The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  These gloves would not have gone unnoticed by opposing players, to whom they were in no way a novelty by 1962, when both Yankees and Giants wore them during batting practice at the World Series. “It just feels good,” Giants catcher John Orsino said of his gray glove. Mickey Mantle wore a black one in the cage, and when a reporter asked how long he’d been doing so, the Mick—“in an angry mood”—answered facetiously: “Three years, six months and two days.”

  That season, the National League MVP was Maurice Morning (Maury) Wills, who wore a “golfer’s glove” to great notice while stealing a major-league record 104 bases. Wills’s glove, like Mantle’s, was black, but other colors weren’t unusual. Leon Wagner of the Angels hit a two-run home run against the Yankees while wearing his green golf glove in 1962. Quite why Ken Harrelson’s red golf glove, worn two years later, would have moved Mantle to the bulk purchase of golf gloves for ironic purposes is a mystery lost to history.

  Except that doing so fits in perfectly with the history of other innovations, whose early adopters were ridiculed and then—after a brief but uncomfortable pause—universally copied. Nobody wore a fielder’s glove—or a batting helmet, or a golf glove—until somebody did. And then, very quickly, everybody wore one.

  “Though the idea will sound strange to the fans, the adoption of such a form of protection will be following the trend of the sport to bring out at intervals protective devices that lessen the tendency to injury on the part of the player” is how one paper put it. “When introduced the various devices invariably met with some ridicule on the part of players who had gone through years of service without the protecting equipment and from fans as well, but in turn each additional bit of armor has come to be accepted as an essential.”

  That was an unsigned editorial in the New York Times. It appeared on August 19, 1920, three days after Ray Chapman was killed by a thrown baseball.

  Chapter 6

  THE DECREPIT URINALS

  OF EBBETS FIELD

  At a child’s birthday party in Connecticut, I found myself talking baseball with the guest of honor’s grandfather, a former pressman for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, exiled to exurbia from his native borough but still in thrall to Ebbets Field, whose men’s rooms, he said, were reprehensible.

  The celebrated ballpark of the Brooklyn Dodgers, if his memory served, had only four men’s rooms. The lines for the toilets—and the toilets themselves—were always backed up. “It was terrible,” he said, shifting on his feet as if he’d been holding it for six decades. “You spent half the game waiting on line.” As he spoke, birthday candles were lit, and with them, a long-dark corner of history.

  In history, nobody goes to the bathroom. In all the books, newsreels, and documentaries about baseball—in all those black-and-white photographs of fans in fedoras—nobody did what everyone does. And so I became interested in the decrepit conveniences of Ebbets Field, and a little investigative urinalism revealed that Walter O’Malley had become obsessed with his ballpark’s toilets after he was appointed Dodgers president in 1943, at which time he made, “with unfeigned horror,” his first inspection of the restrooms.

  From that day forward, O’Malley framed the men’s rooms at Ebbets Field the way Poe framed the crumbling mansion in “The Fall of the House of Usher”—as not just a frightening chamber in its own right, but as symbol of a larger decay.

  When a Brooklyn fan went to see a man about a horse, he felt more like the latter than the former: “like a horse going to a horse trough,” as one Dodgers fan described relieving himself mid-game in the 1930s. In 1946, it would cost the Dodgers $100,000 to fix their stagnant urinals, which by then had become—in the words of O’Malley biographer Michael D’Antonio—a “matter of public health as well as convenience.” But that hundred grand was only a drop in the bucket.

  That Ebbets Field—which opened in 1913, a year after Fenway and a year before Wrigley—so quickly fell into lavatorial decrepitude is astonishing. But at least Ebbets fell from a great height, having contained unimaginable luxuries when Charlie Ebbets and Van Buskirk drew it up as precisely the kind of corporate-friendly stadium that we like to think, in our nostalgic delusions, is a modern-day affliction. “Public telephone booths will be distributed at various points on the stands,” Ebbets promised in 1912. “Desks will be provided for the accommodation of business men and physicians who may expect sudden telephone calls, to whom messages will be delivered immediately. A room will be provided where articles may be checked free, lost articles reclaimed upon proper identification and umbrellas loaned for a small fee.” Everything about the place was designed to appeal to a prosperous audience.

  “In the preparation of the plans,” Ebbets said, “the aim has been to provide for the comfort, convenience and safety of the base ball public and when completed Ebbets Field will be about the most modern, comfortable, perfectly appointed and conveniently located base ball park in the world.”

  To finance the park’s $750,000 cost ($18 million today), Charlie Ebbets in 1912 sold a half interest in the Dodgers to two brothers, Stephen and Edward McKeever, the former of whom became a plumber’s apprentice at thirteen, a plumbing contractor at eighteen, and—with his younger brother—opened E. J. McKeever & Bro., specializing in sewers and water mains, but that didn’t matter.

  Charles Ebbets and E. J. McKeever, with McKeever’s wife, Jennie, April 1913. (Library of Congress)

  While the park opened as a “modern, comfortable, perfectly appointed” cathedral, it didn’t last long. Ebbets Field seated a mere thirty-two thousand people, with parking for just seven hundred cars, which wasn’t a problem in 1913 but became one by the 1950s. By then, wrote the bard of Brooklyn, Roger Kahn, “the public urinals were fetid troughs,” and O’Malley “saw Ebbets Field not as a shrine but as a relic, with rotten parking and smelly urinals.”

  That miasma of smells had no means of egress in the architectural oddity that was Ebbets. “The fans had to put up with the stench of perennially backed-up toilets and a serious lack of ventilation that made the field and seating areas feel at least ten degrees warmer than the surrounding air,” notes Marc Eliot in Song of Brooklyn, his oral history of the borough.

  In the prosperity of postwar America, when whites began to leave Brooklyn for Long Island and other suburban outposts, Time magazine suggested in 1958—with what reads now like racial animus—that Brooklyn’s bladders were emblematic of the borough’s other ills: “Brooklyn’s slums have spread alarmingly. There is a burgeoning population of Negroes and Puerto Ricans.… Ebbets Field, the cramped, musty cracker box that had been the home of the Dodgers since 1913, had been reduced to the social level of cockfights. A familiar complaint was that some customers were urinating in the aisles.”

  O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles in the winter of 1957—not because of the Ebbets Field urinals, surely, but certainly not in spite of them. They played a critical and unsung role in baseball’s westward migration. O’Malley admitted as much. In April 1958, the Dodgers’ first spring in Los Angeles, he unburdened himself to Time, bidding good riddance to Ebbets with a lavatorial valedictory.

  “Why should we treat baseball fans like cattle?” he asked. “I came to the conclusion years ago that we in baseball were losing our audience and weren’t doing a damn thing about it. Why should you leave your nice, comfortable, air-conditioned home to go out and sweat in a drafty, dirty, dingy baseball park? Ballparks are almost all old. They are built in the poorer sections of the city. The toilets at most ballparks are a germ hazard that would turn a bacteriologist grey. Why, when I came to the Dodgers, I spent a quarter of a million dollars just to change the urinals, and Branch Rickey, who was the general manager, nearly had a stroke. He couldn’t comprehend spending that much money on the customers when we could spend it on ballplayers.”

  The modern history of baseball—beginning with the manifest destiny of the Dodgers’ move west—is in part the history of quotidian objects. Ebbets Field is now preserved in our national nost
algia as an Elysium. Its seats, salvaged ahead of the wrecking ball in 1960, sell for $3,000 apiece. Prominent members of the Brooklyn diaspora—from Larry King to Doris Kearns Goodwin—were still eulogizing it fifty years after its demise.

  The ballpark urinal trough has likewise retained a curious allure. Before the 2010 season, when the Chicago Cubs announced plans to renovate the bathrooms at Wrigley Field—built in Chicago in 1914, a year after Ebbets—there was a public backlash. And almost certainly a backsplash. The Cubs had to reassure their fans that they would not do away with Wrigley’s much-loved troughs, where men stand shoulder to shoulder above a single receptacle in a daily parody of e pluribus unum.

  Even politicians recognized the powerful symbolism inherent in that act. As president of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush made a point of sitting in the main grandstand at Arlington Stadium and walking among the fans. “I want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they sit in, eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same urinal,” he explained. On the power of such populist rhetoric, he went from president of the Texas Rangers to president of the United States.

  The urinal was indispensable to baseball because beer was indispensable to baseball—or rather, because beer was so eminently dispensable in baseball, dispensed in oceanic proportions almost from the beginning of the sport, a sport that sometimes seemed to exist exclusively as a delivery system for malted beverages.

  Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe, the man who traded for my great-great-uncle in 1886, had by then already opened a beer garden in right field at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. “The beer garden was considered in play,” notes J. Thomas Hetrick in his biography Chris Von der Ahe and the St. Louis Browns. “Exactly how many baseballs plunked into beer schooners, scattered revelers, or rattled around picnic tables is conjecture.”

  Even from its very first decade, professional baseball was a backdrop for binge drinking. In 1925, to mark the golden anniversary of the National League, the New York Times recalled—from a not-terribly-distant remove of fifty years—the 1870s as beer sodden and violent. “The empty beer bottle made its appearance as a medium for expressing disapproval. The filled beer bottle was also present. A saloon near a ballpark was a safe investment.”

  Among the many temperance champions of the late Victorian era were Albert Spalding and William Hulbert, who would be buried beneath that enormous baseball in Chicago. Hulbert banned beer sales and Sunday baseball from the National League. Cincinnati could not abide baseball without beer, and joined other dissolute river cities—among them St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Louisville—in the American Association, which was immediately disparaged as “the Beer and Whiskey League.”

  But even in the National League, a ban on beer sales did nothing to prevent fans from smuggling in their own, or becoming insensate before entering the grounds. On May 22, 1886, John L. Sullivan staggered down the steps of Recreation Park in Detroit and fell into his seat to watch the hometown Wolverines play the Washington Nationals. Occasionally loosing a “mighty roar”—the boxing champion was literally roaring drunk—he rooted for the visitors, antagonized his seatmates, and was finally shouted down with a cry of “Put him out,” to which Sullivan replied: “Put me out? I’d break you in two and throw you in the sewer.”

  In his eyewitness account, an unnamed correspondent for the New York Times cabled back to the office: “Interjected at suitable places in this report can be distributed sundry blanks, for which the telegraphic vocabulary has no sign, but which indicate the interpolation of profanity and obscenity that never looks well in a newspaper and is generally represented by dashes.”

  Many team owners in the Beer and Whiskey League were, unsurprisingly, in the beer and/or whiskey business. St. Louis Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe was a magnificently mustached saloonkeeper who commissioned, with the proceeds of beer and baseball, an enormous statue of himself gazing into the middle distance. It was placed outside Sportsman’s Park and named, by a sportswriter, “Von der Ahe Discovers Illinois.”

  One of his “Von der Boys”—as the four-time champion Browns of the mid-1880s were called—was my great-grandfather’s brother Jack Boyle, who would make the papers in the 1890s, as the Giants catcher, for his saloon fistfight with the Reds catcher. Baseball stayed afloat on a river of alcohol.

  At the time of his death, on January 7, 1913, Jack Boyle owned his own saloon, on Seventh Street in Cincinnati. “In his time he was one of the best catchers in the game,” read his obituary in the baseball bible Sporting Life, “and was famous from one end of the world to the other.”

  Less than five months later, Von der Ahe succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. He was broke and out of baseball, but received a grand memorial at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, where visitors cannot possibly miss him, buried as he is beneath his own statue—right hand on hip, staring into the middle distance, forever discovering Illinois.

  When Cornelius McGillicuddy left East Brookfield, Massachusetts, with only his mitts in 1884, he made a promise to his mother that he would never imbibe. And he never did. But he was an exception among players and spectators, and his mother was right to worry.

  That very summer of ’84, Albert Spalding was preaching temperance among players. “Men who have said to me point blank that they ‘have not touched a drop to-day’ have been proved to have drank that very day over a dozen glasses of beer beside liquor, before going to a match,” he said. “I tell you, sir, the leagues have got to stop this drinking business or give up running club teams.”

  Spalding’s complaints fell on deaf ears, literally so in the case of Louisville Slugger Pete Browning, dozing just off second base in the Beer and Whiskey League, which finally disbanded after the 1891 season. Several of its teams—Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, St. Louis—were subsumed into the National League, and the American Association faded into oblivion, except for its initials, which survive as shorthand for Alcoholics Anonymous.

  By the 1890s, drinking was the most popular pastime within our most popular pastime. After the cops of Brooklyn’s Second Precinct played their counterparts of Manhattan’s First Precinct in a game at the Polo Grounds in 1892—losers picked up the winners’ terrifying bar tab—the victorious Brooklyn pitcher, Twirler Martin, composed a poem on the spot:

  We’re not as big as we ought to be

  Not in a thousand years;

  But we’re big enough, as you will see,

  To win a thousand beers.

  Mercifully, baseball and beer conspired to produce better poems than that one. In October 1894, a sixteen-year-old outfielder for the town team in Galesburg, Illinois, was shagging flies in a pasture when his friend hit a deep ball that required him to sprint. In doing so, the outfielder stepped on a broken beer bottle, leaving a gash on his right foot that had to be closed with four stitches. The incident—and his parents’ contemptuous reaction to it—made Carl Sandburg reconsider his dream of professional baseball and go into poetry instead.

  More often, to believe its purveyors, beer was not the end but the gateway to a career in baseball. Beer was marketed to Americans in the same way that Louisville Sluggers were: as a performance enhancer. Beneath the headline BALL PLAYERS USE BEER IN TRAINING, a 1909 Budweiser ad quoted Brooklyn president Charles Ebbets saying, “A simple dinner with light beer [is] our idea of a proper drink for athletes in training.”

  When players weren’t pitching beer to fans, fans were pitching beer at players. In 1907, after several Cleveland Indians were hit by thrown bottles in Detroit, American League president Ban Johnson warned clubs about airborne concessions. Then that fall, when Detroit was playing at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, boyish umpire Bill Evans was hit in the head and badly injured by a thrown soda bottle. He told Christy Mathewson he was grateful for it, for it seemed to focus his attention on getting his calls right. “If I had any idea who the bird was that tossed the bottle I would look him up and thank him,” Evans said. “He did me a good turn.”

  On another occasi
on, after making a controversial call at first base in Chicago, Evans was showered with dozens of bottles. As they rained down on him, Evans remained at his post, enduring the barrage for a full three minutes, even after players begged him to retreat to the safety of the infield grass.

  The following season, Cubs manager Frank Chance had cartilage in his neck severed by a thrown soda-water bottle at the Polo Grounds, while racing off the field to the clubhouse after clinching the 1908 pennant. “Unfortunately baseball as played uptown can never be a fashionable sport because it is as dangerous to a spectator as automobile racing on public highways,” the New York Times sniffed. “You never can tell where the danger is coming from—an empty beer bottle, a seat cushion or a bat.”

  One solution to bottle throwing—banning beer altogether—was not an option worth serious contemplation. Indeed, a ball club signing a contract with its beer purveyor was cause for celebratory headlines in the winter months. “The prospect of a beer-less season at the Cincinnati baseball park was removed to-day when President August Herrmann awarded the beer contract for the coming baseball year,” read a January 1911 dispatch in the Times, beneath the comforting headline CINCINNATI FANS TO HAVE BEER.

  August (Garry) Herrmann, the Cincinnati owner, employed “an army of lads” to collect the empty bottles, or “dead soldiers,” that accumulated by the hundreds beneath the grandstands and on the grass at Reds games, where vendors sold “pop,” sassafras, and mineral water in bottles, replete with straw, in addition to the copious amounts of beer sold and consumed there.

  And so Herrmann lobbied aggressively against Prohibition. In 1917, the Reds’ program carried an ad that read, “If You Want To Enjoy a Glass of Beer, VOTE AGAINST PROHIBITION. In Any Form and At All Times. Keep Your Country a Land of Personal Liberty!”