The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  What Dandy and Bennett designed was a featherweight plastic insert that fitted into a zippered pocket on the inside of Dodgers caps. They were inspired by a jockey’s helmet MacPhail had received from his friend Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt II, a great-great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt II was the innovative father of modern Thoroughbred horse racing, to which he introduced the use of the starting gate and the photo finish, among other novelties.

  The “armored caps,” as Dr. Dandy called them, could accommodate two inserts, one for the left side of the skull, the other for the right, so that a batter could choose to wear only one at the plate. In fact, most Dodgers would choose to wear both, and not only at the plate. Joe Medwick—who had taken up Foulproof Taylor on his offer to whack him over the head—wore it in the outfield. Dodgers pitcher Freddie Fitzsimmons wore it to throw batting practice. The day before MacPhail made his grand unveiling, Medwick and shortstop Pee Wee Reese wore them in an exhibition game against the Indians, during which the caps had passed the most important test of all: Nobody noticed them.

  This was critical. Helmets had been discussed since the Chapman beaning, but—as in Washington—they were always proscribed by the boundless nature of human vanity. “The objection I heard from other club owners,” MacPhail said, “was that players would never wear them.” But Reese and Medwick were only too happy to do so. As a rookie the year before, Reese missed eighteen days after being beaned at Wrigley Field, where he never saw a pitch emerge from the white shirts in the center field bleachers. Three weeks later, Medwick, too, was hit in the head.

  That same season, another device like a boxer’s headgear was patented, but also patently ridiculous, at least to players’ eyes. It was designed to be worn over the cap, not instead of it. As a result, the wearer always resembled someone who had just sustained a head injury, rather than someone seeking to prevent one.

  But the hidden inserts of Dr. Dandy robbed the helmet of any such stigma. MacPhail predicted that all players in the big leagues would be wearing them by 1942.

  That prediction was echoed at season’s end by the magnificent Dr. Dandy, who reminded reporters that Dodgers star Pete Reiser had been beaned low on the cap, near the cheekbone, in late April. If not for the insert he was wearing, he’d have been sidelined for some or all of the season. Instead—his coconut cocooned in an armored cap—Reiser led the National League in both hitting and being hit by pitches. He was drilled six times in 1941, twice in the head, but survived to lead the Dodgers to the pennant by two and a half games over St. Louis, whose captain, center fielder Terry Moore, missed a month down the stretch after being concussed by a pitched ball in August. Had the Cards worn the armored caps and the Dodgers gone unprotected, St. Louis would likely have advanced to the World Series, Dr. Dandy asserted.

  Though many still refused to wear them, seventy-eight-year-old Connie Mack thought invisible inserts were underkill, not overkill. “The man who invents a helmet that insures absolute protection will make a fortune,” he said, oblivious to Foulproof Taylor’s Beanproof Cap. “Some players may feel now it would reflect on their gameness to wear one but the time is coming when they will be standard equipment.”

  That time didn’t come fast enough. Mack had underestimated human vanity. Players continued to step to the plate in a soft cap. Cardinals outfielder Harry (the Hat) Walker got his nickname for fiddling with his cap after every pitch. Dandy lived to see many players in both leagues wear his armored cap, but none was yet wearing a helmet when the good doctor died in 1946, of a coronary occlusion at age sixty.

  In death, W. E. Dandy was revealed as “the greatest neurosurgeon of his time,” a magician who was summoned to the deathbeds of George Gershwin and Leon Trotsky. He was a pioneer of a surgery called ventriculography—a technique for locating tumors and one of the most important developments in the history of neuroscience. And still, the subhead above his obituary in the New York Times, seeking to summarize his life in a few syllables, inevitably said: HE DEVISED MANY METHODS OF OPERATING—CO-DESIGNER OF BASEBALL HELMET. Such was the power of the national game.

  What baseball needed, as Connie Mack recognized, was something more. The liners could prevent a rung bell, but not a fractured skull. “These protective liners made of fibroid material that are inserted inside the cap aren’t the answer,” White Sox general manager Frank Lane said in 1954. “They are of some benefit of course. Cass Michaels would have been killed if he hadn’t worn one because it caught at least part of the blow.”

  On August 27, 1954, a pitch thrown by Marion Fricano of the A’s fractured Michaels’s skull and ended his career. The resulting sound—at once familiar and otherworldly—was peculiar to baseball beanings. As Roger Kahn wrote in Sports Illustrated, “This sound without echo meant—always—a solemn circle of men, busy trainers in white and finally the stretcher, borne by the victim’s teammates, on whom baseball uniforms suddenly looked out of place.”

  And so it was that Mack’s prophecy—“The man who invents a helmet… will make a fortune”—came to pass. In 1952, a Pittsburgh engineer named Ralph Davis brought a primitive prototype of a “protective cap” to the Forbes Field office of Pirates general manager Branch Rickey. It was a bulletproof, military-grade device made of fiberglass and polyester resin. Rickey ordered them for each of the teams in the Pirates system.

  Rickey asked a Pirates executive named Charlie Muse to work with Davis and designer Ed Crick to refine the helmet. But the helmet they came up with could not protect the head of a player who refused to wear it. Which described most players. “It was more difficult than people think,” Muse said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1989. “The players laughed at the first helmets, called them miner’s helmets. They said the only players who would wear them were sissies.”

  A promising young farmhand on the Pirates affiliate in Brunswick, Georgia, had declined to wear the team’s single helmet before he was beaned that summer of ’52 by Jack Barbier, a sidearm pitcher in the A’s system. “Only sissies wore helmets then,” Mario Cuomo recalled years later, when he was the sitting governor of New York. He joked that the residual effect of the hematoma on his brain was what drove him into politics.

  Helmets could not remain optional much longer, at least not on the Pirates. As with his signing of Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers six years earlier, Branch Rickey recognized both a moral and a financial benefit to the batting helmet. He owned a hat-making company, American Baseball Cap, Inc., which grossed $6,000 in 1953, a figure likely to increase exponentially if helmets became acceptable. That year, Rickey ordered all his Pirates to wear the new helmet, a mandate that protected the players’ heads but not their dignity: Children seated behind the bullpen at Ebbets Field threw marbles at the Pirates. There is an industrial quality to those first Pirates helmets, a halo of holes drilled in each crown for ventilation, as if the players were wearing them to mine for coal or repair power lines.

  But the players also saw the benefits. Like the glove, just one prominent athlete wearing the helmet made it instantly less sissified. And so baseball’s first $100,000 bonus baby, Pirates pitcher Paul Pettit, wore one as a pinch runner and was promptly hit in the head by a thrown ball. The helmet was dented but Pettit’s head was not, serving as a powerful example to many of his teammates that it was possible to un-ring a bell.

  That same summer, a star Dodgers farmhand—heir apparent to Pee Wee Reese as shortstop in Brooklyn—was biding his time leading the American Association in home runs and RBIs for the St. Paul Saints. In that role, Don Zimmer dug in at the plate one day in Columbus to face Red Birds right-hander Jim Kirk. Zimmer wasn’t wearing a helmet, and struggled in the twilight to see the ball emerge from a backdrop of trees. The fastball he took to the temple fractured his skull, leaving Zimmer unconscious for six days. Four holes were drilled through the bone to reduce pressure on his brain, and those holes were later plugged with buttons of tantalum, a metal used in lightbulb filaments, which was apt, as
lightbulbs were slowly buzzing to life above the heads of a scant few major-league hitters, if not the world at large.

  That watershed year of 1953, University of Southern California professor C. F. (Red) Lombard applied to patent his new motorcycle helmet, which had a cushioned inner layer for comfort, but also an outer shell that absorbed and evenly distributed the energy of a collision. Lombard’s battle would be every bit as uphill as baseball’s, for his patent application coincided with the release of The Wild One, in which Marlon Brando played an outlaw biker whose wardrobe became iconic: black leather jacket, white T-shirt, and a pillowed service cap of the sort Ralph Kramden wore to drive his bus on The Honeymooners.

  In baseball, as with Brando, helmets weren’t cool. The Cardinals followed the Pirates in making them mandatory, but the $25 fine for noncompliance suggested that enforcement would be lax. Phil Rizzuto was the only Yankee to wear a helmet in 1954. When Zimmer made it to the majors that season, he and Don Hoak were the only two Dodgers to wear them. Not wearing a helmet was reckless, but wearing one was hardly a guarantee of safety, for the act of facing a major-league pitcher was (and remains) an inherently perilous undertaking.

  On June 23, 1956, in the fourth inning of the Dodgers game at Ebbets Field, Zimmer, wearing a helmet, was hit in the face by a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball thrown by the Reds’ right-hander Hal Jeffcoat. The pitch shattered Zimmer’s left cheekbone and nearly detached his left retina, yet such were the duties of the American game to the American public that Jean (Soot) Zimmer, the shortstop’s wife, consented to be photographed hours later holding the hand of her inert husband, laid out on a slab in Long Island College Hospital, still in his pristine Dodgers home flannels.

  When Zimmer emerged from that hospital, nearly three weeks later, in dark glasses that allowed only a pinpoint of light through either lens, his vision was blurred beyond fifty feet. For three months, he couldn’t tie his shoes, pick up his children, or ride in a car. That season, Dr. Dandy’s liners were made mandatory throughout the majors, but full helmets, finally, were growing in popularity, too, worn by one or more members of every major- and minor-league team. Branch Rickey’s helmet concern—American Baseball Cap, Inc.—grossed more than $200,000 that year, finally fulfilling Connie Mack’s prophecy.

  Many others wanted a piece of those profits. In 1960, the unsinkable Foulproof Taylor received U.S. patent 2,926,356 for yet another iteration of the Beanproof Cap the Senators wouldn’t wear a quarter of a century earlier. As ever, his market research involved epic bouts of self-endangerment. “In demonstrations of the cap, the inventor has been slugged or beaned repeatedly, without sustaining injury,” the patent stated. “The inventor claims that his bean-proof cap frees baseball players from serious injuries by transforming the effect of a pitched baseball at one hundred miles an hour (more or less) into a mere jarring vibration, with no concussion.”

  But the helmet did not make Foulproof a fortune, or indeed a new name. Nor did any of his other manifold inventions, including a protective bra for lady wrestlers, the Bustproof Brassiere. His great-niece, Diane Taylor, recalled “Uncle Foulproof” persuading her mother to put one on, then “charging her in the chest” by way of demonstration. By the 1960s, Foulproof had an electroshock of white hair that fit neatly with his other eccentricities, which included several daily doses of Guinness and a predilection for pouring water on his cornflakes.

  Foulproof remained known, by those who knew him at all, as a fixture at the televised Friday Night Fights of the 1950s and ’60s. On the back of the jacket that he always wore ringside were the words I AM FOULPROOF TAYLOR. Below that was the hard-won phrase FOULED 30,000 TIMES. It’s a wonder that he bothered to keep count of the various assaults on his nether regions, just as McDonald’s still boasts of “billions and billions” of burgers served. That Taylor still answered to Foulproof, and not Beanproof or Bustproof, was testament to which of his inventions was most successful.

  Foulproof Taylor, late in life but still in the sack. (Courtesy of Diane Taylor)

  In the end, Foulproof Taylor’s greatest invention was Foulproof Taylor. Before he went into the hospital with terminal stomach cancer in 1970, the inventor alerted the few contacts he still had in the New York newspaper trade that the great Foulproof Taylor was dying. They made little record of the fact and Taylor left no record in the form of offspring. He and his Canadian-born wife, Margaret, never had children.

  As his great-niece put it: “We supposed all those years of being kicked you-know-where had taken their toll.”

  He did leave one legacy, however. By the time of his death, most baseball infielders considered the cup invaluable. Mark Belanger played shortstop from 1965 to 1982 without one—and without incident—but most of his colleagues weren’t so brazen. The cup had become such an article of blind faith among baseball infielders that an eight-year-old second baseman in Romulus, Michigan, was banned from the local Little League in 1975 for failing to wear one, despite the fact that young Nancy Winnard was unimpeachably a girl. Her parents sought a federal injunction, and briefly seized headlines across the nation, before the league relented and the story ebbed away, a tempest in a different kind of cup altogether.

  Little Leagues had good reason to be vigilant. Cups saved lives, at least of those unborn. In the big leagues, however, with ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastballs and line drives up the middle, a cup could only offer so much protection. During a spring training game in 1974, a foul tip off the bat of Joe Torre struck Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk in the cup. Fisk was hospitalized for three days with a ruptured testicle, missed the first seventeen games of the regular season with “considerable swelling,” and was replaced by his backup, Bob Montgomery.

  Fisk returned to the lineup in May, and in the next six weeks took five more foul tips to the cup. The last, in Chicago in June, knocked him unconscious. Fisk had to be revived with smelling salts. “All catchers get hit between the legs,” he said afterward, “but this is ridiculous.”

  Fisk tried new cups, altered his catching stance, and altered the standards of local journalism. “Newspapers held long, soul-searching editorial conferences to determine whether the word testicle might appear in print,” Bud Collins wrote in the Boston Globe that summer, having won over his editors. “Writers were running out of euphemisms.”

  Collins’s column appeared on June 12, 1974, forty-four years to the day since Max Schmeling won his heavyweight championship at Yankee Stadium after Jack Sharkey hit him flush in the groin, briefly elevating Foulproof Taylor’s Foulproof Cup to national significance.

  Forty-four years later, Fisk wore something almost as inviolable, a hockey goalie’s cup likened to iron underwear. And that only dulled the pain slightly. On the night in 1989 that he broke Yogi Berra’s record for most home runs by an American League catcher, Fisk felt connected to Yogi in a much deeper way: He took a foul tip to the groin at Yankee Stadium. “I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Fisk said afterward. “Yogi would appreciate that part of the game.”

  Johnny Bench broke seven cups in his career. Umpire Dave Pallone had his shattered by a ninety-four-mile-an-hour Nolan Ryan fastball. The protective cup wasn’t indestructible and was sometimes an oxymoron, but players treated it as a magical talisman. “It’s like my American Express,” Joe Girardi said when he was catching for the Cubs. “I don’t leave home without it.” Mark McGwire wore his high school cup throughout his college, Olympic, minor-league, and major-league careers, spanning three decades, until the summer of 1998 when—en route to hitting seventy home runs, and at the peak of his global fame—he had it stolen from his locker. The thief was presumed to have been a craven collector, with one exceedingly strange curio cabinet.

  Now, most outfielders don’t wear a cup, and—seven decades after Pepper Martin saw the light—some infielders still don’t. Three starting infielders on the Florida Marlins—Derrek Lee, Luis Castillo, and Alex Gonzalez—won the 2003 World Series without a cup among them. Adrian Beltre never wore a cup at
third base, despite having been hit in the groin at that position. To this day, even though most who play it are suitably armored for battle, baseball is tied with lacrosse as the cause of more testicular injuries than any other sport, including cycling and horseback riding.

  In almost all sports, jockstraps have begun a slow fade from existence, replaced by skintight compression shorts. Clubhouse wits find it increasingly difficult to put Bengay or a live amphibian in the jockey strap of an unsuspecting colleague, and perhaps that is progress, though try telling that to anyone who witnessed Gorman Thomas put a live frog in the jockstrap of his Brewers teammate Sal Bando.

  But cups endure. Cups even overfloweth, sometimes literally so, as when the Tampa Bay Rays clinched the American League East title in 2008. After the game, in the visitors’ clubhouse in Detroit, Rays outfielder Jonny Gomes—carried away on a tide of emotion—filled a protective cup with beer, then drank lustily from his plastic chalice.

  It was evidence, if any were needed, that the cup still inspired fascination, to say nothing of innovation. Mark Littell pitched nine seasons in the major leagues with Kansas City and St. Louis, and spent much of his retirement building a better cup, which he called the Nutty Buddy. To demonstrate its efficacy, Littell videotaped himself squatting, legs splayed, on top of two Gatorade tubs. Ten feet away, a young lady fed a baseball into a pitching machine, which abruptly fired a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, point-blank, directly into Littell’s crotch.

  Littell didn’t flinch much less curl convulsively into a fetal ball, and the video—approaching half a million hits on YouTube—was replayed on television around the world. Littell would repeat the demonstration wherever the cup-buying public gathered, and the cue he frequently gave to have the ball placed in the pitching machine—“Here we go, Ramrod, let’s go!”—called to mind the masochistic catchphrase of Foulproof Taylor: “Kick me here.”