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 Chapter 1. Waiting for the Cry, “Play Ball!” 1. In 1924 the Hot Springs gathering drew perhaps as many as one hundred players, including such notables as Stan Coveleskie, Burleigh Grimes, Harry Heilmann, Walter Johnson, Babe Ruth, Ray Schalk, Luke Sewell, and Urban Shocker. The Indians and the Nationals were particularly well represented. Unfortunately for those who gave up time to enjoy the hospitality of Hot Springs, the weather in early 1924 was cold and rainy. 2. “Humors and Tragedies of Baseball Training-Time in Dixie,” Literary Digest 59 (April 9, 1921): 64. 3. Quoted in Charles C. Alexander, John McGraw (New York: Viking Press, 1988), 249. 4. Groh later laughingly noted that he had been present at so many famous moments in baseball history—Snodgrass’s muff, the Toney–Vaughn double nohitter , the Black Sox World Series, and (soon) the Lindstrom “pebble”—that he was called “the ubiquitous Mr. Groh.” Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, enlarged ed. (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 299. 5. Joe Williams, The Joe Williams Baseball Reader, ed. Peter Williams (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1989), 99. People began calling Wilson “Hack” after they noted a resemblance to a wrestler named Hackenschmidt. 6. Though “saves” were not a recognized statistic in the 1920s, post facto reconstruction of the era shows that Jonnard led the National League in both 1922 and 1923 with 5 in each year. 7. These terms refer to the play-for-1-run strategy of the first two decades of the twentieth century. 8. Alexander, McGraw, 4. 9. Frank Graham, McGraw of the Giants: An Informal Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944), 179–80. The statement was not factually accurate. 10. William Knowlton Zinsser, Spring Training (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 141; Ritter, Glory, 301. Roush was so great an athlete that, when he broke his right arm in 1912, he learned to throw left-handed. Roush has been oddly denigrated lately. Bill James, for example, states that he was not as good as Bobby Doerr or Phil Rizzuto, in The Politics of Glory: How Baseball’s Hall of Fame REALLY Works (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 142, 433. That judgment is • 159 • absurd. Roush was one of the greatest hitters and defensive outfielders of his day. In fact, if the rules controlling official records had been the same in 1918 as they were before 1910 and after 1920, that is, for the great majority of baseball history—Roush would have won the batting title in 1918, too, and been one of a handful of players to have three consecutive titles. See Joseph M. Wayman, “Roush’s Ruled-Out Batting Title,” Baseball Research Journal 22 (1993): 9–10. 11. Among Latin pitchers only Dennis Martinez (with 245), Juan Marichal (243), and Luis Tiant (229) won more games than Luque’s 193 during their major league careers. Luque won another 93 games playing winter ball in Cuba. Only Marichal, at 2.89, has a lifetime earned run average that is lower than Luque’s 3.24. A useful article is Peter C. Bjarkman’s “First Hispanic Star? Dolf Luque, of Course,” Baseball Research Journal 19 (1990): 28–32. 12. Ritter, Glory, 208. 13. On Rixie, see Ted Farmer, “Eppa Rixie, Virginia Squire,” Grandstand Baseball Annual 1996: 57–60. 14. Frederick Lieb, Baseball as I Have Known It (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1977), 133. 15. Baseball Magazine 32 (February 1924): 386. Kenneth D. Richard argues that Mays was the third-best pitcher of his era, behind only Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander. See his “Remembering Carl Mays,” Baseball Research Journal 30 (2001): 122–26. 16. Sporting News (St. Louis), April 17, 1924. 17. On these four, see Lyle Spatz, “The Best NL Rookie Crop? The 1924 Pirates by Far,” Baseball Research Journal 16 (1987): 57. 18. Hollocher committed suicide in 1940; undiagnosable physical symptoms had never left him, and it is probably fair to conclude that he was psychologically troubled. See Arthur Ahrens, “The Tragic Saga of Charlie Hollocher,” Baseball Research Journal 15 (1986): 6–8. 19. Charles Alexander, Rogers Hornsby: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 86. 20. Quoted in Honig, Man in the Dugout, 48. 21. Rogers Hornsby, My Kind of Baseball, ed. J. Roy Stockton (New York: David McKay, 1953), 60. 22. Robert W. Creamer, Stengel: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984...

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