The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  The fielder had no such equivalent Excalibur until 1957, when American ingenuity produced—in the year that Mantle opened his Holiday Inn—the Excalibur of baseball gloves. Power-giving and protective, the Wilson A2000 was the glove’s great leap forward, the exemplar of the art, suitably armored with hyphenates like Grip-Rite Pocket and Twin-Split Web. The latter had two parallel vertical laces, giving fielders “the flexibility to ‘close’ on the ball faster.” The A2000 was not just the progenitor of the modern glove—it is the modern glove. Its genius, in the words of Noah Liberman, author of the engaging Glove Affairs, is that “the A2000 doesn’t look like the human hand. It took almost 90 years for ballplayers and glove makers to shake off the belief—or was it instinct?—that the glove must look like the hand.”

  In hindsight, the A2000 made all of its predecessors look like the Hamburger Helper glove. It resembled—for the first time—a baseball glove, or what we now think of as a baseball glove: The thumb is as long as the fingers. The fingers (joined together by laces) are flattened and curved, not thickly pillowed. Liberman quotes Tigers outfielder Al Kaline—featured in A2000 ads of the 1960s—telling a reporter: “The A2000 gave you so much confidence, especially when you had to catch the ball with one hand. The glove seemed to automatically collapse around it.”

  Instead of a hand-mattress that cushioned the blow of a baseball, the A2000 was designed for catching. The glove premiered the year the Giants moved west, toward Francisco Grande, and was still going strong a decade beyond 2000, that far—off, far—out, sci—fi date that it was intended to evoke in 1957, the year of Sputnik’s launch.

  Many have tried, but it’s nearly impossible to overstate what an object of beauty the A2000 is, with its near-perfect symmetry and a golden-brown glaze that makes many models resemble a Thanksgiving turkey, fresh from the oven. “It’s not just a baseball glove,” Esquire declared fifty years after the A2K’s introduction, “it’s the single greatest piece of sporting equipment ever built.” To sportswriter Dave Kindred, who kept an A2000 on his desktop computer as a muse, “the Wilson A2000 is a masterpiece of man’s creative urge.”

  In 1960, Horace Stoneham paid a $110,000 signing bonus to Randy Hundley, a seventeen-year-old catcher just graduated from Bassett High School in Madison, Virginia. Hundley’s father, Cecil, was a semi-pro catcher whose throwing hand had been broken in twelve places by a baseball. As a result, Cecil Hundley taught his son to catch one-handed, with a flexible, hinged catcher’s mitt. The skeptical Giants watched him catch six games that way before abandoning the experiment and dealing him to the Cubs before the 1966 season, at which time he single-handedly—the pun is very much intended—changed forever the way catchers caught.

  In 1967, Hundley’s second season in Chicago, he made only four errors and won the Gold Glove. With the stiff catcher’s mitt, the catcher had to clap his free hand over the ball, like a trumpet mute on a trumpet bell. But catching one-handed, with a hinged mitt, Hundley could keep his bare hand at his side, or behind his back, out of harm’s way, where it remained: In 1968, when he made five errors, Hundley caught in 160 games—a record still.

  One of Hundley’s distant predecessors behind the plate at Wrigley, Jimmy Archer, had his meat hand photographed by Baseball Magazine in 1917, his last year catching for the Cubs. “The first and fourth fingers look like the wreck of the Hesperus,” the magazine pointed out. “The little finger curves like a barrel hoop.” Archer had broken every finger on that right hand, which was nevertheless an aesthetic improvement on his right arm, twice broken and once burned to the bone after he fell into “a vat of scalding tanners’ liquid.”

  For Hundley, never taking a foul tip off his meat hand had another salutary effect. It helped him keep a promise to his mother never to swear, though he did develop, in fourteen years in the big leagues, an extensive vocabulary of anodyne expletives like shucks and blooming.

  More significantly, the hinged mitt helped Hundley honor his father. He promised Cecil half the $110,000 signing bonus he’d received from Stoneham, compensation contested by the IRS in 1967. In the landmark case Hundley v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the U.S. Tax Court decided that the payment was indeed a genuine business expense, Cecil Hundley having performed a unique and invaluable service for his son. “A few years before Cecil retired from active participation in baseball as a player, he developed a one-handed method of catching which was unique and unorthodox,” the ruling stated. “This technique was beneficial because injuries to the catcher’s throwing hand were avoided.”

  The ruling vouchsafed one-handed catching in the American tax code. But Hundley had not entirely done so on the baseball field—despite his simultaneous Summer of Love victories of court case and Gold Glove. In fact, that first Gold Glove would be Hundley’s last, for the following season, 1968, a more prodigiously talented catcher—also the son of a semi-pro player—would win it, and do so without pause for the next decade.

  Johnny Bench was a two-handed catcher on July 31, 1966, when he broke his thumb in the very first inning of his very first game for the Buffalo Bisons. In sitting out the rest of the season, he had time to witness Hundley’s ascension in Chicago, and to contemplate catching one-handed, which he was doing, rather adeptly, by 1968, when he was named the National League Rookie of the Year.

  In winning the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1970, Bench—like Spalding with his black glove—had the bona fides to change the way all his colleagues caught the baseball. And it was neat that he did so in Cincinnati, one hundred years after that other Cincinnati catcher, Doug Allison, first caught in buckskin mittens.

  The year Hundley moved to the Cubs and Bench broke his thumb in Buffalo, a ten-year-old in Seattle, the son of an attorney, drew up an ironclad contract with his sister: For $10, he would get unlimited use of her baseball glove, whenever and wherever he wanted. The contract is often cited as early evidence of the budding business sense of Bill Gates, who—like Hundley—would also prove revolutionary.

  By its centennial, 1970, the catcher’s mitt was so firmly fixed in American culture that a key American outpost in the Vietnam War was called just that. The “Catcher’s Mitt”—formed by prominent bends in the Song Be River north of Saigon—would become a late line of defense for the capital against the advancing Vietcong.

  “To get to Bien Hoa and Saigon, the enemy has to come through the Catcher’s Mitt,” Don C. Hall, recalling a superior officer’s briefing, wrote in his memoir, I Served. “If you will, men, it’s the sword pointed at Saigon, which the enemy has as his major objective.”

  American boys were throwing baseball grenades in an effort to defend the Catcher’s Mitt and, by extension, democracy itself. This object that didn’t exist a century earlier—the catcher’s mitt—was now a cartographical fixture: on the Song Be River in Vietnam, but also in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah—you can ski the Catcher’s Mitt, a white-filled concavity on the east side of Kessler Peak—and of course in Bushong, Kansas, namesake of old Doc Bushong, a town as devoted to baseball in its own way as the lost city of Francisco Grande.

  The baseball glove had come so far, and seen so many innovations—stuffed, hinged, webbed, dyed—that it took some reminding: It remained, in essence, a mattress for the hand, or any other part of the human anatomy requiring protection. Whether purchased at auction to admire, or at a sporting-goods store to wear, the glove—be it writer’s muse or candle scent—was above all meant to comfort.

  That comfort came in World War II. Stanley Pisk fought in the 38th Field Artillery of the Second Infantry Division, which spent 320 consecutive days in European combat. Pisk stormed Omaha Beach at Normandy on D-Day and fought, six months later, at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. He and his comrades were moving off Eisenborn Ridge there when his attention was seized by something in the snow. Pisk uncovered a partially buried catcher’s mitt, a 1941 Wilson model that moved him unexpectedly, filling him with an intense desire to make it home to his wife, Kaye, in New Britain, Co
nnecticut, and to play ball there someday with his newborn son, Ted.

  “I think this caused an immediate transformation in his outlook, a life-changing experience,” his son, Ted Pisk, told their hometown newspaper sixty-five years later. “It reminded him that there was another life out there. After months of fighting and trying to stay alive, this glove jogged his memory of home, of his son, his wife, of baseball and all the good things that would await him if he could make it.”

  Stanley Pisk carried that glove in his backpack to combat’s end in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and back to the United States, where it very slowly made its way, in 2009, to Cooperstown. There, its story will give comfort to many more, in a way that only catcher’s mitts can.

  There are other ways, of course. Former Orioles and Rangers catcher Johnny Oates, afflicted with hemorrhoids in his retirement, found relief from his pain by sitting on his old gamer.

  Chapter 4

  THE MEN IN THE GRAY

  FLANNEL SUITS

  As June turned to July in 1901, New York City succumbed to five straight days of record heat. On July 2, at 2:15 in the afternoon, it was ninety-nine degrees in Manhattan and office workers abandoned their stifling buildings to ride the Staten Island ferry, packed with people desperate for a breeze. “Tunnel workers crawled from the depths,” the New York Times reported, “complaining of a heat that humans could not stand.” Families spent nights sleeping in parks or on fire escapes. The dying were carried away in horse-drawn ambulances, until the horses, too, dropped dead in the streets.

  In Brooklyn, in the twenty-four hours from July 1 to 2, 198 burial certificates were issued. Among the dead in that borough was Barney Morris. Born in Ireland in 1792, survivor of 109 years touching three centuries, Morris finally yielded not to war or famine or disease but “to the terrible weapon of death” that was—in an age before air-conditioning—the urban heat wave.

  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran an editorial cartoon that week in which Satan, sweltering beneath a parasol, said: “I’ll be darned if this place doesn’t remind me of home, sweet home.” Clutched in the devil’s cloven hand was an electric fan, like the ones being flogged down on Pearl Street by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, whose slogan—“You Can Be Comfortable In The Hottest Weather”—was not entirely true.

  We’ve forgotten how hot the world was not so very long ago, how inhospitable life could be in places incapable of cooling. In those days, comfort was often forbidden by conventional modes of dress. In Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, villagers were scandalized that some people—in a week when many were driven to insanity by the weather—wore their bathing suits on the streets, in the train station, and even to the post office.

  And so, on that fifth straight day of heat, while all about them man and horse were dropping, and brazen suburbanites were posting letters in their swimsuits, the National League champion Brooklyn Superbas hosted the St. Louis Cardinals at Washington Park, in ninety-three-degree heat, in flannel uniforms.

  Three years earlier, for its personnel stationed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the United States Army had abandoned its smothering flannel in favor of lighter-weight canvas. In the theater of baseball, no such comforts were afforded. Players could only hope that the heat would break during the game, which would go on as scheduled despite that terrible weapon of death all around them.

  The game began in the suffocating nineties, but the temperature dropped twelve degrees in two hours, thanks to an Old Testament litany of meteorological phenomena, best summed up in the headline above the Eagle’s game story: BROILING SUN, WIND, RAIN AND HAIL SERVED UP AT WASHINGTON PARK. A hot wind, like a dog’s breath, descended on the diamond, stirring the dust that clung to flannel fibers like an early version of Velcro. The dust storm was followed by torrential rain that delayed the game. Hail—its metaphorical size went unrecorded, alas—followed rain, “which deluged the ground and precluded any further proceedings.” The Cardinals were declared winners, 4–2, but fans and players alike remained in the ballpark to watch nearby St. Agnes Church—struck by lightning during the game—go up in flames. The players could not stay long, however: Like so many men in gray flannel suits in the years to come, they had a train to catch. The Superbas were traveling overnight to Chicago, on a hot train fired by coal, to a still hotter hotel advertised—as so many were in that day—as ABSOLUTELY FIREPROOF.

  In the scorching summers at the turn of the last century, man needed reassurance that all about him things weren’t going to spontaneously combust. The Superbas, and their twenty-nine-year-old second baseman, Willie Keeler, would have been grateful as they left Brooklyn by train, windows open, the coal cinders sucked into their compartments a small price to pay for the sensation of moving air. A horse had expired on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn thirty-six hours earlier but was never removed and “the stench in the neighborhood since that time,” the Eagle reported, “has been something almost unbearable.” The players were exposed to all of this—to deadly heat, welcome rain, pelting hail, the smoke of a church fire, the aroma of dead horse, the dust stirred by urban siroccos—in a single afternoon, in wet flannel. That players of the era often went straight to the station in uniform to catch a scheduled train almost beggars belief.

  “When I played for Toledo around 1908 or 1909,” Yankees manager Joe McCarthy said in 1957, “we’d pile into a Pullman right after a home game and head for Milwaukee. Our clothes would be dirty and soaking wet, and the first thing we’d do would be to change and hang everything to dry. When we ran out of places to hang clothes, we’d raise the windows and drape the wet shirts out in the breeze. You should have seen how some of the passengers would lose their appetites when they passed through our car en route to the diner.”

  In all the films and photographs, the radio accounts and interviews from baseball’s first half century, what doesn’t survive are the smells. But they were powerful, and most powerfully absorbed by wool flannel.

  It was still hotter than the Fourth of July when the Superbas played their first game of that western swing to Chicago—on the Fourth of July, as it happened. Brooklyn manager Ned Hanlon had a chore for idle pitcher Jay Hughes that torrid afternoon. “I asked Hughes to come up from the dressing room to coach,” an irate Hanlon said after the game, “but he disappeared in the shade somewhere and came out at the end of the game cool as a lily.”

  Superbas infielder Tom Daly squared to bunt in that game in Chicago and popped the ball into one of his eyes, which promptly swelled shut, after which leeches were applied, with little positive effect. But leeches weren’t a daily torture in the summer heat. Flannel was.

  The Superbas left Chicago for St. Louis, where, on another very hot day, Brooklyn beat the Cardinals on a disputed call at home plate, where umpire Hank O’Day ruled Cardinals left fielder Jesse Burkett out. A crowd of several hundred spectators descended on O’Day as he passed the Cardinals dugout, shouting “Robber!” at him, like the baying mob had done to Barabbas at Gethsemane. Some of the St. Louis players kicked O’Day, then an arm in the mob reached out and punched O’Day in the jaw, and the ump responded with a flurry of blows, at which time he was pummeled beneath a cartoon cloud of flying fists.

  And yet, while getting punched, O’Day was dressed as if going to the theater, in flat cap, wool jacket, and a tie knotted at the throat. Surely some of the madness of the day had to do with the heavy clothing of spectators and umpires, to say nothing of the players, sprinting beneath a broiling sun in their flannel pants, shirts, and caps—often collapsing beneath that wool flannel, which weighed eight ounces to the yard, even before it was soaked in sweat.

  There was one small consolation: This was lighter than what players had once worn. “Owing to the heavy weight flannels used in our Nos. 0 and 1 Uniforms, we have found it desirable after many years of experience, to use a little lighter weight material for the shirts,” read an 1896 ad for uniforms manufactured by the A. G. Spalding & Brothers Company. “This makes them more comfortable, much cooler, an
d wear just as well as the heavy weight.”

  The heat literally made people crazy. When Brooklyn made its road swing through St. Louis and Chicago in 1901, some players recalled the same trip in 1897, made in the same insufferable heat. In Chicago, on July 9, 1897, the eighty-eight degrees at eight o’clock in the morning was the highest temperature ever recorded at that hour. The weather filled the papers with its terrible toll: “Charles Benson committed suicide while insane, caused by the extreme heat. John Eaton shot himself while suffering from the heat.… Henry Hazemann, found dead hanging near Park Ridge, [was] driven to the deed by heat.… The night was terrible. There was comfort to be found nowhere.” One hundred horses fell dead in the street.

  On that road swing in 1897, the Brooklyn players wouldn’t visit Chicago for another forty-eight hours, stuck instead in stifling St. Louis, where seven people died on the twelfth consecutive day of the heat wave. Two of the seven that day—“one a New Orleans negress”—were driven insane by the heat. Among the “numerous prostrations” were two who couldn’t remain upright during their exertions in that afternoon’s baseball game. They were St. Louis first baseman Mike Grady and Brooklyn catcher Aleck Smith, who afterward was said to be unconscious and in serious condition.

  Prostration—rendering one prostrate, horizontal in the merciless sun—was a baseball buzzword in that age before night games. Heat was a malevolent force made doubly dangerous by baseball’s inexplicable attire. Broadway Aleck Smith would survive the prostration of July 9—he died twenty-two years later to the very day, of what was poignantly called an “athletic heart”—but it remains a wonder how he and any other catchers so often remained upright.