In the bottom half of the frame, Billy Herman led off with a double, but the Cubs failed to bring him home. It was their last hit until the bottom of the ninth. With one out, Demaree and Cavarretta both singled, putting the tying run at second. Hack smacked a sharp grounder right at Rogell, who flipped it over to Gehringer to start a game-ending double play.
For Chicago, it was the first time they had lost three games in a row since the beginning of August. Detroit’s offense was good enough, but just barely, having left 13 men on base in Game Four. After the game, Cochrane sat at his locker, puffing on a cigarette as he pulled off his leather shin guards. The strain of competition was beginning to show on Black Mike’s visage; one had to wonder how much sleep he had gotten in the last week. Cochrane understood that a 3–1 Series lead could disappear quickly, and he was wary of overconfidence in his club. He praised Crowder’s effort. “He pitched a smart, cunning game. It was marvelous. But those young Cubs certainly hit the ball hard. They’re tough to beat.”1
Gabby Hartnett was not as quick to give credit to the opposition. He insisted that Detroit’s win was a product of luck. Galan made no alibis for dropping Clifton’s long drive in the sixth, setting up the winning tally. “I just missed it—that’s all. But I’m going to make a prediction that the Cubs are going to win the next three games. We’re going to Detroit tomorrow night.”2
If the Cubs were indeed going to return to the Motor City, they would have to go through Schoolboy Rowe first. A classic big-game pitcher, Rowe loved taking the ball when so much was riding on the outcome. It was a mustwin for Chicago, and Rowe understood the basic tenet that it was imperative for a team to go for the jugular when the opposition was down. The Tigers, however, were banged up. Not only would Greenberg still not play, but Gehringer was also suffering from a slightly sprained left wrist. Owen, the man replacing Greenberg at first, had to scramble to find a first baseman’s glove large enough to accommodate a swollen thumb sustained in Game Four.
The Cubs hitched their cart to Lon Warneke, the winner in the Series opener. They would be missing their regular center fielder, however: Like Owen, Freddie Lindstrom woke up that morning with a badly inflamed thumb, a result of his muff of Gehringer’s fly ball the day before. Lindstrom could barely bend the digit, and the Cubs announced that he would be out for the rest of the Series.
When one door closes, another one opens. On October 6, 1935, one day short of his 31st birthday, the door opened for Chuck Klein. Benched for nearly the entire month of September, he was 1-for-4 in a primarily pinch-hitting role in the Series, and had scored the tying run in the ninth inning of Game Three. Klein was clearly on the downside of his great career. A prototypical left-handed slugger, he had averaged 36 home runs and 139 RBI for the woeful Philadelphia Phillies from 1929 to 1933. His detractors argued that Klein’s numbers benefitted from the ridiculously short distance (280 feet down the line) to the 80-foot-high, right-field wall at Baker Bowl. In his five-plus years with the Phillies, he had hit an outrageous .420 at home and .296 on the road. He was the only marketable commodity for owner Gerald Nugent, whose franchise bled money. Klein won the National League’s Triple Crown in 1933 with 28 homers, 120 RBI, and a .368 average. He also topped the circuit in hits (223), doubles (44), and OPS (1.025) for the second year in a row. The Phillies lost 92 games, drawing only 156,421 customers that year, and Nugent had little choice but to sell Klein to the Cubs in November. In return, he received $65,000 in cash and three aging players in Mark Koenig, Harvey Hendrick, and Ted Kleinhans, who contributed virtually nothing to their new team.
Klein arrived in Chicago in 1934 amid much ballyhoo. A serious leg injury in early May, however, hampered his production. By season’s end, he had proven that Wrigley Field was no Baker Bowl, although most players would be satisfied with a .301 average and 20 home runs. In 1935, he failed to hit .300 for the first time in his career. Still a solid hitter, Klein was on the outside looking in as the Cubs roared to the pennant in September. Worse still, he had fallen out of favor with the Chicago fans and press.
Billy Herman led off the bottom of the third inning in a scoreless Game Five by whacking a low liner toward the corner in left. It caromed off the wall and bounced past Jo-Jo White, allowing Herman to race into third. That brought up Klein. His moment of redemption came on a 1–1 count, when Schoolboy Rowe made a terrible pitch, down the middle, waist-high. Klein unleashed his powerful swing and launched a ball deep to right that sailed over the permanent bleachers and banged off a brick wall. The titanic blast put the Cubs up, 2–0, and the crowd of 49,237 shook Wrigley Field to the rafters. Cochrane, taking no chances, immediately ordered Elden Auker to start warming up in the bullpen.
Rowe quickly bounced back, however, retiring the next ten Cubs. Warneke was also in top form, allowing only three baserunners through the first six innings. But all was not well with the Cubs right-hander. In the third inning, he threw an overhand curve to Rowe and felt a sudden snap in his shoulder, followed by a twinge of pain. He kept quiet about it, but the arm bothered him the next frame, when the Tigers eked out two hits but could not score. Catcher Hartnett noticed a lack of zip on Warneke’s first pitch in the sixth, and the pitcher’s arm seemed to drop as if dead. Hartnett headed out to the mound to see what was up, but Warneke insisted he was okay. He gutted it out through a one-two-three inning, but then headed back to the dugout and gave Grimm the unhappy news: He could not go on. The pain was too much.
Jurges led off the seventh with a single and was bunted to second by Bill Lee, the new Cubs pitcher. Augie Galan cued one that hugged the grass on its way toward first base. Owen, who was playing first only because of Greenberg’s injury, let the ball scoot under him and into right field. The speedy Jurges tore around third. Right-fielder Jo-Jo White’s strong throw arrived at the plate the same time as the runner. Jurges barreled into Cochrane, who held onto the ball even as he tumbled backward. Umpire Moriarty called Jurges out. The Cubs put up an argument, and the fans booed their disapproval, but it made no difference. Galan took second on the play at the plate and scored an unearned run moments later when Herman doubled to right-center. Chuck Klein then worked Rowe to a full count before grounding out to Owen to keep the affair at 3–0.
No one could blame the Tigers for breathing a collective sigh of relief now that Warneke was back in the trainer’s room. Lee, however, hung tough. Detroit threatened in the eighth inning with runners on first and second and two outs. Cochrane made a bid for a hit, but Cavarretta smothered his hot shot to first and tossed to Lee covering the bag for the third out.
Detroit refused to go down without a fight. Gehringer, Goslin, and Fox hit three straight singles to open the ninth, shaving the score to 3–1. With runners on first and second, Rogell hit a soft, shallow fly to Klein in center field for the first out. The runners stayed put. Pinch-hitter Gee Walker’s excuse-me swing produced a slow roller to second; Billy Herman scooped it up and tossed to first. Now, with Goslin dancing off third and Fox off second, it was all up to Flea Clifton. Bill Lee fed him an inside fastball, and he skied a high pop fly on the first-base side. Phil Cavarretta drifted over next to the Tigers’ dugout, reached his glove into the stands, and plucked the ball out of the October air to end the game.
For Schoolboy Rowe, it was a tough pill to swallow: Eight innings pitched, eight hits, two earned runs, one walk, three strikeouts, and one very bad pitch to Chuck Klein. As for Warneke, he had looked masterful before the injury. Back in the clubhouse, the Cubs’ righty listened to the game’s denouement on the radio. As he lay on the training table, an electric heat lamp burned the pain out of his shoulder, standard practice in the days before an ice pack was deemed the better solution. A reporter asked him why he had not come out of the game earlier. “I didn’t tell Charlie I was through because I wanted to win,” Warneke mumbled through his chaw of tobacco, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.3 Grimm, for his part, insisted that the health of Warneke’s arm was worth more than any championship.
Baseball fans in Detroit were ready for this day. The 48,000-plus packing Navin Field were a boisterous bunch and did not have to wait long for the Tigers to give them something to cheer. Tommy Bridges, seeking his second win of the Series, set Chicago down in order in the first inning. His mound opponent, Larry French, was trying to avoid his second Series loss. Detroit got to him in the first inning. Singles by Cochrane and Gehringer put runners at first and second with two down. Next up, Pete Fox pulled one down the third base line; Hack dove to his right but was unable to get a glove on it, and the ball rolled into the corner. Cochrane raced home and Gehringer easily made it to third on the stand-up double. Not wanting to concede any more runs, Grimm ordered an intentional pass to Gee Walker, who was getting his first start of the Series in center field. The strategy worked. With the bases loaded, Billy Rogell bounced one right back to French, who tossed it to home to force Gehringer and squelch the rally.
Billy Jurges opened the Chicago third with a single up the middle. French muffed two attempts to lay down a bunt and eventually struck out. On a 3–2 count, Galan lined one just out of the reach of Gehringer, with Jurges taking third. Billy Herman roped a single into right that scored Jurges to tie the game. The speedy Galan, trying to make third, was gunned down by a strong throw from Pete Fox. Convinced that Clifton pushed him off the bag, Galan put up an argument with Moriarty, the third-base umpire. Moriarty, for his part, made a public display of jawing right back at Galan, which excited the crowd even further. Chuck Klein then made a bid for a home run with a deep drive to right, but Fox raced far to the scoreboard to make a spectacular catch.
The Tigers had French on the ropes in the fourth inning. Walker opened with a single and stopped at second on Rogell’s base knock to left. With the infield drawn in, Stan Hack pounced on Owen’s bunt down the third base line and threw a strong peg to Jurges to force Rogell. With runners at the corners, Bridges bounced into what looked to be an easy 5–4–3 double play, but the Tigers’ pitcher, tearing down the first-base line, beat the relay throw from Herman by less than a step. Walker scored, and Detroit had a 2–1 lead.
Chicago took the advantage right back in the next inning, however. With one on and one out, Galan took a borderline pitch for strike three. He spun around and put up a squawk, but umpire Quigley let the critique pass. With a count of three balls and one strike on Herman, Bridges grooved a pitch that the Cubs’ second baseman rocketed on a line over the fence in left. Chicago had its first lead of the afternoon, 3–2. The Navin Field crowd, in such a hopeful state just moments before, felt hints of panic set in.
A mild brouhaha occurred in the top of the sixth. With two outs, Hack doubled off the scoreboard in right. Jurges hit a chopper down to Clifton, who reached out to tag the charging Hack. The runner appeared to evade the swipe, but Moriarty thumbed him out, claiming he ran out of the baseline. Hack put up a howl, and Moriarty responded in kind with theatrical gestures, which only ignited the crowd further. Grimm, coaching at third base, stayed above the fray this time.
In the home half of the inning, French got two quick outs before Rogell drove one into the left-field corner that bounded into the stands for a ground-rule double. That brought up Owen, still hitless in the Series. In the biggest at-bat of his life, he came through, lining a single to left that plated Rogell to tie the affair at three. Bridges fanned, but then headed back out to the mound to try to keep Chicago in check.
After two scoreless frames, Stan Hack led off the top of the ninth inning for the Cubs. Twenty-five years old, Hack had hit .300 for the first time as a regular in 1935. He was 1-for-3 so far against Bridges, including a double in his last at-bat. This time, he got a pitch he liked and drilled it toward deep center field. It caromed off the flagpole at the base of the wall, and by the time Gee Walker could get it back to the infield, Hack was standing on third base with the potential go-ahead run.
All Billy Jurges needed was a long fly or deep infield grounder. The last thing he wanted to do was strike out. Like most of the Cubs, Jurges was a solid contact hitter, striking out only 39 times in 1935. Bridges, however, conceded nothing. With the infield pulled in for a possible play at the plate, he got Jurges to swing and miss on three straight pitches. That brought up French, and Charlie Grimm had a decision to make. Should he let his pitcher hit and thus keep him in the game, or should he pull him for a pinch-hitter with a chance to take the lead?
Grimm made his choice, and French stayed in to hit. He swung and missed on Bridges’ first two offerings, then tapped a weak grounder back to the mound. Bridges fielded it, checked Hack back to the bag at third, and tossed to Owen at first for out number two.
From a twenty-first-century baseball perspective, the fact that Grimm allowed French to bat borders on the ludicrous. Today, all but the very best and most durable starting pitchers are usually long gone by the seventh inning. They certainly do not go to bat in the ninth inning of a must-win World Series game with the go-ahead run 90 feet away. In 1935, however, managers expected pitchers to finish what they started. French had pitched 16 complete games in 30 starts. Even more telling was that Cubs pitchers went the distance 81 times that season, the most in the National League. In all of baseball, only the Boston Red Sox (82) and the Tigers (87) pitched more complete games.
Even by the standards of the day, however, Grimm’s declining to insert a pinch-hitter for French opened the manager up to criticism. After all, it was not as if French was tossing a perfect game; the Tigers had collected ten hits off him in eight innings. He was a lifetime .185 hitter, not bad for a pitcher. The Cubs’ bench, however, had three other able bodies, any of whom would have been far likelier to deliver a key blow. There was backup catcher Ken O’Dea, who had delivered a clutch ninth-inning pinch hit in Game Three, as well as another receiver, Wally Stephenson. In addition, Woody English, the captain of the team and at one time the best player on the Cubs, had still not seen action in the Series. Couldn’t Grimm take his chances with one of them and then send in a relief pitcher capable of getting three outs in the ninth? Apparently not.
The unflappable Tommy Bridges was a three-time 20-game-winner with the Tigers. He etched his name in World Series lore with his gutsy performance in the ninth inning of Game Six in 1935 (courtesy Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, Detroit Public Library).
That left it up to Galan, who took a called strike, then flailed at strike two. Bridges’ next pitch was an errant curve ball that bounced two feet in front of the plate. Cochrane, with the agility of a cat, got down to his knees and smothered it—keeping it from getting away and allowing the go-ahead run to score. Hack was forced to scamper back to third. Later, Frank Navin called Cochrane’s block “the most important play of the Series.”5 Bridges came to the set and pitched again. Galan swung and lofted a high pop fly to shallow left field. Rogell, Clifton, and Goslin all converged on it as Hack headed for home. At the last moment, the charging Goslin made a fine catch, and the Chicago threat was over. Tigers fans exploded in cheers.
It was the most pivotal moment of the entire 1935 World Series. Had Hack been able to score the go-ahead run, Tigers history may have been very different indeed. Year
s later, Billy Herman could only shake his head and wonder what might have been. “When I think back to the 1935 World Series, all I can see is Hack standing on third base, waiting for somebody to drive him in. Seems he stood there for hours and hours.”6 Cochrane called it the finest exhibition of pitching he had ever seen in a World Series.
Clifton fanned on a three-two count to start the bottom of the ninth. Cochrane hit a smash up the middle; Herman ranged far to his right, knocking it down with his glove, but was unable to make a play. With the lefty French on the mound, Cochrane took a modest lead off first, as Cavarretta held him close. The next batter was the speedy Gehringer, a hard man to double up. As French wound and delivered, Cavarretta pulled slightly off the bag. The pitch was low and inside to Gehringer, who hit a scorching one-hopper right to the first baseman, a potential double-play ball. To Cavarretta, it seemed to explode right on top of him; decades later, he would remember it as the hardest-hit ball he faced in over 20 years of playing first base. He threw up his hands in self-defense; the ball tore right through the webbing of his mitt, but he was just able to stab it with his bare left hand. Normally, his instinct would have been to throw the ball down to second to get the lead runner, and, with any luck, a double play. But the ball had smacked so hard against his throwing hand, stinging it, that he did not want to hazard making a wild peg. “I was afraid it might wind up in left field,” he would remark afterward.7 Instead, he stumbled the few feet back to the bag for the sure out on Gehringer. He immediately risked a quick throw down to Jurges, but it was too late to get the sliding Cochrane, and the Tigers had a two-out threat.
To the plate strode Goose Goslin, exactly the man the Tigers wanted in a situation like this. Goslin was known as a clutch player, and he had hit .330 in 1935 with runners in scoring position. With first base open, the Cubs certainly did not need to pitch to him, and his run meant nothing. Grimm came out and huddled with French and his infielders to determine strategy. The reputation that had followed Goslin was that he was a sucker for left-handers. This was a bit unfair, as modern statistics point out: to that point in his career, Goslin had hit .290 against southpaws. Grimm wouldn’t have known that, but either way he still preferred this lefty-on-lefty matchup. To walk Goslin meant facing Fox, a right-handed batter who had hit .321 versus portsiders that summer. Of course, Grimm could have ordered French to walk both Goslin and Fox, setting up a force at any base, while taking his chances with the right-handed Gee Walker, who hit lefties and righties equally well. Loading the bases in a situation like this, however, put an extraordinary amount of pressure on the pitcher: A wild pitch or a base on balls could end everything. It was settled: French would pitch to Goslin.
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