Cooperstown Confidential (6 page)

Yikes.

Still, when I began the research for this book I wanted to contact James in the name of due diligence. A friend of his gave me the e-mail address and a tip. “Ask him a question. A
specific
question. If it interests him, he’ll answer.”

“What if it doesn’t interest him?”

“You won’t hear back,” said the friend.

I labored over my question for several days. Finally I settled on: “Whose per formance do performance-enhancers enhance more? Pitchers or hitters? Hitters or fielders? Major-league vets trying to hold on or minor-league players trying to move up? Or does it come out in the wash?”

Twenty-three hours later, I received a reply:

“That’s a really good question. A minor league player once told me that, on the teams he was on, all the people who used ste roids were the pitchers. Pitchers used to come back quicker from injury. People ASSUME that the hitting explosion of the last 15 years is caused by steroids, but there is very little real evidence that this is true.”

I was elated. I had asked Bill James not just a good question but a
really good
question. Even better, he invited me to ask more. In the next few months, we exchanged dozens of messages about the Hall of Fame, how it works, and who belongs there. James responded to every one of my queries, let me bounce ideas off him (the bad ones didn’t bounce far), and never minced words (“If you believe that you are as dumb as a bag of hammers,” he wrote on one memorable occasion). These cyber-conversations made me feel like a man chatting with Newton about apples.

Cooperstown is the one place in baseball where James is not highly regarded. In fact, the Hall’s bookstore doesn’t even stock
The Politics
of Glory.
Former president of the Hall Dale Petrosky admitted glancing through the book but failing to find it interesting.

The current president, Jeff Idelson, who knows everybody in base-ball, pointedly told me he has never met or spoken to James. Jane Forbes Clark assured me that she has never read a word of the book.

But James’s critique on the favoritism and random nature of Veterans Committee selections, which reverberated throughout baseball, did not go unheeded by Cooperstown. In 2001, the Hall ended the practice of allowing an appointed fifteen-member body to do the veteran voting in secret. Instead, it turned the process over to a larger electorate composed of all living Hall of Fame players, writers who had won the Hall’s J. G. Taylor Spink Award, and broadcasters who had received the Ford C. Frick Award. Candidates—players whose fifteen-year eligibility for election by the BBWAA had expired—would need 75 percent of the vote.

Expanding the committee limited the possibility of a Connie Mack or Frankie Frisch slipping cronies into Cooperstown. But the new system had a flaw, too. In the first election, in 2003, nobody got in. This result was repeated in 2005.

In 2007, baseball insiders were sure that the new Veterans Committee would choose at least one new Hall of Famer. The odds were on Ron Santo, the old Cubs third baseman. Santo had lobbied hard, even enlisting Illinois se nior senator Dick Durbin, who sent a letter to committee members making Santo’s case.

“Beyond the numbers, there are other reasons why Ron Santo deserves to be in Cooperstown,” Durbin wrote. “The first is his courageous struggle with diabetes and his tireless efforts to help others who suffer from this disease.

“Since 2001, Ron Santo has lost the lower portions of both legs to diabetes. He has also survived a bout of cancer and endured more than twenty three surgeries. Walking on prosthetic legs has slowed his gait, but not his charitable work.”

The Veterans Committee, unmoved by this appeal, chose nobody for the third time in a row. Frustrated, Jane Forbes Clark announced that in 2008 the voting would be limited to Hall of Fame players, not writers or broadcasters (players who broke in before 1943 would be picked by a special committee). But the rule change didn’t alter the outcome: another electoral shutout.

What accounts for this exclusivity? Some of the Hall of Famers, led by the most se nior member, Bob Feller, have a low opinion of the players who followed them. Others believe that if you weren’t good enough to be picked by the writers, you don’t deserve to be enshrined.

But there is also an economic explanation. The Hall of Fame produces and markets its own line of memorabilia. For many years, members got nothing; but since 1995, the pot has been split three ways: 30 percent for the Hall, 40 percent for MLB, and the remaining 30 percent split evenly among the living Hall of Famers. Red Schoen-dienst gets the same cut as Nolan Ryan. So far, about $6 million has been divvied up.

Of course, the money that comes from the Hall directly is only a small part of the income generated by membership in the Hall; an HoF after your name means speaking engagements, endorsements, and memorabilia sales.

“Adding new people dilutes the total,” Marvin Miller, who founded the baseball players’ union, told me. “Recently I broached this question to one of the veterans. I asked if this was the single most important reason nobody gets picked. He said it had never occurred to him. But his tone told me I got it exactly right.”

In December 2008, the Veterans Committee voted once again. There were ten players on the ballot: Dick Allen, Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, Al Oliver, Vada Pinson, Luis Tiant, Joe Torre, Maury Wills, and poor Ron Santo. None was elected.

The Vets kept their perfect record: 0 for the twenty-first century.
*

* Over the years, this appointed committee has had several names: the Centennial Committee, the Old-Timers’ Committee, the Permanent Committee, and the Veterans Committee. Its composition has shifted over the years, and so has its purview. These days it is composed of all the former Hall of Fame players, meeting as a committee of the whole. It now has the power to elect players whose fifteen years of BBWAA eligibility have passed, regardless of whether they played in the twentieth century or, soon, the twenty-first. The committee, in all its iterations, has experienced rule changes “more often than a hooker’s underwear,” in the words of Bill James.

* In 1946, the Hall instituted another unfamiliar feature: the Honor Rolls of Baseball, an honor granted to 39 nonplayers—5 managers, 11 umpires, 11 executives, and 12 sportswriters. Eight of these men were later inducted into the Hall of Fame, but the Honor Rolls were never made concrete at the Hall and were subsequently discontinued. A complete list can be found in appendix 3.

* Dan Okrent, who is not a member of the BBWAA, took a lot of abuse, but he handled it with aplomb (as befits a Detroit boy). Okrent made his journalistic bones as an editor at
Esquire
and
Time
and later as editor in chief of
Life
magazine and the first public editor of the
New York Times
—not a job for the fainthearted. His baseball credentials come from two very good books he has written on the game and a gig as a talking head in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series
Baseball.
He is also the inventor, along with some friends, of the fantasy game Rotisserie Baseball, so named because his Doubleday Field was a table at La Rotisserie Française restaurant in Manhattan.

* Bill Mazeroski was elected by the old, appointed Veterans Committee in 1999. So was nineteenth-century second baseman Bid McPhee.

FOUR . . .
A Question of Character

T
he rules for induction were infinitely contestible. It is probably more fun that way. And it is certainly closer to what Stephen Clark and Judge Landis envisioned. Clark, after all, was a great patron of the arts, and Landis was a lifelong moralizer. Together they created a Hall of Fame without statistical criteria of any kind. The only criterion they insisted upon was that the members of the new Hall be men of integrity, virtue, and character.

In the beginning, this went without saying. It got said in 1944, in Rule 5 of the Hall’s election requirements: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability,
integrity, sportsmanship,
character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played
” [italics added].

Known as the “Character Clause,” Rule 5 is the
only
condition imposed by the Hall on its electors. There is a Kantian moral self-assurance to the formula. It assumes that sportswriters, Veterans Committee members, and the general public will share a common understanding of what constitutes integrity, sportsmanship, and character. This is the sort of thing that a man like Stephen Clark might well have believed in 1944. For all I know, men like him believe it today. But, in an age of moral relativism and cultural diversity, character evaluation isn’t always clear-cut. And in no age would sportswriters be regarded as qualified arbiters of virtue.

Cooperstown is the model for hundreds of halls of fame around the country, but very few of them have insisted on virtue as a qualification. It is impossible to imagine the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame or the Boxing Hall of Fame insisting on such a thing. In the fall of 2007, the Idaho Hall of Fame inducted Senator Larry Craig into its ranks. Only months earlier, Craig had been arrested in a Minneapolis airport men’s room for attempting to play inter-stall footsie with an undercover vice cop. Some hardliners, such as Kootenai County Republican precinct chairman Phil Thompson, wondered if Craig deserved to be honored in the same institution as Boise State football coach Chris Peterson or hospitality magnate Duane Hagadone. But Craig had done his job in Washington, D.C., bringing home billions in pork over a twenty-year career. And, for the Idaho Hall of Fame, that’s what counted.

But baseball isn’t boxing or rock ’n’ roll, or even the U.S. Senate. Cooperstown celebrates not just a game but the National Pastime, and its immortals are supposed to represent the country’s best, most wholesome moral values. In the early days of the Hall, Commissioner Landis even proposed enshrining “Harvard” Eddie Grant, an outfielder of modest ability who died in combat in World War I. Grant didn’t make it. Ty Cobb did. And this posed a problem that the Hall still wrestles with today—what to do when great things happen to terrible people, and when ideals bump up against reality.

For most of the Hall’s history, reality has suffered, starting with the first inductee, Ty Cobb.

Nobody disputes that Ty Cobb was a transcendent baseball player. His lifetime .366 batting average, compiled over more than two de-cades, is a measure of professional greatness that will last as long as baseball. As kids in Detroit, we grew up on Cobb’s legend as a fierce competitor. We were told that he sharpened his spikes to intimidate infielders, and we emulated him by filing down our own rubber cleats. We were also aware that he sometimes got into fights on the field, a form of trying hard that our coaches admired. What we didn’t know—or care about—was that Cobb was a sociopath, a nasty drunk, a raving racist, and maybe a murderer.

In August 1912, newspapers in Detroit reported that Cobb had been accosted by three men and defended himself. He told one reporter that he had knocked a mugger down and caused two others to flee. He told another that he beat one of his attackers until the man fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness.

In 1959, in an authorized biography, Cobb told Al Stump that he had beaten one of his attackers bloody and, using the sight on the barrel of a Belgian Luger as a blade, slashed another and drove him away.

Then, in 1994, Stump published an
un
authorized biography, revealing the rest of what the long-dead Cobb had told him about the incident. “[I] lashed away until the man was faceless. Left him there, not breathing, in his own rotten blood.” It isn’t clear if this version is accurate. Perhaps it was only Cobb’s after-the-fact embellishment. Baseball historian Doug Roberts combed through the Detroit Medical Examiner’s autopsy reports for that period, found no corpse that matched the description, and concluded that there had been no murder. Even if Roberts is right, though, the story illustrates something fundamental about the first Hall of Famer—in old age, Cobb was still the sort of man who would have been proud to take credit for a murder.

In the parlance of a later time, Cobb was a hater. His teammate Sam Crawford said he never stopped fighting the Civil War. Early in his career, Cobb was convicted for assault and battery for slapping a black construction worker in Detroit. At Cleveland’s Euclid Hotel, he slapped the black elevator operator and slashed the black night manager, George Stansfield, with a knife (to be fair, Stansfield hit Cobb with a nightstick). That fight resulted in criminal charges and an arrest warrant that forced Cobb to travel to the 1909 World Series in Pittsburgh by way of Canada. In New York, three years later, Cobb went into the stands after a heckler named Claude Lueker who called him “half a nigger.” Cobb beat the man bloody with little resis tance; Lueker, it turned out, had lost a hand in an industrial accident, and was missing three fingers on the other. Ban Johnson, the president of the American League, suspended Cobb indefinitely, but Cobb was unremorseful. “When a spectator calls me a half nigger, I think it’s about time to fight,” he told the
Detroit
Free Press
.

At the end of the 1926 season, Cobb suddenly announced his retirement as player-manager of the Tigers. Shortly thereafter, Hall of Fame center fielder Tris Speaker quit as player-manager of the Cleveland Indians. Speaker, the only man to interrupt Cobb’s streak of twelve American League batting championships, was voted into the Hall in 1937. He, too, was a racist, a sheet-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. There were lots of bigots in baseball (and in America) in those days, but most didn’t go all the way to the KKK, and few fans would have thought of membership as representing integrity, sportsmanship, and character.

Cobb and Speaker had more in common than a hatred of black people. They shared a secret. The story began in late September 1919, when Cleveland had already clinched second place and the Tigers were fighting for third. According to Detroit pitcher Dutch Leonard, he met with Cobb, Speaker, and outfielder Joe Wood to discuss an illicit gambling deal. “Don’t worry about tomorrow’s game,” Speaker allegedly told the others. “We have second place clinched and you will win tomorrow.” With the fix in, the four of them planned to make wised-up bets on the next day’s game.

Leonard confessed all this in a letter to American League president Ban Johnson at the end of the 1926 season. He also produced letters from Cobb and Wood that seemed to verify his claim. Cobb was late getting his money down and made nothing from the fixed game, but Wood won six hundred dollars, which he divided with Speaker and Leonard (by check!), minus thirty bucks to the clubhouse boy who actually placed the bet. Ban Johnson reacted to this information by buying the incriminating letters from Leonard for $20,000, suspending Cobb and Speaker, and trying to force them into retirement. But Landis, who saw Johnson as a rival, reversed the decision.

“These players have not been, nor are they now, found guilty of fixing a ball game,” Landis ruled. This, of course, was technically true; there had been no trial. (In the Black Sox case—which
had
gone to trial—Joe Jackson was acquitted, but that didn’t stop Landis from banning him for life.) In the Cobb–Speaker case, Cobb and Speaker were reinstated in time for Connie Mack to sign them for the 1927 season.

Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were both in Cooperstown in 1939 for the grand opening of the Hall. So was Babe Ruth.

Ruth was, of course, the greatest role model in baseball history. He visited sick kids in the hospital, the legend said. He handed out autographs to waifs outside the ballpark. He cautioned little children to stay in school and obey their parents and teachers. Some of this actually happened. Some was the creation of a pack of journalists and PR men whose job it was to keep Ruth’s less-virtuous acts out of the newspaper. Almost the entire corps of baseball writers was complicit in this. Some of the scribes even took part in Ruth’s orgies, joined his wild (and, during Prohibition, illegal) pub crawls, accepted his money, and even became his silent partners in business deals or his employees as ghost writers. Ford Frick himself worked for Ruth, when Frick was still on the payroll of the
New York
American
.
*

So did Marshall Hunt, a sportswriter for the
New York Daily
News
who sometimes did Ruth the favor of forging his signature on baseballs, accompanied him on binges, introduced him to women, and generally covered up for his bad behavior. Once he was asked why he didn’t write a book on Ruth. “I just have to wait a while and let nature do a few things before I’d write that book because I might run into a suit,” he replied. “Several things happened up in the Babe’s farmhouse outside of Boston that are worth a couple of thousand words. That’s never been touched, never been used. But I want to wait until that female is out of the way.”

Even with all this protection, the public was not unaware that Ruth was a bad boy off the field and even on it. In 1923, he got caught using a corked bat. He was suspended from baseball for seven weeks by Commissioner Landis in 1922 for going on an illegal barnstorming tour after the previous World Series (why this should have been illegal is an open question). He was sometimes absent from games with “bellyaches” which his pals the beat writers knew perfectly well were alcohol-related. His behavior became so erratic that the mayor of New York, James J. Walker, staged a public (and highly humiliating) intervention. Speaking at an Elks Club dinner in Manhattan in November 1922, with Ruth sitting nearby on the dais, Walker said:

Babe Ruth is not only a great athlete, but also a great fool. His employer,
Col. Jacob Ruppert, makes millions of gallons of beer, and
Ruth is of the opinion that he can drink it faster than the Col o nel
and his large corps of brew masters can make it. Well . . . you can’t.
Nobody can.

You are making a bigger salary than anyone ever received as a
ballplayer. But the bigger the salary, the bigger the fool you have become.
Here sit some forty sportswriters and big officials of baseball, our
national sport. These men, your friends, know what you have done, even
if you don’t . . . You have let them down.

But worst of all, you have let down the kids of America . . . You
carouse and abuse your great body and it is exactly as though Santa
Claus himself suddenly were to take off his beard to reveal the features
of a villain.
*

Alas, it was not to be. That very night, Ruth was served with a paternity suit filed by a nineteen-year-old Bronx waitress named Dolores Dixon. “He said he didn’t know the girl, but the way he said it, you knew he was lying,” said Marshall Hunt. “He knew that girl. I said, ‘Okay, Babe, that what’s you say. That’s what I’ll put in the paper.’ ” Ruth’s lawyers made the lawsuit go away, and nothing more was heard about the matter.

“Ruth was not unique,” observed Bill Veeck. “Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball’s immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooper-stown, taking spoils, like the Third Army busting through Germany. Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.”

Grover Cleveland Alexander was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1939.

Ronald Reagan played him as a falling-down drunk in the 1952 movie
The Winning Team.
After Alexander retired, he became an itinerant barnstormer, chronically broke and occasionally jailed for public drunkenness. There was no big payoff for ex-ballplayers in those days. He barely had the money to make it to Cooperstown for the induction ceremony and remarked acidly that he couldn’t eat the plaque he was awarded. The Hall got the hint and offered him a job—as a security guard. Alexander turned it down and hit the road, drifting until he died.

Cap Anson was another charter member of the Hall of Fame, chosen by the Veterans Committee in 1939. His plaque reads: “Greatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of 19th century. Started with Chicagos in National League’s first year 1876. Chicago manager from 1879 to 1897, winning 5 pennants. Was .300 class hitter 20 years, batting champion 4 times.”

Missing from this resume is Anson’s crucial role in keeping orga-nized baseball racially segregated. In 1883, Cap Anson declared that his team would not take the field against the Toledo Blue Stockings if Toledo’s African-American catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker, suited up. (Contrary to pop ular belief, the first known black player in orga nized baseball was Walker, not Jackie Robinson.) Four years later, Anson threatened to cancel a White Stockings exhibition game against the Newark Giants if they used black players. Anson was a man of great influence. In the wake of his boycott, the International League voted to refuse contracts to blacks in the future. (The American Association and National League never took such a vote. They simply used a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep baseball white.) Anson wound up his life managing a pool hall, but he always took pride in his role in preserving the racial purity of the national pastime.