category, dubbing him “Furious Ferris,” “Fearless Ferris,” and the Firebrand.” One less alliterative writer observed that Fain took any defeat as a personal insult, calling him “the Angry Champion.”

Fain retired to a hilly farm near California’s Sierra Nevadas, but his exploits made news again in 1985, when he was arrested for growing marijuana. He was still at it three years later when authorities discovered an industrial-scale growing operation in his barn, making this a full-on Breaking Bad-type situation. Fain, age 67, did 18 months for his crimes, but Fiery Ferris did not do remorse:

I grew them because, damn it, I was good at growing things, just like I was good at hitting a baseball.

G: 78 names

Hall-of-Famer: Goose Goslin. I know some might say Goose Gossage should also be here, but I’m a rule-follower and on Baseball Reference that player is listed as “Rich Gossage,” so he’s out.

Runners-up: Gus Getz, Gary Glover, Gary Gray (middle name George), Gene Green

Winner: Goose Goslin

When Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, came to see Leon Goslin play in a minor-league game in 1921, the left fielder was clearly a work in progress. One fly ball reportedly hit Goslin on the head that day, and another just missed. In that same game, however, he hit three home runs, and that was good enough for Griffith to make him a Senator.

Goslin’s defensive growing pains continued in the major leagues, where amused teammates watched him track fly balls waving his arms like he was trying to take off. A clever Washington writer played that off his last name, dubbing him “Goose,” a name which stuck even as the hits kept coming. That once-pejorative nickname is now on his plaque in the Hall of Fame, listed alongside many offensive accomplishments.

No defensive accomplishments are mentioned.

H: 72 names

Hall-of-Famers: Harry Heilmann, Harry Hooper

Runners-up: Harvey Haddix, Heath Hembree

Winner: Hinkey Haines (and Hunky Hines)

Surely every New Yorker knows all about Henry “Hinkey” Haines, the only athlete to ever win a World Series ring (with the 1923 New York Yankees) and a National Football League championship (with the 1927 New York Football Giants—over the New York Football Yankees).

Haines, a superb athlete, played a reserve role on the first Yankees team to ever win a championship, in their first season at Yankee Stadium. But on a team loaded with bats, his never broke through. In football, however, he shined, earning accolades for his for cunning on the field and the golden hands that made him a talented wide receiver who helped the Giants to their best-record victory in 1927, beating out the football Yankees, led by Red Grange.

And there’s more—so much more. Haines once participated in a stunt catch, receiving a pass thrown 324 feet down from the top of a newly built 24-story New York skyscraper. Oh, and there’s the story about the time Haines snuck his pal Babe Ruth into a Giants practice to participate as a tackle, his identity known only to Haines and the coach. Ruth retired from football after two plays. The name is the least interesting part, just a nonsense name someone dropped on him in college that happened to stick.

And that brings us to Henry “Hunkey” Hines, who appeared in three games for the Brooklyn Grooms in 1895. Hines earned his nickname in the minor leagues in 1890, where the local paper described as:

…the only man in the team thus far who boasts a mustache. This hirsute adjunct is dark and heavy, as is his hair—which he wears a la pompadour. His face is rather long, and his eyes dark blue and deep-set.

Two outstanding names, but since Hunky Hines won no championships in any sport and never snuck Babe Ruth into anything, it’s Hinkey Haines by a whisker.

I: 0 names

Baseball has had 83 players whose surname began with the letter I, suggesting some real opportunities were left on the table here. Nobody from that group was ever nicknamed “Ivy” or “Iggy” or “Ike.” What about “Ice Box?” Anybody?

Winner: Bert Inks

Albert Inks pitched in the 1890s. “Inky” Inks was right there for the taking but nobody made a move!

J: 115 names

Hall-of-Famer: Judy Johnson

Runners-up: Jelly Jackson, Janson Junk, Joe Just

Winner: Judy Johnson

In the years after World War I, William Julius Johnson, who would become the best third baseman in the history of the Negro Leagues and an essential figure in both preserving the history of Black Baseball and recognizing the greatness of the men who played it, came to Philadelphia to join the Hilldale club. His new teammates decided he bore a resemblance to an in-and-out teammate of theirs named Judy Gans.

When Johnson arrived, Gans was gone, and the other Hilldale players decided to maintain their status quo: “They said I looked so much like him they called me Judy, too.”

Gans was a solid player, but the new Judy would prove to be something else entirely.

K: 35 names

Hall-of-Famer: King Kelly

Runners-up: Katsy Keifer

Winner: Kenny Kelly

The obvious winner here is Mike “King” Kelly, the “$10,000 Beauty,” baseball’s first crossover star, a central figure in the game’s early professional history and the only major-league player with a firm grip on that royal title. But I’m giving the win to Kenny Kelly, an early 2000s outfield prospect who appeared in a handful of major-league games, so I can share the picture used to represent him on his otherwise carefully detailed Wikipedia page. This is easily the worst identifier image I have ever seen:

Kenny Kelly was a two-way baseball/football talent in college. He was drafted by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1997 for $450,000 and later signed a four-year, $2.7 million dollar contract that secured his full commitment to baseball. That’s over $3.1 million for -0.1 WAR and 14 major-league at-bats.

Back in 1886, Mike Kelly was sold from Chicago to Boston for $10,000, a historic sum at the time, even for a player who accumulated 46 WAR in his career. $10,000 in 1886 is significantly less money than $450,000 in 1997. Looking at it that way, I think we can all appreciate who the real king is.

Know a great alliterative name that didn’t make our list? Represent your guy in the comments (A-L only, please; M-Z stans, hold your fire for one more week).

Leave a comment

L: 42 names

Runners-up: Lerrin LaGrow, Lyn Lary, Lou Limmer, Lep Long

Winner: Leonidas Lee

Leonidas Phyrrus Lee pitched in four games for the St. Louis Brown Stockings in 1877. Named after two famed generals of Greek antiquity, he was a slam-dunk winner here…until we read somewhere that his original last name was “Funkhouser.”

Disqualified!

…which is not to say “Leonidas Funkhouser” isn’t a great name in non-alliterative competition. I bet he and Boots Poffenberger would have been friends.

Here’s the star- and scrub-studded second half, starting with M. And when the winner is NOT Mickey Mantle or Minnie Minoso, you know it’s a loaded category.

In a very special episode, joined us to talk about a shared love: the baseball name. We never did define the term, but the three of us certainly knew some good ones, famous and obscure. To keep things interesting, we each threw in a fake name and player, to see if the other guys could spot it. Our record at uncovering fraud was mixed; hopefully yours will be better. Either way, we brought some actual immortal monikers back for your consideration.

We cover about 20 of the 26,000-some professional baseball names on this episode, so this may be Volume 1 of a series. We had a blast. If you did, too, leave a comment and include your favorite baseball name.

Leave a comment

Come back any time, Gordon!

P.S. Be sure to check out Gordon’s fantastic work on his YouTube channel. There’s something in The Athlete Archives for everyone.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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

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

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In honor of the 209th birthday of the United States of America, the 44,997 fans who came to Atlanta Fulton County Stadium on July 4, 1985 were promised fireworks. But first there would be baseball, the Braves against the New York Mets. Both the game and the fireworks depended on the weather, a double-or-nothing summer spectacular, and it was raining in Atlanta at 7:40 p.m., when the game was supposed to start.

An hour passed before the grounds crew could remove the infield tarp. At 9:04 p.m., when most of the city’s other fireworks shows were being hurriedly set off in the window of good weather, the game was just getting underway.

Rick Mahler, 11-7, started for the Braves. Dwight Gooden started for New York. Gooden, 20 years old, was 11-3 on the season, with a 1.75 earned run average and more strikeouts than Nolan Ryan. His participation made the Mets the favorite going into the game, but Gooden never really got going. He walked three in the second inning, putting a lot of pitches on his precious arm. He recorded a strikeout and gave up a single in the third, and then the rain returned.

The game was delayed for 40 minutes. Davey Johnson, the Mets’ manager, watched the skies, frowned, and shook his head. Gooden had sat for too long. When the weather cleared, a reliever, Roger McDowell, replaced him.

The Braves’ manager, Eddie Haas, allowed his starter one tentative batter after the rain delay. Mahler gave up a single and Haas came for the baseball. It was looking like a long night for the bullpens.

New York first baseman Keith Hernandez doubled in the first and tripled in the fourth, contributing to a four-run inning that put the Mets ahead, 5-3. With no designated hitter to tidy things up, the double-bullpen game fractured into a jigsaw puzzle of pitching changes, position shifts, and double-switches.

Hernandez homered in the eighth and the Mets were winning, 7-4. Around this time, the Mets’ television broadcast crew, Ralph Kiner and Tim McCarver, began planning their departure, summoning a cab to wait for the end of the game. They hoped the soon-to-be-lit fireworks would keep fans in their seats and let them jump in their cab and beat the traffic.

Davey Johnson began calling in what were, in theory, his best bullpen arms, starting with Jesse Orosco. Orosco was struggling after several excellent years, and he wasn’t alone. The former Mets’ stopper now glumly described himself and fellow relievers Doug Sisk and Tom Gorman as the Mets’ “continuers.” He got the continuing going against the bottom of the Braves’ order, loading the bases and walking in a run before Johnson pulled him. Sisk entered the game and center fielder Dale Murphy hit a three-run double, giving Atlanta an 8-7 lead.

Bruce Sutter, the Braves’ closer, did some continuing of his own in the top of the ninth inning, giving up three straight singles and a run that tied the game. The Braves did not score in the bottom of the ninth. July 4 was over, but the game was not.

When night baseball first arrived in the major leagues in the mid-1930s, it came with some sensible rules. One of them held that no major-league inning could begin after 12:50 a.m. Any game dragging that late into the night would be suspended and completed at a later date.

For some reason, Branch Rickey hated this rule.

In 1949, Rickey, then the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was up to his usual disruptive tricks. He had already reshaped the minor leagues with the “farm system” and dashed baseball’s unofficial color barrier, and this time Rickey had his sights set on the official rules, all of them. He was embarrassed by the rulebook at the time, seeing it as a hodgepodge of regulations, some written in language so archaic that it might as well be dead. A great housecleaning was necessary, and Rickey got himself put in charge of a committee that would recodify the old-time game for the modern day.

In the course of their work, Rickey’s committee took the liberty of doing some keep-and-throw, and one of the things they discarded was the sport-wide prohibition on games continuing long past midnight. The individual leagues could make those rules for themselves. The American League, facing pressure from several cities with their own curfews, quickly reinserted the rule, but the National League, where Rickey held sway until 1955, never did, presumably having forgotten the whole thing.

The issue was not revisited in the NL until the early 1980s. The resulting rule, 4.1(d), stated:

A legal game stopped because of bad weather after 12:45 a.m. shall be called immediately and become a suspended game.

In other words, only an act of God could halt a late game in the National League.

Doug Sisk continued pitching for the Mets, faring much better with the bases empty and delivering a scoreless 10th, 11th, and 12th for New York. He was matched by the Braves’ Terry Forster. Forster had been a capable reliever for A long time, but late in his career he was struggling with his weight. Forster’s size had recently attracted the attention of David Letterman, the svelte host of NBC’s Late Night show, who made waves by describing Forster as “a fat tub of goo.1” He didn’t seem very gooey as he threw three scoreless innings for Atlanta, including the 12th, when Keith Hernandez singled and became the fourth Mets player ever to hit for the cycle.

Forster ran into trouble in the 13th, giving up a two-run home run to Howard Johnson, a late-inning replacement off New York’s rapidly emptying bench. Johnson’s blast made it 10-8.

Lefthanded Tom Gorman was the only reliever left in the Mets’ dugout, and in the bottom of the inning, Davey Johnson called on Gorman to reel in the save that eluded Orosco back on July 4. Gorman gave up a single and struck out Gerald Perry and Dale Murphy. He had an 0-2 count on the Braves’ right fielder, Terry Harper, and went with a forkball. Harper sent it aloft. The towering fly ball appeared foul until it dinged off the left-field foul pole, a home run that tied the game again. Like Orosco, Gorman had a blown save, but with no other relievers left, he had to keep pitching.

Tim McCarver and Ralph Kiner, both former players, were deep into their bag of yarn. Kiner in particular had slipped into a kind of storytelling fugue state, tossing off trivia and anecdotes with an increasingly casual grip on dates and facts, filling the dead time while the Mets failed to win and refused to lose. McCarver kept reminding insomniacs tuning in at home that they were not watching a late-night replay of the earlier game: “This is really happening. It is now 2 a.m. New York and Atlanta time.”

Hearing this, Kiner seemed to briefly come back to reality: “Seriously, though, this is ridiculous.”

It was ridiculous. The beer vendors were long gone, but every coffee pot in the stadium was percolating. One fan in the upper deck swore they heard a vendor call, “Waffles, grits, cold milk!” Perhaps he’d dreamt it; many people were plainly asleep in their seats.

Tens of thousands of sensible guests had already left, but the rest lingered, savoring the novelty and burnishing their “die-hard” credentials. Many small children remained at their posts. Their parents had promised fireworks, and a promise was a promise.

One nine-year-old, whose usual bed time was 9 o’clock, told a reporter he was getting through the night on a combination of hot dogs and naps. “I’ve had fun,” he said, “even though we’ve been here since the beginning.”

The 14th, 15th, and 16th innings came and went. In the Mets’ dugout, players reached back to high school tactics, turning their jackets inside-out and donning “rally caps,” the headwear of the truly desperate. “We were literally trying anything,” Keith Hernandez said.

If he had to suffer, Hernandez wanted to be sure somebody knew about it. “[In the 17th inning] I figured I just had to call somebody. I called my brother Gary and told him I just wanted him to know I was still out here playing.”

A few players appeared to be early birds. Howard Johnson entered the game in the ninth inning and went 3-for-5 with an intentional walk. Ray Knight, the Mets’ third baseman, had had a miserable July 4, going 0-for-7, including three outs with the bases loaded. But once the calendar turned to July 5, Knight seemed to wake up, going 3-for-4. “That was my problem last year, I couldn’t hit before 2 a.m.”

Tom Gorman was still pitching in the 17th inning. Forster (and his replacement) were gone, removed for pinch hitters who hadn’t hit. Now Haas brought in Atlanta’s last available reliever, Rick Camp.

Camp was greeted by Gary Carter, the Mets’ catcher, who caught the entire game for New York. “It took a toll on me,” Carter said, “but I wanted to be in there.” The Mets wanted him in there, too: He was as in the zone as Ralph Kiner, going 5-9 with a walk that night. One of those hits was a single off of Camp. Next came right fielder Darryl Strawberry, who had also played the entire game. Camp got Strawberry with a called strike three. Strawberry rounded on the home plate umpire, Terry Tata, pointing out, perhaps correctly, that Camp’s pitch was nowhere near the strike zone.

Umpires get tired, too. According to Strawberry, Tata replied, “At 3 o’clock [in the morning], that’s a good pitch.” Strawberry decided, perhaps correctly, that that was an opinion worth challenging, and he got ejected When Davey Johnson heard what had been said, he got himself thrown out, too.

Camp finished his inning and Tom Gorman cruised through the bottom of the 17th. The crowd cheered when the stadium announcer reported the game had officially become the longest in major-league history. A plaintive banner in the upper deck seats unfurled:

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

After four becalmed innings, the game began moving in the 18th. Howard Johnson singled and advanced on an error when Camp made a bad throw fielding a bunt attempt. Center fielder Lenny Dykstra hit a sacrifice fly, breaking the deadlock and giving Tom Gorman his second save opportunity of the night.

Gorman was in his sixth inning of work, but he still looked strong, getting through Gerald Perry and Terry Harper, who had earlier ruined his Fourth of July. With two away, the Braves were down their last batter, Rick Camp.

As a National League pitcher who got his share of garbage innings, Camp already had a handful of plate appearances that season. None ended in hits, but he walked once with the bases loaded, so there was some hope.

Still, disrespect was rampant as Camp came to the plate with the game on the line. Gary Carter and the entire Mets infield rose as one and began performatively waving the outfielders closer in.

Camp took a mighty cut at Gorman’s first offering and fouled it off. Atlanta Journal writer Gerry Fraley described the pitcher’s swing as “unpolished.”

“Camp’s lifetime average,” McCarver noted, “is 062. No career home runs. Ten career base hits.”

One booth over, the Braves’ television broadcast team that night, Ernie Johnson and John Sterling, were having the same conversation, albeit with a more positive spin.

“At least he took a good cut,” Sterling said. The tired Sterling succumbed to a daydream. “Ernie, if he hits a home run to tie this game…”

Johnson laughed at the very idea of it. Sterling went on:

If he hits a home run, this game will be certified as absolutely the nuttiest in the history of baseball.

Camp watched strike two, which had caught a piece of umpire Terry Tata’s “after-hours” zone. Now Sterling sounded like he was starting to pack up his things. “It’ll be an 0-2 pitch.”

Camp took another swing from his heels—and hit Tom Gorman’s forkball as hard as he’d ever hit a ball in his life. “Deep left!” Sterling cried. Left fielder Danny Heep threw up his hands, tossing away his glove. In center field, Lenny Dykstra sunk to his knees. Sterling managed to sound both incredulous and exhilarated: “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! Rick Camp. Rick Camp!”

Camp was all business as he rounded the bases. Ernie Johnson laughed. “If you only knew,” he told the audience, “on the Braves, we kid Rick Camp about his hitting more than anything.”

It was considerably quieter in the Mets’ booth after Kiner called the home run. Finally McCarver broke the silence:

Well, these fans thought they were going to see some fireworks tonight. Rick Camp’s first major-league home run has re-tied this ballgame.

“I mean, that is the most improbable act,” Sterling said. “I mean if you told me that John Sterling’s going to run for president and win, that wouldn’t be any more improbable. That’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened in baseball. I’m telling you the odds on that have to be a million to one. Ten million to one.”

“Rick Camp had struck a blow at the order of the universe,” Gerry Fraley wrote in the Journal. “He took his free-wheeling swing and proved that all things were possible.”

Camp returned to the mound for the top of the 19th inning. He faced Gary Carter, who singled again. After a sacrifice and an intentional walk, Knight, the Mets’ third baseman, doubled in a run that gave the Mets another lead. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about one base hit in my whole career,” Knight said.

The dominoes began falling. Another walk, a single, an error. Three more runs. Second baseman Wally Backman drove in a fifth run with the team’s 28th hit, a team record.

By then it was past 3:45 in the morning. Surely it was over, but the fans—and the players—had seen too much to make assumptions. The dugout benches were unusually crowded; normally a steady stream of players would have left for the clubhouses, but on this night, “No one wanted to miss all the weird things happening,” Howard Johnson said. The fans kept their seats, too. Whatever happened, they knew they’d want to be able to say they’d stayed until the end when they told the story of this game any number of times over the rest of their lives.

Tom Gorman was finally out of the game, subbed for a pinch-hitter, Rusty Staub (another veteran looking a little portly to David Letterman’s eyes). But since the Mets had taken the lead before Gorman was removed, he was in line for a win to go along with his two blown saves.

Requiring one more pitcher, the Mets had no choice but to dip into their starters, and Ron Darling made his first relief appearance since his days pitching at Yale. Darling got a groundout to open the inning but another routine ground ball rolled between Keith Hernandez’s legs. He made no apologies. “I was so exhausted, I could hardly move.”

The next batter flied out, but Darling walked Dale Murphy and Gerald Perry to load the bases. Terry Harper hit a two-run single, making it 16-13. No crowd had ever been so happy to see their relief pitcher step into the batter’s box with two outs. “We want Camp! We want Camp!”

“I was more nervous with Camp up than I would have been if it was Willie Stargell,” Ray Knight said.

Ron Darling kept his cool. “I couldn’t let him hit another one,” he said. “It was no time to pick away at the corners. I threw the ball as hard as I could right down the middle.” Rick Camp swung away, but Darling had beaten him, and the Braves.

It was 3:55 a.m.

The Braves/Mets game on July 4/5, 1985 yielded a bumper crop of outlandish facts and figures.

Six hours and 10 minutes, the longest single game in history, with the latest ending time. Adding in the rain delay, it took eight hours and 15 minutes to determine a winner.

Ten players were on the field for the entire game, including Dale Murphy, Gerald Perry, Wally Backman, and Lenny Dykstra. The latter two had 11 at-bats.

Keith Hernandez called Tom Gorman the night’s “hard-luck winner.” With two blown saves, six innings pitched, and a win, it was a difficult performance to process. “I think I saw it all tonight,” Gorman said. “I should have saved the game. I should have won it. I should have lost it. It’s the weirdest game I’ve ever seen.”

In the clubhouse, a reporter reminded Rick Mahler that he had started the game and Mahler seemed almost surprised. “Did I?”

The Fifth of July fireworks began above Atlanta Fulton County Stadium at 4:01 in the morning. According to the Braves’ PR director, Wayne Minshew, there was no question about whether it was too late to use them. “As long as there were people at the game, we were obligated to fire them off, I thought.”

Less than an hour before dawn’s early light began creeping up from the east, 1500 pounds of fireworks were sent skyward, waking up the whole neighborhood.

The team received “about thirty complaints,” according to Minshew, and the area police precinct passed on several more. The Braves took those lumps with no regrets. They had promised their fans fireworks—and a promise was a promise.

Episode Highlights:

- The indignities of 42 (the age).

- A clown car of legends pulls up to Candlestick Park.

- Extra innings? No problem for these starters.

- The atmospheric adventures of the old ballpark off San Francisco Bay.

- Willie Mays “takes care” of his pitcher (and the wind-burned crowd).

- Two great pitchers compare ailments and exchange stretching tips.

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

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

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

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

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

This is a paywalled post is exclusively for paid subscribers. Our Monday feature stories are for all subscribers, but we’d love it if you can support our work with a paid subscription, and gain access to bonus material like this.

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Here it is! My first paid-subscribers-only post, for the Project 3.18 Partners only. Truly, thank you for your support and showing me there is some monetary value in the work I do.

I’m not entirely set on a strategy with these subscriber-only posts. They will be occasional; I’m not going to snow-in your email inbox!

I’m sure I’ll share some postscripts to the Monday feature stories, I may do some juiced-up versions of smaller things I write on other platforms, and I may do some more opinion/commentary, with a baseball angle, of course. In all cases, I’d love to hear from you in the comments, and we can have a little back-and-forth among friends.

Today I want to expand on something my podcast partner Ted and I discussed yesterday for an episode of Clear the Field. I shared a Very Special Video produced by or at the behest of the A’s, formerly of Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Oakland, presently of Sacramento, and eventually of Las Vegas.

The video is a one-minute promotional clip that seeks to show off the higher-end luxuries planned for the A’s new Las Vegas ballpark, currently under construction. The actual baseball features of the park only appear in the last 12 seconds or so, but that’s fine; every modern stadium has fancy stuff and I don’t begrudge the A’s for wanting to show theirs off.

What’s strange is the fact that most of the video is AI-generated, and not particularly well. Here’s a quick rundown of the amenities you can expect at the A’s new park, according to the clip:

Read more

This Week’s Lineup:

- Ted’s NL All-Star round-up. How many times have you voted?

- The uncanny horrors we can expect at the A’s new ballpark in Las Vegas!

- By far our most sophisticated reference to seat cushions.

- Rafael Devers doesn’t want to be lifted for a pinch-runner. Tries Jedi mind trick. Fails.

- This week in Jazz Chisholm, Jr.

Support Us

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

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

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS

Give a Rating, Like, or Restack

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

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

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

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

On Social Media

Paul: Substack Instagram Facebook

Ted: Substack

Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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

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

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This is the story of the 1944 debut of Joe Nuxhall, the youngest player to ever appear in a Major League Baseball game. Here’s the set-up, if you need it:

“Joe, warm up!” Bill McKechnie yelled. After eight innings, McKechnie’s team was losing, 13-0. Three pitchers had already been torched by the Cardinals’ offense, and the Reds’ manager figured Joe Nuxhall, even at age 15, couldn’t be any worse.

Hearing his name, Nuxhall looked at the manager. He pointed to his chest, as if there might be another Joe Nuxhall pitching for the Reds he hadn’t met in his brief time with the team. Me?

McKechnie nodded. You.

“This was the fifth or sixth big league game I’d ever seen, and I was just sitting there like a spectator,” Nuxhall recalled. “One second you’re admiring the scenery and the next second you’re being told to get in the game. Changes your thinking a little bit.”

He clutched his deteriorating glove and clambered up the dugout steps in donated spikes with turned-up toes. He made it up the first two steps but the last step got him and he spilled out of the dugout and nearly fell on his face. He could smell the dirt. Some in the crowd of 3,510 people laughed; His teammates were nice enough to cover their faces. He walked—carefully now—to the sideline bullpen in short left field, but his face was as red as the “C” on his cap.

Al Lakeman, age 25, greeted him in the bullpen. Lakeman was the bullpen catcher, with limited big-league experience during the war years. Barely more than a kid himself, he began warming up a pitcher 10 years younger.

“In the bullpen at Crosley Field you threw toward the left-field fence,” Nuxhall said. “Poor Al couldn’t even touch the ball. I sent him up the terrace three or four times chasing my wild pitches. He would yell ‘follow through,’ and this, that, or another thing, but I was throwing the ball over his head and all over the damned place.”

Soon it was the top of the ninth. Lakeman gave Nuxhall an encouraging pat on the back and half-shoved him toward the vacant pitcher’s mound.

The Reds’ catcher was Joe Just, age 21, another fringy wartime player with limited game experience. Like Nuxhall, Just was only in the game because McKechnie had given up on winning it. Communication between the inexperienced battery was not a problem. “He didn’t need any signs,” Nuxhall said, “because all I could throw was a fastball.”

At the Nuxhall family home, Joe’s mother, Naomi, was listening to the Reds’ game on the radio, some white noise in the room while she did the ironing. All of a sudden she heard play-by-play announcer Waite Hoyt say a name she never expected him to say. She put the iron down with trembling hands.

“I was in another room,” Don Nuxhall, one of Joe’s younger brothers, recalled. “I heard her yell, ‘Joe’s in the game!’” Don couldn’t tell if she was excited or distressed.

Joe Nuxhall never forgot his bewilderment out on that mound. He didn’t recognize many of the batters he faced, starting with Cardinals infielder George Fallon. All he could do was shove it and hope for the best.

Nuxhall’s first pitch in the major leagues was a strike. Fallon worked a full count and grounded out, and the kid had cleared the first step. The Cardinals’ pitcher, Mort Cooper, batted second. Nuxhall threw another first-pitch strike and Cooper swung through it. The next three pitches were well out of the zone, but Nuxhall got another swinging strike and another full count. Cooper walked and the Cardinals’ lineup turned over.

Even young Joe might have recognized the Cardinals’ starting center fielder, Johnny Hopp, but Hopp was out of the game, replaced by a reserve outfielder named Augie Bergamo. Nuxhall started Bergamo with two swinging strikes, then threw a wild pitch that went to the backstop while Cooper advanced to second. Bergamo fouled two pitches then hit a lazy pop-up caught by the Reds’ shortstop.

Nuxhall had cleared the second step. His wildness had served him, keeping the Cardinals from digging in. “They knew I was throwing nothing but fastballs, but nobody was ready to stand in there. They didn’t know where the ball was going and neither did I.”

The next batter was third baseman Debs Garms, a left-handed former batting champion. Nuxhall started strong again, getting two quick strikes. He was on the third step now. He glanced idly at the on-deck circle, and what he saw there made him do a double-take.

“I knew who Stan Musial was,” Nuxhall said. “I look up and there he’s standing. That’s when I realized exactly where I was.” Nuxhall was like Wile. E. Coyote, running blithely off a cliff with no difficulty—until he stopped to look down.

I thought, “Geez, three weeks ago I was pitching against 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds, seventh, eighth, and ninth graders. Now here’s Stan Musial in the on-deck circle.” After that it was, ball one, ball two, ball three, ball four. I walked Garms and all hell broke loose.

Garms trotted to first and Musial stepped into the box. Nuxhall watched him dig in comfortably, coiling his body into the famous corkscrew stance. Nuxhall vividly remembered seeing the “6” on the back of Musial’s jersey.

“The thing that amazed me,” Nuxhall said, “is that the Cardinals were ahead 13-0, but Musial was standing there like it was a 1-0 game. I would have thrown him a curve, but I didn’t have a curve. All I had was a fastball.”

He was in a jam, and it was time to try out Gee Walker’s advice. Nuxhall reared back and threw his best fastball. Decades later, he could still see that same ball “zoom by” in the other direction. “Wham! He hit a rope to right field, absolutely shillelaghed it. That one loosened my knees.”

The runners advanced a base. No one scored, and there were still two outs. He’d given up his first hit in the big leagues to Stan Musial. Nothing to be ashamed of, but according to one writer, the kid “fell apart like ashes” after that.

First baseman Ray Sanders walked and drove in a run. Just, the catcher, trotted out to the mound to try and settle Nuxhall down. “Boy, that was as useless as anything. I didn’t even hear what he was saying.”

Walker Cooper, the Cardinals’ catcher, walked and another run scored. Left fielder Danny Litwhiler walked and a third run scored. It was almost mesmerizing.

Nuxhall surely did not recognize Emil Verban, another late-inning substitute for St. Louis, but Verban gave him something to remember, another ringing single that drove in two more runs.

Bill McKechnie had seen what he needed to see. He popped out of the dugout and marched briskly to the mound. “Well, son, I think you’ve had enough,” he said, gently. He stuck out his hand for the ball.

Nuxhall walked off the mound in a daze, his head low and his eyes on the ground. Returning to the dugout, he passed over the marks he’d made earlier, tumbling onto the field. He could still smell the dirt.

A writer in 1944 spoke with Nuxhall after the game. The young pitcher dropped into a chair and seemed preoccupied with the Reds emblem on his shirt. “I’m lucky,” he said. “Never thought I’d be pitching in the big time at fifteen. Guess lots of kids would like to do that.”

Warren Giles, the Reds’ general manager, chimed in. “You did all right,” he said, trying to buck Nuxhall up, “until Stan Musial came to bat.”

The boy nodded. “Guess then is when I was really nervous. Things weren’t going right. I walked the next three men…I don’t know who they were.” He apologized to the reporter. “You see, sir, I don’t know all their names yet.”

Later in life, Nuxhall recalled being summoned to Giles’ office. “He was very nice to me. He said, ‘Go down [to the minors] and get some experience.’”

With no family or friends in attendance, there was nothing for Nuxhall to do but walk the six blocks to the bus station, pay his 50 cents, and ride back to Hamilton. Two days later he boarded a train bound for Birmingham, Alabama, home of the minor-league Birmingham Barons.

Nuxhall knew what people wanted when he told the story of that first game, and in four different decades he often wrapped it up with a gauzy, dreamy what-if:

I’ve often wondered what might have been if I had gotten that third strike to get out of the inning. It might have been interesting. Maybe I could have stayed up there for a season or two until the guys got home from the war. Maybe they would have said, “Let’s take another look at this kid.”

Perhaps a butterfly’s wings might have pushed him safely past Stan Musial and over that treacherous third step, but his experience in Birmingham suggested otherwise. “I had a hard time getting started there. I’d throw batting practice. I hit two or three guys and the manager said, ‘Hey, that’s enough.’ They wouldn’t even let me throw batting practice.”

He eventually got a chance in Birmingham, similar to the one he’d gotten in Cincinnati, for better and worse:

They decided to promote the fact that I was there to try and put some more people in the stands: “Come out and see the fifteen-year-old kid pitch.” So, the day comes and there’s a good crowd, ten thousand people. But I only lasted a third of an inning. I walked five, gave up a hit and five earned runs.

Coming off the field, he threw his glove out into the crowd.

Nuxhall didn’t travel with the Barons, so he hung around the ballpark, Rickwood Field, also home to the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. One of his enduring memories of that summer was watching Satchel Paige, then pitching for the Kansas City Monarchs, perform his famous gum wrapper trick, spotting his pitches so perfectly it looked like they were traveling on wires.

All told, Joe Nuxhall pitched one inning in 1944, giving up three hits, 10 walks, and two wild pitches, producing an ERA that looked like a basketball score. He knew it didn’t look good. “I’m sure many people thought, ‘Well, that’s the last we’ll ever see of that kid.’”

Nuxhall spent spring training with the Reds in 1945. He was farmed out to Syracuse, the Reds’ upper-level farm team, where he was still a decade younger than many of his teammates. After struggling with the Chiefs, the Reds sent him to Class D ball in Lima, Ohio. Now he was only a few years younger than his teammates and he finally had success, making 16 starts and going 10-5. He struck out 119 batters—and issued 145 walks. With all the servicemen returning to the game in 1946, Nuxhall left to finish high school, where the former major-leaguer was the biggest fish in more ways than one.

He returned to the minors in 1947 and began the difficult work of maturing. “Control and my temper were the biggest two things that held me back. I was my biggest enemy. I’d get mad at myself when things started going wrong, then everything would mushroom. Blowing up won’t get you anywhere. It took a while before I finally learned that.”

He was famous for being rushed into the major leagues, but baseball took its own time with Joe Nuxhall. The kid who’d never left home lived all over the eastern half of the United States: Syracuse, Lima, Muncie, Columbia, Charleston, and Tulsa, working on his confidence and developing a slider to play off his fastball. In 1952, Nuxhall, age 23, was called up to the Cincinnati Reds.

“You’ve got to be patient,” he said in 1983. “That might be the problem with the young players today—being in a big hurry to get somewhere and never really getting there at all.”

Joe Nuxhall’s wartime stint with the Reds remains a moment to dream on. That it didn’t work out (and probably set the young man back) pales in comparison to the fact that it happened at all.

But how did it happen? How he appeared in a major-league game is no mystery: Nuxhall was like Chekov’s pitcher—as soon as he appeared on the Reds’ bench, it became inevitable that McKechnie would put him into a game, if for no other reason than curiosity.

The tougher question is how Nuxhall ended up on that bench to begin with.

Later in his life, he seemed to follow the predominant narrative. These were strange, desperate times: “Just because of the timeframe, the situation, the war. There were a lot of players in the service and they were looking for anyone with ability.”

Star-depleted teams were also looking for publicity, and Nuxhall theoretically checked a lot of boxes there. This kid could be a story, even a draw in Cincinnati: Come watch Hamilton Joe try to pitch one past Stan Musial! A match-up like that blurred the line between serious competition and spectacle, but these were pragmatic times, too. Local kid. 85-mph fastball. Good publicity. Why not sign him?

Fine, sign him, but why put him directly into the major leagues? The minor leagues still existed. A farm team was the obvious place to stick a 6’ 3” child with a live arm. The Reds would have wanted to fill the big-league roster with players who could help them right away; from that perspective, Joe’s father, Orville, would have been a better bet to try to eat some innings. Everyone in the Reds’ organization would have known what major-league batters were going to do to a 15-year-old with one pitch, but they put Nuxhall in a Reds uniform anyway. Why?

We’ll tell you why:

Because Joe’s mother made them do it.

Our evidence comes from local news accounts in the spring of 1944, when Nuxhall signed his pro contract with the Reds. The team insisted he was a legit talent. McKechnie said that if Nuxhall had been 18 or 19, he’d be a touted prospect instead of a curiosity. “This is no wartime blossom who will fade in big-league baseball.”

Warren Giles defended the unorthodox signing, saying, in part: “Two other clubs wanted him and he would have been signed, war or no war.” Even if he never named the other teams, Giles certainly acted like a man with competition; that competition meant the Nuxhalls had leverage. Naomi Nuxhall put it to good use.

In early April 1944, right around Nuxhall’s field trip to Opening Day, the Dayton Journal Herald visited the Nuxhalls in their home. Naomi did most of the talking for the family. Like any mother in that situation, she admitted she was wary of putting too much on her son:

“At first I was a little skeptical of his becoming a ballplayer. He’s still only a boy. That St. Louis trip last year was the first time he was ever away from home. You see, I couldn’t think of Joe going all the way to Birmingham by himself…”

…but, Naomi had told the Reds’ representatives, she was willing to let him take the bus to Crosley Field:

That was how a 15-year-old kid ended up on a major-league roster. The war, yes, the publicity, sure, but it happened because Naomi was playing hardball in the kitchen-table negotiations. The Nuxhalls had walked away from two minor-league contract offers a year earlier. Either the Reds stashed Joe Nuxhall on their major-league roster to appease his mom or they risked losing a talented local prospect who had other, out-of-state suitors.

If Naomi Nuxhall had stayed quiet, her son would have become merely the youngest prospect on the Birmingham Barons. Instead, he made history as the youngest person to ever appear in a Major League Baseball game…and then became the youngest prospect in Birmingham.

Once he made it back to Cincinnati, Joe Nuxhall stuck there for the vast majority of the next 15 years. He was an All-Star in 1955 and 1956. The child prodigy turned out to be a late bloomer: His best season came relatively late in his career, in 1963, when he went 15-8 with a 2.61 ERA.

On September 22, 1963, Crosley Field bid farewell to Stan Musial. Musial was retiring after the season, and on the occasion of his final appearance in their park the Reds presented their ancient nemesis with a cake and a rocking chair.

The pitcher assigned to usher Stan the Man out of Cincinnati was Joe Nuxhall. The Reds’ comeback ace was brilliant that day, allowing just one hit in the first eight innings of a complete game, his 14th victory. The hit didn’t come from Musial, who struck out in the first and flied out in the fourth. He was ceremonially removed from the game in the fifth inning, and he doffed his cap to the appreciative crowd and ran off the field.

A few minutes after Musial’s departure, Nuxhall climbed out of the home dugout and headed back to work. The Reds’ old lefthander wasn’t as spry as he’d once been, but the boards of the dugout steps never gave him any trouble—he knew them too well.

We’ve thrown two features at you in two days, but we’re going to be off next week, so it will even out. We’ll be back after the Fourth of July. Be safe and have fun!

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

Happy Father’s Day to all who celebrate! From the Griffeys to the Bells to the Carays to the Wendelstedts, sometimes the national pastime seems like one big “take your kid to work” day, and we’ve got a special story today along those lines.

If you’re a dad, enjoy, and if you’re not a dad, enjoy—then send it to a dad so they can enjoy it, too.

Bill Veeck, the owner-operator of the Indians, Browns, and White Sox, loved the seedier aspects of his job. He moonlighted with security staff, helping break up fights—and coming away the shiners to prove it—and enjoyed visiting with the gamblers, who were as much a part of the ecosystem in his ballparks as the umpires and concessionaires. Just as the un-incarcerated Johnny Cash loved singing songs about prison life, Bill Veeck loved getting as close to trouble as decorum allowed.

“You meet all kinds at the ballpark,” he said in 1978, prefacing a story about John Dillinger, the famous bank robber of the 1930s. Dillinger was a customer at a time when Veeck was an employee of the Chicago Cubs.

Dillinger couldn’t miss a Cubs’ game, even when he was one of the most wanted crooks in the country. He started out with box seats behind the dugout. When the cops started chasing him and he became more widely known, he moved to the bleachers in the outfield.

Things got so bad for him he had to get a face job so he could still see the Cubs. After he got the face job, he still sat in the bleachers. We knew who he was even after the face job. One day the cops got a tip that he would be in a particular spot in the bleachers and they had more cops than I’ve ever seen all over the place. They didn’t know the guy in the spot, but it was Dillinger. He watched the game right in the middle of them and after it was over he got up and walked right through them.

That’s a typically Veeckian anecdote, presenting the ballpark, in this case Wrigley Field, as the great equalizer in which Americans from all walks of life could congregate. Criminals like Dillinger “were just customers to me,” Veeck said. In his ideal world, cops sat next to criminals, enjoying the same game, and he had the honor of selling everyone their tickets.

He inherited this ethos from his father, William L. Veeck, a much more upstanding man by all appearances, but practical when it came to business. He once showed his son a desk at Wrigley Field, piled high with money from the day’s ticket proceeds. “You know, Bill,” he said. “It’s a very interesting thing. You look at that money and it all looks exactly the same, doesn’t it? You can’t tell who put it into your box office. It’s all the same color, the same size, the same shape. You remember that.”

William L. Veeck, who Bill always called “daddy,” was a product of small-town Boonville, Indiana. Born in 1886, William began his career working for his father, a wagon builder and cabinet maker, but he gravitated towards the newspaper business. He took a production job at the town paper and began a career in journalism.

When his son, William Jr., was born in 1914, William Veeck was a sports writer working for the Chicago American newspaper. Writing under the pen name “Bill Bailey,” William wrote commentary without fear or favor, and the Cubs, a middling team during this period, came in for their share of criticism. Some of Bill Bailey’s even-handed comments attracted the attention of William Wrigley Jr., who was then a minority shareholder in the Cubs.

Wrigley found out who Bill Bailey was and invited Veeck to dinner. In the best version of the story we’ve seen, in Wrigleyville, by Peter Golenbock, “during their conversation, William Veeck described the Cubs by saying, ‘My infant son [that would be Bill] could throw his bottle farther than the team can hit.’”

Wrigley was either irritated or delighted, saying, “If you’re so smart, why don’t you see if you can do a better job?” He was about to take over as principal owner of the team, so this was both a taunt and an offer of employment. Veeck accepted.

Bill Veeck described Wrigley, a chewing-gum mogul, as “a well-upholstered, jovial man who liked people and knew what made them tick.”

Bill described his own father as dignified above all else. William was “Mr. Veeck” to everyone, leaving his son to find identity in informality, inviting people to call him Bill. Others remembered William Veeck as an “upright” and “starchy” man who became a patriarch and counselor for the Cubs’ players.

The two Williams ushered in a miniature golden age on the North Side. Shortstop Woody English said the players “got a new straw hat every spring and a new felt hat every fall.” Salary holdouts were rare, and Veeck seems to have enjoyed the “write in what you feel you deserve,” gimmick at contract time, a tactic that won admiration from the players, who inevitably wrote in less than they were actually worth.

“Veeck and Wrigley were two great men,” English recalled, “such decent fellows. To us ballplayers they were like fathers, part of our family. They took care of us.”

Veeck even covered for the players whose hard-drinking proclivities made life more complicated in the Prohibition era. As long as they showed up in playing shape, that was good enough for Veeck, who also employed this approach at home. Young Bill recalled frequenting a speakeasy as a teenager—until his father found out. William confronted his son at home, but instead of punishing him, he invited him to have a drink with dinner, saying he didn’t think Bill should be drinking, but “it’s a sorry state of affairs when you do something away from home that you can’t do here.”

William Veeck didn’t shy away from the kind of ambitious thinking that got him the Cubs’ top job in the first place. He persuaded Wrigley to invest in advertising and radio broadcasting, and was rewarded by the sight of out-of-state license plates on cars parking in the vicinity of Wrigley Field on game days. He suggested shifting the Cubs’ usual crowd by attracting more women with steeply discounted Friday tickets. “Ladies’ Days” became a runaway hit, attracting upwards of 20,000 female fans, although, according to a contemporary verse, the ladies could be pretty rough:

I saw a wounded baseball fan tottering down the street,
Encased in bandages and tape, and bruised from head to feet;
And as I called the ambulance, I heard the poor guy say:
“I bought a seat in Wrigley Field, but it was ladies’ day.”

Veeck was not, however, a miracle worker. The Cubs spent many of his 14 years as president stuck behind perennial powerhouses in New York, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh, but they won pennants in 1929 and 1932 and annual attendance at Wrigley Field more than doubled during his tenure.

William Wrigley died suddenly in January 1932. Control of the Cubs passed to William’s son, Phillip. Phillip was a capable hand in the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company, a technocrat and tinkerer with no preexisting or discernible interest in baseball. As Bill Veeck wrote in his 1962 memoir, Veeck—As in Wreck: “If [Phil Wrigley] has any particular feeling for baseball, any real liking for it, he has disguised it magnificently.”

Still, Phillip announced he was keeping the Cubs after his father’s death: “The club and park stand as memorials to my father. I will never dispose of my holdings in the club as long as the chewing-gum business remains profitable enough to retain it.”

At first, this was a relatively light burden for Phillip to bear. He had one direct report, the doughty William Veeck, who controlled all aspects of the organization. Both men preferred this arrangement.

In the fall of 1933, the Cubs were finishing up a third-place season. During a mid-September series against the New York Giants, William Veeck reportedly sat in the stands despite cold and wet conditions, and this was said to have brought on a nasty case of influenza. He rested at home for several weeks but failed to improve, and he was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago on September 29, where tests revealed a much more serious condition: leukemia.

By October 3, his condition had become critical. Some reports said he had pneumonia, but the interaction between his underlying illness and whatever he’d picked up sitting in the stands at Wrigley was and is unclear. His doctors administered oxygen therapy when he began to have trouble breathing and he rallied briefly on October 4, holding conversations with his immediate family and John Seys, a long-time Cubs vice president, at his bedside. We don’t know what William Veeck said to his son, but we do know what he said to Seys. The Cubs were about to begin the annual City Series exhibition against the White Sox, a cherished postseason activity. “If anything happens to me,” William Veeck reportedly said, “I want the series to go on.” He lapsed into unconsciousness that night and never awoke, dying early in the morning on October 5.

The game went on, but the bereft Cubs looked “listless and dispirited” in a 2-0 loss to the White Sox, while flags flew at half-staff overhead. “He was the fairest, squarest fellow that ever lived,” Cubs manager Charlie Grimm said. “He was a true friend to every man on the team. His death is a great shock to us.”

A funeral was quickly planned for October 7, and no less than commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis stepped in, ordering the City Series postponed so the Cubs’ players could attend the services.

Bill Veeck was attending Kenyon College when his father became ill. He drove home and was with William for at least the last week or so of his life. This time became a core memory for Bill, 19 years old, and it also became, later on, one of his most colorful stories, as told in his memoir:

The doctors told me there was no hope. They also told me that the last thing a dying man can hold in his stomach is wine. I had done little enough for my father, I knew, and I was determined that he would go out in some comfort and some style.

Prohibition had just ended. The bootleg supply was drying up; the legitimate wineries were not yet in full production. But there was one man in Chicago, I knew, who would know where the best champagne was to be had. Al Capone. I knew him slightly from the ballpark and I knew some of his boys even better.

I hurried to Al Capone’s headquarters at the Hotel Metropole and told him what I wanted and why. “Kid,” he said, “I’ll send a case of champagne right over.” The case was there when I got back. Every morning during those last few days of my father’s life, a case of imported champagne was delivered to the door.

The last nourishment that passed between my daddy’s lips on this earth was Al Capone’s champagne.

Marvelous story. We’ve got Bill’s love for his father, his craftiness and determination, his associations with baseball and criminality, and a connection to another famous (perhaps the most famous) Chicago figure of the period. There’s just one problem:

It can’t be true. Like, at all.

There are two cracks in Bill’s story. First, the setting. Al Capone did have his “headquarters” at the Hotel Metropole—between 1925 and 1928. After that, Capone relocated his operation to a different Chicago hotel, the Lexington. Well, that’s not a big deal; Bill probably just mixed up the order of Capone’s gangland fortresses. Happens to us all the time. But by 1933, when William Veeck fell ill, Capone was long gone from any hotel, and that brings us to Flaw No. 2.

In October 1931, two years before William Veeck died, Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for tax evasion. He began serving that sentence, with much fanfare, at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, in May 1932. He was still there in 1933. Here’s a fun tidbit we found from that summer:

Al Capone is playing on the Atlanta prison’s baseball team. Too bad the prison doesn’t boast of a tennis team. Al used to be quite a racketeer, you know.

Now—we’re really stretching here—maybe Bill was trying to say that he went to Capone’s suites at the Lexington and met with somebody there, an associate still running the booze business. Nope. The judge who oversaw Capone’s conviction went to great lengths to ensure the hotel lair was cleared out in 1932, after Capone was put on a train heading south.

And lest we believe Bill misspoke (miswrote, actually, which is harder to do), here he is in 1978 telling the same story to a journalist, who lauded Veeck’s “astounding recollection of the past.” As far as we can tell, this is the only version of the story that exists outside of Veeck’s memoir.

I knew Al because he was a great customer at the ballpark. This was during Prohibition days. He was a great fan of the Cubs.

I’ll tell you a story about Al. My daddy was dying of leukemia. He was in a Chicago hospital. Long after he couldn’t keep anything else in his stomach, he could keep champagne down because the bubbles would keep it from coming up. The doctors told me champagne would be good for him, but you couldn’t get it legally during Prohibition.

I went down to the hotel Al worked out of. When I went in, I told his boys downstairs I wanted to see Mr. Capone. They called him and he told them to send me up. They frisked me first. When I got past the guards to him, he asked how my father was and I told him that was the reason I was there. He asked me what he could do. I told him I needed some champagne, the kind he drank, not the kind he sold. He got one of his boys to get a case and the guy followed me to the hospital. From that day until my daddy died, there was a case of champagne in his room every day.

There can be no doubt that this story portrays Bill conversing directly with Al Capone, who was also known at that time as Federal Inmate No. 40886. This is “pants-on-fire” stuff.

What is true in this story? The timing of Prohibition ending. The 21st amendment was in the process of being ratified by the states in the fall of 1933, so obtaining champagne would have required some extralegal assistance. And Capone was certainly an enormous Cubs fan, as we explored in an earlier post:

Researching that piece led us to this one, because we realized the dates were problematic. Our hope was to find some angle that showed Bill Veeck was merely fudging the truth of the encounter, adding a little extra juice for narrative purposes, as he often did, but given the dates and the particulars involved, we can only conclude that this story is a whopper through and through, made out of whole cloth for reasons known only to the craftsman.

Anyone who knows anything about Bill Veeck knows he was a long way from George Washington by truthfulness. Phillip Wrigley certainly knew it. He hired Bill into the Cubs’ organization after his father died, and the two sons of Cubs became peers for many decades. “His father was a very high-class gentleman,” Wrigley recalled, “thorough and serious-minded, which Bill certainly wasn’t.”

Bill was far too wild for Phillip’s tastes, and the younger man would have to strike out on his own before he could start giving away lobsters and ice cakes and shooting fireworks all over the place. But even Phillip appreciated “Young Bill’s” charm: “He’s always got an idea for a good story,” Phillip said in 1975. “The story’s not always accurate, but it’s always a good idea.”

Even Veeck admitted tall tales were part of his legacy. After he left baseball in 1981, he told a reporter, “I miss a lot of people, a lot of conversation, a lot of lies being told and the ones you are telling.” Everybody did it; he just did it the best.

But it surprised us to find such an intimate anecdote, featuring Bill holding a cup of champagne up to his dying father’s lips, to be entirely made up. Perhaps it happened just as Bill said, except the benefactor was some no-name, no-neck gangster and not the most notorious man in the country. The story really pops with Capone’s name and reputation, and the man who told it put a high premium on entertainment: “Nothing beats a well-told tale.”

He was right about that. The Capone anecdote was heavily trafficked when Veeck’s memoir was released in 1962 and frequently cited in many later profiles of his life. Later versions sometimes had Capone trading champagne for season tickets, but that is both implausible–Veeck was just a college kid, not yet working for the Cubs and far too smart to promise Capone something he didn’t have—and makes for a poorer tale; Veeck himself never told that version.

In the chapter on his father, titled, “A Man of Dignity,” Bill Veeck told many stories which seem true. Together, they portray a boy who watched and took notes while his father navigated the many complexities of running a baseball team with class and integrity. “I am not going to say I had a ‘close’ relationship with my father,” Bill wrote.

He was 37 years old when I was born. He was my father and I was his son and there was never any nonsense that we were pals or could be pals. I had something more with him. I admired my father and I liked him.

That, certainly, was true.

Here’s to the dads out there. May your champagne be legal and consumed in happy moments today, yielding true stories to be told for years to come.

Programming Note

We’ll be back tomorrow with the much-anticipated conclusion to Joe Nuxhall’s major-league debut. We’ll be off next week, so you’ll have time to catch up.

In 1980, Detroit Tigers executive Jim Campbell closed the outfield bleachers at Tiger Stadium and vowed to win a generational standoff.

This is the conclusion of the story we began in our last episode, “A Day Without Bleacher Creatures.” Be sure to check that out!

Episode Highlights:

- Jim Campbell sets a Clear the Field record for cusses.

- Tigers players pick a side.

- A modern-day folk hero emerges.

- The American League cracks down on...beach balls.

- The rise of the “Bleacher Creatures” courtesy of WABX FM.

- The outrage of Jim Campbell and Howard Beale.

Tigers fans, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and share your memories of the bleachers at old Tiger Stadium:

Leave a comment

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Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni

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On February 19, 1944, Warren Giles, vice president and general manager of the Cincinnati Reds, announced the club had signed a left-handed pitching prospect. Nothing unusual about that, but two details of this particular signing were decidedly strange. Giles said the new pitcher would skip the minor leagues and go straight to the major-league club—but not until June, because before he could report, Joe Nuxhall, age 15, had to finish the ninth grade.

In response to manpower shortages, professional baseball teams, including the Reds, had relaxed certain standards in search of playable talent, and Nuxhall’s age immediately put him squarely among that motley crew of wartime baseball players. Giles acknowledged the team was being more creative than usual, but he insisted Nuxhall was a real prospect. “We aren’t signing him because of the war situation.”

But even if it wasn’t a stunt, the Reds weren’t going to shy away from the obvious angle. “He will report almost two months before his 16th birthday,” Giles promised. “It is possible that he will appear in a National League game at the age of 15.”

At the time of his signing, Joe Nuxhall could not drive, vote, work, or even shave, but he could turn heads. He was six feet, three inches tall, with a large head, a “lantern jaw,” a left arm likened to a tree trunk, and enormous hands that “hung like bunches of bananas.” No one could deny his was a frame to dream on.

Nuxhall was already a sporting legend in his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio. As the center for the Woodrow Wilson Junior High basketball team, he practically delivered the school back-to-back championships. Nuxhall dominated his competition so thoroughly that the school principal didn’t let him play offense during “friendly” games, as it was unfair to the other kids. When he was allowed to shoot in competition, he scored an average of 21 points per game. But as good as Nuxhall was at basketball against other kids, he was even better at baseball—facing adults.

In the early 1940s, more than 500 major leaguers interrupted their careers to enlist or answer the summons of their local draft board. Still more professionals left the Negro Leagues and the minor leagues throughout the country. The war was a careless, rummaging hand inside baseball, plucking out what was useful and leaving behind a jumble of odds and ends. The pace of call-ups and send-downs increased dramatically as the remaining players were shuffled around to replace those gone to war, and every player who got a shot in the majors probably created a hole somewhere else.

The Reds were hardly the only team resorting to searching underneath the proverbial couch cushions for bats and arms. In 1943, Branch Rickey, the era’s baseball genius, sent form letters to 20,000 high school coaches nationwide, looking for projectable talent. 2,000 hopefuls attended the subsequent tryouts, and 400 of them received contracts to play in the Dodgers’ farm system. One of them was future Hall-of-Famer Duke Snider.

After a similar round of local tryouts, Philadelphia’s Connie Mack was intrigued by a skinny, 5’ 6” infielder and invited him to join the Athletics for spring training in 1944. Nellie Fox was 16 years old and so green he showed up wearing a Boy Scout pin in his jacket lapel. After that spring, Fox was sent down to the minors, but he’d be back.

The Reds, meanwhile, had bird-dog scouts scouring sandlots throughout the Ohio Valley, and they’d heard good things about an amateur pitcher named Nuxhall.

Orville Nuxhall worked in a factory making locomotives and diesel engines at the time. This was 1943, so his machinist’s job supported a wife and five children and left him plenty of free time to indulge in his passion for baseball. Tall and strong at 34 years old, Orville was well-known in Hamilton, Ohio’s Sunday Baseball League, where the hard-throwing right-hander was called “Ox,” and that’s who a few Reds scouts came looking for one Sunday in the summer of 1943.

They knew to find their quarry at the Hamilton sports complex, a baseball village in the city of 48,000 people. “There were four diamonds,” Joe Nuxhall recalled, “side-by-side, and there might be five thousand people scattered around. Most of the guys who played were older, sole providers for their families or had health problems that kept them out of the service.”

The scouts walked up to the first diamond off the parking lot, asking after Ox. They were pointed in the direction of Diamond No. 3, where Ox’s team was playing. The scouts were about to move off when the teams on this field, No. 1, changed sides and a new pitcher took over. He was left-handed, very young, and very tall.

“Who’s that?” the scouts asked.

“Oh, that’s Ox’s son.”

Ox’s son had been coming to the sports complex with his father since he was nine years old. “I pitched a little bit when I was twelve,” Joe said. “By the time I was fourteen I was pitching every Sunday.” At that point he was playing in a league where the youngest players were 18 and 19, but an exception had been made Joe, who regularly struck out 10-12 adult batters per game with an 80 mile-per-hour fastball.

Seeing that fastball, the Reds’ scouts stuck around a Diamond No. 1 a little longer.

Orville Nuxhall wasn’t forgotten. “They were just looking for people who had ability,” Joe recalled. At the end of the day Joe’s father received a contract offer to pitch for the Reds’ Class C team in Ogden, Utah, but he couldn’t make it work. “[Orville] had five kids to feed. He couldn’t take the gamble, but the way I always tell it is that I beat my father out for a job.”

The scouts didn’t offer Joe a contract right away, but they did invite him to a tryout at Crosley Field, the Reds’ home park. Like Hamilton’s rec league, the tryout was supposed to be for much older kids, but exceptions fell on Joe Nuxhall wherever he went.

Later that summer, while the Reds rested on an off-day in their schedule, “a motley collection of schoolboys” did their best in front of manager Bill McKechnie and his coaches. During the tryout, the grown-ups’ eyes kept drifting back to the rangy left-hander.

“I had terrific control that day,” Nuxhall remembered. “The catcher just stuck up his glove and I hit it. Nobody could have been more surprised than I was.”

At one point Nuxhall tried a few knuckleballs, but McKechnie redirected him. “Son, cut that stuff out. Stick with the fastball.”

In the war-depleted years, the eldest players on rosters often doubled as coaches, and that included outfielder Estel Crabtree, who got the best look at Nuxhall’s pitching.

“He was much too good for all the other kids,” Crabtree said a few months later. “And boy, how wild.”

I’m working as a plate umpire in a practice game and he’s got those batters diving and ducking, as wild as he is, and I’m diving and ducking back there too, believe me. He was so much better than the rest of them, I didn’t give him all the close calls. Every time I called a close pitch a ball, I could see him bristle. He was smart enough not to say anything, but he glared. I never got any dirtier looks from anybody.

The Reds had expected to be impressed with Nuxhall’s physical gifts, but here was the other essential ingredient: drive. “He’s going to make a pitcher, all right,” Crabtree said.

McKechnie, who had a sterling reputation for shepherding young pitching, agreed, and Joe became the second Nuxhall to be offered a professional contract to play for the Class C Ogden Reds. Like his father, he turned it down.

“We had a real good basketball team [at Wilson Junior High],” he explained later. “We were going for a third championship. I didn’t want to let the other guys down.”

But the Reds didn’t quite take no for an answer. Before Nuxhall’s school year/basketball season began, they invited him to accompany the team on a road trip to St. Louis and get a taste of life in the big leagues.

The Cardinals were World Series champions on their way to a second-straight pennant. Nuxhall made special note of Stan Musial, the right fielder about to win his first Most Valuable Player award. Musial got a hit in every game, and in the second game he went 4-for-5. The Reds lost three out of four, twice in extra-innings walk-offs, but for a 14-year-old sitting on their bench who had never been outside of Ohio, the series was an extended daydream.

Cincinnati’s traveling secretary gave Nuxhall five dollars of walking-around money, and he blew it all in a batting cage he found near the park. Two Reds, second baseman Lonny Frey and catcher Tony DePhillips, took him out to dinner one night. Nuxhall ordered the steak, a big one.

He pitched batting practice before the games. “I learned a lot from the Reds [on that trip],” Nuxhall said in 1944. “They taught me to hide my grip on the ball, how to properly stand on the rubber, and some more things. But they didn’t tamper with my delivery. I threw the way I wanted.“ His fastball was up to 85.

With Nuxhall back on the floor, the Wilson Junior High basketball team completed a three-peat. Once that banner was hung, he turned his attention back to baseball, reopening negotiations with the Reds. On February 18, they had a deal. Sitting at the kitchen table of the family home on Vine Street, Orville Nuxhall signed an unprecedented major-league contract on behalf of his minor son.

Nuxhall received a $500 signing bonus and a monthly salary of $175. “These days, I probably would have been worth a buck or two more,” he observed in 1983, and the price of banana hands has only gone up since.

Nuxhall received special dispensation from the principal to miss school on April 18, Opening Day at Crosley Field, where he put on his Cincinnati Reds uniform and was introduced as a major leaguer to 30,000 fans.

After the ceremonies, he made his way to the dugout bench, which seemed impossibly long. As he sat there, idly twirling his glove, Si Burick, a writer for the Dayton Daily News, made a careful study of this baseball curiosity.

Burick described Nuxhall “a little on the open-mouthed side,” but the kid seemed almost unnaturally cool and composed in the enormous moment. He got tired of sitting and solicited another rookie, catcher Joe Just, age 21, to warm him up. “He is no figure of grace walking,” Burick wrote. “Maybe he never will be. He’s big all over and knock-kneed. But he can throw it, all right.”

After warming up, Nuxhall wandered back to the bench. As the Reds played the Chicago Cubs, he sat next to center fielder Gee Walker, age 36, who struck up a conversation.

“All right, Joe,” Walker said. “Suppose you’re pitching out there today. What would you throw?” The boy jokingly demonstrated how he’d prepare a spitball, but Walker pressed him for a real answer.

Nuxhall frowned. “I don’t know anything about these guys. I’d have to depend on what my catcher knew about them.”

“In the jams, too?”

“I guess so.”

“Let me give you a tip, kid. And remember it now and for all time. In the jams, no matter what anybody else wants you to throw, you give the hitter what you consider your best pitch. That’s the best thing for you to do when you’re in a hole. Give him your best.”

“Thanks, Gee.” Nuxhall leaned back, staring out at the field.

Walker shook his head, bemused. “There isn’t a trace of excitement in him,” he told Burick, the writer. “No imagination, I guess.”

That spring, Nuxhall joined the Reds for weekend games at home, which amounted to no more than six dates. “No one worked with me too much,” he remembered. “I’d go to the field on Saturday and pitch a little batting practice. My control was terrible and sometimes I’d be lucky to get one out of ten over the plate. After batting practice I’d sit on the bench and watch the game.”

Nuxhall remembered showing up with only his dress shoes, but he soon inherited an old pair of baseball spikes. “The shoes turned up so much that the front spike never touched the ground.” He used a Johnny Vander Meer signature glove that was so broken-in he worried it was on the verge of disintegrating. He knew he must have been quite a sight, but “by golly, I was a big-league ballplayer.”

Too young to drive, he took a bus to the park, paying the 50-cent fare each way and walking six blocks from where the bus stopped to Crosley Field. His parents had their hands full with his younger siblings, and none of his family came out to the park with him. No one, Nuxhall included, expected he would ever actually pitch.

As the weeks went by, he grew restless. He decided he wanted to pitch. That was why he’d signed, and was presumably why Cincinnati had let him stay with the major-league club. “I hope I stay with the Reds,” he’d said after signing contract. “I figure I can learn more from the big leaguers than I can by going to the minors.”

On June 6, 1944, Allied forces began the long-planned invasion of Europe, storming the beaches of Normandy, and Joe Nuxhall graduated from junior high. Two days later, the Reds officially activated Nuxhall and several other newly signed players, bringing the team roster to 27. The organization had until midnight on June 15 to cut that number down to 25, but first they had to figure out what they had, especially with the new “men.”

Warren Giles, the general manager, said McKechnie would decide how to handle their rawest recruit, but offered a vote of confidence. “The boy is big and strong and looked very good in the times that I’ve seen him pitch. He’s got a real fastball.”

But that fastball was all he had. “My curve won’t fool anyone,” he told a reporter. “I call it a curve, but it’s nothing more than a roundhouse that is liable to wind up in the reserved seats.” Perhaps there was a knuckler, but McKechnie had already indicated he wasn’t interested.

On June 8, the Reds began a homestand with four games against the first-place Cardinals. Bucky Walters, Cincinnati’s best remaining pitcher, got the job done that day, allowing one run over nine innings. The two teams had scheduled an off-day on June 9, setting up a Sunday doubleheader, so they reconvened on Saturday, June 10.

It was a hazy summer day, and Crosley Field swam in heavy, humid air, but there was nothing heavy about the balls flying off the Cardinals’ bats. Unlike the war-depleted Reds, the defending National League champions had managed to fend off the draft lottery gremlins and remained at nearly full strength. With shortstop Marty Marion, center fielder Johnny Hopp, the brother battery of Mort and Walker Cooper, and Stan Musial, one jealous Cincinnati writer described the Cardinals as “the only team in the majors which even remotely resembles a big-league outfit.”

These big-leaguers chased starter Bill Lohrman, another call-up, during a six-run second inning. At least Lohrman recorded a few outs. His replacement, Ed Huesser, gave up four straight hits and two more runs scored. Nuxhall watched his teammates’ struggles with wide eyes, thinking, “Geez, these guys can hit.”

A third Reds pitcher, Buck Fausett, staunched the flood to a steady stream, allowing five more runs over the next six innings. Every Cardinal had at least one hit and most, including Mort Cooper, the pitcher, had two or three.

When Fausett gave up two runs in the eighth inning, McKechnie threw in the towel. The Reds were losing 13-0, and there was nothing left to do but try out some of the team’s new pitching before the upcoming roster deadline. McKechnie knew who he wanted to see first.

“Joe!”

Down at the far end of the bench, Nuxhall didn’t react. There was no reason McKechnie would want to talk to him in the middle of a game. He figured the manager was calling for Joe Just, who’d taken over at catcher during the blowout.

“Joe!”

Nuxhall turned and found McKechnie looking right at him. Now that he had the kid’s attention, the manager jerked his head in the direction of the Reds’ sideline bullpen.

“Go warm up.”

In the conclusion, Joe Nuxhall makes history and—for the first time—Project 3.18 exposes the shadowy figure who made it all happen.

Over on Clear the Field:

Ted and I revisit an intergenerational battle at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium in 1980, when a normally patient executive is pushed to his breaking point by beach balls, loose change, and strategically hidden flasks of rum.

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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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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Original Research and Writing: Paul Jackson

Production and Music: Ted Walker

Design: Ketaki Kulkarni