The 34-Ton Bat by Steve Rushin

Author:Steve Rushin [RUSHIN, STEVE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation / Baseball - History
ISBN: 9780316200943
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

What baseball needed, as Connie Mack recognized, was something more. The liners could prevent a rung bell, but not a fractured skull. “These protective liners made of fibroid material that are inserted inside the cap aren’t the answer,” White Sox general manager Frank Lane said in 1954. “They are of some benefit of course. Cass Michaels would have been killed if he hadn’t worn one because it caught at least part of the blow.”

On August 27, 1954, a pitch thrown by Marion Fricano of the A’s fractured Michaels’s skull and ended his career. The resulting sound—at once familiar and otherworldly—was peculiar to baseball beanings. As Roger Kahn wrote in Sports Illustrated, “This sound without echo meant—always—a solemn circle of men, busy trainers in white and finally the stretcher, borne by the victim’s teammates, on whom baseball uniforms suddenly looked out of place.”

And so it was that Mack’s prophecy—“The man who invents a helmet… will make a fortune”—came to pass. In 1952, a Pittsburgh engineer named Ralph Davis brought a primitive prototype of a “protective cap” to the Forbes Field office of Pirates general manager Branch Rickey. It was a bulletproof, military-grade device made of fiberglass and polyester resin. Rickey ordered them for each of the teams in the Pirates system.

Rickey asked a Pirates executive named Charlie Muse to work with Davis and designer Ed Crick to refine the helmet. But the helmet they came up with could not protect the head of a player who refused to wear it. Which described most players. “It was more difficult than people think,” Muse said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1989. “The players laughed at the first helmets, called them miner’s helmets. They said the only players who would wear them were sissies.”

A promising young farmhand on the Pirates affiliate in Brunswick, Georgia, had declined to wear the team’s single helmet before he was beaned that summer of ’52 by Jack Barbier, a sidearm pitcher in the A’s system. “Only sissies wore helmets then,” Mario Cuomo recalled years later, when he was the sitting governor of New York. He joked that the residual effect of the hematoma on his brain was what drove him into politics.

Helmets could not remain optional much longer, at least not on the Pirates. As with his signing of Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers six years earlier, Branch Rickey recognized both a moral and a financial benefit to the batting helmet. He owned a hat-making company, American Baseball Cap, Inc., which grossed $6,000 in 1953, a figure likely to increase exponentially if helmets became acceptable. That year, Rickey ordered all his Pirates to wear the new helmet, a mandate that protected the players’ heads but not their dignity: Children seated behind the bullpen at Ebbets Field threw marbles at the Pirates. There is an industrial quality to those first Pirates helmets, a halo of holes drilled in each crown for ventilation, as if the players were wearing them to mine for coal or repair power lines.

But the players also saw the benefits.

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