Baseball 100 (9781982180607) by Posnanski Joe

Author:Posnanski, Joe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

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Rowdy Jack O’Connor—also known as Peach Pie O’Connor—was a longtime catcher in the wild early days of baseball. He was Branch Rickey’s teammate for a while, and what Rickey remembered most about him was that he had this trick where he would spit tobacco juice into a hitter’s eye while the pitcher was winding up. This, apparently, was quite effective.

Rowdy Jack once threatened the umpire Hank O’Day with such ferocity—he promised not only to attack O’Day personally but also to bring a mob of Cleveland fans with him—that O’Day refused to take the field in Cleveland until his safety was guaranteed.

That year, in 1910, Rowdy Jack became manager for the St. Louis Browns. “While he has retained the belligerence,” the Pittsburgh Press assured baseball fans, “he has passed up the rowdyism.”

Maybe. But his team was a fiasco. They came into the final doubleheader 22 games behind the next-worst team in the American League.

Nobody knows for sure what motivated O’Connor to do what he did on that day, October 9, 1910. Many assumed he did it because he loathed Cobb, which is never a bad guess. Others thought he did it out of admiration for Lajoie, which is also not a bad guess.

Others suggested O’Connor did it because, like so many others, he had big money on the batting race, which is probably the best guess of all.

Whatever his reasons, O’Connor decided that he was going to get Larry Lajoie a batting title and a new Chalmers automobile. He did not even try to hide his intentions. In the first game of the doubleheader against Lajoie and the Naps, Rowdy Jack inserted himself as the catcher. He was 44 years old and had not played in a game in more than three years.

Then, he put a 22-year-old rookie named Red Corriden at third base and gave him specific instructions to play Lajoie deep because otherwise “he’ll take your head off.”

And so he set up one of the greatest scams in the history of baseball.

The first time Lajoie came up, he lifted a fly ball to center field. He hit it pretty well—Lajoie would later say he crushed it, which was almost certainly an exaggeration—but most newspaper accounts thought it was definitely playable for rookie centerfielder Hub Northen. Northen did not get to the ball; it went over his head for a triple.

“It was a clean and hard hit, but there were many in the stands who were of the opinion that a more experienced outfielder would have captured the ball” was the nuanced opinion of the Washington Post.

That was hit No. 1—and it lifted Lajoie’s average to .377.

That hit was the least controversial Lajoie at-bat of the day.

Next time up, Lajoie noticed that Corriden was playing deep. And by “deep,” I do not mean that he was playing at the back of the infield dirt. No, this guy was playing in left field. Lajoie couldn’t run by then and loathed bunting—he was famous for hitting the ball hard—but he wasn’t a fool.

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