35. Tinker to Evers to Chance

[A] couple of things about the "poem," published in the New York Evening Mail on July 10, 1910. First of all the title is not "Tinker to Evers to Chance." Here's the verse as it originally appeared, along with its original title:

Baseball's Sad Lexicon

These are the saddest of possible words,

"Tinker-to-Evers-to Chance."

Trio of Bear Cubs fleeter than birds,

Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double,

Words that are weighty with nothing but Trouble.

"Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance."

--Franklin P. Adams.

For Frank Adams it was a "sad lexicon" because he was a fan of the New York Giants. In fact, Adams wrote the verse because he was in such a hurry to get to the ballpark. As he later remembered, "I wrote the poem because I wanted to get to the game, and the foreman of the composing room ... said I needed eight lines to fill."

What exactly is a "gonfalon"? According to my dictionary, it's "a banner suspended from a crosspiece," so apparently Adams was saying that Tinker and pals were hurting the Giants' pennant chances with their double-play antics.

It's been fashionable in recent years to question the double-play skills of Tinker and Evers ... To be sure, it's quite possible, perhaps even likely, [Tinker and Evers] (and Chance, too) might not be in the Hall of Fame if not for the poem. Their career stats simply are not typical of Hall of Fame players, even middle infielders. It's also true ... that from 1906 through 1911 the Cubs never led the National League in double plays. Individually, Evers never led N.L. second basemen in double plays, and Tinker topped N.L. shortstops in double plays only once .... Writing negatively of their Hall of Fame qualifications in 1999, USA Today's Tom Weir noted, "Despite the poetry, the three ranked as the National League's best double-play combo only once."

Well, there's more to playing the infield than raw numbers of double plays. The Cubs featured an outstanding pitching staff ... that permitted relatively few baserunners. In turn, that limited the number of double-play opportunities available to the Cub infielders.

So is there an easy way to evaluate the Cubs' double-play abilities given the statistics at our disposal? Yes, there is. Bill James has come up with a system to measure what he calls expected double plays for a team, based on (essentially) the number of runners the opposition has on first base and the estimated number of ground balls hit by the opposition....

.... Yes, the Cubs only tied for third in total double plays [from 1906 to 1910], which is nothing special in an eight-team league. But ... [they] turned 50 more double plays than expected, easily the most in the National League. So while Tinker and Evers never really dominated the National League in a single season, nobody could match their consistency .... [I]t also seems safe to say that they were probably the best of their era and an important factor in the Cubs' amazing run.

It's too bad that they couldn't have enjoyed each other a little more. It seems that Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers, paragons of keystone teamwork, once went upwards of two years without speaking to each other. In 1936, New York World-Telegram columnist Joe Williams got to talking with Evers about the old-time Cubs, and Williams asked if all the stories about the feud were true.

"That's right," admitted Mr. Evers. "We didn't even say hello for at least two years. We went through two World Series without a single word. And I'll tell you why .... [O]ne day -- it was early in 1907 -- he threw me a hardball. It wasn't any further than from here to there .... It was a real hardball. Like a catcher throwing to second. And the ball broke my finger .... I yelled at him, 'You so and so!' He laughed. That's the last word we had for -- well, I just don't know how long."

Other sources have reported that the feud actually began in 1905, when there was a mix-up over a cab the two were supposed to share. By all accounts, though, Evers was an incredibly high-strung fellow.

.... Frank Chance got so sick of listening to his irascible second baseman that he considered shifting Evers to the outfield. These days, I suppose you'd call Evers an extreme type-A personality, and he didn't really get along with anybody, which is probably why everyone called him "The Crab." Evers missed most of the 1911 season after suffering a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, he succeeded Chance as player-manager in 1913, leading a disgusted Tinker to demand a trade. After the season, Evers himself was traded to the Boston Braves, for whom he played a major role in their miraculous, World Series-winning 1914 campaign ....

As for Frank Adams, he reportedly thought his famous lines "weren't much good."

Baseball Dynasties, Rob Neyer & Eddie Epstein

Copyright 2000 by Rob Neyer & Eddie Epstein

Published  by W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. (New York), 2000

26. Casey at the Bat

"The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day..." So began "Casey at the Bat, A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888," a poem that appeared in the fourth column of page 4 of the Sunday, June 3, 1888 San Francisco Examiner. The poem that would become the most famous American verse ever written was bylined "Phin" and sandwiched inconspicuously between editorials on the left and Ambrose Bierce's weekly column on the right.

Ernest Lawrence Thayer, or "Phinney," as such classmates as William Randolph Hearst and George Santayana called him, had been the editor of the Harvard Lampoon. After Hearst was kicked out of Harvard for sending personalized chamber pots to several professors, his father gave him the Examiner to run, and the errant heir soon asked Thayer if he would write a humor column for the paper.

It took Thayer half a day to write "Casey." The piece might have been forgotten altogether had not a novelist named Archibald Clavering Gunter clipped it and given it to his actor friend William DeWolf Hopper, who was performing a comic opera entitled Prince Methusalem at New York's Wallack Theatre on August 14, 1888. The Giants and White Stockings had been invited to the show, and Hopper thought the new piece particularly appropriate. Before beginning, though, he congratulated Tim Keefe, who was in attendance, on his feat of 19 straight victories.

Hopper, whose fifth wife was gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (their son Paul Hopper played Paul Drake in the Perry Mason television series), later described his first reading of the poem in his autobiography, Once a Clown, Always a Clown: "When I dropped my voice to B flat, below low C, at 'the multitude was awed,' I remember seeing Buck Ewing's gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch. And as the house, after a moment of startled silence, grasped the anticlimactic denouement, it shouted its glee."

Had Casey hit the ball out of the park, we might never have heard of Thayer or Hopper or been subjected to the countless parodies of "Casey at the Bat." Hopper hit upon its appeal when he wrote, "There is no more completely satisfactory drama in literature than the fall of Humpty Dumpty." He would go on to recite the poem more than 10,000 times, each time in five minutes, 40 seconds...

Baseball Anecdotes, Daniel Okrent & Steve Wulf

Copyright 1989 by Daniel Okrent

Published  by Oxford University Press (New York), 1989

Image: In 1927, Paramount Pictures made Casey at the Bat, a silent film starring Wallace Beery