The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  It was just as well that those yearbooks disappeared, as the acquisitive fan was by then already overburdened. Program in hand, cap on head (after the playing of the anthem), possessed of hot dog and beer and possibly a sundae—the soft-serve at sea in a capsized plastic batting helmet—there was nothing left to do but to take one’s seat, a fraught proposition in any age of baseball.

  Chapter 8

  ROW C, SECTION 42, SEATS 3

  AND 4 AT THE POLO

  GROUNDS

  On the Fourth of July, 1950, Barney Doyle made his way down Row C of Section 42 in the left field grandstand at the Polo Grounds, the cigars in his shirt pocket fortifying him for the baseball doubleheader ahead. The fifty-four-year-old freight sorter from Fairview, New Jersey, brought a guest, thirteen-year-old Otto Flaig, a neighbor’s son. By the end of that season, 17 million people would attend major-league baseball games in 16 ballparks (compared to 73.4 million in 30 parks in 2011) and most would make the same instant calculation that Doyle did when confronted with two identical seats: Which one of us will sit in this one, and which one of us will sit in that one? Doyle eased his bulk into Seat 3. The boy sat in Seat 4.

  At half past noon, as the Brooklyn Dodgers emerged for batting practice on a brilliant green field, Doyle turned—scorecard in hand—to speak to Flaig. Then he abruptly pitched forward, blood pouring from his left temple.

  “What’s the matter?” Flaig said.

  Doyle didn’t answer. When policemen were hailed, a fan in Row B reported having heard, moments before, a sound like a paper bag popping. Someone sat Doyle up, but he splayed sideways, across the next seat back. Which is how a brazen newspaper photographer found him: face to the sky. If not for the blood running down his neck and into his shirt, Doyle might have fallen asleep warming himself in the sun.

  An ambulance was dispatched from Harlem Hospital and a doctor declared Doyle dead. Then officers removed his body and took Flaig into protective custody. In that instant, standing-room patrons in the overflow crowd of 49,316—anticipating a glorious day of baseball between the Dodgers and the Giants—rushed to fill the vacant seats.

  Those seats at the Polo Grounds were made by the American Seating Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan—“Furniture City”—the epicenter of mass-produced furniture in the United States. When three civic leaders there sat down for a local school board meeting one evening in 1886, they did so in the children’s desks, which they found poorly designed and ill suited to a long school day. The board members resolved to improve their students’ posture and sight lines by building a more comfortable chair, attached to the desk as a single unit. The result was the first product of the American Seating Company, which quickly built seats for other schools, and for opera houses in McPherson, Kansas, and Leadville, Colorado. By 1909, in addition to schools and theaters, it was supplying the seats for the new Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, the first ballpark to eschew wood in favor of fire-retardant concrete and steel.

  From then on, whenever baseball owners talked of putting fannies in the seats, those seats were likely from the American Seating Company, which supplied Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1910, Fenway Park in Boston in 1912, and Chicago’s Weeghman Park, later renamed Wrigley Field, in 1914.

  When the company delivered seats to the glorious new Yankee Stadium in 1923, those seats ranged from seventeen to nineteen inches wide. It was this style of seat that Barney Doyle squeezed himself into at the Polo Grounds in 1950. His seat had two widely spaced horizontal slats as a backrest. Some aisle seats in the grandstand at the Polo Grounds had the Giants’ interlocking NY elegantly rendered in iron, but Doyle’s seat had only two snub-nosed elbow rests, further pinching him in.

  The seat bottoms were wooden slats, made of elm. By 1950, Dutch elm disease was reducing the supply of such seats—the Elm City of New Haven, Connecticut, had already lost a great many of its stately shade trees—and growing rear ends were rendering them too small and insufficiently sturdy.

  Within eight years, when both teams on the field that Fourth of July had departed New York for the West, the American Seating Company would make baseball’s first plastic seats, for the Los Angeles Coliseum, inaugural home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a name unthinkable to the spectators at the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1950.

  But then so much was about to change in America in that first decade after the war. On the evening of December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, that seat was made by the American Seating Company, which also made the desks that American students were being instructed to hide under, at the height of the Cold War, in the event of nuclear attack.

  When the nation’s capital opened its own new ballpark in 1961—called District of Columbia Stadium, but later renamed for the late Robert F. Kennedy—research by the American Seating Company suggested that the average American rear end had grown three inches wider since Yankee Stadium went up thirty-eight years earlier.

  All of which is to say that Doyle, in the ghastly photograph of him taken at the Polo Grounds on July 4, 1950, scarcely fit into his obsolescent seat.

  Doyle hadn’t always been a spectator. He had once been, in a phrase of Teddy Roosevelt’s, “the man in the arena,” boxing professionally in his youth, then managing a young heavyweight fighter named James Braddock in the 1920s in New York City, back when Foulproof Taylor was haunting gyms asking fighters to “Kick me here.”

  By the time Braddock achieved global fame as the “Cinderella Man”—defeating Max Baer in 1935 for the world title he would eventually lose to Joe Louis—Braddock had long since ditched Doyle for another manager, Joe Gould.

  By 1950, Doyle had settled into a comfortable senescence as a spectator, a fan of the New York Giants, whose games he attended as often as he could at their ballpark in Harlem, from which he was taken—on that Fourth of July, before a single pitch had been thrown—to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner downtown.

  There, a dapper seventy-two-year-old man named Thomas A. Gonzales studied Doyle’s body. Gonzales had worked in the OCME since its creation in 1918, the first office of its kind in the United States. He and his predecessor as chief medical examiner, Charles G. Norris, were pioneers in American forensic medicine. In his thirty-two years on the job, Gonzales had seen, or successfully diagnosed, nearly every conceivable manner of earthly exit.

  A 1939 profile of Gonzales in Life magazine listed, a little too enthusiastically, some of the more exotic of the city’s seventy-five thousand annual deaths. In the year preceding the profile, a man was crushed in a revolving door. Another was killed by the kick of a child. “More than 70 women died during or after criminal abortions,” Life reported, “and for reasons which no one in the C.M.E.’s office pretends to understand, an abnormally high percentage of the victims were named Dolores.”

  And yet what Gonzales saw on July 4, 1950—a bullet that dropped from the clear blue sky before a baseball game—was a first. If the circumstances were unusual, though, the forensic details were prosaic, at least for New York: A .45-caliber slug had entered Doyle’s left temple on a downward trajectory and lodged in his brain, killing him instantly.

  As detectives fanned out on Coogan’s Bluff, the high promontory that overlooked the Polo Grounds from a quarter of a mile behind home plate—affording a clear view of the outfield seats—the Dodgers and Giants resumed their famous rivalry. Between games, players asked sportswriters for details of the shooting, some expressing fear that they might have been targets. Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson, having broken baseball’s color line three years earlier, had more reason than most to fear. Of his teammates, he said: “They were talking more about the shooting than the game.”

  Police questioned dozens of children who were playing on the bluff. That evening, as officers searched the empty ballpark for any bullets that might have missed their targets, detectives questioned a slight fourteen-year-old boy. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and lived with his great-great-aunt at 515 Edgeco
mbe Avenue, a six-story walk-up 1,120 feet above the Polo Grounds on Coogan’s Bluff.

  In that apartment, police found three .22-caliber weapons, but not one that might have fired a .45-caliber slug. After three days of denying any involvement, the junior-high student, Robert Mario Peebles, confessed that he’d found a .45-caliber handgun in Central Park the previous winter, a single bullet in its chamber.

  He saved that slug for six months, firing it into the air from the rooftop of his building in celebration of Independence Day. In doing so, he was exercising what Charles Howard Hinton, inventor of the baseball gun, once called “the deeply implanted love of shooting which exists in every boy.”

  The Polo Grounds viewed from Coogan’s Bluff. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  There was a high parapet that fronted the rooftop, making it impossible for Peebles to have aimed the gun. He fired it at a forty-five-degree angle from behind a shelter enclosing the rooftop stairwell. Newspapers across America that week ran a photo of a New York detective standing atop that roof, reenacting the shot, a perforated white line tracing a terrible parabola from the rooftop of 515 Edgecombe to Section 42 of the Polo Grounds, where it fell on Barney Doyle in Seat 4.

  A similar photograph ran in American newspapers the following season, only the dashed white line traced the arc of a baseball being struck by Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson. This line, too, ended in the left field grandstand at the Polo Grounds, where Thomson’s home run beat the same Dodgers for the National League pennant on October 3, 1951.

  The story in the October 4, 1951, editions of the Daily News pronounced Thomson’s home run—without evident discomfort by anyone who composed or read the headline—THE SHOT HEARD ’ROUND THE BASEBALL WORLD. It instantly entered into lore, slightly shortened, as the Shot Heard ’Round the World.

  That phrase was borrowed from “Concord Hymn,” the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem commissioned to commemorate the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the American Revolution, which led to the fireworks that marked the Independence Day that Robert Peebles celebrated by firing his pistol into the air.

  Those two shots at the Polo Grounds—one heard “ ’round the world,” one heard only by a few fans in left field—have had a very different afterlife. The metaphorical shot, fired by Thomson, became perhaps the most famous moment in baseball history, a touchstone for everyone from Sonny Corleone (gunned down at a toll plaza in The Godfather while the game played on the radio) to Don DeLillo (who made it the opening set piece of his novel Underworld).

  The real shot, which killed Barney Doyle, was quickly forgotten.

  In the 1950s, the Washington Senators sold, at novelty stands at Griffith Stadium, “gun pencils,” in the form of bolt-action, single-shot rifles, that dispensed lead into the scorecard the way real guns did into Apaches in the Westerns that played on TV.

  When the National League expanded from ten to twelve teams in 1962, and the fledgling New York Mets moved into the Polo Grounds—filling a void left by the Giants and Dodgers, both departed to California and its pristine toilets—they hosted the other expansion team on June 22. The Houston team that visited the Polo Grounds that day was called the Colt .45s, named for the same caliber of weapon that had killed Doyle twelve years earlier in the same park. Sewn to the front of the visitors’ jerseys was a .45-caliber pistol that had just fired a .45-caliber slug. The smoke curling from its barrel formed the C in COLTS.

  By then, Doyle was a distant memory. About the only spectator who seemed not to have forgotten that Fourth of July in 1950 was Flaig, the thirteen-year-old guest of Doyle, whose brief time in the protective custody of police proved galvanic.

  Flaig died, of a liver ailment, on July 31, 1992, aged fifty-five, on what was to have been his first full day of retirement from his job as police chief of Teterboro, New Jersey.

  And that is where the story of Barney Doyle would have ended, except that on July 4, 1985—thirty-five years to the day after he was killed—thirty-four-year-old Joanne Barrett, nearly five months pregnant, attended a game at Yankee Stadium. She was with her husband, Kevin, and their two sons, in the upper deck of the stadium, a quarter mile from the site of the old Polo Grounds.

  Those seats, thanks to the renovation of Yankee Stadium in 1974 and ’75, were more capacious—22 inches wide, with 29½ inches of “row spacing,” the industry phrase for legroom—but of little comfort to Barrett in light of what happened in the sixth inning that night.

  In that inning, with the Yankees leading the Twins 3–2, something shattered Barrett’s right hand. To judge by the popping sound heard in the park—to say nothing of the hole in her hand—it was a bullet. Police thought it was fired from inside the stadium. They combed the park for a bullet but never found one. Barrett was taken to a nearby hospital, where Yankees owner George Steinbrenner—born on the Fourth of July—called to offer his condolences. These were apparently insufficient, as Barrett announced her intention to sue the Yankees.

  Police never found a suspect, or the mystery bullet that passed through Barrett’s hand. She pronounced herself too traumatized to ever again attend a baseball game, then promptly withdrew from her unwelcome stay in the spotlight.

  Three days after the game, rifling through her handbag while checking out of the hospital, Barrett found, among the usual detritus—Kleenex, car keys, compact—the copper-colored bullet. It had come to rest in her purse.

  Even on purely baseball terms, none of these was the shot heard ’round the world, nor even the shot heard ’round New York City. That shot rang out a century and a half ago, when an officer named John McDowell of the 29th Precinct of the New York Police Department was walking a beat in Manhattan.

  Tom Shieber, senior curator of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, pieced together what happened that terrible night from contemporary newspaper accounts:

  At 3 o’clock in the morning on January 8, 1877, Officer John McDowell was walking down Seventh Avenue when he noticed something amiss at Courtney’s Liquor Store. A light was on and the door had been forced open, so the officer entered. There he found three burglars with their loot: $120 worth of cigars. One of the burglars, a 19-year-old named James Farrell (sometimes referred to as George Flint), attempted to escape. As he rushed past McDowell, the policeman struck him with his club. The burglar drew a revolver and fired, the bullet hitting McDowell behind his left ear and passing out his right temple. While the other burglars escaped, the seriously wounded officer managed to wrestle Farrell to the ground, at which point a number of other officers came upon the scene and arrested the burglar. The heroic police officer eventually recovered from his wounds and was given $1,000 for his bravery by the Trustees of the Riot Relief Fund. Additionally, McDowell was awarded the New York City Police Department Medal of Valor.

  That medal, and the bar marked VALOR from which it was suspended, were linked by a small charm, custom designed by Tiffany & Co.

  In the language of typography, this charm formed a ligature: essentially, two or more letters joined together to form a new character. In this case, an N was imposed over a Y to form the startling new character now recognized the world over on the caps and home uniforms of the New York Yankees.

  Nobody is certain how—or even if—the Yankees came to embrace the police medal charm, though the Yankees’ publicity department pointed out that a man named Bill Devery joined the NYPD in 1878 (and became its chief twenty years later). From 1903 to 1915, Devery was a co-owner of the New York Highlanders baseball team, which occasionally went by the name Yankees.

  What is certain is that the club adopted a linked NY as its logo in 1909. And that a century later, the New York Times, having reviewed hundreds of New York City police reports, concluded that the Yankees logo was the one piece of apparel common to the greatest number of New York street criminals. “Dozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed and shot at their fellow New Yorkers,” the Times reported on its front page, “have done so while weari
ng Yankees caps or clothing.”

  The paper never noted the violent nineteenth-century root of the linked NY logo, nor of the irony inherent in its becoming, in the twenty-first century, an icon of street crime in the city.

  The Yankees’ interlocking NY graces the exterior of aisle seats in the self-styled “Legends” section at Yankee Stadium, the luxurious moat of 1,800 upholstered seats that stretches from third base to first base. Those seats are twenty-four inches wide, with thirty-nine inches of legroom and teak armrests. When the stadium opened in 2009, the best of those seats were priced at $2,500 per game. They were built to accommodate—in more ways than one—the fattest of fat cats.

  About the only thing those seats have in common with the seat Barney Doyle died in is their city of origin, for they were designed and manufactured by the Irwin Seating Company, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, since 1908. Like its intracity rivals, American Seating (which equipped Radio City Music Hall), Irwin has also built seats for great American theaters, among them Carnegie Hall. And those theater seats provide a two-century snapshot of the average American’s expanding stature.

  Theater seats in the 1890s were eighteen inches wide with twenty-four inches of legroom. That was the industry standard, according to a 2010 study by Theatre Projects Consultants, a firm that designs performing arts venues. Twenty-first century theaters require seats that are twenty-three inches wide, with thirty-five inches of legroom. Between 1910 and 2010, the average American’s height grew by five inches, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In just the forty years from 1960 to 2000, the average adult’s weight increased twenty-four pounds, or 15 percent. In theaters, seats are bigger and thus fewer, with a higher ticket price.