by Steve Rushin
As for Mike Grady, he too survived, so that he could be photographed in 1905, at the West Side Grounds in Chicago, wearing his St. Louis uniform of long flannel sleeves, a broad collar like a pair of pterodactyl wings turned up at his neck, a wide belt cinched around his waist, high and tight like a fastball. Grady’s cap was pulled low to throw half his face in shadow, but otherwise, the only concession to the midday sun was the feeble hole cut in the back of the leather-clad pillow of a glove that must have made his left hand, in the heat of July, feel like a grilling steak.
Grady’s opposite number at first base that day in 1905 was Chicago’s Frank Chance, who would become the Cubs’ player-manager. On July 3, 1911, Chance was overseeing the team’s workout “under a hot sun” in Cincinnati when he returned to the bench and collapsed. Players carried him to the clubhouse, where he was examined by the Reds’ physician, Dr. H. H. Hines, who declared Chance unfit to continue. “Excitement or physical effort,” the next day’s paper reported, “might prove fatal at any time.”
And while Chance had developed a blood clot in his brain from manifold beanballs, he wasn’t done any favors by the Cubs’ uniform of the day. In 1911, the team wore a flannel pullover with four buttons up the front, as on a nightshirt. Above the flannel, over Chance’s heart, was a large felt C all but encircling that gorgeous bear-and-bat logo. To make matters significantly worse, the road uniforms—pants and shirt conjoined at the waist by a cinched leather belt—were a deep midnight blue, the better to absorb and retain the Cincinnati sun.
Frank Chance in the Cubs’ stifling road uniform. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)
At least one of Chance’s jerseys survives from that potentially fatal 1911 season. It is a home shirt, with Albert Spalding’s label beneath the collar. In 2009, it sold at auction for $62,213, for let us not forget: These instruments of torture were also among the most beautiful and evocative garments that ever graced the earth, and young men were dying to put them on, not take them off.
And death was a potential side effect of those uniforms, for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with heat. When the Brooklyn Superbas hosted St. Louis in the subtropical conditions of July 2, 1901, before catching that train west to still hotter miseries, they did so without starting catcher Duke Farrell, who was blood poisoned after one of his shins was torn open by the spikes of Cincinnati player Harry Steinfeldt.
To understand why this would have been terrifying to Farrell’s teammates, we have to go back to the very beginning of professional baseball in 1869, when the Cincinnati team identified itself by the vivid socks of its players. By 1870, the Red Stockings were joined by the Chicago White Stockings (who would become the Cubs), and in 1880 by the Worcester Ruby Legs (a lovely nickname that unaccountably fell into disuse), and in 1896 by the Detroit Wolverines (whose yellow-striped socks prompted people to call them the Tigers).
The Chicago White Sox arrived in 1901, the deliberate misspelling in preemptive obeisance to headline writers, who would shorten it anyway. By December 18, 1907, when the Boston Americans changed their name to the Red Sox, baseball had a long history of colorful hosiery.
Long before baseball caps were accepted as appropriate attire in civilian life, bright socks were the one piece of the uniform players tried to replicate in their civilian dress. “One of Hornsby’s great features as a dresser is his socks,” one writer noted. “They cry to heaven. They can be seen at night.” When Casey Stengel left boisterous Brooklyn to manage the Boston Bees in 1938, his ankles were tamed for the trip north. “Honestly, you wouldn’t recognize old Casey this spring,” a wire-service reporter cabled from St. Petersburg. “His shoes are shined, his nails manicured and his socks of sober hue like those of a modest bank president.”
To men already predisposed to blinding fashions, baseball’s uniform socks were bewitching. The trouble was, colorfast dyes did not exist for professional baseball’s first several decades, and when a player like Duke Farrell of the Superbas was spiked in the shin in 1901—the blood of his open wound commingling with the running dye of his socks—he risked getting blood poisoning. Or so people believed.
Blood poisoning was a grave illness, and seemed to afflict ballplayers disproportionately. Napoleon Lajoie, the great Cleveland infielder who abandoned his double-knobbed bat for a Louisville Slugger, was felled by blood poisoning after being spiked in 1905. As the Boston Globe reported, “The scratch is on the inside and not bigger than a fingernail, but it is thought some of the dye in his stocking got into the wound and affected it.”
Nap Lajoie convalescing on his porch, 1905. (Library of Congress)
To prevent this, teams began to wear a second pair of dye-free socks beneath their vivid uniform hose. These plain white “sanitary socks” were every bit as uncomfortable as they sound. Imagine, on a hot summer day, stuffing a second pair of socks into your baking leather shoes. To ventilate that heat, arched openings were cut in the front and back of the uniform socks, exposing great white moons of the “sanitary sock,” a phrase that now sounds oxymoronic to most of the world but is perfectly familiar to anyone who played baseball in the twentieth century.
For the next eighty years, long after the introduction of colorfast dyes, players would wear these “sanis” beneath their vestigial uniform socks—or stirrups—as an unnecessary and obsolete hedge against turn-of-the-century blood poisoning.
Which isn’t to say that blood poisoning wasn’t a real menace. It would have seemed especially so among baseball people. After Lajoie missed most of the 1905 season with blood poisoning, big-league veteran Frank Bonner—then on his descent with Kansas City of the American Association—died of blood poisoning. The next season, the Senators’ rookie first baseman, Jerry Freeman, was blood poisoned and nearly lost a finger on his throwing hand. The season after that, while playing for the Providence Grays, former Cardinals shortstop Forrest Crawford died of it, quite suddenly, which came as “a great shock” to his manager, Hugh Duffy, “who had no inkling he was sick.”
That’s how abrupt and insidious blood poisoning was. It would kill both the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals (Stanley Robinson) and the owner of the St. Louis Browns (the gloriously named Phil De Catesby Ball). As ailments go, it had an extraordinarily high profile, the phrase frequently attaching itself to obituaries and news bulletins. Blood poisoning was the official cause of death of Yankees manager Miller Huggins and before that—when her appendix burst—of Mary McGraw, wife of future Giants manager John McGraw, then with Baltimore.
Blood poisoning rang the curtain down on one of baseball’s most baroque lives, that of Rube Waddell, the great southpaw (and alcoholic “sousepaw”) whose manifold eccentricities included having the attention span of a carpenter ant. (Waddell was known to leave the mound to pursue, on foot, any passing fire truck.)
In 1913, while playing for Minneapolis in the Northern League, on the treacherous down slope of a Hall of Fame career, Waddell bruised one of his thighs and was promptly hospitalized in serious condition with blood poisoning. As was often the case in such situations, amputation of the leg was mooted and—though that option was rejected—Waddell died anyway, a year later, of what proved to be tuberculosis. He was an old man of thirty-seven.
Players lived dog years. “In 11 years, I’ve changed uniforms some 23 times, broken my left leg three times and suffered such little things as blood poisoning, infected fingers and a brain concussion,” the pitcher Bobo Newsom said in 1938, when he was thirty-one and well into a pitching career—the only pitching career—that would span both Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle.
That socks might serve as a magical shield against the malady was not entirely wishful thinking in that age before antibiotics. By far the most famous victim of blood poisoning was Calvin Coolidge Jr., sixteen-year-old son of the president. On June 30, 1924, while playing tennis on the White House lawn against his older brother, John, young Calvin developed a blister on his toe. It became infected, the infection spread swiftly, and t
he boy died a week later, in Walter Reed Hospital, in the arms of the bereft president, who shouted that he would soon join the boy in the great beyond. “When he went,” Coolidge wrote, “the power and the glory of the presidency went with him.”
Calvin Coolidge Jr. (Library of Congress)
A rumor quickly spread—in malign imitation of the infection that killed him—that Calvin Jr. had worn black socks in his fatal tennis match, and that toxic dye had seeped into the wound. In fact, something like the opposite was true: Young Calvin hadn’t worn socks at all that day, when doing so might have prevented the blister that killed him.
It wasn’t the first time that fear of blood poisoning abruptly led to rumor and in turn to public hysteria. In the top of the ninth inning of Game 3 of the 1911 World Series, Philadelphia Athletics third baseman Frank Baker—who had already won Game 2 with a home run—hit another bomb, this one off Giants ace Christy Mathewson, to tie the game 1–1. In the bottom of the tenth, while getting thrown out at third at the Polo Grounds, Giants center fielder Fred Snodgrass spiked Baker in the leg. The slugger was “cut and bruised severely,” and when the Series moved to Philadelphia for Game 4, the Giants’ train was met at the station by a mob of fans calling Snodgrass “Spiker!” and “Dirty!” and doubtless more colorful epithets unfit for newspapers of that or any other day.
Teammates hustled Snodgrass into a taxi, which whisked him off to the Majestic Hotel, a twelve-story jewel on Broad Street in the theater district of north Philadelphia with a grand tradition of hosting ball clubs. The five-foot-five Rabbit Maranville once entered a twelfth-floor room at the Majestic by way of the narrow cornice that ran beneath the windows on the hotel’s exterior, his teammates having locked him out of a card game.
As torrential rains fell on Philadelphia, Game 4 of the 1911 World Series was twice postponed. (A week would pass before it was played.) In the meantime, and with little else to do, a crowd of Philadelphians gathered outside the Majestic. They “hooted and hissed” whenever Snodgrass passed, and an A’s fan jostled with Arthur Fletcher, claiming that the Giants shortstop had hit him with a newspaper. The fan vowed to return that night and exact vengeance. In such an atmosphere, in those idle days between games, rumors (and wounds) were likely to fester.
And they did. A report quickly circulated that Baker had been hospitalized with blood poisoning, a result of the spiking. Snodgrass wisely holed up in his room at the Majestic, his absence on the street leading to reports that he’d been shot by an A’s fan. Several Giants players had to be pulled from a nearby theater to deny the rumor to the baying mob, but such mobs are seldom quelled easily. And so McGraw finally sent Snodgrass back to New York to wait out the rain, at once proving that his defiant center fielder was very much alive and neutralizing the bloodthirsty crowd on the sidewalk.
A’s fans had tried to get his goat, but as Snodgrass memorably put it: “My goat is not for sale.” A line in the next day’s New York Times, beneath the headline SNODGRASS HOOTED OUT OF PHILADELPHIA, drily understated the tenor—then as now—of that city’s sports fans: “Partisan feeling here is very strong.”
Baker, meanwhile, was not in a hospital with poisoned blood but at home, resting comfortably, in advance of what would be a two-for-three performance in Game 4. His winning shots in Games 2 and 3 had already earned him a brand-new nickname—Home Run Baker—that would last the rest of his life and beyond, inscribed as it is on his Cooperstown plaque.
History was less kind to Snodgrass. After losing to Philadelphia in 1911, he and the Giants would return to the World Series in 1912, in Boston’s brand-new Fenway Park, where they led the Red Sox 2–1 in the decisive game. The home team opened the bottom of the tenth inning with an easy fly ball to center field that “fell from the pouch of the padded glove” of Snodgrass, beginning a game- and Series-winning rally for which Snodgrass would forever be held responsible. A father of two who played nine seasons in the big leagues, Snodgrass became the mayor of Oxnard, California, and died—a grandfather of five—on April 5, 1974, in his native Ventura, California. And what was the headline in the next day’s New York Times? FRED SNODGRASS, 86, DEAD; BALL PLAYER MUFFED 1912 FLY.
The Giants would lose a third consecutive World Series in 1913, again facing the A’s, an experience so dispiriting to McGraw that he was said to have committed suicide in his Philadelphia hotel room. The desk clerk at the Majestic received so many inquiries from the press that he “finally went up to McGraw’s room to reassure the New York papers and was informed via the keyhole that ‘the report was greatly exaggerated.’ ”
But then man’s worst fears and darkest thoughts came to life in the absence of facts. Which goes a long way toward explaining how stirrups and sanitary socks came to be, but not how they continued to thrive long after dyes were rendered nontoxic, and blood poisoning (or sepsis, as it has come to be known) was treated with antibiotics, a phrase coined by a Ukrainian microbiologist named Selman Waksman, who discovered many of the bacteria-fighting agents used today. Waksman won the Nobel for medicine in 1952 for his discovery of streptomycin, which fights tuberculosis, albeit too late to help mad Rube Waddell.
In the age of antibiotics, after stirrups and sanis lost whatever function they were intended to serve, they were simply accepted as part of the proper costume of a ballplayer. A century after the Cincinnati Red Stockings started big-league baseball, big-league teams—Cincinnati among them—were still wearing stirrups. But not happily so. The Reds of the 1970s were ordered by management to wear their stirrups so low that only a small arc of sanitary-white showed beneath, like the white crescent moon at the base of your fingernail.
The players ridiculed these stirrups as “ankle-chokers,” better suited to Midwestern winters than to Cincinnati summers, a fact not lost on Johnny Bench, who wore them while duck hunting. “You could go out any morning, no matter how cold,” he said, “and stay warm as toast.”
On an August day in 1939, the sportswriter Henry McLemore stood in the Yankees’ clubhouse, in a sodden seersucker suit, and watched the “poor players” get dressed for battle at the stadium: “First a layer of heavy underwear. Then two pairs of socks. Then a layer of sliding pads. Then a heavy sweat shirt, and finally, their Yankee uniforms, made of the hottest, thickest, most luxuriously smothering flannel that can be bought.” Catcher Bill Dickey, before donning a mask, chest protector, and shin guards that day, put on “leg warmers” beneath his pants. And while the airless clubhouse was “boiling hot,” it was an oasis compared to the playing field that summoned them at the last possible moment. “Out the Yankees went,” wrote McLemore, “to suffer under the Congo sun.” It was, he noted, 102 degrees.
The baseball uniform was a study in masochism but also its near anagram—machismo. The photograph of my grandfather that hung in the house I grew up in—and now greets my children daily in the hallway of our home—is a portrait of quiet suffering. Jimmy Boyle is in his catcher’s crouch at the Polo Grounds, wool Giants cap pulled low over his forehead, its blunt bill providing the only shade, his arms covered in long sleeves of thick flannel, his collar high and tight against his neck, a leather mattress on his left hand as he stares implacably at the camera. “To Mother & Dad,” reads his inscription, in a neat Palmer script. “7/29/26. New York Giants. Lovingly, Jim.”
Of course, the umpire standing behind the catcher had it worse, in his cap, blazer, dress shirt, and necktie, his slacks and polished shoes attempting to exude the authority of a prosecutor. When umpire Red Ormsby suffered heat prostration during a doubleheader in St. Louis in 1935, White Sox reserve center fielder Jocko Conlan filled in for him and—just like that—switched careers. Conlan would work as a National League ump for twenty-five years, officiate in six World Series and as many All-Star Games, and be inducted, in 1974, into the Baseball Hall of Fame. But in his speech at Cooperstown, all he could talk about was the heat that at once gave him a career and made baseball life so exceedingly uncomfortable.
Trains and train stations were a
special misery. “When you think you had to carry two fifty pound bags [of equipment] and those [porters] would run away from you at 116 degrees,” he said. “I wish after reading the papers these days that these 20- and 30-year-old guys playing get tired, if they had to ride the train from St. Louis to Boston with a screen on the window, [and] thank God the screen was there.… I think they’d change their story. We just didn’t know any different.” Then he thanked former National League president Warren Giles for his unsung contribution to the game: arranging to have umpires’ bags airfreighted from one city to another at the conclusion of a series.
As if it weren’t hot and heavy enough on its own, the flannel uniform doubled its weight with perspiration. It was almost medieval. At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French outnumbered the English five to one. But each suit of steel-plate armor worn by French knights weighed as much as 110 pounds. A study by biomechanic scientists in 2011 concluded that those knights moved at half the speed while expending twice the energy of their more lightly clad English counterparts.
The flannel uniform wasn’t just heavy, though. It was as itchy as a medieval hair shirt. The outfielder Andy Pafko likened it to wearing burlap. “The uniforms were so uncomfortable,” Yankees first baseman Moose Skowron once said. “Maybe that’s why our games lasted two hours. Because we wanted to go take a shower instead of scratch.”
Scratching is what the young Mets outfielder Ken Singleton did throughout spring training of 1972. That April he was traded to Montreal, where he became even itchier, and developed hives from neck to knee. “It looks like he stepped out of a shower of mustard gas” was manager Gene Mauch’s description of this mystery ailment, which puzzled allergists, who asked Singleton to keep a daily diary of his diet.
Alas, Singleton’s hives only intensified. He was having the worst kind of breakout season. Singleton’s hives became so bad he was sent home from a series in Cincinnati, after which the hives mysteriously disappeared. But when he returned to play, so did they, driving Singleton to such great distraction that he couldn’t even remain on the bench.