Cooperstown Confidential (7 page)

Cobb, Ruth, Anson, Speaker, and Alexander were all inducted before the Character Clause was formally instituted. So was Rogers Hornsby, elected in 1942. Known as the Rajah, Hornsby was one of the greatest hitters in National League history. His lifetime average, .358, is second only to Cobb’s.

Like Cobb, Hornsby was widely disliked around the league. He didn’t bother to attend his own mother’s funeral. He brawled with opponents on the field, ignored his own teammates, and, as a manager, was generally hated by his players. Like Tris Speaker, Hornsby was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Bill James ranks him as perhaps the biggest “horse’s ass” in baseball history, ahead even of Cobb.

Hornsby was famous for never going to the movies with the other guys on the team. A legend developed that he was trying to preserve his batting eye. In fact, he didn’t give a damn about movies or teammates. Asked once what he did in the off-season back in Texas, he said that he sat by the window and waited for the next baseball season to start. His one great diversion was racetrack gambling. Commissioner Landis warned him a number of times that this was unacceptable; baseball couldn’t afford any more gambling scandals. Hornsby ignored the warnings and Landis finally went public, telling the
Sporting
News
that Hornsby’s betting “has gotten him into one scrape after another, cost him a fortune and several jobs, and he still hasn’t got enough sense to stop it.” Hornsby responded by charging that Landis himself had recklessly gambled away baseball’s money in the 1929 stock market crash.

Not all the early members of the Hall of Fame were rogues or racists. Many were great players and model citizens. Christy Math-ewson was a college graduate and an officer in World War I who was gassed in a training exercise, later contracted tuberculosis, and died at the age of forty-five. Honus Wagner was beloved in Pittsburgh. Walter Johnson was known throughout baseball for his unwillingness to throw at batters, and he retained his good reputation even after retiring and entering politics. Connie Mack reached great old age without a serious blemish on his record. Henry Chad-wick was a saintly figure, and his rival A. G. Spalding was a highly respectable citizen who, if he perpetuated a lie about the origins of the game, did it for unselfish, even patriotic reasons. The early Hall of Famers were probably neither better nor worse human beings than other players of their day, or any cross-section of red-blooded young men with money in their pockets and time on their hands. There is no evidence that they were deluded about their own level of sportsmanship, integrity, and character. That was Cooperstown’s standard, not theirs.

Cooperstown has been aided and abetted in the public relations sham of the Character Clause by its appointed electoral college, the BBWAA. The Hall of Fame’s own newspaper archive reveals the extent to which the national pastime was (and to some extent remains) sanitized by the journalists who cover it. Long before the Hall opened its doors, reporters were complicit in image building and preservation. The ethos of the press box in the early days was summed up by Abe Kemp, a San Francisco baseball writer (and horse-racing reporter) whose career spanned sixty-two years, from 1907 to 1969. “When I broke in . . . the only advice [the sports editor] gave me was, ‘Abe, I’m not telling you to do this, but if you can’t write something nice about a ballplayer, don’t mention his name.’ ”

Writers were a part of the team. Not only did they travel with the players, they sometimes roomed with them on the road, at the team’s expense. Writers and players socialized and kept each other’s secrets. When the public somehow did learn about Babe Ruth’s whoring, Grover Cleveland Alexander pitching drunk, or Tris Speaker betting on games, these lapses were spun by reporters as harmless and even charming examples of the sporting mentality.

Why did the writers protect ballplayers? Start with self-preservation. In most cities, there was a close relationship between the local team and the local newspapers. What ever journalistic ethics applied elsewhere in the paper didn’t seem relevant to the toy department. Disillusioning the public about its heroes wasn’t good business. If writers got too cranky, teams would simply deny them access and that was the end of them.

For some, though, it was less a professional instinct than a personal one. Grantland Rice, the most famous sportswriter of the twenties, once told a colleague, “When athletes are no longer heroes to you anymore, it’s time to stop writing sports.” This is exactly the right approach for a public relations shill or a team-employed baseball announcer, and precisely the wrong one for a self-respecting reporter, in any field, in Rice’s time or today.

Great rewards were in store for compliant writers. When they went out with players, they drank and ate on the house, and they sometimes benefited from the surplus of enthusiastic Baseball An-nies. They got to spend their afternoons watching baseball, a plum job on any newspaper, and travel in major-league style. Many writers took their relationship with players—and major-league teams—beyond hero-worship and revelry into something closer to partnership. They served as ghostwriters for players they were supposedly covering, or even took part in salary negotiations by writing puff pieces about their friends at contract time or tamping down a player’s value on behalf of management.
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The most avaricious, like Marshall Hunt, worked both sides. He actually brokered at least one of Ruth’s salary negotiations, closing the deal with Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert in a steam bath.

Not everything was about money. Jimmy Cannon worked for the
New
York Post
and the
New York Journal-American
between 1940 and 1960. A lot of people considered him the best sportswriter of his era. He was capable of tough judgments, but not about Joe DiMaggio. “It’s one of the great boasts of all journalists, and especially baseball writers, that they are not influenced by their relationships with people off the field. This is an absolute myth. I always considered myself a fair and neutral man, and yet how could I not be for Joe DiMaggio, who lived in the same hotel with me? We went on vacations together. We were great friends.”

Buddy-buddy journalism was not invented by baseball writers. White House correspondents covered up Roo sevelt’s wheelchair when they could. World War II war correspondents didn’t bust Dwight Eisenhower for tooling around London with his mistress. The Washington press corps turned a blind eye to John F. Kennedy’s drug abuse and his ties with orga nized crime. The legendary Ben Bradlee, the editor of the
Washington Post
who broke the Watergate story that brought down President Richard Nixon, socialized with JFK and kept his secrets. Today’s “serious” journalists are not really much different. They form mutually beneficial social friendships with the political and economic figures they cover and, people being people, this often blossoms into a sort of love affair (which is rarely mutual, and almost always ends when the journalists are no longer useful).

The close friendship that Jimmy Cannon and Joe DiMaggio enjoyed is less common today. Money is the main reason. Before the advent of the players’ union in 1966, writers and baseball players were more or less in the same economic and social class.
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Most major-leaguers were paid so little that a lot of them had off-season jobs, often in professions even less prestigious than journalism. The superstars made bigger money, but even they weren’t stratospheri-cally rich. Writers, a little older and more worldly than the players, often assumed the role of consigliere. These days, major-leaguers are surrounded by personal managers, agents, and public relations specialists; press availability is carefully managed, and it is a weapon in the hands of astute media advisers. Today, as always, a beat reporter who gets cut off from a key player or an angry locker room is going to have a hard time keeping his job. That is increasingly true of the print reporters who comprise the membership of the BBWAA. In the Internet age, they are a vulnerable and diminishing breed.

As the gap widened between players and writers, feelings got hurt. Players’ union executive director Marvin Miller remembers standing with Dick Young near the players’ entrance to Shea Stadium as a visiting team filed off the bus for a game against the Mets. The players were quickly surrounded by a crowd of attractive women.

“Look at that,” Young said to Miller. “I’ve been covering baseball for all these years. Some people say I’m the premier writer in the game. And these Baseball Annies make fools of themselves over these players.”

After World War II, the writers and the Veterans Committee continued to honor Rule 5 mostly in the breach. Lefty Grove, perhaps the greatest pitcher between Johnson and Koufax, was hated throughout the American League for throwing at hitters, feuding with other players (he held a lifelong grudge against teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Al Simmons for letting him down by taking a day off), and staging epic fits of temper on and off the field. “He was a tantrum thrower like me, but smarter,” said Ted Williams. “When he punched a locker, he always did it with his right hand. He was a careful tantrum thrower.”

Jimmie Foxx, another Williams teammate who made the Hall of Fame (class of ’51), was a degenerate drunk who often went to bat with a flask in his pocket. (Foxx served as the model for the alcoholic manager played by Tom Hanks in
A League of Their Own
.)

In fact, the roster of Hall of Famers who were also hall of fame– quality boozers is long and distinguished. King Kelly, the Babe Ruth of the nineteenth century, drank during games. Outfielder Paul Waner was praised by Casey Stengel as a very graceful player because “he could slide without breaking the bottle on his hip.” Shortstop Rabbit Maranville was beloved by baseball writers for his drunken antics. So was Tigers outfielder Harry Heilmann, who once drove a small automobile directly down the stairs of a speakeasy as a joke. Manager Joe McCarthy drank himself out of a job and retired for “health reasons.” A’s pitcher Rube Waddell was once the victim of a mock trial, staged by manager Connie Mack, meant to frighten him away from the bottle (it worked, but not for long). The great John McGraw was arrested as a result of a drunken brawl during Prohibition (a sympathetic New York jury acquitted him). Cubs slugger Hack Wilson played outfield, but Chicago columnist Mike Royko once suggested moving him to first base so that “he wouldn’t have so far to stagger to the dugout.” Mickey Mantle more or less drank himself to death. In all, it is quite a roster of public drunks (and a partial one, at that) for an institution that supposedly immortalizes only models of high morals and good character.

The Cardinals Dizzy Dean, HoF ’53, liked a drink as much as the next guy (and the next guy on the Gashouse Gang team of the thirties liked a drink), but his real weakness was gambling. In 1934, at the height of Dean’s career, National League president John Heydler hired detectives to shadow the pitcher. When this news leaked out, Heydler implausibly called it a “routine precaution.”

Dizzy Dean was never caught gambling during his career (as far as we know), but in 1970, when he was a Cardinals announcer, he got swept up in a federal gambling raid and named a coconspirator along with some mobsters. “I won’t say I haven’t done some foolish things in my life,” Dean told a press conference in Phoenix. “But I’ll assure you of one thing: I have nothing to do with big-time gambling—never did and never will. I want to tell you exactly how I became involved in this thing. It was through a friend who asked me to make wagers for him, and I did. I was told there was no harm in it. Later on I was told it was the wrong thing to do, and I stopped it.” According to
Time
magazine, the incident “cast black shadows on the national game—and all professional athletes.”

Leo Durocher, HoF ’94, a teammate of Dean’s, cast a similar shadow. Leo the Lip was a flamboyant and contentious character who managed the Brooklyn Dodgers in the forties.

In 1946, the new commissioner of baseball, Happy Chandler, confronted Durocher about his gambling and his associates, who included Bugsy Siegel, gunman, gambler, and Vegas casino visionary; Joe Adonis, a notorious Mafia hit man who, at the time, was running the National Crime Syndicate on behalf of the exiled Lucky Luciano; bookie Memphis Engelberg; and George Raft, a mobbed-up Hollywood movie star. Chandler, who had been the governor of Kentucky before he moved to baseball, told Durocher that he was giving baseball a bad name and ordered him to stop hanging around racetracks and socializing with organized crime figures.

Durocher considered Chandler a lightweight—who ever heard of a commissioner nicknamed Happy?—and ignored the warning. But Durocher had misjudged his man. Chandler was a politician. He knew public opinion, and he saw that it was against Leo the Lip. Durocher had recently, and very publicly, “stolen” an actress named Laraine Day from her husband. Today such a theft would be considered a social misdemeanor, but in 1947 it was a real problem. A lot of World War II veterans had been on the receiving end of “Dear John” letters from faithless spouses and sweethearts, and they considered wife-rustling to be a hanging offense. The Church didn’t approve of divorce, either. The Catholic Youth Orga ni zation of Brooklyn denounced Durocher as “a powerful force for undermining the moral and spiritual training of our boys” and withdrew its fifty thousand members from the Dodgers Knothole Gang fan club. Durocher was suspended without pay for a season. (His pal Bugsy Siegel had an even worse 1947. On June 20, he was shot to death in a gangland hit in Los Angeles.) Durocher came back and managed various teams for the next quarter century, but he was seldom anything but nasty. He called his autobiography
Nice Guys Finish Last
. None of this prevented the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee from putting him in Coop-erstown in 1994.