Cooperstown Confidential (5 page)

The inductees spoke in turn. Nobody said anything particularly memorable.

Babe Ruth was given the final slot, and he used it to hit a rhetorical pop-up. “They started something here,” he said, “and the kids are keeping the ball rolling. I hope some of you kids will be in the Hall of Fame. I’m very glad that in my day I was able to earn my place. And I hope that the youngsters of today have the same opportunity to experience such a feeling.”

“I now declare the National Baseball Museum and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York—home of baseball—open!” boomed Judge Landis. The crowd cheered and headed for Doubleday Field to see a choose-up all-star game between teams captained by Honus Wagner and Eddie Collins. “Each of the major league teams had sent two representatives,” wrote Ken Smith.

The selection of the two delegates from the New York Yankees had produced
a whimsical observation from the loquacious Lefty Gomez.
“Leave it to the Yankees to be represented by a couple of foreigners.”

But his humor only cloaked a deeper realization, that baseball, being
a truly American game, reflects the heterogeneity that makes America
unique among the nations of the world. The Yankees were represented
by Norwegian Arndt Jorgens, a catcher, and outfielder George Selkirk, a
citizen of Canada. Cincinnati sent Ernie Lombardi, a California Italian.
The New York Giants sent Mel Ott, native of the Louisiana bayou country.
Bill Herman of the Cubs and Charlie Gehringer of the Tigers were of
German extraction. Morris Arnovich of the Phillies, Moe Berg of the Red
Sox and Hank Greenberg of the Tigers were of Jewish parentage.
Johnny Vander Meer was of Dutch descent. Pepper Martin and Dizzy
Dean of the Cardinals, Lloyd Waner of the Pirates and Carl Hubbell of
the Giants, sprang from Southwestern prairie stock . . . And so it went,
kaleidoscopic repre sentation welded into a unified purpose: the glorification
of baseball’s birth.

Smith wrote these words of praise for the melting pot without noticing that there had been no black players on the field at Coopers-town that day (later that summer, on Fireman’s Day, an exhibition contest was held between the Mohawk Colored Giants and the Havana Cubans). The all-star game ended as a tie, called after six innings to allow the assembled dignitaries to make their train back to New York City. It had been a great party and people went home happy. Clark and Cleland had the tourist attraction they wanted. By the end of the summer, almost thirty thousand paying customers visited the Hall—a far cry from the “hundreds” Cleland had predicted only a few years earlier. Ford Frick had put baseball at the very heart of the American narrative and, in the pro cess, created a perpetual public relations machine. Baseball’s greatest players had been granted immortality. And somewhere up in heaven, A. G. Spalding, entrepreneur and patriot, was smiling.

* Roosevelt didn’t personally like baseball; he considered it a sport for sissies. But he often praised the game as “typically American.”

* The players were all inducted at the same time, but they weren’t all members of the inaugural class. The BBWAA began holding elections in 1936, when it chose Cobb, Ruth, Wagner, Mathewson, and Johnson. The others were elected in 1937 (Lajoie, Speaker, and Young), 1938 (Alexander), and 1939 (Collins and Keeler).

THREE . . .
James and the Vets

I
f Stephen Clark had been more of a baseball fan, he might have insisted that there be some professional criteria for membership in the Hall. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. Instead he farmed out the job of choosing to the BBWAA, which was delighted to have it. In 1938, Tom Swope, head of the orga nization, cut a deal with Landis by which the writers would get permanent control over twentieth-century players. A committee of veterans could continue to pick through the nineteenth century. Clark, who was nominally in charge of the Hall, waved the system through.

The idea for an external electoral college was borrowed from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans; but the credentials of the electors were not quite the same. The Great American voters were themselves distinguished men and women, whose ranks, over time, included professor Jonas Salk, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, anthropologist Margaret Mead,
Time
magazine found er Henry Luce, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Ambassador Ralph Bunche. By contrast, to vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame, all you needed was a job covering a major-league team for a daily newspaper.

The Hall gave its voters almost no guidelines. They were free to vote for active as well as retired players, and there were no minimum statistical standards. Luckily for the writers, they had a comparatively easy job. They were working virgin territory, and the history of or-ga nized ball stretched back seventy years or so; it wasn’t hard for 75 percent of them (the electoral minimum) to agree on the best players of all time. There had been no real surprises in 1939. Rogers Hornsby, Rube Waddell, and other near runners-up, it was assumed (correctly), would be chosen in subsequent elections. No one knew when elections would be held, though; the Hall left that up to the BBWAA.

In addition to the thirteen players elected by the writers in 1939, Commissioner Landis and a committee of baseball executives and insiders chose thirteen “pioneers” and “builders of baseball.” They included Spalding, Chadwick, and Cartwright; former National League president Morgan G. Bulkeley (who had also been a member of the Mills Commission) and former American League president Ban Johnson; managers Connie Mack and John McGraw; George Wright, star shortstop of the first all-professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings (his brother, Harry, was inducted as a manager in 1953); Charlie Comiskey (later the owner of the Chicago White Sox), Cap Anson, Buck Ewing, Candy Cummings (often credited with inventing the curve ball), and Hoss Radbourn, a pitcher who once won 60 games in a single season (and who later died of syphilis).

So, from the beginning there were two gates to the Hall of Fame, one guarded by the writers, the other by a committee of insiders appointed by the Hall’s board of directors. This two-track system is still in place, and so is the requirement that candidates receive 75 percent of the relevant votes.

In the winter of 1939, the writers held a special election for the purpose of inducting Lou Gehrig, who had fallen fatally ill. They didn’t vote again until 1942, when they selected Rogers Hornsby, then took World War II off. Between 1946 and 1950, they chose seven more: Carl Hubbell, Frankie Frisch, Lefty Grove, Mickey Cochrane, Herb Pennock, Pie Traynor, and Charlie Gehringer. All these BBWAA picks were obvious, except perhaps Pennock, who benefited—as Lefty Gomez and other Yankees would later—from the publicity that comes from playing in New York. On the whole, the BBWAA did its part in keeping Cooperstown an exclusive and prestigious club.
*

The same can’t be said for the Veterans Committee. In the summer of 1944, Commissioner Landis expanded it to six members and then proceeded to die. At his funeral, the assembled committee members voted Landis into Cooperstown, installing him in the baseball firmament while he was still standing in line at the pearly gates. In the commissioner’s (corporeal) absence, Connie Mack, a baseball elder whose managerial prowess and great dignity made him one of the Hall’s first elected members, became the dominant voice on the committee. The following year, he and his colleagues went on a spree, choosing ten old-timers, and followed with eleven more in 1946. More than half of these inductees were, as it turned out, Irish: Bresnahan, Collins, Jennings, Delahanty, Duffy, Kelly, O’Rourke, Brouthers, Robinson, Clarke, McCarthy, and McGinnity—the new immortals sounded like a roll call at a meeting of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

This wasn’t simple ethnic favoritism. Irish players dominated the nineteenth-century game as Latinos rule today, for many of the same economic and cultural reasons. But it also didn’t hurt that Connie Mack’s real name was Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy.

The dump of 1945–46 changed the balance of the Hall. In a stroke, it became less exclusive, less familiar to modern fans (al-most no one had ever actually seen the old-timers play), and less logical.
*

Connie Mack was one of the great baseball men of all time. Lawrence Ritter was an academic economist without any real baseball experience. But in the sixties and early seventies, Ritter’s influence over the Veterans Committee’s choices was almost as great as Mack’s had been.

In 1966, Ritter published
The Glory of Their Times,
an oral history of baseball. He took a tape recorder, put it in front of twenty-two men who had played in the majors between 1898 and 1945, and asked them to talk about their lives and times. The old-timers reminisced about their teammates and rivals in mostly warm-hearted but refreshingly realistic terms. Here, for example, is Sam Crawford on player-manager relations at the turn of the twentieth century: “Those old Baltimore Orioles didn’t pay any more attention to Ned Hanlon, their manager, than they did to the batboy . . . He was a bench manager in civilian clothes. When things would get a little tough in a game he would sit there on the bench and wring his hands and start telling some of the old-timers what to do. They’d look at him and say, ‘For Christ’s sake, just keep quiet and leave us alone. We’ll win this ball-game if you only shut up.’ ”

Fans, used to the formulaic writing of the sports pages and the corny, sanitized anecdotes of team announcers, were charmed by the sound of authentic voices from the past. Suddenly a cast of forgotten players came to life. In the next five years, four—outfielders Goose Goslin and Harry Hooper and pitchers Stan Coveleski and Rube Marquard—were tapped by the Hall’s Veterans Committee. Goslin probably should have been there already; he hit a lifetime .317—impressive even in an era of high averages. Hooper, though, hit only .281 in an era of even
higher
averages. He was a fine fielder, but so were a lot of guys who didn’t get into Cooperstown. Stan Coveleski had a distinguished career as a spitball pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and was a plausible if not obvious choice; but Marquard, who bounced from team to team and won only 201 games in eighteen seasons, was not.

In 1967, the Veterans Committee dynamic changed again when Frankie Frisch joined. In his prime, in the 1920s and ’30s, Frisch had been a superstar for the Giants and Cards. He was a Gold Glove second baseman with remarkable range, an aggressive baserunner, a lifetime .316 batter, and a natural leader, whose teams won eight pennants. Frisch, known as the Fordham Flash in honor of his Jesuit alma mater, was better educated than most baseball people; he was also opinionated, articulate, and persuasive, and he very quickly became the dominant personality on the committee. Frisch thought modern players paled in comparison with the studs he had played with and against. And in 1971, Bill Terry, who had been Frisch’s teammate with the Giants, was added to the committee and seconded Frisch’s picks. Together they engineered a player dump of old teammates—pitcher Jesse Haines, shortstops Travis Jackson and Dave Bancroft, outfielders Chick Hafey and Ross Youngs, first basemen Jim Bottomley and George Kelly, and third baseman Fred Lindstrom—for the Hall. Many of these guys had no business on the same wall with Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson.

Nobody made this clearer than Bill James. In his 1995 classic
Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?
James called the Frisch and Terry choices “simply appalling” and “absurd.”

“The selection of this group of eight men . . . is the absolute nadir of the Veterans Committee’s performance . . . The selections of Hafey, Kelly, Haines, Lindstrom and Ross Youngs are just absurd, absolutely beyond any logical defense.”

James dubbed George Kelly “the worst player in the Hall of Fame.” “George Kelly was a good ballplayer,” he wrote. “So were Chris Chambliss, Bill Buckner, George McQuinn and Eddie Robinson. He wasn’t a Hall of Famer on the best day of his life.”

Nobody else in the baseball world could make this sort of ex-cathedra pronouncement and be taken seriously. But nobody, at least since Henry Chadwick, has known as much about the game of baseball.

Bill James never played pro ball. He never coached or managed, never reported on the game for a newspaper or broadcast one on the radio. He was just a fan and an amateur student of the sport. In 1975, he was in his mid-twenties, working as a night watchman in a Kansas bean factory, when he started mimeographing a self-published baseball newsletter. Two years later, he produced an annual in book form. It sold seventy-five copies.

James’s early readers were members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), which was founded in 1971 by Bob Davids, a Washington, D.C., baseball maven. James joined the group in the mid-seventies and soon became its most influential member. In fact, he coined the term for the particular way the society applied statistical methods to baseball questions: “sabermetrics.” Led by James, sabermetrics became a subversive movement. Baseball, as generations of players and fans knew it, was full of unexamined axioms:
Never walk the first hitter. Pitching is 75 percent of the game.
The weakest hitter should bat last. Runs batted in tell you all you need
to know about a hitter’s ability to produce under pressure. Earned runs
are the best measure of pitching excellence. Hitting .300 is the gold
standard for batters.
Such truisms formed the catechism of front-office decisions, on-field strategy, and what passed for expert analysis.

James and his disciples challenged the experts. Using statistical analysis, looking for variables where none had been perceived, reworking well-known numbers to find hidden meanings, they called everything rudely into question. Is the sacrifice bunt really a worthy offensive tool? Prove it. Does the category of “earned run” actually make sense? Defend the idea. Are left-handed pitchers really more effective against left-handed batters? How big is the home-field advantage? Do runners really steal on the pitcher, not the catcher? Show me the numbers. Sometimes James found that the conventional wisdom was actually wise, and said so. More often, he punched holes in it.

In May 1981, Daniel Okrent introduced Bill James to the nation in a
Sports Illustrated
article titled “He Does It by the Numbers.” Okrent compared James to another baseball revolutionary. “As with Babe Ruth,” he wrote, “when James hits one it’s a beauty, and even when he strikes out it’s worth watching.”

For a year,
Sports Illustrated
had refused to publish Okrent’s article. The editors simply didn’t believe that some guy in Kansas had figured so many counterintuitive truths just sitting in his bedroom. Predictably, the baseball establishment reacted with ridicule. Who the hell was Bill James and where did he get off telling lifelong baseball men how baseball worked? The brotherhood of the BBWAA was especially hostile. If James was right, they had had spent their careers misunderstanding and misreporting the game they were paid to cover.
*

But James was right, with intimidating frequency, and after a while smart baseball people stopped arguing. In 2006,
Time
named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. The Boston Red Sox hired him in 2003 as a senior adviser, and the following year they won their first World Championship since 1918 (and repeated in 2007). The Sox used sabermetrics, which by then was available in some form to every team in baseball, and James’s expertise, which was not. You can’t attribute those two world championships solely to Bill James, but having him on your side didn’t hurt.

James has a reputation for being distant and difficult. In a book called
How Bill James Changed Our View of Baseball,
edited by Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, historian Ron Shandler describes his first encounter with the great man. Shandler had rented a table at a baseball convention and was trying to sell copies of his
Baseball
Forecaster
.

Bill James was browsing the exhibition hall and came upon my table. I
greeted him and introduced myself; he whispered a coarse “hello” under
his breath as he picked up one of my books. And then he stood there,
silently thumbing back and forth through the book for at least two or
three minutes. It felt like two or three hours . . .

[He] opened up to one page, leaned over the table to me and pointed
to a single number amidst an ocean of data. And he said, “This is
wrong.” Then, without another word, he closed the book, placed it back
on the stack, and moved on to the next table.

After he was out of view, I reopened the book to the data point
in question. It was the batting average of then Atlanta Braves
prospect Andy Tomberlin. In those days of data entry by hand, I had
mistyped Tomberlin’s total at-bats; his batting average in the book was
wrong.