The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  Spalding alone produced a million bats in 1900. Those bats were driving baseballs into streets and neighboring yards, where children were helpless to chase them. Men like Spalding, the Rawlings brothers, J. A. Hillerich, former Philadelphia A’s player A. J. Reach, and George Wright (member of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings) and his partner, Henry Ditson, were all making (or remaking) names and sometimes fortunes during the greatest economic expansion in American history, what Twain called “the Gilded Age.”

  These men were selling the newly invented objects of the game and even inventing the game’s inventor. In 1905, Spalding set up a committee to investigate the origins of baseball, specifically to suppress the growing heresy that it evolved from the British game of rounders. The commission featured A. J. Reach and George Wright and was headed by Abraham Mills, who succeeded William Hulbert as president of the National League when Hulbert was buried beneath that giant baseball in Chicago.

  In 1907, after two years of dithering, the Mills Commission abruptly declared Civil War general Abner Doubleday the game’s inventor. Their evidence was a letter from an elderly mining engineer in Denver named Abner Graves, who claimed to have witnessed Doubleday whip up the sport in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. It didn’t bother Americans that Doubleday was in fact a cadet at the United States Military Academy that year, confined to West Point, nor that Graves would eventually die in a Colorado insane asylum.

  No, by 1935, when a farmer in Fly Creek, New York, found an ancient baseball in a trunk, it looked like something Doubleday might have used, had he ever played or expressed an interest in baseball. The ball was chocolate brown, split at the seams, like a bulb from which something is straining to grow. It was the serpent’s apple required by baseball’s creationists to disprove the countervailing theory of evolution. Dubbed the “Doubleday Baseball,” it became a centerpiece of the Hall of Fame when it opened in 1939, the hundredth anniversary of Doubleday’s fictitious invention. In its glass case there now, it looks like a detonated baseball grenade.

  In the new century, gloves were ubiquitously advertised amid dropsy tonics and other curatives and—once outfielders became the last to succumb—adopted at every position on the field.

  Not everyone was smitten. By 1908, as Cait Murphy points out in her chronicle of that season, Crazy ’08, writers were calling for the abolition of outfielders’ gloves: “The big mitt has made the ballplayer,” Sporting Life editorialized. “We have no desire to revert to the glove-less game, but there is a wide margin between no gloves and the present huge mitts which enable the veriest dub to face a cannon shot.”

  But such nostalgia was by then already twenty years old, appearing as early as the 1880s, when George Ellard wrote a poem about Doug Allison’s Red Stockings team called “The Reds of Sixty-Nine,” in which he lamented:

  We wore no mattress on our hands,

  No cage upon our face;

  We stood right up and caught the ball,

  With courage and with grace.

  That the glove completely changed baseball is evident elsewhere in Ellard’s poem, the part that never gets quoted, in his now-comical ode to the good old days, when a baseball was all but impossible to catch consistently:

  The game you see them play to-day

  Is tame as it can be;

  You never hear of scores like ours—

  A hundred and nine to three.

  The irony, of course, is that barehanded big leaguers invented the baseball glove precisely so they wouldn’t have to play barehanded any longer. Those hands would be needed for other toil that would provide for them when their baseball skills had faded.

  When that happened to him, Doug Allison went to work for the U.S. Post Office in Washington, D.C., where he’d sit in the lobby of the Reds’ team hotel whenever they were in town. It was in Washington on January 20, 1914, that Allison placed a pen in the claw hammer of his right hand and wrote a letter to Cincinnati Reds owner August (Garry) Herrmann, imploring him to help another of the original Red Stockings.

  “Dear Sir,” Allison wrote,

  I have just received a sad letter from Cal McVey, telling me he’s down and out through a mine accident. His playing in the old “Cincinnati Red Stockings” helped to put base ball on the map of today, and [he] was one of the greatest players of his day. Cannot the National League put him on the retired list say at $40 or $50 per month. He also tells me if he could put himself under a good doctor he might be able to do some work. Also told me that Pres. Lynch and Pres. Johnson was notified of his trouble but up to the present time heard nothing from them, which I am very sorry to hear. I see by the papers where the National Association was willing to pension Capt. Anson but he said he did not need it. Now, Mr. Herrmann, please do what you can in his behalf. By doing so you will greatly oblige me of his many friends. Hoping to hear from you soon in regard to same. I remain, Yours Respectfully, Doug Allison.

  Then Allison appended a postscript, squeezed into the lower left-hand corner of the page: “McVey’s Address is Eddie Graney’s Billiard Parlor, Market Street, San Francisco.”

  McVey survived another dozen years. But Allison died less than two years after writing that letter, at the age of seventy, at ten forty-five in the morning, on his way to clock in at the post office.

  Allison’s colleague and contemporary Charlie Waitt, whose glove so impressed Albert Spalding, had preceded him in death by four years. “A more honest and harder-working professional player it would be difficult to find,” the New York Clipper had said of Waitt in his playing days. “[He] has long enjoyed the reputation of being one of the finest outfielders in the profession.” But that was 1882. By 1912, when Waitt died in San Francisco, reportedly from a fall while washing windows, he was remembered—when remembered at all—for having worn a glove, at the risk of great ridicule, thirty-seven years earlier.

  The man to whom Waitt confessed his unease at wearing a glove—Albert Spalding—died in 1915, in Point Loma, California, a titan of commerce seated atop a double-stitched globe. And though he left a fortune estimated at $600,000 (nearly $14 million today), Spalding—like Waitt and Allison—died at heart a manual laborer, in the truest sense of the phrase, which grows from a Latin root, manualis: “belonging to the hand.”

  For its first three decades, the glove was primarily a protective device and often prevented the wearer from catching anything at all. (How apt that it would become a synonym for condom, spawning the phrase “No glove, no love.”) Pocketless, fat-fingered, and inflexible, baseball gloves were not specifically designed for catching baseballs. This seemed strange to pitcher Bill Doak, who—as a spitball specialist for the Cardinals—was always in pursuit of a competitive advantage.

  In 1920, Doak conceived a revolutionary accessory to what was by then a five-fingered glove. He had Rawlings loop two horizontal leather laces between the thumb and forefinger, creating a rudimentary web, ideal for snaring a baseball, for concealing a pitcher’s grip, for cursing into without causing offense, and for countless other uses as yet unimagined in 1920.

  Without Doak’s innovation, we wouldn’t have Tommie Agee’s snow-cone catch in Game 3 of the 1969 World Series, no “Web Gems” on Baseball Tonight, nor any way for an idle Little Leaguer to wear his glove on his face as a mosquito shield. Doak’s webbed glove was instantly successful and so popular that Rawlings offered it for sale for the next thirty-three years, earning Doak as much as $25,000 in royalties in a single season and ushering in an escalating arms race for the human hand.

  First basemen in particular wanted more-capacious gloves, great catchment basins for collecting baseballs. Hank Greenberg was their Rube Goldberg, dreaming up bigger and more complicated gloves every season. “Last year, Hank had a glove made which looked like a mattress for a Singer midget,” Bud Shaver wrote in the Detroit Times in 1935, name-checking a troupe of diminutive vaudevillians. “This year he has a bigger one. It is a half-inch larger in diameter and it looks somewhat like a lobster trap.… It has a thumb as long
as Jimmy Durante’s schnozzle. Between the thumb and the rest of the mitt, Hank has something which looks like a fishnet.”

  By 1939, when the Singer Midgets were employed as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, Greenberg’s latest mitt contained, in its bottomless depths, “three lengths of barbed wire, four corners, two side pockets, a fish net, rod and trowel, a small sled, a library of classics, a compact anti-aircraft gun, a change of clothes and a pocket comb.”

  Indeed, when Greenberg moved from first base to the outfield in 1940, Boston Braves first baseman turned outfielder Buddy Hassett warned: “There’s a whale of a difference between a mitt and a glove. This is especially true these days, with first basemen wearing mitts that look like fish nets, mitts that snare tosses so easily that some first basemen don’t even know they’ve got the ball in those nets.”

  On the other hand, as it were, Lou Gehrig’s mitt was a modest thing, “the smallest glove of any first baseman I know,” as he told John Kieran of the New York Times. The last glove he ever wore, when his undiagnosed disease made it difficult to bend over in the spring of 1939, was also his largest, but even that was little more than a leather oven mitt, with athletic tape braided around the worn webbing as reinforcement.

  X-rays taken in 1938 revealed seventeen fractures in Gehrig’s hands, at least one on every finger, injuries through which he famously played for 2,130 consecutive games. Gehrig’s iron-man streak was aided by two other men: One was Albert Spalding, whose surname was branded above the palm of his glove, a palm in which Gehrig assiduously avoided catching the ball whenever he could help it. Teammate Bill Werber, late in life, remembered Gehrig “trying to catch the ball in the webbing of the glove when the infielders threw it to him,” a small blessing for which Gehrig could thank the other man who abetted his streak: Bill Doak.

  What became of that final glove is not entirely clear. In a 1979 interview with the Sporting News, Babe Dahlgren, Gehrig’s replacement at first base, recalled returning to Yankee Stadium after spring training in 1940 to find Lou—diagnosed with ALS the previous June—cleaning out his locker. “He took his glove and threw it over to Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse man,” Dahlgren told Bill Madden. “I remember him saying, ‘I won’t be needing this anymore, Pete.’ ” Dahlgren asked Sheehy for the glove, even though he was right-handed and Gehrig was left-handed.

  “Lou had worn the glove so much he had Ed Rainey, of Spalding, reface and reline the glove,” Dahlgren wrote in a letter. “I never knew any other player who did this.”

  The letter was to Barry Halper, owner of the largest private collection of baseball memorabilia in the world. Halper bought the Gehrig glove from Dahlgren and eventually made it lot 2421 in a Sotheby’s auction of the Barry Halper Collection in 1999. It was purchased, for $387,500, by an anonymous buyer widely reported to be the actress and director Penny Marshall.

  Trouble is, the Baseball Hall of Fame also had, in its possession, Gehrig’s last glove, a gift from the Gehrig estate. With that revelation, Marshall denied ever having purchased the other glove. But the fact is someone bought it, for nearly $400,000, reflecting a deep desire to shake the hand that shook the hand of Lou Gehrig, whose glove had been, in the words of biographer Jonathan Eig, “an extension of his own skin.”

  In the Halper auction, the actor and comedian Billy Crystal purchased one of Mickey Mantle’s Rawlings XPG3 gamers for $239,000, and in doing so became a baseball-fan version of Adam, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, straining to touch the hand of God.

  “What makes the human hand unique?” visitors to the American Museum of Natural History were asked in an exhibit on primates. Answer: “The human hand can grip with strength and fine control, so it can throw a baseball or sign a name on the dotted line.” Those without sufficient skill to throw a baseball, but with sufficient wealth to sign a check, have made vintage baseball gloves a valuable commodity, and one of the most intoxicating inhalants known to man.

  As an official Rawlings model, the Bill Doak glove was discontinued in 1953. And so, a year later, was Bill Doak, swiftly following his mitt into eternity the way surviving spouses often do. He died in a warm bath, over the Thanksgiving holiday, in Bradenton, Florida, where he’d lived for the previous twenty-nine years, coaching youth baseball and running a candy store called Bill Doak’s Sweet Shop. “Almost every youngster here is an acquaintance of Bill Doak,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune noted the year before he died. “They love to chew candy and talk baseball with a fellow who really loved and loves the American pastime.”

  Doak’s was, by all appearances, an exceedingly pleasant and Cleaveresque existence, despite his having lost his first fortune in the crash of ’29. Doak taught Sunday school in Sarasota, Florida, became a golf pro, and managed a bowling alley before settling into his role as bespectacled proprietor of a candy store. “One must lead a whole life to succeed in any walk of life,” Doak liked to say. He was duly eulogized as both inventor and confectioner—part Wilbur Wright, part Willy Wonka. His influence is still felt every time a glove is sold, when the buyer secures the webbing over nose and mouth, like an airplane oxygen mask, and takes a deep drag of its leathery essence.

  Nineteen fifty-four marked not just the passing of Doak, but also the passing of a glorious glove tradition. Baseball adopted Rule 3.16, forbidding players to leave their gloves on the field when going to bat. Prior to 1954, many did just that, dropping their gloves on or near the diamond, sometimes in foul territory, sometimes in fair, but always in ankle-breaking proximity to their position. “They might as well leave tombstones out there,” the Hartford Courant editorialized when the rule was under consideration.

  Not everyone agreed. Lugging one’s glove all the way back to the dugout was considered by many to be a waste of time. “It would be foolish,” Red Sox scout Ted McGrew said. “If the player made the third out at second base, he would then have to run clear to the bench to get his glove before taking his place in the field.” That a teammate could just run it out to him evidently didn’t occur to anyone.

  With one’s glove unattended on the field, there was always a danger of having infield dirt or a dead mouse inserted into its fingers by opponents. And disembodied gloves occasionally affected a game’s outcome, to say nothing of at least one pennant race. Philadelphia beat the White Sox on September 28, 1905, when Harry Davis of the A’s singled to left and the ball struck the unattended glove of teammate Topsy Hartsel, who promptly scored from second. (The A’s would go on to win the American League pennant by two games over the White Sox.)

  The Sox got that game back forty-five years later, on August 4, 1950, when Nellie Fox hit a bloop to shallow center field at Comiskey that caromed off his own glove and went for a double. Had Fox left his glove palm up, and had the ball landed in it, he would have had the distinction of being the first big leaguer to fly out to himself.

  While pursuing a ball two seasons later, White Sox shortstop Sam Dente stepped on a glove in a game at Washington, allowing a run to score. He was charged with an error, and the Sox lost 2–1, and talk was renewed about banning the practice of abandoning gloves in the field. Rule 3.16 was approved in November 1953 thanks to the strong advocacy of an ex-player on the Official Playing Rules Committee. “Aside from the possibility of hindering play,” he said, “gloves on the field look sloppy.” That former player, who found gloves so aesthetically displeasing, was retired first baseman Hank Greenberg, whose own mitt, two decades earlier, had resembled Durante’s schnozzle.

  Of course, this was the dawn of the decade when baseball was becoming art and architecture, yielding Francisco Grande and Mickey Mantle’s Dugout Lounge and an almost mystical attachment to the game’s objects never equaled before or since. The era’s most famous literary protagonist—Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye—mentioned that his kid brother, Allie, scrawled poems on his left-handed fielder’s glove “so that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat.”

  Catcher was published in 1951, a
t a time when baseball gloves were being manufactured and poetry came standard on them, factory-installed. Allie Caulfield’s poetry was superfluous. Rawlings had a musical genius for naming its patented innovations: the Trap-Eze, for instance, and the Edge-U-Cated Heel. Baseball has always loved the hyphen and the intentional misspelling, particularly in combination with each other. Witness the Twi-Nite doubleheader, the Snow-Cone catch, the outfield billboards for GEM CLOG-PRUF RAZORS WITH SINGLEDGE BLADES. The year of Catcher’s publication, one of baseball’s most popular gloves was the Nokona Ristankor, which consisted of three deliberate misspellings: not just “wrist” and “anchor,” but also Nokona, a brand based in Nocona—with a c—Texas.

  The ’51 Nokona, bearing the signature of White Sox shortstop Chico Carrasquel, had an adjustable wrist strap that GRIPS THE WRIST—CAN’T FALL OFF—CAN’T BE KNOCKED OFF. This, of course, was the titular Ristankor. Baseball gloves in the 1950s were like automobiles of the 1950s—beautifully styled, lovingly named, with a range of models ubiquitously advertised. As the tagline of the Carrasquel campaign said: “Ask your dealer to show you the new Nokona line.”

  The pin had been pulled from the baseball grenade, and the explosion would reverberate for the rest of the ’50s, a decade in which it was not unusual for a man or boy to have a baseball glove dealer. The year after Catcher came out, Bernard Malamud published The Natural, a baseball retelling of the Arthurian legend, with a homemade bat in place of Excalibur. Wonderboy was hewn by Roy Hobbs from a tree split by lightning. When a fastball left the bat likewise split in two, “the Knights’ batboy nervously collected both the pieces and thrust a Louisville Slugger into Roy’s limp hand.” Stripped of his power, the mighty Hobbs struck out.