The Chicago Daily News began its“My Biggest Baseball Day” series with the memories of nine of the paper’s sportswriters. After Leonard Lewis, the sports editor led off with a fan's experience, the next seven writers described memorable games and players they covered as reporters. It wasn’t until Angelo Biondo contributed the ninth and final writer’s account that the focus returned to the fan’s perspective. But while Lewis chose a classic World Series matchup featuring the legendary Christy Mathewson, Biondo wrote about a meaningless August 25, 1922 game between the fifth-place Chicago Cubs and the seventh-place Phillies. Few, if any, of the players mentioned in Biondo’s account will mean much to today’s readers. Indeed, they probably weren't baseball household names in their own time.
While the game was insignificant to the larger baseball world then and now, its importance to Biondo can’t be overstated because it was the 11-year-old boy's first major league game. Such experiences are still meaningful today, but not in the same way they were over a century ago. In a world before television, the only way to see major league baseball was in person. Even though the August 1922 game was between two second-division teams, playing out the season, it didn’t lack for record-setting performances. In his first major league game, Biondo witnessed two records that have never been broken – total runs by two teams (49) and most hits by two clubs (51). Also included was the rare occurrence of a player, Marty Callahan, batting three times in one inning.
Many of us would have been thrilled to see the offensive fireworks. But Biondo’s reaction was one of great disappointment because the sloppy play destroyed the “most beautiful illusion a boy ever had.” Why then did Biondo, who saw many memorable games as a writer, choose what he considered “probably the worst major league game ever played?" It’s speculation, but possibly he looked back on that game with gratitude because he learned early on that major league baseball players, no matter how talented, are human beings who make mistakes. That knowledge would have been useful to a sportswriter whether reporting great achievements or understanding the plight of those who fail, especially in big moments.
The August day was pleasantly warm and a cloudless sky dispelled the sickening fear I had endured for 24 hours that rain would spoil my first look at major league baseball. All through the night I had tossed and spun in my bed, waiting in sleepless anxiety for a dawn it seemed would never come. I was 11 at the time, an age when baseball can be just about the most important thing in a boy’s life, and that day I was to see the Cubs, yes, the big league Cubs play for the first time. Through the courtesy of the management, the neighborhood playground was taking to Wrigley Field, a group of boys and I was one of ‘em. (You see I formed the habit of attending ball games on a pass at an early age).
That the Phillies then as now [1943] the humblest of National League teams, were to provide the opposition was of little importance. The big thing was that, at last, I was to see a major league baseball game.
For several years I had listened with reverential interest of the heroics of the big leaguers as narrated, not without exaggeration, by the older boys. Most of the tales just then revolved around the champion White Sox of ’17 and ’19. How the fabulous Eddie Cicotte threw a snake ball that evaded the mighty swings of the opposing batters by literally curving around the flying bat. How "Shoeless" Joe Jackson time and again robbed enemy sluggers of home runs by climbing the bleacher wall at Comiskey Park and stretching over to snare powerful drives with one hand. And others much the same.
Defense was the keynote of most of these tales, the Ruthian eran was still around the corner, so it was natural that I, having absorbed them thoroughly and without question, should have attained the conclusion that big league ball was a continuous series of 1-0, 2-1 and similarly tight battles. Nothing could have prepared me less for what was to come.
Somehow I fidgeted through the endless morning and afternoon found an excited but happy boy headed northward on the “L.” My heart all but stopped when I spied the massive green of Wrigley Field so stately and beautiful did it appear. Once inside, I gaped with appropriate awe at the smooth infield, the velvety green outfield and the mammoth scoreboard that then stretched all the way down to the ground behind center field.
Soon a husky voice barked through the largest megaphone I had ever viewed: “Batteries for today’s game – For Philadelphia, [Jimmy] Ring and [Butch] Henline; for the Cubs, [Tony] Kaufman and [Bob] O'Farrell,” and my supreme moment had arrived.
A Cub run in the first inning brought forth lusty soprano cheers from my young throat, but this elation quickly subsided when Philadelphia came back with three runs in the second. But I was back straining my vocal cords in the Cubs’ half as the Bruins, after two out, staged a parade of batters around the bases that did not conclude until 10 runs had crossed the plate. Hits, walks and errors spun men around the base paths in too dizzy a sequence for recollection. Only one detail remains clear – that swarthy Hack Miller, the Cub left-fielder who was built short and stubby like the great Hack Wilson , who was to come, and sometimes pulverized the ball with the same gusto, hit a home run in front of the scoreboard in center.
Two runs in the third and one in the fourth for the Phillies created little furor, and then, in the Cubs’ fourth came the outburst that was to shatter for me forever the simple, beautiful, boyish, illusion that every major leaguer was an unerring god, every major league park a Mount Olympus.
Before unbelieving, moist eyes, the Cubs scored 14 times. Yes, 14 runs crossed the plate as the Phillies put on the most horrible exhibition of baseball I have ever seen. Bases on balls, too numerous to recollect; errors, both of commission and omission; hits that should have been out, and some solid blows, the most lusty of which was a second homer by Miller, this one to right field, combined to manufacture the astounding run total. In this inning Marty Callaghan, right-fielder, went to bat three times, hitting safely twice and striking out once.
“I’ll bet the Eagles or Ravens (neighborhood teams) could beat those Phils,” I whispered to the boy next to me.
By this time the score was 25 to 6 and three runs for the Phillies in the fifth did nothing more than reveal that the new Cub hurler, [George] Stueland, possessed even less pitching stuff than Tony Kaufman, who had given way to a pinch-hitter in the fourth. Another run in the sixth ended the Cub scoring for the day, and in the seventh neither team scored, the only frame this happened in the entire game.
Few of the 7,000 spectators remained in the stands when the Phillies staged their eight-run uprising in the eighth. A third Cub hurler graced the mound, [Uel] Eubanks by name, Stueland having stepped out for a pinch hitter in the seventh, and the Phils wasted no time in going to work on him. In this endeavor they received generous support from the Cubs, who strived with success to emulate the Phillies’ defensive antics. In fact, only because of the light color of their uniforms could you distinguish them from the Phillies of a few innings before. When the round ended a fellow named [Ed[ Morris was doing the Cub hurling.
That wasn’t all, either. Nine runs behind, Philadelphia commenced a blast in the ninth that nearly tied the score. Six runs crossed the plate before [Tiny] Osborn who rescued Morris, quelled the revolt. As the last Phil, in the gathering shadows of evening, went down swinging with the bases loaded, a few scattered, sarcastic cheers arose from those valiant bleacherites who had endured till the end.
I sat gazing at the darkening field long after the players left; stunned, bewildered, unbelieving. Like the child who had just been told there was no Santa Claus, I felt a whole world topple around me. Air castles built through several years had burst in their first contact with reality. When I looked around I was quite alone. Slowly I made my way out of the deserted park, leaving behind the most beautiful illusion a boy ever had about major league baseball.
The score of that game – Cubs 26: Philadelphia 23 – remains to this day a record for runs scored in a major league game. One other record fell and three were tied in that hectic contest that one baseball writer appropriately titled “a comedy of hits, runs and errors.” Fifty-one hits – 26 for Philadelphia and 25 for the Cubs – established a mark, and 14 runs and 11 hits in the fourth inning both tied records as did Callaghan’s going to bat three times in one frame. Through the entire game, the Phils employed only two pitchers – Ring and [Lefty]Weinert.
Since then I’ve seen many memorable games, including Bob Feller's 1-0 no-hit victory over the White Sox that chilly April afternoon of 1940 in Comiskey Park, Edgar Smith's 1-0 triumph over the same Feller in an 11-inning battle the previous year, and that Sunday game in the 1935 World Series in which Lon Warneke threw out his arm at Wrigley Field beating Detroit for the second time. Diamond classics, all of ‘em, but as my biggest baseball day I’ll take that August afternoon of 1922 that produced probably the worst major league game ever played.
No comments:
Post a Comment