120. Mickey Mantle: The Miner's Son Becomes A Miner

The Yankee organization was plenty pleased with Mickey Mantle's freshman performance with the Independence Yankees. In the spring of 1950 Mickey was invited to come to St. Petersburg, Florida where the big club training. Despite no one knowing who this teenager was, the kid from Oklahoma quickly stood out.

Batting left-handed he knocked ball after ball over the left field wall and switching sides he scattered hits all over the field. Even among the Yankee legends on the field, DiMaggio, Berra and Bauer, this kid was something else. After watching one particularly impressive blast, Manager Casey Stengel was said to have cried out "What'sis name? Mantle?" When the Yanks broke camp and headed North, Casey went back to New York dreaming of when this kid would be sitting on his bench.

The Yankee management agreed with Stengel's evaluation and the consensus was that he had the rare skills to be able to skip the many rungs of the minor leagues and go right into AA level, the highest level of the minors (now reclassified as AAA). While the temptation to do so must have been excruciating, cooler heads prevailed and it was decided to bring Mickey along slowly. He was just 18 and known to be somewhat homesick and lacking a strong self-esteem. The Yankees had a Class-B farm team in Joplin, Missouri, less than 30 miles away on the old Route 66. The youngster would have the comfort of staying close to home as well as having a familiar face in the dugout - his manager in Independence, Harry Craft, was also moved up and was taking the helm of the Joplin Minors.

At the Miners' spring training camp in Branson, Missouri Mickey continued to awe with his unprecedented hitting performance. He'd beefed up since the previous season and took to rolling up the sleeves of his flannel jersey to make room for his muscles.

When Lee MacPhail, director of personnel for the organization and son of former Yankees owner Larry MacPhail came to Joplin to watch a pre-season exhibition game, he told friends that Mickey Mantle was the strongest and fastest man in organized baseball. There was talk already around the Yankees front office that this kid was going to be the usurp the mantle of the aging Joe DiMaggio.

Buoyed by one successful season under his belt and glad to be close to his family, Mickey exploded. Encouraged by Harry Craft to swing away, Micky was soon leading the Western Association in almost every offensive department. In a night game in Joplin he smashed one home run left-handed, then turned around and did the same right-handed. It was obvious to his teammates, fans and opposing players that this kid was something special.

Mickey was allowed to go home to his family after games played in Joplin. The kid had begun hanging out at a local pool hall and discovered beer. Manager Harry Craft figured letting the kid go home every night to his family would help keep him straight. But having his family close was a double-edged sword. After on game where he went 3 for 4 with a home run, his father Mutt told him that he would have got 4 hits had he hustled on a ground ball. The kid had a quick temper as well which he directed at himself, always believing he could do better.

The only problem was his fielding.

Try as he might, Mickey couldn't seem to improve his play at shortstop. Fly balls were so troubling to him that his own teammates would yell for him to stay away when one came towards short. He committed 55 errors in 137 games and his arm, though strong as hell, was so erratic that legend has it the box seats beyond first base were left empty for fear of getting hit by one of Mickey unpredictable throws.

As the 1950 season came to a close, Mickey could look back on an impressive year. He grabbed hold of the next rung of the Yankee farm system and improved by leaps and bounds over his first season. He was popular with his teammates and fans alike and could bask in all the attention lavished on him. The Yankees, on their way to a repeat pennant that year, rewarded the 18 year-old with a September call-up to the majors. For the final 2 weeks of the 1950 season Mickey watched the big leaguers from the security of the Yankees' dugout. Shy and reserved he couldn't even muster the nerve to talk to idol Joe DiMaggio, the man he was destined to replace. Though he didn't get into a single game, that first experience of being a big league ballplayer would help him get him used to what was ahead.

Like my previous post on Mickey's 1949 season, I'd like to dedicate it to my Uncle Eddie, a great Mickey Mantle fan and the guy who came to my little league games when my father could not. Nick Diunte's article in the Examiner was particularly helpful in this story, check that and his other articles out, he's quite a good writer and focuses on New York City baseball.

Memorial Day 2012

By the morning of March 4th, 1945, the boys of G Company, 2nd Battalion, 11th Infantry Regiment, 5th Infantry Division had become hardened veterans. Most had just arrived in Europe barely 3 months before and now those same freshly minted young soldiers had checked the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, chased their asses back across the Rhine and were now slugging their way into the Third Reich itself. The war was close to being over with, the Allies gaining more momentum everyday and the enemy knew it. If the Germans were only fighting the western powers they most likely would have caved in already. However, on the other side of Germany the Soviets were smashing towards Berlin and every day they held out meant more Germans could make their way west to be captured or at least get to an area occupied by the western Allies. No one wanted to be around when the Russians came so the war ground on.

The boys of G Company probably didn’t care much about the reason why the Germans still fought them tooth and nail. Each man had had his life interrupted and shipped half way around the globe to stop an evil that was threatening to swallow the whole world. The boys of G Company had left pretty young wives, anxious mothers, college classrooms or good jobs and took up a Garand Rifle to do their part. Complaining about what they were missing out on was pointless - the fella next to you had the same story. Maybe even better than yours. Nah, complaining wouldn’t do any good. Best thing was to keep marching forward and get this over with. As they wearily crossed the makeshift bridge built over the Kyll River they just cared about the fight they had ahead of them that afternoon and the one after that and the one after that until these Krauts threw in the towel.

If any of the boys in G Company were still sleepy, chances are the mortar fire that greeted them as the crossed the bridge woke them up. The enemy they’d been chasing since Luxembourg had dug in around the town of Erdorf. As the German lines collapsed and contracted the enemy became more dense, more desperate. Besides regular infantry, G Company was marching right into redeployed artillery and Panzer units. As they pushed forward the resistance became stiffer and more determined. Each gain was met with vicious counter-attacks and artillery barrages.

G Company was deployed to sweep the fields around the village of Erdorf. This was pleasant farm land of rolling little green hills and blooming trees. To the boys of G Company, the area they were clearing of enemy troops looked a lot like familiar places in the northeast and Midwest United States. Perhaps more than a few were suddenly lost in thoughts of an afternoon spent in surroundings much like this. The boys of G Company thought back to little places they left behind called Sussex County, Washington Courthouse, Mechanicsburg or Crescent Springs.

To the officers of G Company, this place was just called Hill 378.

The company spread out and took a low hill like they had countless other times in the last three months. All very textbook. Regrouping and moving forward, they entered a wooded area where entrenched German troops and the Panzer tanks were waiting. This obstacle, too, was eventually beaten aside by G Company and just like every other hill and wood and field G Company had cleared in the past three months, they left behind some of their own. As the troops emerged on the other side of the wood and continued eastward into Germany, one of the 32 boys they left behind that afternoon was 22 year-old Private First Class Bill Niemeyer of Crescent Springs, Kentucky. The life he had put on hold in order to beat back the evil that darkened the world consisted of his young wife Marie, infant daughters Deanna Gail and Mary Johanna and a promising pitching career in the Chicago Cubs organization.

Even though Bill Niemeyer never made it up to the Cubs, I wanted to depict Bill in a Chicago uniform. Was he good enough to have eventually made it to Wrigley Field? I don’t know. We will never know. The same as we will never know what any of the other boys in G Company who died that afternoon in Germany would have accomplished in their lives. The one thing I do know is that is their sacrifices, all veteran’s sacrifices, made it possible for me to have a good life in the greatest country in the world. As I sit here writing this, I can see and hear my neighbors enjoying this beautiful Memorial Day weekend. The shouts of the boys next door, the couple across the street putting a pair of mountain bikes in their SUV and the girl on the corner attempting to train her new puppy on her green front lawn. In a few hours I will be going over to see my girlfriend who I love very much, and share a nice, lazy summer evening. All that I see and hear right at this very moment was possible because of men and women like Bill Niemeyer, a 22 year-old promising ballplayer who once lived right down the street from where I sit right now, the place he left to go off to war and never saw again.

Many thanks to Gary Bedingfield who is the foremost authority on baseball and World war II. While looking around for a ballplayer to feature this Memorial Day I of course consulted his amazing website www.baseballinwartime.com. Consulting a page he constructed showing the many professional ballplayers who died fighting for our country, Bill Niemeyer jumped off the screen. He was born and raised right where I was sitting. I might even pass his relatives at the market or live next door. The fact that he came from this place made his sacrife a bit more personal for me, especially as I sat there with a nice fresh cup of coffee by an open window enjoying the beautiful Kentucky scenery he never saw again. The place of his death was even more interesting as that part of Germany looks very similar to what he had grown up in. I’m glad I found Bill’s name on that website and I encourage every other baseball fan to take a look at Gary Bedingfield’s monumental work. His site features in-depth articles about hundreds (actually it might even be thousands of entries by now!) of players who found themselves in the service during the war. Gary is also an author of two indispensable books on the subject, "Baseball's Dead of World War II: A Roster Of Professional Players Who Died" and one of my personal favorites, "Baseball In World War II Europe (part of the Images of Sports series)."

119. Mickey Rutner: Man On Spikes

When I first started this blog a little over two years ago, I started receiving many requests for players to be profiled on here and given The Infinite Baseball Card Set "treatment." Out of all the emails I began to notice that it was not one particular player that was asked for the most, but rather a whole ethnic group: Jewish ballplayers. I did cards and stories on here of Sandy Koufax and Moe Berg, but I began slowly researching different players of the Jewish faith, trying to find characters who would fit in with the kind of stories I like to write. Guys with interesting stories who may not be known to the casual fan of baseball history. Mickey Rutner was one of those guys, and in fact he appears on page 15 of the Premier Issue of "21: The Illustrated Journal of Outsider Baseball." Ron Kaplan, founder of the highly informative baseball book review site Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf, told me that no feature on Jewish ballplayers was complete without including Mickey. As far as I was concerned, including Mickey was a pleasure because not only was he the inspiration for a fine baseball novel and made-for-TV movie, but I had actually met him back in 2002 and had a nice talk with him while taking in a minor league ballgame in Round Rock, Texas.

Mickey Rutner wasn’t a great ballplayer, but he was a darn good one. His entire major league career consisted of 12 games with Connie Mack’s 1947 Philadelphia Athletics but it was his long, bittersweet minor league experience that inspired author Eliot Asinof to make him the hero of his best selling 1955 novel “Man On Spikes”. The novel follows hero “Mike Kutner” as he winds his way through the minor league system battling prejudices and the exploitation of the players toiling in its farm system. In Asinof’s novel the prejudice faced by the main character was due to his wearing of glasses - the real “Mike Kutner”- Mickey Rutner, faced anti-Semitism.

Mickey grew up in Hempstead, New York and after starring on his high school baseball team went on to play the sport at St. John’s University. In 1939 while playing in a semi-pro league sponsored by major league clubs and made up of college players, Rutner was teammates with another Jew from New York named Eliot Asinof. The team was run by manager Bill Barrett and after a losing streak approached Asinof telling him “there’s too many Heebs on this club. You’re fired.” Rutner got to stay.

After graduation Mickey was signed by the Detroit Tigers. Given a $3,000 signing bonus which he was later cheated out of, he was sent to play in their minor league system. While playing for Winston-Salem in 1941 Rutner’s manager was none other than Jake Atz, famed Texas League manager now in the last year of his long and successful career. Atz, also a Jew, told Rutner that his name Mickey and degree from St. John’s must have fooled the Detroit management into signing him. If they knew he was Jewish he wouldn’t have been offered a contract. The Tigers already had one Jew on the team, Hank Greenberg.

Mickey moved up a rung to Wilmington in 1942 and batted .277 along with a spot on the league All-Star team. His career seemed to be headed in the right direction when he was drafted. Mickey spent 3 prime years serving in Europe with the 45th Division before rejoining Wilmington in the Spring of 1946. Now playing third base, Rutner exploded batting .310, 126 RBI’s and his 36 doubles lead the league. He made his second All-Star game appearance that year as well. Moving up to the Birmingham Barons in 1947 Mickey responded by hitting .327, earning his promotion to the major leagues.

Playing his first game in an Athletics uniform on September 11th, Mickey went 2 for 4 against the White Sox. In his first appearance at Yankee Stadium, Mickey had the thrill of getting a game-winning base hit off ace Yankee relief pitcher Joe Page. All told Mickey played in 12 games for Philadelphia and hit .250 including a double and home run. He was invited take spring training with the Athletics the next year but by the start of the season he was sent back to Birmingham. Veteran Hank Majeski was the regular third baseman and although Mickey was good, he wasn’t better than Majeski.

Rutner continued to post good numbers playing in the high minors- .312 for Birmingham in 1948, .287 for Tulsa in ‘49, .286 for Toronto in ‘50 - but the majors never called again. The parent team of every club he played for had a good player already manning third base. First it was Majeski in Philly then Vern Stephens in Boston, then Grady Hatton in Cincinnati and finally Willie “Puddin' Head” Jones on the Phillies. As he grew older he slipped back down the ladder into the depths of the minor league system. After 10 years in the minors he hung up his spikes for good after the 1953 season ended. His lifetime average was just shy of .300. It was two years later that Mickey Rutner’s futile plight in the minor leagues was made famous by his former teammate now novelist Eliot Asinof. The book was further popularized when it was made into a television movie later that year.

In his later years Mickey retired to Texas where he took up a job with the Roundrock Express baseball club as the team’s official luxury suites greeter. Shaking hands and telling baseball stories, the old Man On Spikes wound down his last years again working around the game he loved. While undergoing surgery for a torn rotator cuff, Mickey developed a fatal staph infection and passed away at the age of 88.

The Premier Issue of "21: The Illustrated Journal of Outsider Baseball" is finally released and can be purchased by clicking on the tab right below the arrow on the main header of this blog.

118. Cannonball Dick Redding: Clean livin' and a fast fastball

When I started to watch that HBO series "Boardwalk Empire", about prohibition and crime in 1920's Atlantic City, I kept wondering if they were going to mention the great Negro league team that once represented that resort city. As I got through the whole first season, the show touched on the large black community of Atlantic City but came up short in regards to showing anything of the baseball team that once called the town home. Originally formed in Jacksonville, Florida and known as the Duval Giants, the team was convinced to relocate to New Jersey by a couple of local black politicians. Making the move north in time for the 1916 season they were renamed the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants after the corrupt major of town, Harry Bacharach. The team had a good following due to the seaside town's vacationers looking for entertainment as well as the quality of the players the Bacharachs put on the field. Besides Negro league stars Dick Lundy, Nip Winters and Oliver Marcelle, the Bacharachs boasted one of the greatest pitchers of any color to ever stand on a mound, Cannonball Dick Redding.

Perhaps the fastest pitcher of all time, Dick Redding’s fastballs were thrown in an assortment of different deliveries from hesitation wind-ups to compact throws from the waist. His match-ups with fellow Negro league legend Smokey Joe Williams attained mythical status through their retelling. Among the major league teams he defeated were the Boston Braves and the N.Y. Giants and against the Jersey City Giants he struck out 24 men. In 1922 Babe Ruth fanned on three straight pitches from Redding and he once out-dueled Carl Mays 2-1 in 15 innings. Redding would often pitch both ends of a double-header and is reported to have thrown 30 no-hit games in his career. Though he was big and burly, Redding never argued balls and strikes and prided himself on living a clean life, no smoking drinking or cursing. When his career ended in the 1920’s he turned to managing and skippered the Brooklyn Royal Giants until 1932.

116. Pee Wee Reese: The Name Ain't What You Think

My brother called me yesterday to ask me about Jackie Robinson. See, Jay's a public middle school teacher in Jersey City and he was having his class read a novel that mentions Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers throughout the text. That the book has Robinson and the Dodgers in it has a deeper local connection - in Journal Square downtown there is a giant bronze statue of Robinson reaching skyward, a silent but striking tribute to the day in 1946 when he stepped onto the field in Jersey City's Roosevelt Stadium to become the first black man to play organized baseball in the 20th century.

Being a big Robinson admirer I probably told my brother much more than he desired to know about his first season in the majors but I didn't care, I was on a roll talking baseball. One thing I told him was that despite the way coverage has been skewed the past couple of years portraying him as a lone-crusader, Robinson had quite a few solid and courageous teammates who helped him through that most difficult year. Manager Leo Durocher, for example, single-handedly squashed a budding team mutiny by telling the players that all he cared about was the Dodgers winning and if the white players didn't hustle and win he had no problem replacing them with blacks who could. He told them that more black players were following Robinson and they had better get used to the idea. As for the anti-Robinson petition that was supposedly circulating, the players could "wipe their ass with it." To cap it off he declared: "I don't care if he is yellow or black or has stripes like a fucking zebra. I'm his manager and I say he plays."

There was one other player that came to mind when I was telling that Durocher story to my brother. While Durocher showed his support with tough-guy talk, this one particular teammate of Robinson's showed his with a silent but far-reaching gesture.

Before he was known as "The Little Colonel" and "The Captain", they called him "Pee Wee". The nickname evokes a vision of a diminutive fella, but in fact, Pee Wee Reese was not small at all, 5'-10", and 160lbs, average size for ballplayer during the era he played in. No, the nickname "Pee Wee" came from being a champion marbles player as a kid and a "peewee" is what players call a 1/2" sized marble. Reese was such a good player that he was runner-up in a city-wide peewee marbles championship held by his hometown Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper.

Like I said earlier, Reese wasn't small by any means, but in high school he was skinny and frail looking and this kept him from playing much on his high school baseball team. His love of the game was satisfied by playing for his his church team, New Covenant Presbyterian. With pro ball the farthest thing from his mind, Reese took an apprenticeship with the local telephone company where the constant climbing of poles built up his slight body adding strength to his frame. When his church team won the 1937 Louisville City League Championship, things began to change quickly for Reese.

The Louisville Colonels were the local minor league team and a scout made sure he snatched up the New Covenant shortstop after the series. For a $200 bonus and a promise of $150 a month, Pee Wee Reese became a professional ballplayer.

The new kid did pretty decent his first season, batting .277. Reese beat out former major leaguer Ray French to become the Colonels' starting shortstop and although he was just average at the position, manager Bert Niehoff could tell he just needed to play in order to hone his natural skills. He was fleet afoot and in 24 stealing attempts was successful in 23 of them. Being from Louisville didn't hurt and the good-natured Reese quickly became the hometown's favorite player.

The Colonels played in the American Association which was equivalent to today's AAA classification. In 1938 the Louisville team was what was termed "unaffiliated" which meant that it was under no working agreement with any major league club. This left the ownership open to offers to buy their players from a variety of different teams instead of having to sell to just one. At the end of the season a group of businessmen bought the Louisville club. The identity of the members of the group which made the purchase was intentionally kept ambiguous but it eventually became known that Tom Yawkey, owner of the Red Sox was behind it. The reason for the purchase was the team's shortstop, Pee Wee Reese. Yawkey wanted to make sure no other club sunk their teeth into this kid which his scouts said had the makings of a great major league shortstop.

The next year Reese built on his rookie season, batting .279 and stealing 35 bases in 36 tries. The 19 year-old was so respected in the league that at mid-season he was voted onto the American Association All-Star team. Opposing managers described him as the best infielder in the American Association, despite his youth.

Reese was pretty much guaranteed a place on the Red Sox except for one thing - their player-manager Joe Cronin, who happened to play that very same position as the kid from Louisville. Cronin was notoriously sub-par in the field and sensitive as hell about it. The Red Sox had a decent ballclub at the time, having clawed their was up from being a perennial second-division team. With young players like Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams mixed with veterans Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove, the Red Sox were beginning to gain back ground and respectability in the league. The only problem was that manager Cronin was terrified of being beaten out of his shortstop job by a younger player. While other Boston scouts reported the merits of the budding superstar in Louisville, Cronin told Yawkey that Reese was just too small and sickly-looking to play in the bigs. Boston's owner listened to his manager and tried to recoup his Louisville investment by selling Reese to the Brooklyn Dodgers for $35,000.

At the time of the purchase, the Red Sox were in second place behind the mighty New York Yankees and looked like the next big powerhouse of the American League. Now suddenly Reese found himself headed not for a first-rate team but to the joke of the National League, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Like the Red Sox, Brooklyn had been the league's bottom feeder for decades. The difference was Boston's owner Tom Yawkey spent money on his players with reckless abandon and the Red Sox had turned their fortunes around. Brooklyn on the other hand had just recently avoided bankruptcy and their record was anything but encouraging. In '38 the team finished in 7th place, 18 1/2 games out and in '39 12 1/2 games back in 3rd place. The sporting papers were chock full of the stories about the team's incompetence - 3 guys winding up on the same base, outfielders being hit on the head with the ball and crazed fans driving the opposing team's players as well as the home team's mad with their incessant heckling.

No, Brooklyn was as far away from Boston as you could get. When informed by a sportswriter that Louisville's star player was soon to be a Dodger, Reese instinctively replied: "Oh - not Brooklyn!"

Of course Pee Wee Reese went on to become one of the Dodgers' most popular and successful players, the anchor that held together 2 generations of great Brooklyn teams in the 1940's and 50's. His leadership both on the field and in the clubhouse kept the Dodgers cool and collected during some of the most competitive pennant races in baseball history. But beyond that, it was Reese that became the example for his fellow ballplayers when it came time to integrate the team in 1947. When other players chose to shy away from making any statement about Jackie Robinson's presence on the team, it was Reese, a southerner by birth, who had the courage to stand by Robinson's side during that challenging 1947 season.

Perhaps no story says it better than the often repeated one about a May afternoon at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. There had been KKK death threats before the game. A sniper was supposedly poised to take down Robinson if he dared to take the field. The capacity crowd was extremely hostile against Jackie's presence on the field and the game hadn't even started yet. As the Dodgers took batting practice the Reds players began shouting racial slurs from their dugout. In this seething cauldron of hatred, Pee Wee Reese walked over to the solitary Robinson and casually put his arm around Jackie's shoulder in a show of friendship. Legend has it the stadium responded in a single, collective gasp. With that single gesture, Reese told the world that Robinson was accepted and from here on in, they had better get used to it.

Talking to Roger Kahn, author of the classic Brooklyn Dodgers book "The Boys of Summer", Reese said: "I was just trying to make the world a little bit better. That's what you're supposed to do with your life, isn't it?"

SABR, The Society of American Baseball Researchers has compiled a comprehensive book on the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers called "The Team That Changed Baseball And America" in which every single player who wore a Brooklyn jersey that year has their own well-researched biography. While as a whole it tells the complete story of that fabled team, each individual 3-4 page biography tells the story of one man's journey to play professional baseball. If my word holds any water when it comes to suggesting reading materials, let it be known that I highly recommend this gem...

A Little Interior Decoration

For the rest of the month of April, the company who prints my posters has offered me a little discount which I'm passing down to anyone who would like to own one of my art posters. There are quite a few different themes and styles and you can see most of them HERE. I also have a store on ETSY which you can see even more HERE. The limited time pricing is for 16x24" size prints for $70 postage included. Payment is through Paypal and you can order a poster by clicking on the BUY IT NOW bar below, just REMEMBER TO WRITE IN THE NAME OF THE POSTER YOU WANT...

Name of Poster You'd Like:

114. Joe Jackson: Shoeless Joe in North Jersey

Well, no set of Black Sox would be complete without Ol' Shoeless Joe. Often portrayed as the hapless victim of the fix, I personally believe he got himself willingly into the mess and spent the rest of his life regretting it, but then again, who really knows.

As with all the other Black Sox, much of Jackson's baseball career after the fix has been shrouded in speculation. Growing up in Northern New Jersey I would hear stories of Shoeless Joe's appearance on local ball fields back in the 1920's but like so many other great baseball lore passed down through the generations, you never know what's fire and what's smoke. Over the years I looked around for evidence of Jackson in Jersey and one day someone sent me two photos of him playing in Hackensack. He wore a pinstripe uniform and a dark cap with a "P" on it. The two photos intrigued me and I wanted to know more about them but ran into dead ends. Then one day I got into contact with T.W. from BlackBetsy.com and he gave me the low-down of Jackson's day in Hackensack. So, I think it's fitting to cap off this series with a look at the day in the life of a fallen big league star, in this case Joe Jackson and the afternoon of Sunday, June 25th, 1922.

The man standing in the shade of the building was deeply suntanned and wrinkles ran round his face, making him seem older than his 32 years. He wore a black suit, finely tailored, though of an older style cut and starting to show it's age around the edges. In his rough, calloused hand he gripped a leather travel bag, which, upon closer examination, showed that the ornate brass plaque between the handles had been crudely altered: someone had scratched away all traces of the original engraved initials.

The man stood outside the box office entrance to the town ballpark. It was a small, but well built ball yard, but in actuality he hardly took notice. After all, he'd played in a different one almost every weekend that summer and now they were all starting to blend together. If he hadn't stopped at the coffee shop back in the train station he'd probably have had no idea where exactly he was, which, by the way, was Hackensack, New Jersey.

After standing around in the late morning sun for a few minutes a caravan of dirty open cars turned into the dirt lot beside the ballpark. Stopping in a cloud of dust, a dozen men poured out. These were to be his teammates for today's ballgame. He watched as the men unloaded canvas bags of equipment. The oldest looking one of the group saw him standing near the box office door and walked quickly over to him, extending his hand. He introduced himself as the manager. In his other hand he offered up a manila envelope. The suntanned man opened it and pretended to count the money inside and quickly shoved it in his coat pocket. It was time to get ready.

The locker room was a locker room in name only. The small room was damp and had 2 long wooden benches that ran the length of the room and the walls had a shelf about neck high opposite each bench and a row of hooks beneath that. Each of the ballplayers staked out a space on one of the benches and unpacked their small traveling bags. Most of the players talked loudly with one another, laughing and throwing around swear words. Their accents were harsh to his ears and sometimes not too easy to follow. A few of the players stared unabashedly at the suntanned man and he began to grow more uncomfortable than he usually felt. As the suntanned man undressed he hung his jacket from the hook and folded his black pants and silk pink shirt. Running his hand over the folded silk garment to smooth it out before placing it on the shelf, he quietly touched the gold embroidered "J" monogram over the pocket.

The suntanned man removed a worn baseball uniform from his leather satchel. It was of a rougher quality wool than he was used to but it was a baseball uniform just the same. There was no name on the front, just black pinstripes. The cap he retrieved from the satchel was black as well, with a white button and white "P" on the front - a souvenir of an afternoon up in Poughkeepsie the week before. His name was "Joe Nutter" that day.

The manager appeared with another ballplayer in tow. He introduced him as "Smith" but the suntanned man recognized him as a young pitcher with Toronto. He couldn't recall his name, but it sure as hell wasn't Smith. The manager repeated the story he'd already heard - that his Westwood town team, traditionally a local powerhouse, had been unexpectedly clobbered by Hackensack a month before. There was always a heated rivalry between the two towns and the games always attracted spirited betting, the action being covered by heavies from nearby New York City and Newark. Westwood swore Hackensack had a few ringers on their team that day and needless to say much money was lost by Westwood's fans that day. Plenty of people were pissed off and thirsty for revenge. Taking up a collection, Westwood decided to purchase some insurance for today's game, hence the manila envelope of cash. Today, the suntanned man's name was "Josephs", at least that's what it said on the lineup card.

By this time he could hear the roar of the crowd. Through the row of filthy windows that lined one wall above the shelves he could make out much movement as hundreds of people jostled for seats. He could hear men shouting and children squealing. Someone threw something through one of the open windows and every few minutes some wiseguy would bang on the glass and shout something nasty. One of the suntanned man's temporary teammates sidled up and said: "They know you're here."

Emerging out from the darkness of the locker room he pulled his cap down as low as he could over his eyes to protect them from the sun. The crowd went wild when they recognized him.

"My God, it's Shoeless Joe Jackson!"

Spectators were spilling out onto the field and bits of paper littered the field. Glancing out to center field he could see it was cleared of fans, which made him feel a little better. The roar was deafening. There must be more than 1000 here today, probably more. Ugly, twisted faces shouted unintelligible words at him. Small children stared and women craned their heads and stood on tip-toes to catch a glimpse of him. He'd seen it all before. He did this every weekend.

The game wasn't much to remember as far as he was concerned. It was a standard affair - the Hackensack manager came over to the Westwood bench and in between swearwords made it clear his team would be playing the game under protest. Westwood held back the Toronto pitcher until he was unleashed in the 3rd inning after Hackensack scored a few runs. It was smart managing as it gave the gamblers time to settle the odds before the Toronto kid shut them down for the rest of the game.

In between hitting a home run, double and two singles there were a few notable incidents. A news photographer ran onto the field while Westwood was batting and attempted to take a photo of him as he sat on the bench. Two of his teammates started shoving the newsman and threatened to beat the hell out of him if he didn't get back to the stands. When Westwood's catcher reared back, ready to throw a punch, the fella ran off so fast he left his hat behind. The catcher stomped on it with his spikes and the rest of the ballplayers laughed. A few times the game was stopped, not by the umpire but because everyone paused to watch a fist fight in the bleachers. He noticed that the couple of policemen stood by and did nothing - wading into a crowd like this was pointless and after a few minutes the fighting stopped on its own anyway. At a few points in the afternoon the play was stopped while the players collected some of the larger items that were thrown onto the grass. Bottles of beer, scorecards, newspapers and even a few straw hats were picked up and thrown in a pile behind home plate. One call by the amateur umpire cause a heck of a row. When he called Westwood's left fielder out for supposedly not touching first base on his way to an easy double, the bench cleared and for a time it looked like the poor umpire was going to catch a beating. He sat on the bench and watched. The guy missed touching first by a mile anyway. A few innings later a Westwood fan charged out of the stands and accused a Hackensack outfielder of putting a concealed second baseball in play when he couldn't get to a deeply hit fly ball. He just pulled his cap lower over his eyes and thought about his wife.

He was proud of one play he made that day, not at bat but in the outfield. On a long ball hit out to him in center, he'd made the catch and threw a straight liner back to the surprised catcher who tagged out the equally surprised runner to end the inning. The bases had been loaded and it squelched a rally and when all was wrapped up it probably made the difference in Westwood's 9 to 7 defeat of Hackensack. Most of the crowd cheered but some threw even more crap on the field. This wasn't Comiskey Park.

After the game he tried to dress as quickly as possible. Half the team was drunk and in various stages of undress. One of the guys threw his spikes through one of the glass windows. He was too busy packing his leather satchel to find out why. Someone was pounding on the locker room door but no one answered. After a while he slipped his black suit coat over his pink silk shirt, once again obscuring the embroidered "J" above the pocket. He opened the locker room door and ignoring the lingering spectators in the parking lot headed off towards the train station, trying to remember where he was going to be next weekend and what his name would be when he got there.

The whole concept of this story was derived from a June 28, 1922 New York American newspaper article. It is one of the most moving articles I've come across dealing with the banned ballplayers. The writer had been at the Westwood game and the game details are as I have described here. Besides giving a summary of the whereabouts of the other Black Sox, writer Arthur Robinson includes fascinating details such as what Jackson wore that day and mentioning that his initials had been scratched off his travel bag. It is a grim and unflinching story and reading it all I could think about was how it made Jackson and the other seven men seem like they were stuck in some sort of sad baseball purgatory. Perhaps that's a fitting end to the perpetrators of baseball's saddest moment... but what the hell do I know, I'm just an simple artist.

I just wanted to give credit again to a few sources that besides first-hand contemporary newspaper articles, were the best places to glean hard-to-find information regarding the post 1920 lives of the Black Sox:

BlackBetsy.com a great website and more importantly it's staffed by a group of very knowledgeable Joe Jackson experts who were more than willing to share their groundbreaking research on the Black Sox Scandal. I owe much of the Joe Jackson article to T.W. and I just want to thank him for his kindness.

After The Black Sox: The Swede Risberg Story by Alan Muchlinski. Simply excellent chunk of research that shines a light onto the later years of Swede and his former teammates who he played against.

Outlaw Baseball Players in the Copper League: 1925-1927 by Lynn Bevill. A M.A. thesis published online that is the best source I've found that really explains the role of the Black Sox in the Copper League but also does a great job at telling the story of the towns and how the league operated.

Blacksoxfan.com No list of sources would be complete without a big thanks to this site dedicated to the Black Sox. The authors downloadable pdf of every existing outlaw and semi-pro game featuring a member of the Black Sox is just a monumental achievement and unbelievably helpful in tracking the movements of the eight men.

113. Swede Risberg: "Why work, when you can fool the public"

I hope you are enjoying the "After The Black Sox" series so far. When I was starting the Infinite Baseball Card site the very first drawings I attempted were of these 8 players. Besides the 1919 World Series fix being an interest of mine, drawing a set of 8 let me see how the style I was developing would look as a series. The originals were pretty basic and sparse compared to the ones you are looking at now, but the idea was there, the firm black line with bold blocks of color. I had wanted to re-draw these guys again but after getting to Happy Felsch and Eddie Cicotte, I got sidetracked by so many other great players who needed a card. Now, seeing them all together in all their post-1919 glory, I have to say it is a nice looking series. Anyway, here is the story of Swede Risberg's later years, leaving only one more, Shoeless Joe, who will make his appearance next week...

Swede Risberg has gone down in baseball lore as the muscle behind the 1919 fix. Besides having a nasty reputation that he cultivated long before he broke into the majors, his threat to murder Joe Jackson if he spilled his guts caused Shoeless Joe to make the infamous statement: "The Swede is a hard guy."

The Swede was born in San Francisco when it was still part of the "wild west" and grew up tough. His old man was a lumberjack from Sweden, and I don't think it would surprise anyone to know that that's where his nickname was derived from. Like many of the ballplayers he played with, Swede's education ebbed at an early age. His surly disposition and quickness to use his fists to settle a disagreement probably stems from insecurity derived from his embarrassment at his lack of schooling. Or maybe he was just a bad seed. Regardless of its root, when asked why he dropped out of school in the third grade, Swede quipped it was because he refused to shave...

During his minor league career on the west coast, the Swede forged his reputation as a tough customer through numerous spurts of violence. But he also became known as a very versatile player, filling in where ever he was needed, including on the mound. The White Sox snapped him up in 1917 and although he was terrible at bat, his defensive skill kept him in the game. His scrappiness was also noted, most memorably when he fought the ferocious Ty Cobb to a draw. By 1919 he was Chicago's starting shortstop and the press tabbed him as an up-and-comer.

Much like his pal Chick Gandil, Swede was a malcontent and must have been gasoline on the fire of the already inflamed White Sox locker room. With some of the team earning what they were worth and the rest playing for peanuts due to their inability to fight for good contracts, it was easy for the bitter Swede to make the choice to join in the fix. For his part he took home $15,000, one of the few conspirators who made anything for their troubles.

After the trial, acquittal and banishment from organized ball, the Swede played around Chicago under assumed names and then joined Gandil, Cicotte, Weaver and Felsch on the "Ex-Major League Stars" barnstorming team. What should have been a lucrative tour turned into a nightmare as the team was constantly heckled in what few games they were able to book. The whole organization collapsed when Cicotte's demand for his pay earned him a severe beating from the Swede. The former ace of the White Sox pitching staff left the team, leaving behind a few of his teeth.

With his 1919 pay-off cash, the Swede had bought he and his wife a dairy farm in Minnesota and he now embarked on an 11 year career as a ballplayer for-hire. Playing mostly for town teams throughout the northern part of the Midwest, the Swede changed teams frequently because the sheer cost of hiring him was too costly for most small towns to pay for more than one season. Many towns would hire a guy like the Swede to beef up their team in order to crush neighboring villages, giving its inhabitants bragging rights and make a little bit of money for the sporting men of the area.

From Alan Muchlinski's great book we now know where the Swede spent his post-1920 career. Muchlinski tracked down obscure local newspapers and mapped out his odyssey. After the disbandment of the Ex-Major League Stars, Risberg joined the Aces of Rochester, Minnesota in 1923 and 24, then joined Happy Felsch on the Scobey, Montana Giants. He went back to Rochester for a bit of 1926 and then over to Watertown, South Dakota through 1927 and then up to Manitoba, Canada to play for a team from the town of Virden.

Swede next turns up as a back-up pitcher on an integrated team in Jamestown, North Dakota. Among his opponents was old friend Happy Felsch who frequently worked the same circuit as Risberg. During the 1930 season the Swede threw a no-hitter against LaMoure. He went 2-for-4 that afternoon and fanned seven. Though it was merely semi-pro, it still wasn't bad seeing as the Swede was almost 36 at the time. His many seasons of rough ball playing also started to take its toll on him. A spike wound, courtesy of Ty Cobb, eventually caught up with the Swede and he developed osteomyelitis, the infection of the bone marrow and his playing days were numbered. Risberg played for Sioux Falls in '31 and '32 and then retired from the game.

According to his son, Risberg made more from barnstorming than he did as a major leaguer, but things didn't go too smoothly for the Swede - he lost his savings in the stock market crash of 1929. He appears to have stayed on his Minnesota farm until the early 1960's when he moved to California and opened up a bar. Like most of his Black Sox pals, the Swede never spoke openly about what really happened back in the fall of 1919 and I'm guessing that most men didn't have the stones to ask him, either. Swede's ex-wife did say that after he was accused of fixing the series he'd respond to inquires about his part with: "why work, when you can fool the public." When Eliot Asinof was writing his ground breaking "Eight Men Out" book in the early 1960's, Risberg told the author he couldn't remember anything about it - it was too long ago. About the only Eventually losing his leg to that old spike injury, the Swede proved his toughness by outliving all the other Black Sox, dying on his 81st birthday.

I just wanted to give credit again to a few sources that besides first-hand contemporary newspaper articles, were the best places to glean hard-to-find information regarding the post 1920 lives of the Black Sox:

After The Black Sox: The Swede Risberg Story by Alan Muchlinski. Simply excellent chunk of research that shines a light onto the later years of Swede and his former teammates who he played against.

Outlaw Baseball Players in the Copper League: 1925-1927 by Lynn Bevill. A M.A. thesis published online that is the best source I've found that really explains the role of the Black Sox in the Copper League but also does a great job at telling the story of the towns and how the league operated.

Blacksoxfan.com No list of sources would be complete without a big thanks to this site dedicated to the Black Sox. The authors downloadable pdf of every existing outlaw and semi-pro game featuring a member of the Black Sox is just a monumental achievement and unbelievably helpful in tracking the movements of the eight men.

112 Lefty Williams: Baseballs, Booze and Black Sox

Continuing with the post-scandal career of the Black Sox... Buck Weaver in my mind was the most tragic character from the whole scandal because he, unlike the other 7 players, apparently did not take money or agree to fix the world series. Pitcher Lefty Williams, however, is tragic in his own special way.

Back in 1919, Williams was on the way to being one of the best left handed pitchers in the American League. After a few faltering years with the Tigers he settled down with the White Sox and went 17-8 in 1917, 6-4 in 1918 and 23-11 in 1919 and led the league in games started with 40. His E.R.A. was consistently under 3.00. He, along with Eddie Cicotte were the heart of the White Sox pitching staff and his career was only getting better. In the 1920 season, his last before he and the other crooks were booted out of the game, Williams won 22 games. Cicotte, Jackson, Risberg and Gandil's careers were winding down and you can see how they would have been tempted to take the cash, but Williams was in his prime and through his greed and poor judgement a great career ended before it began.

Originally uninterested when he was approached by Chick Gandil to throw the series, Williams supposedly relented after being informed the fix was in anyway. Lefty received only half of the promised $10,000, but this still was almost double his regular season salary (Lefty's wife claimed the grand total he received for his part was actually $150). He and the other players may have tried to call off the fix half way through, but when Lefty’s wife was threatened (even this much-repeated part of the story may be made-up) he went ahead with it. Williams lost 3 games in the series and it was in part his atrocious and suspicious play that the series came under close scrutiny.

After his banishment he stuck close with some of the other banned players in their failed attempts to form a barnstorming team that capitalized on their infamous reputation. This all came to naught when first fans heckled and ridiculed the crooked ballplayers and then word came down from the commissioners office that any man taking the field against or with any of the 8 men out were subject to banishment themselves from organized ball. Now even the lowliest town-team didn't want to risk the future careers of any of their ball players for a game against the Black Sox.

Realizing his career as a major league ballplayer was over, Lefty began to live the life of a hired-gun ballplayer, one-game stands with what ever team could meet his price. With his wife Lyria in tow, Williams traveled the country making stops in towns from Minnesota to California. In 1926 Lefty accepted an invitation to join Buck Weaver and Chick Gandil in the outlaw Copper League.

As I talked about in the Chick Gandil story, the Copper League was made up of rough and tumble wild west mining towns and with the arrival of Hal Chase in the early 1920's had become a haven for blacklisted ballplayers. By the time he showed up in Douglas, Arizona in the spring of 1926, Lefty had turned into a surly, dark figure with a serious drinking problem. He fit right in.

Williams joined his former teammate Buck Weaver who was managing the Douglas Blues, but his time there only lasted through June when he left to join the Fort Bayard Veterans team where he was probably promised more money. Fort Bayard was a former New Mexico Army post that was converted into a hospital for veterans suffering from tuberculosis and other debilitating injuries brought on by being gassed in France during the first world war (remember that the great Christy Mathewson died from T.B. after being gassed during a training exercise). Fort Bayard also featured Chick Gandil who also jumped from the Douglas team the previous season. By most accounts Lefty was an ace pitcher who only seemed to get better as he drank between innings. I'm not sure whether the booze added anything to his fastball but opposing players said it sure did make him more intimidating. As ace of the Fort Bayard team, Lefty was given more leeway when it came to team rules - he would sometimes skip showing up for games he knew he wasn't scheduled to pitch and instead spend the day at his favorite speakeasy concentrating on his drinking.

To underline the fact that Lefty was still in his prime as a pitcher, in August he tossed a no-hitter against Weaver's Douglas Blues, sending the last 20 batters back to the bench in order. Sure it was only semi-pro but a no-hitter is still a no-hitter and factor in that Lefty was probably far from being in-shape due to his heavy boozing. At the conclusion of the season Lefty joined a Copper League all-star team and toured parts of Mexico before returning to Fort Bayard where he and his wife spent the winter months.

Despite Judge Landis' strenuous efforts to shut down the Copper League, or at least get them to expel the crooked ballplayers, the league continued for the 1927 season. Williams continued to dominate the league and as Lynn Bevill records in the excellent "Outlaw Ballplayers in the Copper League 1925-1927", at the midpoint of the season Lefty was 5-2 with 23 strikeouts and just 7 walks. As he did the year before, Lefty continued playing ball after the Copper league season and toured the southwest and Mexico with a barnstorming team, this time called the Juarez Brewers.

After the barnstorming trip I have been unable to find any more evidence of Lefty playing ball again. Around this time he and his wife Lyria turned up in Southern California where they opened up a nursery business in Laguna Beach. I don't know one way or another but I am guessing his alcohol intake probably subsided because the business seemed to do well. Like most of the other Black Sox, Williams never spoke about his part in the fix and died in 1959 at the age of 66.

I just wanted to give credit again to a few sources that besides first-hand contemporary newspaper articles, were the best places to glean hard-to-find information regarding the post 1920 lives of the Black Sox:

After The Black Sox: The Swede Risberg Story by Alan Muchlinski. Simply excellent chunk of research that shines a light onto the later years of Swede and his former teammates who he played against.

Outlaw Baseball Players in the Copper League: 1925-1927 by Lynn Bevill. A M.A. thesis published online that is the best source I've found that really explains the role of the Black Sox in the Copper League but also does a great job at telling the story of the towns and how the league operated.

Blacksoxfan.com No list of sources would be complete without a big thanks to this site dedicated to the Black Sox. The authors downloadable pdf of every existing outlaw and semi-pro game featuring a member of the Black Sox is just a monumental achievement and unbelievably helpful in tracking the movements of the eight men.

111. Buck Weaver: Innocent, But Still Guilty

Out of all the Eight Men Out, Buck Weaver is the only one who elicits any kind of sympathy from me. Weaver was a product of his age, upholding the turn of the century version of the unwritten "no snitching" code that so many of today's inner-city youth hide behind when it comes time to stand up for what is right. Buck was no different - he failed the test when it came time to speak up and stop the fix his teammates put in motion back in September, 1919. For this he never stopped paying the price, forever banned from the game he loved...

Besides being a pretty good hitter, “Buck” was an outstanding fielder, to the point of being the only third baseman Ty Cobb would not steal against. As far as I'm concerned that speaks more volumes about The Ginger Kid than any statistic found in the Baseball Encyclopedia. One of the most popular men to ever play for the White Sox, Weaver apparently knew of, but refused to participate in the fixing of the 1919 Series. It was this knowledge that was used against him and he was banned along with the other seven crooked ballplayers after the 1920 season. Even his stellar batting and errorless play in the series wasn’t enough to save him.

Weaver spent 1921 proclaiming his innocence to the point of deluding himself into believing he would be absolved of his part in the fix and be let back into the game. While the other banned players formed the "Ex-Major League Stars" and attempted to tour the mid-west, Weaver refused a lucrative contract to play with them and flatly refused to have anything to do with his former teammates. One afternoon in Chicago Weaver was asked by Risberg and Felsch if he would join their team that day to which Buck haughtily replied “Nothing doing. I’ll be back in the majors soon and you guys will still be semi-pros.” At this point he still believed he would be back on the White Sox. Throughout the summers of 1921 and 1922 newspapers in the mid-west featured stories about Weaver and his supposed appearances with a variety of semi-pro teams but these turned out to be just rumors. He was home in Chicago with his wife patiently waiting to be reinstated. It wasn’t until the following year that Buck came to the realization that Judge Landis’ ruling was indeed binding.

Weaver now needed to make a living and he began hiring himself out to semi-pro teams. In July he swallowed his pride and briefly reunited with Cicotte, Jackson and Risberg on the Bastrop, Louisiana ball club. He also played that summer with a team called “Sorg‘s Ice Creams” from Reedsburg, Wisconsin. He reportedly hit .369 that season and played against Happy Felsch who was roaming the outfield for the Twin Cities Red Sox.

1925 found Weaver in Arizona where he was recruited to play in the outlaw Copper League. This rough and tumble semi-pro circuit was made up of wild west mining towns and was a haven for black-listed ballplayers. Weaver’s team, the Douglas Blues, was managed by the crooked Hal Chase and featured Chick Gandil at second base. Gandil soon jumped the team for another in the league but the following year Weaver became the Blues manager and was joined by Lefty Williams. Weaver coached the Blues to a losing record and wasn’t helped by Lefty’s desertion mid-season to join the rival Fort Bayard club. To cap it off, Buck also severely injured his ankle that season and didn’t return to the Copper League in 1927. The reasons went unreported, but there was talk of Chick Gandil pulling strings to keep Weaver away because of their disagreement over the 1919 fix. Weaver still told anyone who would listen that he was clean while the other seven were guilty, most recently that winter in Chicago when he and the other Black Sox were called to testify in court once again. Gandil must have been seething every time he had to face Weaver’s team and now he felt the self-righteous Buck had double-crossed him again.

Weaver was an extremely popular figure in the Windy City and his presence in uniform on a ball field was sure to attract a crowd. While the other Black Sox generated a mix of mostly negative reactions when they played after 1920, Buck seemed to always get a warm welcome and no place was more friendlier than the Chicago area. Spring of 1927 brought the much-heralded return of the Ginger Kid to the area’s sandlots when he signed on with the Hammond, Indiana Hammonds. As the Hammonds made the league circuit a few opposing teams threw a “Buck Weaver Day” in honor of the popular third baseman. The Hammonds played against other top-notch Chicago area semi-pro clubs like the Logan Squares and Duffy Florals as well as Negro league teams such as the Chicago American Giants.

Moving over to the rival Duffy Florals, Weaver finished out his playing days by switching over to shortstop and managing the Floral’s for the ‘28 and ‘29 season. At the age of 41 Buck fronted a team called “Buck Weaver’s Cooney’s” which was financially backed by one of Al Capone’s associates named Duke Cooney. The team played through the 1933 season and Buck wound down his playing days with another self-named semi-pro club, “Weaver’s West Side Colonels.”

While all the other Black Sox left Chicago for good after 1920, Weaver remained there for the rest of his life. He worked for the city of Chicago, installed elevators and eventually went into the drugstore business with his brother in-law. A fellow by the name of Charlie Walgreen approached Buck with an offer to combine their drugstores into a city-wide chain but Weaver declined. Walgreen’s became, well, WALGREENS, and Weaver’s store went under during the depression. The once fun-loving third baseman devolved into a bitter, disgruntled man, always decrying his punishment by Judge Landis and proclaiming his innocence in the 1919 fix. At the age of 65 the Ginger Kid suffered a heart attack and died alone on a Chicago sidewalk. His numerous letters to the commissioner’s office and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown never once received a response and the one man who rightfully should have had the best chance at reinstatement was left overshadowed by all the publicity generated by Shoeless Joe Jackson’s deluded supporters.