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Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History
by Cait Murphy |
Elberfeld’s appointment as manager of the New York [Yankees] Club will put this brainy but flighty ball player to a test . . . Since his first minor-league engagement, he has been one of the anarchists of the game.
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Sporting News,
July 9, 19
However crude, the Highlanders (so named because their stadium was on the highest point in Manhattan)19 had a home. To fill it with players, Johnson persuaded—and, likely, ordered—other franchises to stock the new club, and not with cripples, either. The strategy worked well enough for the team to finish a respectable fourth. Hilltop Park 154
attracted only 211,000 patrons in 1903, the second-worst attendance in the league, but the auguries were good. During the team’s achingly close pennant run of 1904, lost on the last day due to a wild spitball by forty-one-game–winner Jack Chesbro, attendance more than doubled. When the subway reached the area in 1906—ironically, Freedman was a director of the company that built the system, and made a fortune from it—the team was well and truly launched. One of the players thrown to New York was Norman Arthur Elberfeld, a shortstop with a disposition befitting his nickname, “the Tabasco Kid.” His friends just called him “Kid.” He joined the team early in 1903 after a couple of tumultuous years in Detroit. Elberfeld was a baseball hard man, who poured whiskey into his spike wounds and held the AL record for seventy-five years for being hit by pitches—he was beaned 165 times in fourteen seasons.
One spring training, when the team was being ignored by their hotel’s dining room staff, Elberfeld, never a patient man, said, “I’ll get you some waiters, fellows”—and crashed a plate down onto the tile floor.23 That kind of thing was rather endearing. How the scrappy short-stop would let his temper rule his play was not. During his tenure with the Tigers, he got angry when manager Ed Barrow did not make him captain. Suddenly, the Kid began making errors. In June 1903, he was suspended for “laxity of training habits and the deliberate throw-ing of three games.”24 Disgusted, Barrow traded him to the Yankees, who were delighted to have him. Farrell and Devery were hardly likely to object to a rascal on the roster. Elberfeld played solidly for a couple of years, but in 1906, with New York in the thick of the pennant race, he had to be hauled off the field by police when he kept trying to attack umpire Silk O’Loughlin.
The following year, the Yankees were expected to contend again, but they floundered instead, finishing a poor fifth and winning twenty fewer games. Elberfeld began to feud with the manager, Clark Griffith, just as he had with Barrow. In June, the team was playing poorly and lost to the Tigers 16–4. Such things happen. What made the game distinctive, though, was that New York committed eleven errors on the day—four of them by Elberfeld. “Of course it is preposterous to suppose that a conspiracy could exist to oust the manager” was the arch comment of the New York Times, “but the circumstantial evidence happened to coincide with that view.” The baseball press at the time was normally circumspect beyond all reason. Teams paid for the writers’ travel; in return, they expected— and generally got—a blind eye to trivia like backbiting, whoring, boozing, fighting, cheating, and other minor character flaws. So it says something when reports of dissension became public at all. But it was hard to avoid when Farrell suspended Elberfeld without pay in July for “not giving his best services.”
After a busy off-season restocking the roster, 1908 begins full of optimism in New York. Jack Chesbro is said to be back in form. A flame-throwing rookie named Walter Manning looks good, while a kid from Jersey City, Joe Lake, promises to be better than Matty. Charlie Hemphill and Harry Niles, acquired in an off-season trade with the Browns, add speed and savvy. And there’s even reason to hope that the team’s sore-armed catcher, who won’t play on Sunday and who, even worse, allowed thirteen stolen bases in a single game, will be back in form. Sadly, Branch Rickey’s playing career is all but over, but he will return to baseball (after picking up a law degree) as a manager and front-office man. The situation has improved enough to impress the enemy; looking at the Yankees’s lineup, Fielder Jones, manager of the White Sox, commits preseason heresy by choosing the Yankees, and not his team, to win the pennant. New York manager Clark Griffith is not about to disagree. As spring training ends, he is chipper: “We come back whole and sound from our southern jaunt, and we are happy to get back and show the New York public what we can do,” he tells Sporting News. “All my players think we will win the flag and as for me I am sure of it. I never saw a team so confident of winning in my life.” The team starts well, with the mayor throwing out the first ball on Opening Day and fans cramming the rickety decks of Hilltop Park. On June 1, the Yankees are in first place. There is even some mutter-ing that the race is fixed,28 with Ban Johnson allegedly instructing his chosen umps to give all close calls to New York.Then the wheels fall off; the team loses eighteen of its next twenty-two games. Griffith quits.
His replacement: Elberfeld. Yes, the man suspended the year before for deliberately poor play is now supposed to lead this unhappy band of underachievers out of their morass. He fails; the Yankees fall to last place in July, and keep dig-ging. The Detroit News would write sarcastically of the Yankees's swoon, “Faintly we remember how the ‘dazzling speedsters’—or was it the ‘speeding dazzlers’—the greatest aggregation of ballplayers ever gathered together in one lot, the fastest team in the world, the team that surpassed the old Baltimore club for quick thinking and skill.”29 Elberfeld tried to inspire his team with his fury; instead he alienated them. And his anger could be dangerous: He once spit tobacco juice in the eye of umpire Jack McCarthy, permanently damaging it. The team is a cesspit of animosities, riven by factions. By August, even the Yankee-loving Joe Vila of the Sun throws in the towel, complain-ing that “the team is sadly crippled and disorganized and nobody seems to care what happens to it.”
Attendance suffers, with one late-season game attracting only five hundred people. “If it gets any smaller,” one sportswriter writes, “they’ll have to put fractions on the turnstiles.” To be fair, Elberfeld probably could not have succeeded, because the biggest presence on the Yankees is Hal Chase, the team’s first homegrown star. Chase believes that he, not Elberfeld, should have been named manager. He makes the Kid’s life miserable and shows his contempt by playing well below his best. Vila, normally a reliable Chase ally, turns on him, writing: “He acts at times as if his heart were not in his work.” And there’s the rub. The 1908 season marks the first time that people wonder out loud if Chase is strictly honest. It is not the last. By the end of his career, in 1919, he would be widely regarded as bent. He is now universally considered the most crooked player in baseball history—a man of wondrous talent who squandered it for cheap thrills and a fast buck. It didn’t have to be that way.
On paper, Hal Chase could have been the AL’s answer to Christy Mathewson. Like Matty, Chase was handsome, intelligent, articulate, and a ballplayer of extraordinary skill. But Matty was essentially decent; Chase was fundamentally rotten. “The man was born without any sense of right or wrong,” recalled S. L. A. Marshall, who dealt with Chase in the Arizona Copper League in the 1920s. “The deep pity of it is that the world thinks of him as a hoodlum rather than as a man who was mentally ill.” It’s a poignant assessment, given the high hopes with which Chase began his career. A star on the left coast, the Yankees bought him in 1904 and brought him to the big team in 1905 with the usual buildup associated with rookie phenoms. Chase quickly won fans with his spectacular fielding and charming demeanor. He could field bunts on the third-base side of the bag and regularly made plays of such boldness that they turned into errors because his teammates could not keep up with his thinking. The opinion of his contemporaries was unanimous—he was the best they ever saw. For decades after he left the game, sportswriters who had seen him play would agree. No less an authority than Babe Ruth, whose baseball smarts were profound, would say, “For my dough, Hal Chase was the greatest first baseman who ever lived.”
Chase played a deep first, almost in the outfield, but was so quick that he could still cover the bag. And his arm was so good that even Cobb reined in his otherwise frenzied baserunning: “He never went from first to third on an out when Chase was playing,” recalled Davy Jones,35 because Chase “could bounce around that infield like a rubber ball.” In his first season, Chase was a classic good-field, not-so-good-hit infielder, but the following year he batted .323. By early 1907, he was regarded as “perhaps the biggest drawing card in baseball.”36 His nickname was “Prince Hal,” and he was the man the AL hoped would take Manhattan from the Giants. But Chase was no prince. Trouble followed him, or walked with him, or chased him. He was late for spring training in 1905, and in 1906, he elbowed a base runner so hard the victim was knocked out for several minutes. In 1907, he skipped all of spring training in a holdout; later that year, his common-law wife, Nellie Heffernan, got caught up in an ugly matter when she was arrested for helping a friend burn and then bury a stillborn infant.
That winter, Chase played, against league edicts, under an assumed name in winter leagues in his native California. This was a firing offense, but Chase calculated that the rules would not apply to a star. They didn’t. Farrell and Devery liked the man, who was clearly one of their ilk. They were meddlers, constantly trying to tell the managers what to do; Chase was a clubhouse lawyer. They were corrupt; he was dishonest. They introduced him to gamblers, displayed him to their friends, bathed in the glow of his charisma.39 He lapped it up. Before 1908, Chase was not known as crooked. But during the course of that season, rumors surface that he is throwing games, and he ultimately leaves the team in September, complaining that his integ-ity had been impugned. “If any attempt is made by the management of the club to roast me,” he threatens, “I will tell a story which will rip the baseball world wide open.”40 More likely, he simply didn’t want to play out the string with a rotten team. He begins to “pout and fret and fume”41 and worse, to visibly loaf on the field. Finally, Elberfeld benches him. So Prince Hal cashes his September paycheck and skips to California, where there is good money waiting for him. If he wants to get back to the majors, well, management would likely cave in again. That is exactly what happened. When he deigned to show up in 1909, two weeks into the season, the crowd gave him a “hilarious welcome” and his teammates a “magnificent loving cup.”
In a team sport, a crooked player—or even an indifferent one—is an insidious virus. The infection is stronger when the player is a high-profile star. With Chase probably laying down on the job, and numer-ous veterans showing little respect for the manager, the Yankees lose whatever character they started with. In an August game, they openly laugh and joke at the trials of their rookie pitcher during a miserable 16–3 loss to Cleveland; by September, it is generally conceded that they are mailing it in. “They are only lookers-on,” chides Sporting Life, “and that from a long distance.” Under Elberfeld, they lose seventy of their last ninety-eight games, often in humiliating fashion. In September, they are shut out three times in four days by the seventh-place Washington Senators. Granted, the young fireballer who whitewashed them each time was named Walter Johnson, but still . . .
The Yankees, concludes Sporting Life in September, “are regarded as nothing more than a joke.”43 With Farrell and Devery as their owners, Elberfeld as their manager, and Chase as their on-field leader, it could hardly have been otherwise. But there is no joy in it.
Walsh moistens the ball with delicacy, as befits a nifty ballroom dancer, but the style of application differs. Rookie Joe Lake of the Yankees is said to fairly eat the ball, while his teammate, Jack Chesbro, sticks tongue to leather. Chesbro actually complains in July of a ball that “tastes funny.” The umpire, Billy Evans, gives it a try; so does the Yankees manager, Kid Elberfeld, and then the Tigers’ resident funny man, Herman “Germany” Schaefer, who declares it tastes like “lemon pie.” Pitcher Bill Donovan demurs: it’s more like nutmeg. The sight of grown men licking a filthy ball cannot be an appealing one. Aesthetics are one of the main reasons behind a lively debate over whether the spitter should be banned. Other arguments are that it lengthens games;40 that it is unduly hard on the pitcher’s arm; and that it promotes tuberculosis
Rubbish. Everyone in baseball spits all the time, when they are not scratching themselves. There is no evidence that games pitched by spitballers are any longer than average. As for the health of pitchers, who cares? In no other way does baseball management treat them tenderly. And the TB excuse is absurd. The real objection is that the thing works.
As for that anarchist Elberfeld, he lasted out the season, then was replaced by George Stallings. Here is how Sporting News de-scribed Stallings in 1908, after recounting a fight in which he broke a pool cue over the head of a minor-league umpire:129 He “knows base ball law but resists its application to himself . . . he has been through his professional career a base ball anarchist.”130 232
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Sporting News,
July 9, 19
However crude, the Highlanders (so named because their stadium was on the highest point in Manhattan)19 had a home. To fill it with players, Johnson persuaded—and, likely, ordered—other franchises to stock the new club, and not with cripples, either. The strategy worked well enough for the team to finish a respectable fourth. Hilltop Park 154
attracted only 211,000 patrons in 1903, the second-worst attendance in the league, but the auguries were good. During the team’s achingly close pennant run of 1904, lost on the last day due to a wild spitball by forty-one-game–winner Jack Chesbro, attendance more than doubled. When the subway reached the area in 1906—ironically, Freedman was a director of the company that built the system, and made a fortune from it—the team was well and truly launched. One of the players thrown to New York was Norman Arthur Elberfeld, a shortstop with a disposition befitting his nickname, “the Tabasco Kid.” His friends just called him “Kid.” He joined the team early in 1903 after a couple of tumultuous years in Detroit. Elberfeld was a baseball hard man, who poured whiskey into his spike wounds and held the AL record for seventy-five years for being hit by pitches—he was beaned 165 times in fourteen seasons.
One spring training, when the team was being ignored by their hotel’s dining room staff, Elberfeld, never a patient man, said, “I’ll get you some waiters, fellows”—and crashed a plate down onto the tile floor.23 That kind of thing was rather endearing. How the scrappy short-stop would let his temper rule his play was not. During his tenure with the Tigers, he got angry when manager Ed Barrow did not make him captain. Suddenly, the Kid began making errors. In June 1903, he was suspended for “laxity of training habits and the deliberate throw-ing of three games.”24 Disgusted, Barrow traded him to the Yankees, who were delighted to have him. Farrell and Devery were hardly likely to object to a rascal on the roster. Elberfeld played solidly for a couple of years, but in 1906, with New York in the thick of the pennant race, he had to be hauled off the field by police when he kept trying to attack umpire Silk O’Loughlin.
The following year, the Yankees were expected to contend again, but they floundered instead, finishing a poor fifth and winning twenty fewer games. Elberfeld began to feud with the manager, Clark Griffith, just as he had with Barrow. In June, the team was playing poorly and lost to the Tigers 16–4. Such things happen. What made the game distinctive, though, was that New York committed eleven errors on the day—four of them by Elberfeld. “Of course it is preposterous to suppose that a conspiracy could exist to oust the manager” was the arch comment of the New York Times, “but the circumstantial evidence happened to coincide with that view.” The baseball press at the time was normally circumspect beyond all reason. Teams paid for the writers’ travel; in return, they expected— and generally got—a blind eye to trivia like backbiting, whoring, boozing, fighting, cheating, and other minor character flaws. So it says something when reports of dissension became public at all. But it was hard to avoid when Farrell suspended Elberfeld without pay in July for “not giving his best services.”
After a busy off-season restocking the roster, 1908 begins full of optimism in New York. Jack Chesbro is said to be back in form. A flame-throwing rookie named Walter Manning looks good, while a kid from Jersey City, Joe Lake, promises to be better than Matty. Charlie Hemphill and Harry Niles, acquired in an off-season trade with the Browns, add speed and savvy. And there’s even reason to hope that the team’s sore-armed catcher, who won’t play on Sunday and who, even worse, allowed thirteen stolen bases in a single game, will be back in form. Sadly, Branch Rickey’s playing career is all but over, but he will return to baseball (after picking up a law degree) as a manager and front-office man. The situation has improved enough to impress the enemy; looking at the Yankees’s lineup, Fielder Jones, manager of the White Sox, commits preseason heresy by choosing the Yankees, and not his team, to win the pennant. New York manager Clark Griffith is not about to disagree. As spring training ends, he is chipper: “We come back whole and sound from our southern jaunt, and we are happy to get back and show the New York public what we can do,” he tells Sporting News. “All my players think we will win the flag and as for me I am sure of it. I never saw a team so confident of winning in my life.” The team starts well, with the mayor throwing out the first ball on Opening Day and fans cramming the rickety decks of Hilltop Park. On June 1, the Yankees are in first place. There is even some mutter-ing that the race is fixed,28 with Ban Johnson allegedly instructing his chosen umps to give all close calls to New York.Then the wheels fall off; the team loses eighteen of its next twenty-two games. Griffith quits.
His replacement: Elberfeld. Yes, the man suspended the year before for deliberately poor play is now supposed to lead this unhappy band of underachievers out of their morass. He fails; the Yankees fall to last place in July, and keep dig-ging. The Detroit News would write sarcastically of the Yankees's swoon, “Faintly we remember how the ‘dazzling speedsters’—or was it the ‘speeding dazzlers’—the greatest aggregation of ballplayers ever gathered together in one lot, the fastest team in the world, the team that surpassed the old Baltimore club for quick thinking and skill.”29 Elberfeld tried to inspire his team with his fury; instead he alienated them. And his anger could be dangerous: He once spit tobacco juice in the eye of umpire Jack McCarthy, permanently damaging it. The team is a cesspit of animosities, riven by factions. By August, even the Yankee-loving Joe Vila of the Sun throws in the towel, complain-ing that “the team is sadly crippled and disorganized and nobody seems to care what happens to it.”
Attendance suffers, with one late-season game attracting only five hundred people. “If it gets any smaller,” one sportswriter writes, “they’ll have to put fractions on the turnstiles.” To be fair, Elberfeld probably could not have succeeded, because the biggest presence on the Yankees is Hal Chase, the team’s first homegrown star. Chase believes that he, not Elberfeld, should have been named manager. He makes the Kid’s life miserable and shows his contempt by playing well below his best. Vila, normally a reliable Chase ally, turns on him, writing: “He acts at times as if his heart were not in his work.” And there’s the rub. The 1908 season marks the first time that people wonder out loud if Chase is strictly honest. It is not the last. By the end of his career, in 1919, he would be widely regarded as bent. He is now universally considered the most crooked player in baseball history—a man of wondrous talent who squandered it for cheap thrills and a fast buck. It didn’t have to be that way.
On paper, Hal Chase could have been the AL’s answer to Christy Mathewson. Like Matty, Chase was handsome, intelligent, articulate, and a ballplayer of extraordinary skill. But Matty was essentially decent; Chase was fundamentally rotten. “The man was born without any sense of right or wrong,” recalled S. L. A. Marshall, who dealt with Chase in the Arizona Copper League in the 1920s. “The deep pity of it is that the world thinks of him as a hoodlum rather than as a man who was mentally ill.” It’s a poignant assessment, given the high hopes with which Chase began his career. A star on the left coast, the Yankees bought him in 1904 and brought him to the big team in 1905 with the usual buildup associated with rookie phenoms. Chase quickly won fans with his spectacular fielding and charming demeanor. He could field bunts on the third-base side of the bag and regularly made plays of such boldness that they turned into errors because his teammates could not keep up with his thinking. The opinion of his contemporaries was unanimous—he was the best they ever saw. For decades after he left the game, sportswriters who had seen him play would agree. No less an authority than Babe Ruth, whose baseball smarts were profound, would say, “For my dough, Hal Chase was the greatest first baseman who ever lived.”
Chase played a deep first, almost in the outfield, but was so quick that he could still cover the bag. And his arm was so good that even Cobb reined in his otherwise frenzied baserunning: “He never went from first to third on an out when Chase was playing,” recalled Davy Jones,35 because Chase “could bounce around that infield like a rubber ball.” In his first season, Chase was a classic good-field, not-so-good-hit infielder, but the following year he batted .323. By early 1907, he was regarded as “perhaps the biggest drawing card in baseball.”36 His nickname was “Prince Hal,” and he was the man the AL hoped would take Manhattan from the Giants. But Chase was no prince. Trouble followed him, or walked with him, or chased him. He was late for spring training in 1905, and in 1906, he elbowed a base runner so hard the victim was knocked out for several minutes. In 1907, he skipped all of spring training in a holdout; later that year, his common-law wife, Nellie Heffernan, got caught up in an ugly matter when she was arrested for helping a friend burn and then bury a stillborn infant.
That winter, Chase played, against league edicts, under an assumed name in winter leagues in his native California. This was a firing offense, but Chase calculated that the rules would not apply to a star. They didn’t. Farrell and Devery liked the man, who was clearly one of their ilk. They were meddlers, constantly trying to tell the managers what to do; Chase was a clubhouse lawyer. They were corrupt; he was dishonest. They introduced him to gamblers, displayed him to their friends, bathed in the glow of his charisma.39 He lapped it up. Before 1908, Chase was not known as crooked. But during the course of that season, rumors surface that he is throwing games, and he ultimately leaves the team in September, complaining that his integ-ity had been impugned. “If any attempt is made by the management of the club to roast me,” he threatens, “I will tell a story which will rip the baseball world wide open.”40 More likely, he simply didn’t want to play out the string with a rotten team. He begins to “pout and fret and fume”41 and worse, to visibly loaf on the field. Finally, Elberfeld benches him. So Prince Hal cashes his September paycheck and skips to California, where there is good money waiting for him. If he wants to get back to the majors, well, management would likely cave in again. That is exactly what happened. When he deigned to show up in 1909, two weeks into the season, the crowd gave him a “hilarious welcome” and his teammates a “magnificent loving cup.”
In a team sport, a crooked player—or even an indifferent one—is an insidious virus. The infection is stronger when the player is a high-profile star. With Chase probably laying down on the job, and numer-ous veterans showing little respect for the manager, the Yankees lose whatever character they started with. In an August game, they openly laugh and joke at the trials of their rookie pitcher during a miserable 16–3 loss to Cleveland; by September, it is generally conceded that they are mailing it in. “They are only lookers-on,” chides Sporting Life, “and that from a long distance.” Under Elberfeld, they lose seventy of their last ninety-eight games, often in humiliating fashion. In September, they are shut out three times in four days by the seventh-place Washington Senators. Granted, the young fireballer who whitewashed them each time was named Walter Johnson, but still . . .
The Yankees, concludes Sporting Life in September, “are regarded as nothing more than a joke.”43 With Farrell and Devery as their owners, Elberfeld as their manager, and Chase as their on-field leader, it could hardly have been otherwise. But there is no joy in it.
Walsh moistens the ball with delicacy, as befits a nifty ballroom dancer, but the style of application differs. Rookie Joe Lake of the Yankees is said to fairly eat the ball, while his teammate, Jack Chesbro, sticks tongue to leather. Chesbro actually complains in July of a ball that “tastes funny.” The umpire, Billy Evans, gives it a try; so does the Yankees manager, Kid Elberfeld, and then the Tigers’ resident funny man, Herman “Germany” Schaefer, who declares it tastes like “lemon pie.” Pitcher Bill Donovan demurs: it’s more like nutmeg. The sight of grown men licking a filthy ball cannot be an appealing one. Aesthetics are one of the main reasons behind a lively debate over whether the spitter should be banned. Other arguments are that it lengthens games;40 that it is unduly hard on the pitcher’s arm; and that it promotes tuberculosis
Rubbish. Everyone in baseball spits all the time, when they are not scratching themselves. There is no evidence that games pitched by spitballers are any longer than average. As for the health of pitchers, who cares? In no other way does baseball management treat them tenderly. And the TB excuse is absurd. The real objection is that the thing works.
As for that anarchist Elberfeld, he lasted out the season, then was replaced by George Stallings. Here is how Sporting News de-scribed Stallings in 1908, after recounting a fight in which he broke a pool cue over the head of a minor-league umpire:129 He “knows base ball law but resists its application to himself . . . he has been through his professional career a base ball anarchist.”130 232
