Strange & Amazing Baseball Stories

by Gutman; Bill

  Both teams swarmed onto the field for all-out warfare. It was a baseball brawl at its worst. Players were punching and kicking for some ten minutes. Finally, the umpires restored order and ejected Lefferts and Coach Jack Krol, who was acting as manager. But peace and tranquillity didn't last for long. In the ninth inning Braves' pitcher Donnie Moore plunked Graig Nettles and out came both teams once more.

  By the time the smoke had cleared, the game had deteriorated into a disgrace. Five fans had to be taken away by the police for actually joining the brawl, and police riot squads were dispatched to guard each dugout. When it was over, National League president Chub Feeney fined and suspended a number of players and both managers. The Padres' Williams received the stiffest penalty, a ten-day suspension and $10,000 fine. Umpire John McSherry summed it all up by saying,

  "It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life. The only way I can describe it is pathetic. It probably set baseball back fifty years."

  It takes teamwork, even for something like that.

  Teamwork doesn't only include the players on a ballclub. It extends to the front office, the people who must deal with personnel, make trades, run the farm system, and build a winner. Once the ballclub is at or near the top, the front office must keep it them. It isn't always easy, and sometimes deals are made that really stretch the imagination. They are downright strange.

  Take the New York Mets. In their early days the Mets were known for their futility. Born to expansion in 1962, the club slowly built a powerful pitching staff and surprised the baseball world by winning the National League pennant and World Series in 1969 after finishing ninth the year before.

  But even that unexpected success didn't prevent the Mets from making some of the strangest trades in recent years. The classic occurred at the end of the 1971 season. That's when the Mets gave up on Nolan Ryan. Ryan was an erratic fastbailer with great strikeout potential, but a pitcher who couldn't always find home plate. All Ryan wanted was regular work, to be left alone in the starting rotation. The Mets wouldn't allow that.

  As a spot starter and reliever in the 1969 pennant year, Ryan was 6-3. But the next two seasons he went 7-11 and 10-14. The Mets had seen enough. They traded him to the California Angels of the American League for Jim Fregosi, who had been California's shortstop for a decade. The Mets wanted him as a third baseman.

  What happened? Fregosi fizzled, lasting barely two seasons with the Mets and not hitting more than .234, although he did go on to manage several teams, including the Angels and White Sox. Ryan went on to become one of the great pitchers in baseball history. He was right about regular work. Once in the rotation, he became a record-setter. As of 1985, he was baseball's all-time strikeout king, approaching 4,200 for his career. He had pitched a record five no-hitters and won more than 250 ball games. Left alone to pitch, he could have been a mainstay of the Mets' staff all these years. If only they had known.

  But the Mets had some precedent for what they had done. Two years earlier, following their World Series success in 1969, they traded a speedy young outfielder named Amos Otis to the Kansas City Royals for another third base candidate, Joe Foy. This trade was almost as bad as the Ryan-Fregosi deal.

  Amos Otis became one of the premier centerfielders in the American League, a durable player, outstanding defensively, and a solid hitter. Foy had one dismal season with the Mets and was gone. In addition, the Mets' incumbent centerfielder at the time, Tommie Agee, whom the club preferred to Otis, started losing it at age thirty. By 1973 he was gone and the Mets struggled to find another centerfielder for years. Otis could have been a very successful answer.

  The Mets have not been the only club to fall victim to strange, inexplicable trading. As one former manager and general manager said: "You gamble every time you make a trade. You always know what you've got, but you don't always know what you're getting."

  While that statement is obviously a true one, it doesn't explain some of the strange trades that have been made over the years. Take it all the way back to the turn of the century, just prior to the 1900 season. The Cincinnati team had just completed a trade they thought would be a blockbuster. It was, all right, only for the other team involved, the New York Giants.

  The Giants had agreed to trade a pitcher named Amos Rusie to the Reds for an untried right-hander fresh out of college. His name was Christy Mathewson. Rusie had won 230 games for the Giants over the past decade and was not yet thirty years old. He was considered a superstar. Mathewson was a college player who had never pitched in a big league ball game.

  What happened? Simple. Christy Mathewson became one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, a Hall of Fame immortal and winner of 373 ball games. Amos Rusie is also in the Hall of Fame, but it was for winning those 230 games with the Giants. Traded to the Reds, he never won another big league ball game. Not one. Rusie came up with a bad arm and didn't recover. It was one of those trades that really changed the course of baseball history.

  In modern times there have been several trades that have not only turned out one-sided, but have also affected entire teams for long periods of time. Sixty-five years after giving up Christy Mathewson for Amos Rusie, Cincinnati made another trade that was to prove disastrous.

  This one came at the conclusion of the 1965 season. That's when Cincinnati decided to unload Frank Robinson, who had been a National League superstar since 1956. But the Reds concluded that the slugging outfielder was "an old thirty" and going downhill, even though he had been the National League's Most Valuable Player just four years earlier in 1961. So they sent Robby to the Baltimore Orioles for veteran pitcher Milt Pappas. What a mistake!

  Robinson quickly showed the American League he was still a Most Valuable Player. In 1966, he won the Triple Crown with a .316 average, forty-nine homers, and 122 RBIs. What's more, he led the Orioles to a World Series triumph that year, and went on to help them win three more pennants and another series. The man who was "an old thirty" continued to be a dangerous hitter until he was past his fortieth birthday. His 586 career homers are the fourth best in baseball history and his uniform number 20 was retired by the Orioles.

  As for Pappas, he proved little more than a .500 pitcher for the Reds and in two years was traded again. Cincy would never win on "Let's Make a Deal" with that one.

  Another classic trade occurred early in the 1964 season and it's still talked about today. Two years before that the Cubs brought up a young outfielder named Lou Brock. In his first two seasons in Chicago Brock batted .263 and .268 and showed potential as an exciting baserunner. But some fifty games into the 1964 season, Brock was again around the .250 mark and the Cubs soured on him.

  They decided to trade him even-up for St. Louis pitcher Ernie Broglio, who had won twenty-one games in 1960 and eighteen in 1963. Broglio was only 3-5 for the Cards when the trade was made, but the Cubs must have been hoping he'd regain his twenty-victory form. Oh, were they wrong.., and were they wrong about Lou Brock.

  Once he joined the Cards, Brock became the catalyst in the team's drive to the National League pennant. He batted .348 the remainder of the season, stole another thirty-three bases, and was a star in the World Series. More than that, he went on to become a recordsetting Hall of Fame player and World Series hero in 1967 and 1968. When he retired, Brock had more than 3,000 career hits and more than 900 career stolen bases, the all-time best. His 118 thefts in a season was also a record until Rickey Henderson's 130 broke it. Lou Brock was one of the most exciting players of his generation.

  As for Ernie Broglio, he won only four games the rest of the 1964 season as he was saddled with arm problems. In the following two seasons he won a total of three games before retiring from baseball. It's no fault of Broglio's that his arm went bad, but he remains a symbol of one-sided trades that never should have been made. Teamwork, from the front office, at its worst.

  Because of the new rules regarding contracts and the ability of players to more or less control their own destinies, crazy and funny trades are not as lik
ely to happen in baseball. Superstars change teams quite often, but only because owners want to get market value before the players become free agents.

  But in the old days, strange and wacky trades were often the order of the day. Players were moved around as pawns and often used as barter in non-baseball-related matters. Again, the object was supposed to be to improve the team, but it didn't always work that way.

  For example, in January of 1920 the Yankees and Red Sox announced a major deal. The Yanks would be purchasing an outfielder-pitcher by the name of George Herman Ruth. He was twenty-four years old and just coming into his own, beginning to play more outfield than pitch, even though he had been a star pitcher for the Sox in the 1918 World Series. The Yankees bought Ruth for the then staggering sum of $125,000.

  The deal improved the Yankees, all right. George Herman Ruth became the mighty Babe and stunned the baseball world with fifty-four home runs in 1920 and fifty-nine the following year. He changed the face of the game and made the Yankees a powerhouse.

  But did the sale of Ruth improve the Red Sox? No way. Owner Harry Frazee simply wanted the cash, and not to benefit his baseball team. He was also a theatrical producer and wanted the money to finance his Broadway productions. Not a way to run a ballclub.

  And here's one for the books. Cy Young was the winningest pitcher in baseball history, winding up an illustrious career in 1911 with 511 victories. But as a lightly regarded rookie pitching for Canton in 1889, he was sold to Cleveland, where he began his career in earnest the next year. The price of the sale... a suit of clothes!

  Then there was the Detroit Tigers of 1905. They had their spring training in Augusta, Georgia, and when they broke camp to head north, there wasn't enough money in the till to pay the rent for the facilities.

  Shortly after the season began, the Tigers paid the rent. They sent Augusta a young pitcher named Eddie Cicotte. No one thought much of the strange rent payment at the time. But Cicotte resurfaced in Boston in 1908, went to the White Sox four years later, and won more than 200 games before being banned from baseball after the Black Sox scandal of 1919. But back in 1905, Eddie Cicotte meant no more to his team than a way to pay the rent.

  And there was still another trade with a future Hall of Fame ballplayer who was swapped for something other than another player. It happened to Robert "Lefty" Grove, the eventual winner of 300 major league ball games. Grove was still in the minors in the early 1920s, pitching for the Martinsburg, West Virginia, ballclub when Jack Dunn, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, decided he wanted the hard-throwing southpaw.

  Baltimore was still a minor league team in those days, but a step closer to the Bigs than Martinsburg. Anyway, Dunn looked for a way to get Grove for his ballclub. That's when he learned that the Martinsburg team still owed money for an outfield fence recently constructed at its ballpark. Being a shrewd wheeler-dealer, Dunn offered Martinsburg a deal. He'd take Lefty Grove and in return pay for the outfield fence.

  So a bargain was struck and Lefty Grove went off to Baltimore, where he attracted enough attention to get his eventual ticket to the majors with the Philadelphia Athletics. But early in his career he had the distinction of being the only player in baseball history traded evenup for an outfield fence. It takes real front-office teamwork to do something like that.

  Marathon games really take teamwork. As the game drags on, inning after inning, a team has to be good enough not to lose yet not good enough to win. So does the other team, and the game continues.., and continues ... and continues. The longest game in big league history was the twenty-six-inning tie between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves on May 1, 1920. The game was still deadlocked when it had to be called because of darkness.

  Though a tie game leaves fans with mixed emotions, there was a notable feature about baseball's longest marathon game. Both starting pitchers, Joe Oeschger of Boston and Leon Cadore of the Dodgers, went all the way. Neither needed relief for twenty-six innings, a remarkable achievement.

  But when it comes to marathon games, the New York Mets have to be the all-time team champion. Leave it to the Mets, a team that has always seemed to create its share of amazing, strange, and funny baseball stories.

  On May 31, 1964, the Mets began playing a doubleheader against the San Francisco Giants. Little did anyone realize when they came to the park that day that they wouldn't be going home for more than ten hours. The first game was over in the regulation nine innings, but it took a little more than three hours for the Mets to lose. Then came game two.

  It was tied after nine, tied after fifteen, and still tied after twenty. The two clubs continued playing, everyone bone weary. Finally the Giants broke through to score a run in the top of the twenty-third inning. The Mets couldn't match it and the game ended, some seven hours and twenty-three minutes after it started. Coupled with game one, the doubleheader took more than ten and a half hours to complete.

  Four years later the Mets were at it again. This time they were playing the Houston Astros and once more the game went into extra innings. This one was scoreless and a monument to offensive futility. Inning after inning both the Mets and Astros tried but failed to score a single run. It seemed as if it would never end, and would even top the mark of the old Dodgers and Braves. The fans must have felt as if they were in the Twilight Zone, destined to watch a scoreless baseball game forever. Finally, in the twenty-fourth inning Houston managed to push a run across and the Mets went home losers again, this time by the longest 1-0 score in baseball history.

  Then the Mets took a vacation from marathon games until 1974. This time they were matching futility with the St. Louis Cardinals. They even came close to setting a new record. The game continued for twenty-five innings, with all twenty-five players on each team getting into the action one way or another. When it ended, guess what? The Mets lost again.

  In the 1986 Playoffs and World Series, the Mets also starred in marathon ballgames. But this time, they won them!

  Winning wasn't a problem for the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The Pale Hose took the American League pennant and were heavy favorites to defeat the National League Cincinnati Reds in the upcoming World Series. Though no one knew it then, what was about to emerge from the series was perhaps the darkest hour baseball has ever known. And it took teamwork, at least by one-third of the ballclub.

  It's incredible to think that a World Series could be "fixed," but that's exactly what happened in 1919. Eight members of the White Sox became involved in a plot to "throw" the series, allowing Cincinnati to win, hopefully without making it look deliberate. The reward was money. Big-time gamblers wanted to make a bundle betting on the underdog Redlegs.

  The White Sox owner, Charles Comiskey, was known back then for paying his players as little as possible. That's why some of the players were easy marks for a bribe. The sad part, other than the fix itself, was that it involved several great players who undoubtedly would have made it to the Hall of Fame.

  Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best known, one of the great natural hitters of all time. He compiled a .356 lifetime average, third only to Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby on the all-time list. In 1911, Shoeless Joe batted .408, and in 1920, his final season in the majors, he hit a rockin' .382.

  Another great player was pitcher Eddie Cicotte, winner of 208 games in his career, and author of a sensational 29-7 mark in the ill-fated season of 1919. George "Buck" Weaver was an all-star shortstop and third baseman who batted a career high .333 in his final season of 1920. Lefty Claude Williams was just coming into his own, having won twenty-three in 1919 and twenty-two in 1920.

  Four other players were involved. They were Chick Gandil, the first baseman; centerfielder Oscar "Happy" Felsch, shortstop Charles "Swede" Risberg, and Fred McMullin, a utility infielder.

  How can eight players fix a series? It isn't easy. Like most everything else in baseball, it takes teamwork. A hitter just doesn't take that good cut. A pitcher doesn't have his top stuff. A fielder juggles a ball for a split second, or arrives at a base a mome
nt too late. It can be done in a way that's difficult to detect. Only there were already rumors before the series began, especially when a lot of money was bet on underdog Cincinnati.

  It was a best-five-of-nine series in 1919, and Eddie Cicotte started the opener. When the White Sox ace was mauled 9-l, the rumors continued to mount. Hugh Fullerton, a Chicago sports writer who was well respected in the baseball community, said after that first game'

  "I don't like what I saw out there today. There's something smelly going on."

  Cicotte had a 1.82 earned run average in the regular season and had completed thirty-six of his forty starts. An off day like that didn't seem right. When the Reds won the second game 4-2, beating Claude Williams, they had a big 2-0 advantage.

  After game two, White Sox owner Comiskey actually went to National League President John Heydiet and said that he felt something was wrong, that there was some funny business on the part of his players. But when AL president Ban Johnson heard about Comiskey's statement, he dismissed it quickly.

  "That is the yelp of a beaten cur," Johnson said. At the time, Johnson and Comiskey were feuding about other matters.

  So the series continued. Rookie Dickie Kerr, who was not in on the fix, pitched the Sox back into it in game three, winning 3-0. Next, Cicotte was due again, and as writer Fred Lieb reported, he was said to have told a fellow fixer, "We've got to look good in losing because we have to think about our 1920 contracts."

  This time Cicotte lost by a 2-0 score, with his own fielding blunders leading to the Cincy runs in the fifth. When Claude Williams lost again, 5-0, the Sox were down four games to one, and in an almost hopeless position. Now the series returned to Cincinnati once more.

  More stories appeared questioning the caliber of play, but nothing was proven and the odyssey of this strangest of World Series continued. The Reds took a 4-0 lead in game six and looked to end it. Suddenly, though, the Sox fought back and went on to win the game, 5-4, for Dickie Kerr. When Cicotte won the seventh game, 4-1, people began wondering all over again.