The men who play—What they are like off the field—Mere human
beings like other people—The road trips—Days in the hotels—Fads
and fancies—Koenig an expert pianist—Hoyt a great reader—Huggins a
financial student—Shawkey a great hunter—Baseball, with them, not a
game but a business—The men who play are business men.
What are they like, these ball players? What do they talk about and
think about as they go traveling around the country? What do they do
and say off the playing field?
These are common questions—questions that are constantly being asked by
kids and grown-ups.
The answer is simple enough. They’re much the same as other men,
interested in the same things, living the same sort of lives. They are
neither better nor worse than the same number of lawyers, or doctors,
or business men, picked from the four corners of the nation. They have
their families, their children and their homes to occupy their spare
hours.
They discuss politics, or finance, or farming or any other subject
that appeals to the normal man. They eat, dress, sleep and live much
the same as Mr. Smith the merchant, or Mr. Brown the banker. Which to
many people will perhaps come as a surprise.
Come and visit the Yankees some evening, as they sit about the
hotel after the game. Suppose it’s in St. Louis, some hot night in
mid-summer. You’ll find Huggins and O’Leary and Fletcher sitting over
in a corner, enjoying their cigars. Chances are they’ll be discussing
politics or the stock market. Huggins is a keen financial student. He
reads all the financial papers and journals and follows the market as
closely, almost, as a city broker.
And in Fletcher he has great company. Fletcher, during the off season
is a successful middle Western farmer, the type of successful farmer
who takes a hand in county politics: serves on the school board and is
a director of the town bank. Fletcher does all these things, and holds
all these offices.
Mark Koenig you’ll find perhaps, playing the piano in the reception
room. Mark does pretty well as a musician, and he plays not jazz but
classical stuff. And if he’s playing the chances are Waite Hoyt
and Benny Bengough will be around somewhere near, listening quietly,
or perhaps doing a bit of harmonizing. Benny is a musician too—in fact
he’s engaged in giving me lessons on the saxophone right now, and a
tough job he has too.
Hoyt not only has a good singing voice, but he’s something of an actor
as well. A lot of theatrical folks who know, tell me that Waite could
make a success on the stage as well as in baseball. But he isn’t
interested. During the off-season, instead, he spends his time at his
profession. He’s a mortician, and has an office with his father-in-law
in Brooklyn.
Waite is a great reader too. I’ve been traveling with him a good many
years and I never saw him start out on a trip without one and probably
three or four books in his bag.
Bob Shawkey is almost sure to be off in a corner somewhere discussing
his annual hunting trip. Bob is one of the best hunters in the
business, and knows the moose trails of Canada as well as most of the
professional guides.
We have a lot of real movie fans on the Yankees too. Lou Gehrig is
a nut on movies, and usually sneaks off to the nearest theater each
evening. Earl Combs likes them too, and Benny Paschal. Those three
are pretty apt to be together—though now and then Lou will pass up the
movies to sit in on a bridge game with some of the rest of us.
We started a bridge game during the spring training trip of 1927 that
lasted clear through the season. Gehrig and I played against Mike
Gazella and Don Miller. Miller is the young pitcher from the University
of Michigan who joined us last year.
You know most ball players are good card players. But on the Yankees
at least, there is very little poker playing. Once and a while the
boys will start a game. But pinochle and bridge are the two favorites.
Gazella is a good bridge player. Ernie Johnson and Everett Scott were
the champions when they were with the club. Pat Collins and Woodie, the
trainer, are pinochle nuts. And they’re always looking for a game.
Cy Moore and George Pipgras like to play “Hearts.” It’s a funny thing
about Cy. He’ll go out there on the mound before 50,000 raving fans,
with the bases full and nobody down, and he’ll be as calm and cool as
though he was pitching hay. But put him down in a heart game and he’s
like a little kid. He yells, and shrieks and laughs until you can’t
stay in the same room with him.
Once on a western trip last season he got so bad that we ganged
on him and put him back in the car with the newspaper boys. He had to
promise to keep quiet before we let him come back to his berth.
The two quietest men on the Yankee club are Bob Meusel and Tony
Lazzeri. They never say a word to anyone. At that I think Tony talks
more than Bob does. I’ve seen Bob go through a whole day when I don’t
believe he spoke a word, unless it was at the dining table when he
asked somebody to “pass the bread.”
Fellows who talk a lot we call “barbers.” Freddy Hoffman, the old
Yankee catcher, was one of the best barbers I ever knew. Freddy would
talk the arm off any one who cared to listen, and he didn’t care what
particular subject he talked about either. Earl Combs is another pretty
good barber. Wallie Pipp, when he was with the club, was a champion.
And what Wallie enjoyed more than anything else was to get hold of some
baseball nut and then kid him into serious conversation about inside
baseball. He and Joe Dugan would pull the stunt together. They’d get
the poor guy surrounded, and get him to telling all his pet baseball
theories.
“Gee,” Wallie would say, “That’s a great idea. I don’t know why no
one ever thought of that before.”
“Certainly is,” Joe would chime in. “Now what do you think should be
done to stop a hitter like Hornsby?”
The fellow would open up on that subject, and when he was through Joe
would probably remark:
“Say, you’ve certainly got the dope. I think you ought to go around to
Huggins and tell him about that. He’d probably be willing to pay big
money for ideas like that.”
I’ve seen Joe and Wallie spend a whole evening just stringing some poor
bird along—and they’d have him so fussed finally, that he wouldn’t even
know his name.
A lot of people still cling to the idea that professional baseball
players are rough necks, hardly fit to associate with real folks.
And of course there are good fellows and bad, among the players. But
then the same thing might be said of lawyers or doctors or business
men. Believe me, playing side by side with a man through season after
season, living with him in hotels, traveling with him on the road,
eating and sleeping with him month after month, gives a fellow a
pretty good line on just what sort of fellow he is.
And I say to you that in my experience I’ve found ball players to be
just as much gentlemen as any class of men I ever knew. Nine times out
of ten they’re a lot better than the people who criticize them.
A couple of generations ago they may have been different. In those days
the corner saloon was the hangout for the baseball crowd, and players
who had finished their playing careers turned into bartenders. But they
don’t do it any more. Ball players are getting smart. They learned long
ago that it takes pretty careful living and pretty steady training to
keep up with the parade. I don’t mean that ball players are plaster
saints. They’re not. But keeping in physical condition is just as much
a part of their business as knowledge of discounts is of the business
of a banker. And ball players today are business men first, last and
always.
I’ll never forget the disappointment of a friend of mine one evening
in Detroit. He expressed a desire to see the players off the field
so I took him around. He got his first shock when we went to the
Book-Cadillac hotel. That’s the newest, most expensive hotel in
Detroit and one of the best in the country.
“Why the ball players don’t stop at this hotel, do they?” he asked,
with some astonishment.
“They certainly do,” I replied, “and I’ll lay a little wager right now
that you won’t be able to pick the ball players out from the rest of
the guests either.”
And he couldn’t do it.
He recognized Meusel, for he had met Bob before. And he knew Gehrig.
Once you’ve seen Lou down on the playing field you can’t mistake those
shoulders and legs anywhere. But the rest of them he didn’t know. He
was a surprised young man.
He expected the ball players to stand out from the rest—to be
different. Maybe he expected to see a lot of loud-talking rough looking
touts in caps and checked suits. I don’t know. But anyhow, when I
pointed the boys out to him, he looked a bit embarrassed:
“Why they look just like anyone else,” he said, “They’re just like
ordinary people.”
It’s funny how a whole ball club will take up a certain fad. One fellow
brings it around, and then the whole gang takes it up. The Yankees for
a year or two, were nutty over cross-word puzzles. Walk into the
hotel lobby and you’d see fellows sitting all around working puzzles.
Ward and Pat Collins were responsible for that. Then Merkle took it up,
and Mike Gazella. Shocker got the craze, and the first thing you knew
the whole club was doing cross-word puzzles. I suppose it was a fine
thing. They certainly added a lot of new words to their vocabulary as a
result. And I think I picked up a couple of jaw-breakers myself.
Mah Jong came near wrecking the Athletic team a few seasons ago. One of
the fellows got a Mah Jong set and took it on a road trip. Before long
every man on the club was interested in the game. They had six or seven
sets of Mah Jong that they carried right along with them in the uniform
trunks, and the boys used to start their games in the morning and run
right through to game time. Finally it got so bad that Connie Mack had
to call a halt—and I think he still blames the loss of the pennant on
that Mah Jong craze.
Most ball players like all other forms of outdoor sport. Fishing
and hunting are ever popular subjects of discussion. Lou Gehrig,
for instance, would rather fish than eat. Lou never misses a chance
to go cod fishing, and most any day in winter you’ll find him
out on the banks after cod. This college kid is one of the queerest
ballplayers I ever knew. It seems he never feels the cold weather. The
coldest day in winter he’ll come swinging down Broadway without an
overcoat, his coat open and no vest. Never wears gloves and half the
time goes bareheaded. Some of the boys claim he never had an overcoat
on his shoulders until he joined the Yankees.
Lou is a great eel-fisherman too, and in the summer after the ball game
he will take his mother in his car and go shooting down to Long Island
to spear eels. His mother pickles them and now and then she will send
a big jar of pickled eels around to the clubhouse. Last year when the
boys struck a big hitting stride they got the idea that it was the
pickled eels which were responsible for their hitting and for more than
three weeks they wouldn’t go into a ball game until they all had taken
a couple of bites of pickled eel.
The big leagues are full of players who are great hunters. Old Chief
Bender, the Athletics’ pitcher, was one of the best trap shots in the
country, and the Chief can still handle a mean shot gun, long after
his pitching days are over. Ty Cobb is a great hunter too—and at
the end of every season he goes chasing off to the mountain country in
Canada or the Western United States for a month of shooting. His home
at Augusta, Georgia is filled with trophies. Among other things he has
some of the finest bear and deer heads I’ve ever seen.
Other great hunters are Eddie Collins, Joe Bush, Sam Jones, Benny
Bengough, Bob Meusel, Freddy Hoffman and Bob Shawkey. Shawkey is one of
the best in the country and for years has been making annual trips into
Northern Canada for a months outing after the season ends.
Eddie Collins is a queer hunter. Eddie likes to get out in the woods
and tramp around with a gun, but so far as anyone knows he never
takes a shot at anything. Eddie is too tender-hearted. He attempted
to shoot a wounded deer once, but when the deer turned its head and
looked at him sort of sad, Eddie hadn’t the heart to pull the trigger.
And I don’t think he ever will. Anyway he makes the trip with the
other fellows every fall, and during the season is one of the best
conversational hunters in the business.
I like to hunt myself, but I’d sooner have bird shooting to
anything else. One of the greatest kicks I ever got in my life came
last fall when I was out on Long Island with Bill McGeehan and Bozeman
Bulger, the sport writers. For two days we lay around in the blinds
without a single shot. Then a flock of geese came over and we got five
of them. It’s the first time I ever shot a wild goose, and I got as
much thrill from it as I ever got from hitting a homer with the bases
full. The best part of hunting, though, so far as a ball player is
concerned, is that it keeps a man in fine condition. You can’t tramp
around over the country all day long, packing a heavy gun, unless
you’re in shape.
Golf is another game in which ball players are fairly expert. They
say that Walter Hagen, the great golf pro, would have made a great
ball player if he hadn’t gone in for golf. Well, Jigger Statz of the
Brooklyn Dodgers, can hold Walter even. Jigger has had plenty of
opportunity to turn golf pro if he hadn’t been in baseball.
Statz is about the best of the ball player golfers I guess. But there
are some others who are almost as good. Poor old Ross Young, who died
in San Antonio last winter, was one of the best. Bob Shawkey is a
fine golfer, and so is Sam Rice of the Senators. Nick Altrock is
another boy who can play pretty close to par, and Dazzy Vance, Aaron
Ward, Bucky Harris and Eppa Rixey are others who swing a deadly mashie.
One thing most ball players can do on the golf course is drive. They
may be bad on their approaches, and their putts may be terrible—but
they all of them can sock that old ball from the tee. One of the
longest drivers I ever saw is Sam Jones, the pitcher. Sam doesn’t know
much about the game, and he isn’t always sure which direction the ball
is going—but he certainly can sock ’em from the tee.
A lot of big league managers forbid golf playing during the regular
season. The story is that the golf swing ruins a player’s hitting
swing. Swinging at a stationary object like a golf ball, they say,
ruins the timing in swinging at a moving object like a baseball.
Personally I never noticed it, and I play a lot of golf during the year.
And if you ask me, the chief objection managers have to golf isn’t
the actual playing at all. It’s the conversation. Golf is one of the
“talkingest” games in the world. If fellows would go out in the morning
and shoot their eighteen holes, then come in and keep quiet it
would be alright. But they don’t do it. They play the game over again
each afternoon on the bench, and it gets a manager’s goat to have some
guy doing an imaginary mashie shot from a trap right when there’s
important business out on the ballfield.
What I’ve tried to show in this chapter is that the big league ball
player is much the same as any other human being. He lives his own
life; has his family, his home, his hobby and his outside interests
just the same as the banker, the clerk or the professional man.
Baseball is his life work and he studies it carefully. Thrown in a
mixed crowd your baseball man will talk politics, or finance or any
other subject that average men discuss. But put three or four ball
players together and they talk—baseball. Laymen I know find something
fascinating in the thought of a big league ball club traveling around
the country. To the outsider, those hours on the train together, and
the hours in the hotels are a sort of magic.
To us they are only routine. We have a lot of fun because we’re all
good fellows together. Card playing is a favorite ♦past time while
traveling. Music helps to pass away many hours. For the past six
or seven seasons I have never made a single trip that I didn’t take
with me a portable phonograph with a couple of dozen records. And from
the time we get on the train until we leave, that phonograph is working
overtime.
♦ “pasttime” replaced with “pasttime”
The boys frequently organize quartets and many a bit of close harmony
has been carved out in a Pullman smoker.
What do we do while traveling?
Here’s a typical scene. The club is enroute on a long jump, say from
St. Louis to New York.
In one section a card game is in session. Meusel and Bengough, Ruether,
Koenig, and Lazzeri are playing “black jack.” They have their coats
off, their collars discarded and their shirts open at the neck. They’re
kidding and laughing over the game. The colored porter stands by
watching the fun, and the conductor stops on his rounds to “sit in” for
a few hands.
Down the car a bit Hoyt sits reading a book. Further on the fussy
foursome is busy at bridge. That’s Gehrig, Miller, Gazella and myself.
Shocker is reading the newspapers, and his berth is messed up with a
dozen sports pages, torn from as many different papers. Now and then he
makes some discovery and pauses to discuss baseball with Pennock
who is writing letters across the isle.
A hearts game is going on at the far end of the car, and above the
noise of conversation you can hear Cy Moore shouting and laughing like
a little kid as he passes Combs the queen. Pipgras is in the game and
Paschal and a couple of the newspaper men.
In an adjoining section Jules Wera is giving the phonograph a workout,
and occasionally Koenig pauses in the business of playing cards to lift
his voice in the chorus of some song the phonograph is playing.
Pat Collins is busy over a cross-word puzzle, and cusses Woodie out
when the trainer pesters him about starting a pinochle game. There’s
the tapping of typewriters as a couple of the newspaper men pound out
their yarns for early editions.
Through the open door of the drawing room you can see Huggins, smoking
his pipe and talking with O’Leary and Fletcher his assistants. Thomas
comes along and slaps Wera with a folded paper and Wera in return
smears him with a pillow. They tussle about the car.
Out in the smoking room some of the boys are whooping it up
on “Sundown” with one of the newspaper men playing a harmonica
accompaniment.
Fun? Sure, it’s fun. And the reason is that we’re all one big gang
together. We know each other, trust each other, like each other.
Baseball has had its share of wonderful friendships and most of them
have started aboard rattling, old Pullman cars when the boys get a few
hours to themselves and have a chance to act natural.