Baseball’s truncated season ends this week with the World Series, an event of great interest to we baseball fans and absolutely no interest to everyone else. Perhaps non-fans might develop an interest in the National Pastime by learning about some of the previously unknown artifacts from baseball’s long and celebrated history. Or, if they don't, they could share this with a baseball fan and resume their sad, baseball-less, lives.
Item 1. Dizzy Dean’s Tarot Cards
Everyone knows Jerome Hanna “Dizzy” Dean won 30 games for the Cards in 1934 to propel the famed St. Louis “Gashouse Gang” into the Fall Classic against the Bengals of Detroit. But his interest in tarot? Let “The Wild Horse of the Osage,” hot corner specialist Pepper Martin, tell the story:
Ol’ Diz might have been a hillbilly, but he had his mystic side, too, an’ he never traveled without them tarot cards. We wuz on the train to Detroit when he consulted them cards as to how to pitch to the Tiger line-up, which wuz loaded with big guns like Gehringer, Cochrane, Goose Goslin, and that big sheeny Greenberg. So Diz takes out his deck of the Major Arcana an’ he closes his eyes, spits, makes a sign, and says “Greenberg!” an’ then he draws The Fool, then Temperance, then The Devil, and then The Hanged Man, an’ he says, “I knew it! Curve ball for strike one, a slow one for strike two, then the heater an’ he’s struck out!’ An’ in the third frame of the first game, Diz was holdin’ a 3-1 lead with two gone an’ Cochrane on third an Gehringer on second, an’ he fanned the big Jew on just them same pitches! Go look it up!”
Item 2. Ty Cobb Mechanical Coin Bank
The ever-competitive Cobb held on to every dollar he ever made as resolutely as he did his bat while accumulating the highest lifetime average in the history of the game, .367. This 1908 Ty Cobb version of the then-popular “mechanical penny banks” capitalized on his both his fabled fielding prowess and his parsimony -- place a penny in his glove, and The Georgia Peach “throws” it into a waiting first baseman’s mitt. Moreover, true to his cantankerous nature – inherited from his Ma, who shot Ol’ Ty’s Pa one night and then claimed it was a case of mistaken identity -- the bank could be fitted with a small caliber bullet to catch unawares the larcenous interloper who turned it over without first flipping the bank’s secret “don’t steal” signal switch, resulting in one heck of a “time out.” Caught stealing, Cobb style!
Item 3. Cap Anson’s Gall Stones
Anson, a repugnant racist and the best player of the 1880s, was the first man to collect 3,000 hits, batting a towering .399 as player-manager in Chicago’s 1881 campaign. But did you know he did it while suffering from a debilitating case of gallstones, which were presereved in a jar after surgery? Anson later described the affliction as being as painful as getting plunked in the brisket by Cy Young’s hard one. Absent the malady, Ol' Cap surely would have legged out one more base-knock to reach the magical .400 mark! And the ceaseless agony no doubt played some role in Hall of Famer Anson’s grumpy boycott of competing clubs who put Black players on the field, leading to the Negro’s 60-year hiatus from Big League Action!
Item 4. Casey Stengel’s 1912 First Edition Copy of Remembrance of Things Past
True baseball fans know that the Old Perfesser graduated from Western Dental College in Kansas City in 1912, one year before he won the starting center fielder’s job for the Brooklyn Robins, and the same year Marcel Proust published the first of the thirteen volumes of his literary classic. But how many know that, after being selected as dental school valedictorian, Casey was gifted by his fellow cuspidrilles with a leather-bound first edition of that same first volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu? The dog-eared volume, inscribed to ‘Charles D. Stengel, with kudos, from his classmates,’ was Casey’s constant companion on the road in a five-decade baseball career.
Casey's third sacker, Dr. Bobby Brown, shared his love of literature. As Bobby tells it: ‘Case was sitting in the dugout one day, holding that Proust book in his lap -- he was never without it, you know -- when Yogi comes by and says, ‘So, Casey, how’d that book on helping your memory finally turn out?’ and Casey winks at me and turns to Yog’ and says, with that famous twinkle in his eye, 'I can’t remember.’ I thought Woodling and Bauer would bust a gut laughing!”
Item 5. Hitler’s Baseball Glove
As war clouds grew over the Atlantic in the late 1930's, a group of prominent Americans led by Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg encouraged Hitler to court American public opinion. To make their case, they sent him a baseball glove in the hope of stimulating an interest in the National Pastime on the part of the cantankerous tyrant. While war ensued nonetheless, the Fuhrer grew fond of the mitt, a Tris Speaker model, once invoking the great center-fielder when joking to a friend “The Grey Eagle comes to the Eagle’s Nest, no?”
Many a sunny afternoon at Berchtesgaden would be whiled away with the Furor tossing the horsehide pill with ‘Baseball Annie’ Eva Braun. Ol' Adolf's plan to form a playing nine at the German High Command took a nosedive, however, when first-sacker Rudolph Hess jumped the Club to barnstorm rival England. ‘That’s why free agency is so detrimental to baseball,’ the diminutive despot is said to have remarked.
OSS certificate of authenticity included!
Item 6. Satchel Paige's Birth Certificate
Leroy Robert ‘Satchel’ Paige claimed to have won over a thousand games in his Negro League career before he cracked the color line in 1948, going 6 and 1 for the pennant-winning Indians and winning the Rookie of the Year Award. But how old was he? He claimed to be born in Mobile, Alabama in 1906, but some historians put the date at 1905, or even 1904 or 1903!
The discovery of Paige's actual birth certificate ends the debate; Ol' Satch was born in...1875! Blessed with a youthful appearance and a spry agility earned by years of stoop labor, Paige broke into The Show not at 42, but 73, a remarkable athletic achievement.
Former Tribe manager Lou Boudreau wasn't surprised. ‘Ol' Satch used to get these envelopes from the Social Security Administration each month. I'd ask him what they were, and he's say 'They's actuarial tables, Mr. Lou. I'm tryin' to calculate what might be gainin' on me.' I guess Satch put it over on all of us!’
6 and 1 at age 73! Imagine what Ol' Satch might have done if he'd been good enough to make it to the big leagues in his prime!
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