11. Player Profile: Grover Cleveland Alexander

Nickname: "Old Pete"

Born: February 26, 1887 (Elba, NE)

ML Debut: April 15, 1911

Final Game: May 28, 1930

Bats: Right     Throws: Right

6'1"     185

Hall of Fame: 1938 (Baseball Writers; 212 votes on 262 ballots; 80.92%)

• Played for: Philadelphia Phillies (1911-1917, 1930); Chicago Cubs (1918-1926); St. Louis Cardinals (1926-1929)
• Postseason: 1915 WS, 1926 WS, 1928 WS

Alexander played semi-professional ball as a youth, signing his first pro contract in 1907 at age 22 for $50 month. During his first season he was hit in the head with a ball, an injury probably responsible for the epilepsy he suffered in subsequent years. In 1910 he was sold to the Philadelphia Phillies for $750. In his first year in the majors he led the league with 28 wins (against 13 losses) -- a modern-day rookie record. He also pitched seven shutouts and 31 complete games. Between 1912 and 1920 Alexander led the league in ERA four times (1915, 1916, 1919, 1920), wins five times (1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1920), innings pitched six times, strikeouts six times, complete games five times and shutouts five times (setting a single season record of 16 in 1916). A master of the curveball, he was unquestionably the dominant pitcher in the National League from 1915 through 1917, winning the pitching triple crown in those three years. (He won 30 or more games in three consecutive seasons.)

Anticipating that Alexander would be drafted when America entered World War I, the Phillies sold him to the Chicago Cubs. Alexander served in France in 1918 as an artillery officer; he returned from the war suffering from shell shock, and his epileptic seizures had worsened. He had also become dependent on alcohol. Nonetheless, he earned another pitching triple crown in 1920. In 1925 he entered a sanitorium, and the following year was suspended by the Cubs before being waived to St. Louis. The Cardinals won the National League that year and met the New York Yankees in the World Series, during which Alexander pitched complete game victories in Games 2 and 6. In Game 7 he came in with the Cardinals up 3-2 in the 7th inning. The bases were loaded and there were two outs. Striking out Yankees slugger Tony Lazzeri with four pitches, Alexander held New York scoreless for the final two innings, and St. Louis won the championship.

Old Pete had another 20-win season in 1927, but then the drinking got the better of him. He pitched for the House of David from 1931-1935, and in 1938 was elected to the Hall of Fame.

-- JM

"He made me want to throw my bat away. He fed me pitches I couldn't hit."

-- Johnny Evers

• Holds the third highest total in wins (373) in ML history.
• Holds league records for most complete games (437) and shutouts (90).
• Tenth all time in innings pitched (5,189), and eighth in hits allowed (4,868).

10. Baseball, 1900

The 1900 season marked the arrival of not only a new century but of a new era in major league baseball. After absorbing the American Association in December 1891, the National League tottered along for eight years as an unwieldy 12-team circuit. At the close of the 1899 campaign, however, the NL pared down its size by bidding farewell to its four weakest members. The elimination of Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington, and Louisville streamlined the NL to eight teams and created a stable composition that would endure until 1953.

The chief beneficiaries of the NL's decision to cut back in size were Brooklyn and Pittsburgh. Both had been under "syndicate" ownership in 1899, a common practice at the time that allowed the same partnership of owners to operate more than one team. As a result, Brooklyn fell heir to most of the cast from the great Baltimore Orioles teams of the mid-1890s, and Barney Dreyfuss, who owned the controlling stock in both the Pittsburgh and Louisville franchises, simply transferred all of the defunct Kentucky club's top players to the Steel City. Among them were pitchers Deacon Phillippe, Jack Chesbro, and Rube Waddell; player-manager Fred Clarke; and the great Honus Wagner.

It was Brooklyn's annexation of three Baltimore pitchers -- Kitty Kitson, Harry Howell, and Iron Man Joe McGinnity -- that spelled the difference in 1900. The trio joined with holdover Brickyard Kennedy for 70 of Brooklyn's 82 wins and lift manager Ned Hanlon's club to its second straight NL pennant by a comfortable 4-1/2 games over Pittsburgh. Philadelphia finished eight lengths back in third place, and Boston rounded out the first division even though the Beantown entry slipped six games under .500.

Because the Louisville contingent needed time to blend with his Pittsburgh holdovers, Dreyfuss's Pirates did not really begin to gel until the season was nearly completed. To settle doubts that he had the superior team, Hanlon accepted Dreyfuss's best-of-five postseason challenge, with all the games to be played in Pittsburgh for a silver cup to be donated by the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph. The "Series" opened on October 15 at the Pirates' Exposition Park. Behind McGinnity and Kitson, Hanlon's Superbas took the first two games but then were belted 10-0 in the third contest. The following day McGinnity cruised to a 6-1 triumph and convinced any lingering skeptics that the best team had won in the regular season.

• Honus Wagner leads the National League in batting average (.573), doubles (45), triples (22), and total bases (302).
• Philly's Elmer Flick leads the NL in runs produced (205) and RBI (110).
• Brooklyn's Willie Keeler tops the NL in hits (204).
• The home run crown is won by Boston shortstop Herman Long (12).
• Brooklyn's Joe McGinnity leads the NL in wins (29) and innings (347).
• Rube Waddell leads the league in ERA (2.37) and Ks (130).
• New York third baseman Piano Legs Hickman commits 86 errors.

IMAGE: Brooklyn Superbas 1900 logo

Baseball: More Than 150 Years, David Nemec & Saul Wisnia

Copyright 1997 by Publications International, Ltd.

Published by Publications International, Ltd. (Lincolnwood, IL), 1997

9. Bill Rigney: A Baseball-Crazy Town

[1947] I fell in love with New York. There [were] ... all the great restaurants and supper clubs, there were stores and Automats, there was music and movies and shows, there were subways and els and double-decker buses, there were newstands everywhere you looked, and Central Park was a beautiful playground .... I guess I started to feel a bit like a celebrity because I'd be walking down Broadway at night and Giants fans would call to me. The New York fans knew who you were and who they were. They were proud of their teams. That made a huge impression on a young player like me. Until I came to New York,  I didn't realize fans could care so much whether a team won or lost. New York was a baseball-crazy town. There were all those newspapers and great sportswriters: Jimmy Cannon of the Post, Arthur Daley of the Times, Red Smith of the Herald Tribune, Dick Young of the Daily News. And we had the best broadcasters: The Giants' Russ Hodges, the Dodgers' Red Barber, and the Yankees' Mel Allen.

[Giants owner Horace] Stoneham built a team around the home run rather than pitching and defense. He liked to watch guys who could hit the long ball. He got my roomie, first baseman Johnny Mize, and catcher Walker Cooper  from the Cardinals. Cooper hit 6 homers in 3 games at one point. Outfielders Bobby Thomson, who had come up briefly in 1946, Willard Marshall, and Sid Gordon were all pull hitters with power. In 1947 we set a major league record with 221 home runs. Mize tied Pittsburgh's Ralph Kiner for the homer title with 51, Marshall was third with 36, Cooper was fourth with 35, and Thomson was fifth with 29 ... We were the only National League team with more than one player with 100 RBIs, and we had three, with Mize, Cooper, and Marshall. We'd win 10-9, not 1-0 ....

With Stoneham's emphasis on hitting, our pitching was weak .... Mel Ott would have been a better manager if he'd had better pitchers. Another problem is that he hired his friends as his coaches. Ott was a great guy and everyone loved him and wanted to play well for him. Dodgers manager Leo Durocher was talking about Otty when he said, "Nice guys finish last."

Even in my first exhibition game against the Dodgers I could tell there was a strong, strong rivalry between the Dodgers and the Giants. I could taste it, smell it. There was never a rivalry to match it. On the field, the two teams detested each other. As the Giants got better, beginning in 1947, the rivalry became even more intense. There were now three good teams in New York. The rivalry wasn't based on jealousy. It was competitive, it was fun. Much had to do with our being in the same area. There was no such thing as a fan of two teams. You liked the Giants, the Dodgers, or Yankees, and hated the other two teams. That the fans cared so much about their favorite teams fed the rivalries ....

When Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, there was no better player in the league. He was the toughest out and there would be no better competitor during my entire career. He was carrying the cross for the black man and was he ever the right man to do that. He had a lot of talent and a strong personality ....

There were a lot of people who didn't like baseball being integrated. Prejudice was prevalent, without a doubt ... Of course, Jackie's great ability and desire to win had to be admired ... We all kept an eye on him,  watching his progress. It didn't matter if we rooted for him to make it, which many of us did, because he was going to make it in spite of everything. He was that dedicated. He was also mature, not a brash young man. People forget that he wasn't young but almost 30.

We Played the Game, Danny Peary (Editor)

Copyright 1994 by Danny Peary

Published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. (New York), 2002

8. Bill Rigney: The Rookie

Jorge Pasquel and his brother formed the Mexican League in 1946 and were offering major leaguers a lot  of money to defect, thousands more than they were making in the majors. Stan Musial even considered leaving the Cardinals. The Giants held a [spring training] meeting and our manager Mel Ott asked, "Is anyone here going to Mexico?" Babe Young, an outfielder-first baseman, said we all should have raised our hands because we'd have gotten better contracts. As it was, we lost Sal Maglie, who had shown great promise as a rookie pitcher in 1945, outfielder Danny Gardella, second baseman George Hausmann, and a couple of other guys. They went down there, though our new Commissioner, Happy Chandler, threatened them with permanent banishment. (Gardella would later sue major league baseball for reinstatement after the Mexican League folded.)

The rest of us headed north. John McGraw had started a tradition: anytime the Giants would open a season in New York, they'd play the Cadets at West Point the day before ....

I'd never been to New York. I'd never been to a major league ballpark. I'd never seen the Polo Grounds. We got in at ten o' clock at night. We carried our own bags in those days, and I walked up those steps and into the Giants' clubhouse. It was a marvelous clubhouse: you walked down the steps and there was one big room and down six more steps and there were all the lockers. The trainer's room was there and the showers were upstairs; the manager's office was on the first deck. I looked for my locker and there it was next to the locker of Johnny Mize. I put my stuff down and said to myself, "Christy Mathewson, Bill Terry, John McGraw, Mel Ott, Travis Jackson, and all the other great Giants of the past dressed right here." Both clubhouses were in center field, and i walked down the twenty steps onto the field. The night lights were on. I saw that the Polo Grounds was built like a horseshoe with home plate in the middle. I remember the chill I got thinking, "Tomorrow you're going to be the shortstop in front of 45,000." I wondered what I was doing there. I wondered if I could handle it.

The next day I was introduced and ran onto the diamond in front of all those fans. I prayed the ball would be hit to me quickly so I could calm down. And the Phillies' little shortstop, Skeeter Newsome, hit the ball through the box. I picked it up one-handed and threw him out. The crowd cheered. And I said, "Oh boy, this is going to be all right." The first time I batted, Oscar Judd threw me a screwball on a 3-2 pitch and struck me out. A 3-2 screwball? I said, "This is the major leagues." Later I solved him for two hits, we beat the Phils 8-2, and Bill Voiselle got the victory.

....That first year I lived in the Bronx, on 183rd Street. My wife was pregnant, and the apartment we rented was on the top floor and had no air conditioning. We just about died. I was under a lot of pressure to succeed. I wanted to raise a family and support them by being a ballplayer. I had such love for the game and couldn't let myself think what I might do if I failed and had to do something other than play professional baseball. It was my life.

We Played the Game, Danny Peary (Editor)

Copyright 1994 by Danny Peary

Published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. (New York), 2002

7. Stats: The Perfect Game

perfect game -- A no-hitter in which no opposing player reaches first base, either by a base hit, base on balls, hit batter, or fielding error; the pitcher or pitchers retire all 27 opposing batters in order.

Lee Richmond ... June 12, 1880 ... WOR 1, CLE 0

John Ward ... June 17, 1880 ... PRO 5, BUF 0

Cy Young ... May 5, 1904 ... BOS 3, PHI 0

Addie Joss ... Oct. 2, 1908 ... CLE 1, CHW 0

Charlie Robertson ... April 30, 1922 ... CHW 2, DET 0

Don Larsen ... Oct. 8, 1956 ... NYY 2, BRO 0

Jim Bunning ... June 21, 1964 ... PHI 6, NYM 0

Sandy Koufax ... Sept. 9, 1965 ... LAD 1, CHC 0

Catfish Hunter ... May 8, 1968 ... OAK 4, MIN 0

Len Barker ... May 15, 1981 ... CLE 3, TOR 0

Mike Witt ... Sept. 30, 1984 ... CAL 1, TEX 0

Tom Browning ... Sept. 16, 1988 ... CIN 1, LAD 0

Dennis Martinez ... July 28, 1991 ... MON 2, LAD 0

Kenny Rogers ... July 28, 1994 ... TEX 4. CAL 0

David Wells ... May 17, 1998 ... NYY 4, MIN 0

David Cone ... July 18. 1999 ... NYY 6, MON 0

Randy Johnson ... May 18, 2004 ... ARI 2, ATL 0

Mark Buehrle ... July 23, 2009 ... CHW 5, TB 0

Dallas Braden ... May 9, 2010 ... OAK 4, TB 0
.

Don Larsen's perfect game is the only one to occur in the postseason; it took place during the 1956 World Series.
.

Detroit's Armando Gallarraga would have had a perfect game against Cleveland on June 2, 2010, but for a blown call by umpire Jim Joyce.

BUF: Buffalo Bisons          PRO: Providence Grays          WOR: Worchester Brown Stockings

6. Baseball's Roots

Baseball as we know it began in 1846 on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey -- where two teams of New Yorkers, the Knickerbockers and New York Nine, played the first formal match under a code of 20 rules written by Alexander Joy Cartwright.* These rules are the foundation upon which baseball developed, over the course of a century and a half, into our modern game.

....Alexander Cartwright did not invent the rules of baseball from nothing; bat-and-ball games are as old as Anglo-Saxon culture, if not older. Forerunners of baseball, with names like old cat, stoolball and goalball, were played in Great Britain and its empire hundreds of years before 1846. These games were broadly similar to modern baseball; they featured pitching, hitting, and rounding a certain number of bases in order to score runs. Like modern baseball, they were structured to outs and innings.

In goalball and stoolball, which originated in the Easter festivities of medieval England and parts of the European continent, stools (or equivalent objects) were used as bases. In old cats, the number of bases depended on the number of players on a side: in one old cat there is one base; in two old cats there are two, and so on. The old English game of rounders, which is played mainly by children throughout Great Britain and her former colonies, is closely akin to these primitive games.

The word "baseball" itself has a long history. In memoirs published in England in 1700, a certain Reverend Wilson protested the widespread playing of "baseball" on Sundays. Written accounts mention games of "base" being enjoyed by General George Washington's Revolutionary War soldiers at Valley Forge.

Of course, not all games called baseball were the same. Baseball before Cartwright was not one game, but a family of related games, with each locality practicing its own particular variety. In the mid-19th century, some of these games developed formal rules and were played by adults in organized clubs. One example is Philadelphia's town ball, which employed a very dead ball and stakes arranged in a square configuration instead of bases in a diamond. Town balls clubs formed in Philadelphia and nearby Camden, New Jersey, as early as 1831.

The Massachusetts, or New England, game, which was closely related to town ball, featured 60-foot basepaths and used wooden stakes for bases. It was obviously a high-scoring affair: one out constituted a half-inning, and the game ended when one side scored 75 "tallies" or runs. In 1858 there were enough clubs competing in the Boston area to form a league, the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players, with a constitution and a common code of rules.

For a time, town ball and the Massachusetts game threatened to rival Cartwright's New York game for national supremacy. But by the end of the Civil War, just as Philadelphia and Boston were outstripped economically by New York City's commercial power, town ball and its Massachusetts cousin were abandoned in favor of the rapidly expanding New York game.

Today, variant forms of baseball have not disappeared. Softball, stickball, and a myriad of baseball-type playground games remain extremely popular. Some of these retain archaic elements, such as throwing the ball at a baserunner in order to put him out. This practice (which was specifically prohibited by Cartwright's original rules) is known today among the children of New England as "Indian Rubber"; it was known in town ball as "soaking."


Ever since the 1840s, however, these games have been outside the mainstream of organized baseball. The history of baseball as a sport in the modern sense -- with organized leagues playing under standardized rules, schedules, and record-keeping procedures -- begins with Alexander Cartwright.


*This game, played on June 19, 1846, was presided over by Alexander Cartwright as umpire. The New York Nine thrashed the Knickerbockers by a score of 23-1.


IMAGE: The game at Elysian Fields

Baseball: More Than 150 Years, David Nemec & Saul Wisnia

copyright 1997, Publications International, Ltd.

Publications International, Ltd., Lincolnwood, IL

5. The Dodgers Cast of 1952

If you spent some effort getting to know the Dodger cast, you found a wonderful assortment of characters, happy to share their experiences with a young sportswriter who appeared to be at least reasonably trustworthy and showed a decent respect for their big-league skills.


I talked pitching with Preacher Roe and Carl Erskine. Roe, a rural doctor's son, disguised his ferocious intelligence behind a hillbilly manner. "Even when ah do strike out Musial," Roe said, "the wind from his swing plumb blows me off the mound." After the droll comments, Roe held forth on the subtleties of his art, as we rode trains or ate bacon and eggs in coffee shops around a league that extended from Boston to St. Louis. In 1952 baseball had not yet recognized California. "Sometimes when I'm gunning for a hitter I can get with a slow curve down low," Roe said, "I set him up with a fastball around the eyes. That's a ball, fer sure, and he won't swing, but like it or not he picks up the speed of that pitch. And that clicks somewhere in his head. Now, when I throw the slow one, he's still reacting to the fast pitch up around his eyes. He swings too soon. I got my man. He makes out on a pitch in the strike zone, but he gets thrown off by the pitch around his eyes. When I hear someone sayin' the high fast one was a bad pitch because it was a ball, I got to wonder what they might be talking about. This game is not as simple as it seems." Nor was Roe himself. To supplement his Dodger salary he taught geometry in a Missouri high school....


Erskine, trim and serious, threw a strong overhand curve and had a change of pace that was always surprising the hitters. As he released the change, Erskine pulled hard, as though drawing down a window shade. This had the effect of imparting terrific spin. "The hitters," Erskine said, "pick up this ball that's spinning like the dickens, rotating like a fastball. They react to the rotation and when they first pick up the pitch they think they see a fastball. That spoils their timing. They get off balance. By the time they adjust -- all this takes place in less than half a second -- it's too late. That's why a lot of changes get popped up, or sometimes even get a hitter so paralyzed that he can't swing the bat at all." Erskine spoke about his work with passion and eloquence. He was a lover of narrative poetry and sometimes in those distant days he recited from memory long works by Robert W. Service. These people fascinated me. The craft of Roe and Erskine was not the sort of stuff one learned playing weekend sandlot games at Lake Mohegan.


Gil Hodges, strong and quiet, liked riddles and puzzles. Duke Snider, the sometimes melancholy prince, never drew as much happiness from his great gifts as he might have. Carl Furillo followed a solitary star ... Hugely popular Roy Campanella spun out minstrel-show stories. "In the old colored leagues I sometimes had to catch a triple-header. That's right. Three games on a hot Sunday afternoon. They didn't pay me much for playin' the three, but I didn't mind because" -- pause, soulful look, wink -- "they was giving me fifty cents a day meal money! Hey, that's true. Ask anybody that was there."


Jackie Robinson was a gentle, thoughtful, loving man, disguised as a firebrand. As the first black to play in the major leagues, Robinson was the first target of bigots on the field, in the grandstands, in the press box. His defense was to put forth a bristling personality, needling and jockeying in sharp and sometimes nasty ways. "It's like I've got antennae," he said. "I can tell who's an anti before they even speak." By 1952 few of Robinson's antis dared argue against the right of blacks to make a living in the major leagues. But most of the sportswriters complained that Robinson was "uppity." I marveled at a curious thing: the same qualities that made a white ballplayer a battler, a competitor, a hard-nosed son-of-a-buck, those very same qualities made Jackie Robinson an uppity coon ... Ol' Minstrel Show Campy was a terrific fellow, they though, just because he resembled an end-man in not-very-dark  black face. Robinson exuded an air of complete independence, and that was not acceptable in a Negro. Like Robinson, I found this thinking outrageous....

Presiding over this Continental Congress of a baseball team was Harold "Pee Wee" Reese, the shortstop and captain. Raised amid the racism of Kentucky, he had exorcised his own demons and worked quietly to get others to do the same. He didn't lecture on civil rights. Reese disliked drawing attention to himself. He simply accepted Robinson as a buddy. At a time when a third of the country's  schools were still segregated, Reese and Robinson went to the racetrack together, played cards together and warmed each other up with a thousand games of catch. Once the games began, they played hit and run and executed double plays with something close to genius.


....Simplistically, Reese was the older brother everyone always wanted to have. In the words of Heywood Hale Broun ... he was both a gentleman and a gentle man. Which is not to say he didn't play rugged, competitive baseball. He was a wonder.


IMAGE: Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson

Memories of Summer, Roger Kahn

copyright 1997 Hook Slide, Inc.

University of Nebraska Press