The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  People could not eat them fast enough. No less than Cary Grant told Arthur he needed to install a grill nearer to the high-priced dugout seats at Dodger Stadium for quicker delivery and the constant aroma of grilled sausage. This desire for instant hot-dog gratification would not be fully satisfied until the late 1990s, when some teams began to fire bunned hot dogs directly into the crowd, from a $7,000 air gun with a range of three hundred feet. The devices weren’t foolproof—dogs destined for the upper deck sometimes broke apart over the grandstand, raining processed meat onto spectators—but they satisfied an ever more voracious public.

  By the 1980s, for $1.75, Orioles fans at Memorial Stadium were offered two hot dogs in a single bun. To speed the passage of beer down the gullets of those same fans, a Baltimore beer vendor named Perry Hahn invented a handheld electrical device that cleanly decapitated aluminum beer cans, removing the lids whole and allowing him to more quickly decant the contents into plastic cups. This flair for innovation was born of necessity among hustling vendors. In the same spirit, in 2000, a peanut hawker in Triple-A Columbus would first toss his wares to a client and then throw him a slit tennis ball, into which the customer would insert his money.

  Many of these vendors became famous in their own right, none more so than Elmer Dean, who lived with his father, Albert, in a single room of a boardinghouse in Depression-era Houston, where he threw bagged peanuts at Houston Buffaloes fans with a cry of “Hey, lady, wanna buy a goober?” While Dean was pitching peanuts in the Texas League, his younger brothers, Dizzy and Daffy, were pitching baseballs for the St. Louis Cardinals. “He was as good as us,” Dizzy said, “except he threw his arm out pitching them damn peanuts.” Called to the big leagues to sell peanuts at Sportsman’s Park in 1936, Elmer returned to the Texas League after only a few days, concluding: “People in St. Louis don’t like their peanuts mixed with baseball.”

  Like Dean, Roger Owens began his baseball career as a pitcher—at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles—before peanut vending brought him fame, if not quite fortune. In his autobiography, the aptly named Working for Peanuts, Owens recounted his rise from hawking sodas in the Dodgers’ first year in Los Angeles to becoming—over the next forty years—as familiar and renowned as many of the celebrity “season-peanut-holders” to whom he threw his prepaid goobers.

  As Jackie Price once had with baseballs, Owens could—with one hand—throw three bags of peanuts to three separate customers. He traveled the country with his peanuts and was picked out by the cameras on Monday Night Football selling nuts at a Dallas Cowboys game. He pitched his wares in Washington, D.C., at the presidential inauguration of peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. “One grows ’em, one throws ’em,” noted a press release from the National Peanut Board, on which Owens sat, though not literally, for baseball’s best vendors never seemed to sit at all. Owens once sold 2,400 bags of peanuts in a single game, though as a peanut-vending iron man he had competition in Dodger Stadium. Hal Schiff began selling at Shibe Park in Philadelphia for Connie Mack in 1937 and was still vending peanuts in Chavez Ravine four decades later, having changed teams, like so many ballplayers before him.

  Another old-timer, “Peanut Jim” Shelton, iconic in Cincinnati in his top hat and tails, worked every Reds home game for forty-three years, a streak that ended only after he was mugged and hospitalized in 1976. He was eighty-six years old.

  Peanut Jim was not to be confused with another top-hatted vendor, Ray (the Birdman) Jones, who wore a top hat with a working water spigot while flogging pennants at Texas Rangers games.

  Their bronze busts will never be displayed in Cooperstown, but these men were part of the game’s fabric, their distant cries heard in the background between pitches on baseball broadcasts from the beginning of radio into the age of color television.

  And for some, vending was the first rung on a very tall ladder. Charlie Grimm was a peanut vendor at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis before becoming a player, manager, and broadcaster. Another St. Louis vendor, Bill Walsingham, became vice president of the Cardinals. When Fred Saigh was forced to sell the team in 1953, Walsingham was his first-choice buyer. “He is a St. Louis native and worked his way up from a peanut vendor at the ballpark,” said Saigh, defying Elmer Dean’s verdict that St. Louisans did not care to mix baseball and goobers.

  For many others, vending was their only aspiration in baseball. It offered life in a nutshell. Three generations of the Jacobs family sold peanuts outside Gate A at Fenway Park from its opening in 1912 through the remainder of the twentieth century—the peanut cart held down for forty-four of those years by George (the Peanut Man) Jacobs. When he died, in 1988, the Red Sox held a moment of silence.

  At Wrigley Field, Dan Ferrone sold beer—and in later years, a lighter load of peanuts—for more than fifty years, beginning in 1938. Manny Gluck, program vendor at Gate 4 of Yankee Stadium, worked fifty consecutive home openers, from age fourteen until his death in 2005, by which time he had obtained—had attained—vendor badge number 1. (If it wasn’t quite as famous as the employee number 1 badge that Steve Wozniak was awarded over Steve Jobs at Apple, the badge was every bit as coveted at Yankee Stadium.)

  When I went to work stabbing dogs for the vendors at Met Stadium in 1979, with no desire to do anything else in life, Walter McNeil had already been selling beer there for eight years of what would be a long run. He moved to the Metrodome when the Twins left the Met in 1981, and on to Target Field in 2010, when the Metrodome was abandoned. By then, McNeil was long celebrated in the Upper Midwest as “Wally the Beer Man,” a sobriquet that appeared beneath his likeness on baseball cards and bobbleheads, and in TV commercials. During a Twins game in 2010, his fortieth season in the big leagues, McNeil unwittingly sold beer to an undercover nineteen-year-old decoy in a police sting operation. Twins fans wore “Free Wally” T-shirts, and a jury eventually did just that, finding McNeil not guilty. But the seventy-six-year-old retired anyway, a reminder—if one were needed—that the Italian word for bottle is fiasco.

  Purveyors of peanuts, beer, hot dogs, and soda would have work forever. Through various vogues—for fried chicken and cake slices and ham sandwiches—those staples have endured for more than a century as baseball’s four food groups. The fifth Beatle of ballpark food didn’t make the scene until 1978, when its abrupt appearance was met with confusion. While preparing its readers for the 1978 All-Star Game at Jack Murphy Stadium, the San Diego Evening Tribune had to explain the Padres’ newest delicacy: “Nachos [are] corn chips with cheese and peppers on them.”

  Among the manifold curiosities on display at the Superdome in New Orleans on September 15, 1978—Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, and Sylvester Stallone, to say nothing of Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks, who were contesting the heavyweight championship of the world that night—nachos drew their share of rubberneckers. There, too, “spectators could buy Nachos Grande,” wrote the St. Petersburg Times columnist Hubert Mizell, “a Mexican dish that amounted to little more than Fritos covered with warm cheese sauce, for $1.60.”

  By Christmas, the nacho agnostics had largely been converted. At college football’s Fiesta Bowl, at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, hot dogs were displaced by a swinging, salsa-dancing, leisure-suited interloper from the Southwest. “The traditional ballpark culinary staple was second fiddle at the Fiesta Bowl,” wrote the correspondent for the Kingman (Arizona) Daily Miner. “Its replacement? Why nachos.… That’s right, nachos. The crispy tortilla chips were served with hot cheese sauce.”

  In American stadiums and arenas, nachos were the thin edge of the cheddar-wedge, opening the door to fish tacos, Rocky Mountain oysters, garlic fries, sushi, toasted ravioli, and all other manner of regional and ethnic exotica. Its “cheese” sauce—the yellow of a school bus, with the viscosity of forty-weight motor oil—was frequently ersatz “cheez.” But then nowhere was baseball’s propensity for willful misspelling more fully and joyously realized than at the concession stand.

  To the game’s litany of Twi-Nite dou
bleheaders and Edge-U-Cated Heels, concessionaires brought Hi-Brow beverages, Marv-O orangeade, Redi-Orange soda, Chik-N-Baskets, Bar-B-Cue Pork, Bar-B-Q Beef, Lik-Em Peanuts, Choco-Pies, Melo-Crown cigars, By-a-Choc hot cocoa, Hygrade Red Hots, Krun-Chee Potato Chips, Sno-Cones, and Snax Peanuts.

  Incarcerated in the walk-in freezer of the main commissary at Met Stadium, a thirteen-year-old boy newly employed by the Minnesota Twins had plenty of time to contemplate the cases of Northland Dairy’s Big Dip Ice Milk Frosty Malts that came with those wooden spoons that looked little oars, and were every bit as transporting. At the Met, the only ice cream alternative to a Frosty Malt was orange sherbet, also from Northland Dairy. (Orange was a groovy accent to baseball’s color scheme in the 1970s, through Charlie Finley’s orange baseball and the Sunkist soda that was offered as the only alternative to Coca-Cola at Met Stadium as late as 1981.)

  By then the Frosty Malt was in retrograde. As a cultural phenomenon, it received a fitting send-off from Steve Goodman, who had written “City of New Orleans” for Arlo Guthrie, “You Never Even Call Me by My Name” for David Allan Coe, and “Banana Republics” for Jimmy Buffett, but is best remembered in his native Chicago for “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” which he first played in 1983, a year before leukemia took his life at thirty-six. “Give everybody two bags of peanuts and a Frosty Malt,” Goodman sang, “and I’ll be ready to die.”

  As a cold confection, the Frosty Malt—like the much-loved Cool-A-Coo ice cream sandwich at Dodger Stadium—lost its place of supremacy to the ice cream sundae served in a miniature, inverted, souvenir batting helmet, which ingeniously combined two of man’s favorite diversions: sports memorabilia and whipped cream dispensed from an aerosol can. From the moment of its mandated adoption by major-league players, the batting helmet almost instantly crossed into pop culture, and not just as a vessel for soft-serve sundaes. It had passed from protective device—the armored cap of Dr. Dandy, the Beanproof Cap of Foulproof Taylor—to piggy bank, lampstand, and Helmet Day giveaway.

  In short, the helmet had become a baseball “novelty,” a word that once evoked joy buzzers, whoopee cushions, and plastic vomit, but came to embrace—on Peg-Board stands of American ballparks—an endless array of branded ephemera: pearl-handled knives, cigarette lighters, lowball glasses—items often more appropriate to grizzled men with mortgages and marital problems than wide-eyed boys.

  The godfather of the modern baseball novelty trade began his career as so many titans had, vending hot dogs. Danny Goodman, son of a milkman, also sold birch beer at Double-A Brewers games at Athletic Park in Milwaukee in 1926, working for Charlie and Louis Jacobs, who ran the concessions at ballparks and burlesque theaters. (Their business would eventually become the catering giant Sportservice, Inc.)

  Goodman worked the burlesque circuit, too, standing in the aisles to hawk “Marsh chocolates, manufactured by the Marsh Candy Company and known throughout the world.” Many of those chocolate boxes, he promised, contained a Wescott Watch, from the Wescott Watch Company of Wescott, Connecticut. There was no Marsh Candy Company, or Wescott Watch Company, or Wescott, Connecticut, for that matter, and the few boxes of ordinary candy that did contain a cheap wristwatch were marked by a rubber band and always “sold” to a shill in the audience, who invariably returned it to Goodman.

  As for baseball, the crowd in Milwaukee during Prohibition was 95 percent male—some days there wasn’t a single woman in the stands—and those men had their choice of four items: hot dogs, peanuts, soda, and near beer.

  At eighteen, Goodman moved up the Jacob brothers’ chain to Baltimore, where he worked for a man named George Weiss. Together they learned many ballpark truths, among them: Never vend Popsicles from a tub filled with dry ice, a lesson learned when Goodman’s inventory on a hot day was quickly reduced to sticks and syrup.

  By 1932, Goodman and Weiss had traveled together to the top of Double-A baseball. Goodman had become the concessionaire for the Newark Bears, where he tried with limited success to persuade Weiss, the new Yankees farm director, that there was an appetite, even during the Depression, for something other than food and drink. Namely, team trinkets and apparel.

  “I used to disagree with George because I’ve always been a guy who felt he could instinctively read the public and its tastes pretty well,” Goodman said of Weiss. “People like to identify with sports heroes and winning teams and they will buy things like T-shirts and pennants if you give them style and value for their money.”

  “Stick to hot dogs,” Weiss replied. “We make two cents clear profit on every one.”

  Until then, “novelties” were largely restricted to programs, scorecards, and seat cushions. Goodman used to soak the grandstand before games in the minors. “A guy had a choice of a 12-cent cushion,” he said, “or ruining a two-dollar pair of pants.”

  Goodman would not be ignored. “Someday,” he told Weiss, “novelties will be bigger than hot dogs, or even peanuts.”

  Weiss did allow Goodman to sell pennants, badges, and the oxymoronic one-size-fits-all cap. Goodman was the first man to flog caps at the ballpark, he often claimed, adding: “So far nobody has ever challenged that statement.” He bought them at wholesale for a quarter and sold them for a dollar. When Prohibition was repealed, Goodman opened a bar under the stands at Ruppert Field, named for Jacob Ruppert, whose Ruppert Beer sold for $0.20 a glass. Newark also offered hard liquor by the drink, the first baseball club—claimed the Sporting News in 1980—ever to do so.

  In 1937, Goodman persuaded the Curtiss Candy Company to donate a case of Baby Ruth bars to any player who hit their sign, which players did frequently. Among those players was my great-uncle Buzz, who was traded from Brooklyn to the Yankees before the 1936 season and assigned to Newark. (Perhaps the Bellevue-bound teenager who stole his uniform pants from the Ebbets Field clubhouse that February had had a premonition that Buzz would never again need those Dodgers knickers.) He and the rest of the Bears had no pressing desire to receive 240 Baby Ruth bars every time they hit a double. So Goodman bought the candy bars back from the players and sold them at a profit in the park.

  So innovative was Goodman that, in 1938, the concessionaire was recruited away from Weiss. Bob Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby restaurant, summoned Goodman to a more receptive market for the selling of his dreams. And so Goodman went to work for the Hollywood Stars, Cobb’s team in the Pacific Coast League.

  Cobb was a forthright businessman. “Bob Cobb,” Goodman told Jim Murray, recalling his days as a burlesque vendor, “was the kind of a guy who would put a watch in every box.”

  Novelties were not entirely new as Goodman worked to explode the market. At Briggs Stadium in Detroit, Tigers fans in 1939 could purchase “Souvenir Miniature Louisville Sluggers With Autographs of Famous Players.” Felt pennants were also growing in popularity. But Goodman, in Hollywood, recognized that team hats and T-shirts conferred a kind of secondhand celebrity on those who bought them, an effect heightened by the countless real celebrities in attendance at Gilmore Field. Cobb himself was a famous figure, and famously innovative. He invented the Cobb salad and provided tableside telephone service at the Brown Derby, the only restaurant on earth where such a practice existed, except in the movies, where diners were frequently interrupted mid-meal with an urgent piece of telephonic exposition.

  The men who made and starred in those movies, whose caricatures hung on the walls of Cobb’s restaurant—Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, Jack Benny, and George Burns—were among the minority shareholders in the Hollywood Stars, and frequent visitors to the park. Shareholder Bill Frawley worked two miles from Gilmore Field, at Desilu Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard, where he played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy. Fred, Ethel, and Lucy famously ate at the Brown Derby, in a booth next to William Holden, in an episode called “L.A. at Last!”

  If the Stars drew ten thousand fans to the brand-new Gilmore Field, Goodman would sell thirteen thousand kosher hot dogs and four thousand ha
mburgers bought fresh from the Farmers Market behind the ballpark at Third and Fairfax. Recognizing the appeal of decent food served quickly, Goodman would pitch oil companies on the idea of serving hot dogs and sandwiches at their service stations. He was flatly turned down. That staple of the gas-station convenience store—shriveled franks rotating on a little heat-lamped Ferris wheel—would have to wait another two decades to take hold.

  At Gilmore Field, Cobb insisted that the ballpark food be on a par with what he served in his restaurants. And it was. Fans who purchased Goodman’s hot dog were offered a choice of whole wheat, white, or rye roll. He put prizes in the peanut bags, to emulate Cracker Jack. The coffee was brewed for hours, to meet the standard of the Brown Derby, whose clientele was sometimes indistinguishable from the crowd at the ball games.

  Indeed, when CBS broke ground on its lavish Television City studio complex in 1951, and Lucille Ball ceremonially lit the construction site, she did so directly across from Gilmore Field. Hollywood stars now only had to cross the street to watch the Hollywood Stars. And they did.

  Jayne Mansfield became a kind of mascot. George Burns put his arm around the concessionaire for a picture in the game program, whose caption claimed the comedian “gulps Goodman’s hot dogs by the gross.”

  Bob Hope and Milton Berle were among the comedians in a pregame celebrity baseball exhibition to benefit Damon Runyon’s cancer charity. The game was organized by Danny Goodman, who chaired the entertainment committee at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills and knew, from that role, that publicity almost always trumped dignity. And so on April 1, 1950, the Stars wore shorts—and rayon shirts—to play the Portland Beavers. As with every other deviation from conformity in baseball history, it was met with ridicule. When Hollywood manager Fred Haney walked to the plate to exchange lineup cards, Portland skipper Bill Sweeney met him there dressed in drag and carrying a mop.