by Will, George
Cermak died on March 6. Just fourteen days after that—the wheels of Florida justice did not grind slowly—Zangara was electrocuted.
As Cermak was rushed to the hospital in FDR’s car, he supposedly said, “I’m glad it was me and not you.” Isn’t it pretty to think so. Cermak’s noble words, which are about as plausible as Ruth’s called shot, are on a plaque in Miami’s Bayfront Park, where the shooting occurred, and are carved on the wall of the marble mausoleum in which Cermak is buried, in Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery, about five miles from Wrigley Field.
What became of Violet Valli? For a while, in a theater near the Loop, she starred as “the Girl Who Shot for Love” in a show called “Bare Cub Follies.”
Before we leave the subject of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, it should be mentioned that this was not the only time an aggrieved and armed woman had consequences at Wrigley Field.
The headline on the obituary in the New York Times of March 24, 2013, read, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer.” She had actually died the previous December 29, but no public attention was paid until a staffer at the Chicago Tribune, while researching an unrelated article, stumbled upon a notice of her death.
Hers was a story of the peculiar melancholy of madness.
Born in the South Side suburb of Cicero, by the time she graduated from a Chicago high school she had a pattern of falling in love with famous men from a distance. Her fixations included the movie star Alan Ladd and the Cubs’ outfielder Peanuts Lowrey. Her interest in Eddie Waitkus, the Cubs’ first baseman, became an obsession. Because he was the son of Lithuanian immigrants, she studied the Lithuanian language and listened to Lithuanian radio broadcasts. Because he was from near Boston—he graduated from high school in Cambridge and attended Boston College—she began craving baked beans. With a calm lucidity unique to a lunatic, she said, in a court-ordered autobiographical essay, “As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy.”
When the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies following the 1948 season, Steinhagen suffered a breakdown. Although she held a job as a typist for an insurance company, she moved into a small apartment less than three miles from Wrigley Field, and in this apartment she built a shrine to Waitkus that included scorecards, newspaper clippings, photographs, and fifty ticket stubs. And there she decided to kill the object of her veneration.
When the Phillies came to Chicago in June 1949, she took a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the team stayed, and paid a bellhop five dollars to deliver a note inviting Waitkus to her room. Having fortified herself with two whiskey sours and a daiquiri, she admitted him to her room around eleven-thirty P.M. “For two years, you’ve been bothering me and now you’re going to die,” she told him. Waitkus, who had survived two years with the army in the Pacific during the Second World War, and who had won four bronze stars, might have died if Steinhagen had fired a weapon more powerful than a .22-caliber rifle. She called the hotel’s front desk, said she had shot a man, and waited by Waitkus’s side until the police arrived.
He was back with the Phillies later that year. In 1950, he hit .284 for the pennant-winning “Whiz Kids” and was named Comeback Player of the Year. In 1952, the novelist Bernard Malamud, who was not a baseball fan but knew a good story when he saw one, and who perhaps had noticed that early in Waitkus’s career sportswriters had referred to him as a “natural,” published The Natural, the story of Roy Hobbs, who is shot by a woman.
Three weeks after the 1949 shooting, a judge declared Steinhagen insane, and she was institutionalized in Kankakee State Hospital, where she underwent electroconvulsive therapy to alter the chemistry of her brain. Released after three years, she lived in quiet anonymity until her death at home on the Northwest Side. Waitkus had died in 1972, at age fifty-three.
The most remarkable Cubs career of Wrigley Field’s prewar years made up with gaudy numbers what it lacked in longevity. Like the country itself, Lewis Robert “Hack” Wilson’s career roared in the intoxicating, and intoxicated, 1920s. And like the country, it crashed spectacularly in the 1930s. He was born with the twentieth century but would not live to see its second half. Yet one record he set will probably survive into the twenty-second.
It is not certain how Wilson came to be called Hack. Some say it was because his first major league manager, John McGraw, thought he resembled a taxicab, which back then was commonly called a hack. Others say it was because he brought to mind Cubs outfielder Hack Miller, supposedly the strongest man in baseball. The most common and plausible explanation, however, is that Wilson looked like a popular wrestler and strong man of the day, George Hackenschmidt. Whatever the derivation of Wilson’s nickname, he was one of baseball’s stranger sights.
He stood five feet, six inches and weighed at least 190 pounds even when in tip-top shape, which he rarely achieved because he never was a martyr to the strictures of sensible living. He had an eighteen-inch neck, an ample belly, and wore size 5½ or 6 shoes. He has been described as a mixture of “suet and swat.” He was a human fireplug whom Arthur Daley described as built like “two men sitting down.” Another sportswriter said Wilson resembled a beer keg, the contents of which Wilson was all too familiar with. His flat face is a characteristic correlated with fetal alcohol syndrome. So is a problem with impulse control.
He was born on April 26, 1900, in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, a town of hard men doing hard work in steel mills and locomotive works about forty miles north of Pittsburgh. His mother, who never married his father, was sixteen when he was born. Both parents drank too much, and his mother died of appendicitis at age twenty-four, when her son was seven. He left school in the sixth grade to toil as a printer’s apprentice and ironworker until, in 1921, the lure of baseball brought him to Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the Blue Ridge League. By 1923, he was with John McGraw’s New York Giants. McGraw, a martinet, was not amused by Wilson’s fast living off the field, and when Wilson struggled on the field in 1925, the Giants sent him down to the Toledo Mud Hens. For some reason—McGraw blamed a clerical error—the Giants did not renew their option on Wilson, and the Cubs acquired him on waivers for $5,000. He and the toddling town took to each other.
In his second month playing there, on May 24, 1926, wielding the forty-ounce bat he called “Big Bertha,” he hit one of the longest home runs in Wrigley Field history to that point. That night he was arrested while trying to escape through a rear window when police raided a saloon that thought, as much of Chicago did, that Prohibition was optional. In 1928, he ignited a Wrigley Field riot when fans poured onto the field after he plunged into the stands to attack a heckler. In 1929, he ran into the visiting team’s dugout to punch a Cincinnati Reds pitcher. At Union Station that evening, as the Cubs and Reds were boarding separate trains to different cities, Wilson got into a fight with another Reds player.
An often-told story, probably too good to be true, but certainly too delightful not to tell again, is that Joe McCarthy, the Cubs’ manager from 1926 through 1930, tried to scare Wilson into sobriety, or at least moderation. McCarthy filled one glass with water and another with whiskey and dropped a worm into each. The worm in the water moved around without noticeable ill effects; the one in the whiskey promptly died. “So,” said McCarthy to Wilson, “what does that teach you?” Wilson replied, “If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms.”
Wilson said, “I never played drunk. Hungover, yes, but never drunk.” But Bill Veeck remembered one instance when Cubs trainer Andy Lotshaw had to resort to heroic measures to get Wilson ready to go out to center field:
Andy had Hack in one of those big, high old tubs, sobering him up. In the tub with Hack was a 50-pound cake of ice. Well, what would you do if a 50-pound cake of ice jumped into your tub with you? You’d try to jump out, right? That was precisely what Hack was trying to do. Enthusiastically but not successfully. Every time Hack’s head would bob up, Andy would shove it back down under the water and the cake of ice would come bobbing up. It was
a fascinating sight, watching them bob in perfect rhythm, first Hack’s head, then the ice, then Hack’s head, then the ice.
That afternoon, Wilson hit three home runs. Some baseball executive might have been tempted to say something like what Abraham Lincoln said about General Ulysses S. Grant’s drinking: Find out what he drinks and send some of it to my other generals. In 1926, Wilson batted .321, drove in 109 runs, and hit 21 home runs, which may not seem very impressive by today’s standards but was good enough to lead the National League. The next year he tied for the league home-run lead with 30, and in 1928 his 31 again tied for the league lead. In 1929, Wilson batted .345 with a league-leading 159 RBIs and the Cubs won their first pennant since 1918. The Cubs lost the World Series to Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, partly because in Game 4, with the Cubs leading 8–0, the Athletics scored 10 runs in the seventh inning when Wilson lost two fly balls in the sun. After the game, when a boy asked Cubs manager Joe McCarthy for a ball, McCarthy supposedly replied, “Come back tomorrow and stand behind Wilson and you’ll be able to pick up all the balls you want.” The following year would be better.
It is unclear why baseball went haywire in 1930. That it did so is written in numbers that are, strictly speaking, incredible. They are to be believed because the events they recorded really happened. They are, however, to be disbelieved because they are so aberrant, so discontinuous with seasons before and since, that they must be taken as evidence that for one year something was done to the ball. Some say it was wound differently—tighter, presumably. Others say, mysteriously, that it was wound with yarn made from Australian wool, although it is unclear why that wool would have made such a difference. Never mind. These are the indisputable facts:
The National League—yes, the league—hit .303, and thirty-three National League players hit .300 or better. Three American League teams and twenty-nine American League players hit .300 or better. Although the Phillies’ Chuck Klein hit .386, he lost the National League batting crown by 15 points to the Giants’ Bill Terry, who hit .401. The Cardinals had more than ten .300 hitters. Six major leaguers drove in more than 150 runs each, and thirty-two had 100 or more. The offensive pyrotechnics were on display at Wrigley Field on May 12, 1930, when the Cubs scored 12 unanswered runs and still lost to the Giants, who’d had a 14–0 lead before the Cubs scored their first run, in the fifth inning. Guy Bush had these mind-bending numbers for the season: He allowed 291 hits and 86 walks—377 base runners, not counting hit batters—in 225 innings and had an ugly 6.20 ERA, yet his won-lost record was a respectable 15–10.
Pitchers that season worried about their physical safety as well as their professional standing, and this only made the onslaught worse. Joe Tinker, the retired Cub shortstop, said pitchers were afraid to throw as hard as they could because their follow-throughs might leave them exposed to line drives; Giants manager John McGraw suggested moving the pitcher’s mound closer to the plate to give pitchers an advantage. Even Yankee owner Jake Ruppert—whose star player, Babe Ruth, had ignited the craze for long balls and big innings—wanted to see the spitball, which had been banned in 1920, made legal again in order to tame the surge of offense.
No one seems to know what was done to the ball, when it was done, or at whose behest it was done. A livelier ball may have been introduced during the 1929 season; such a ball clearly was in use in 1930. And by 1931, the owners recoiled from the wretched excess of the previous year.
From 1926 through 1930, Hack Wilson batted in 708 runs in 738 games, an average of 141.6 a year. Only Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Jimmy Foxx have matched or exceeded Wilson’s 708 over five seasons.
Wilson’s 1930 rampage started fast and then accelerated. In August, he hit 13 home runs and drove in a stupendous total of 53 runs. On September 15, he drove in his 176th run, breaking Lou Gehrig’s season record set in 1927, the year Gehrig’s teammate Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. Wilson finished with 56 home runs, a National League record that would stand until 1998, when two pharmacologically assisted sluggers, the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa, hit 70 and 66, respectively. McGwire would hit 65 in 1999; Sosa would hit 63 in 1999 and 64 in 2001. But leaving aside these empty tributes to better numbers through chemistry, Wilson’s record of 56—itself a product of a somehow-enhanced ball—stood until the Diamondbacks’ Luis Gonzalez hit 57 in 2001.
Wilson’s major league record of 191 RBIs was challenged the next year when Gehrig drove in 184. In 1937, the Tigers’ Hank Greenberg drove in 183. Since the Second World War, the highest RBI totals in either league by players not suspected of cheating with steroids, human growth hormone, or some other substance are 159 by the Red Sox’s Vern Stephens and Ted Williams in 1949, 155 by the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio in 1948, and 153 by the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis in 1962.
Bill James, baseball’s Newton, who has done as much as anyone to teach baseball how to see itself from new perspectives, believes that Wilson’s RBI record has become more secure as team lineups have become more laced with power hitters. In Wilson’s day, most teams had few home-run hitters, and they could feast on the RBI opportunities provided by singles hitters getting on base ahead of them. “In modern baseball,” James writes in his Historical Baseball Abstract, “everybody tries to hit home runs, spreading the offense top to bottom, but creating no ‘clusters’ of RBI opportunities.” Which is to say, extreme RBI totals have declined as baseball has become better, with more power distributed throughout batting orders.
From his pinnacle in 1930, Wilson plunged with stunning swiftness. The Cubs changed managers for 1931, replacing Joe McCarthy, who had considerable tolerance for the off-field behavior that accompanied Wilson’s on-field accomplishments, with Rogers Hornsby, who, to put it politely, did not specialize in positive reinforcement. The greatest right-handed hitter of all time, Hornsby was such a focused fanatic about being in peak condition to play that he avoided movies, lest they strain his eyes. He was a relentless critic of Wilson, who did not take this well. But neither the managerial change nor whatever was done to restore the ball to its pre-1930 condition explains Wilson’s downward spiral. His 1931 salary of $33,000 was the National League’s highest, but as often happens in baseball, the Cubs were paying for the past, not the present—and certainly not the future. Recalling the winter of 1930, Wilson said, “I spent most of that off-season in tap rooms.” He reported to spring training twenty pounds overweight. In 1931, he hit 13 home runs, a decline of 43 home runs from the previous season—a collapse without equal in baseball history. On September 6 of that year, he was suspended without pay for the remainder of the season following a fistfight with reporters on a train in Cincinnati. That winter he was traded to the Cardinals, for whom he never played an inning; they traded him to the Dodgers, for whom he had a productive season (23 home runs and 123 RBIs). But his decline was apparent, and in the middle of the 1934 season, the Dodgers released him. He signed with the Phillies, for whom he had twenty at bats before being released. Less than four seasons after his spectacular 1930, he was out of Major League Baseball. After a season with the Single-A Albany Senators of the New York–Pennsylvania League, he retired. He was thirty-five.
Hack Wilson: “suet and swat.” (photo credit 1.7)
On August 16, 1948, Babe Ruth died. More than one hundred thousand mourners filed past his casket as it lay in Yankee Stadium, and an estimated seventy-five thousand jammed Fifth Avenue outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where his funeral mass was performed. On November 23, 1948, Hack Wilson died, in Baltimore. He had moderated his drinking, but too late. He died destitute. His body was unclaimed for three days. Ford Frick, the president of the National League, wired $350 to pay for Wilson’s funeral. The mortician donated a gray suit for Wilson’s body. Shortly before his death, Wilson had given an interview to CBS Radio. This was part of it:
Talent isn’t enough. You need common sense and good advice. If anyone tries to tell you different, tell them the story of Hack Wilson.… Kids in and out of baseball who think because
they have talent they have the world by the tail. It isn’t so. Kids, don’t be too big to accept advice. Don’t let what happened to me happen to you.
In 1949, a new Cubs manager, Charlie Grimm, who had been Hack Wilson’s teammate, framed that portion of Wilson’s last interview and hung it in the Cubs’ Wrigley Field clubhouse, where it remained for many years.
One Cub’s career conformed to the sentimentality that surrounds Wrigley Field because he was practically a boy from the neighborhood. He is also the answer to a nifty trivia question: Who is the only player who was in the major leagues when Babe Ruth hit his last home run, in 1935, and when Henry Aaron hit his first, in 1954? Phil Cavarretta. He graduated in 1934 from Lane Technical High School, which then was 4.7 miles from Wrigley Field. At Lane, as he would with the Cubs, he played first base and outfield, but he also pitched eight one-hitters, and his final game was a no-hitter. He signed with the Cubs before he graduated, at seventeen. The Cubs then sent him to their Peoria farm club, where he slugged a home run in his first at bat as a professional, in a game in which he hit for the cycle. He was eighteen when, on September 16, he joined the Cubs in Brooklyn. On September 25, he hit a home run in his first Wrigley Field at bat to win a 1–0 game. He played in the Cubs’ last three World Series: 1935, 1938, and 1945, the year he was named the National League’s most valuable player. He played for the Cubs for twenty years, a team record, and was a player-manager in the last three, beginning in 1951.