XXI. Nice Guys Win Sometimes

Race Horse Richard was not the only flagpole sitter to distinguish himself on the Cleveland scene in the years following World War II. Possibly some element in the northern Ohio atmosphere triggered slumbering, latent talents in this highly specialized field; perhaps it was simply that the time was historically right for men to climb flagpoles and pit themselves against nature. At any rate, and whatever the cause, a Cleveland delicatessen operator named Charlie Lupica in 1949 shook loose of the salami and cheddar cheese, bade his pregnant wife a fond adieu, and shimmied to the top of his flagpole for an indeterminate stay.

It was a carefully considered move on Charlie Lupica’s part, not an idle, aimless whim, for he was a fan of the Cleveland Indians, and Cleveland sports fans are traditionally a no-nonsense band. Lupica was depressed by the uncertain fortunes of the Indians in the early stage of the 1949 pennant race. The team was, in fact, floundering about in the vicinity of seventh (then next-to-last) place when he made his fateful decision. Once aloft, he announced to the world that he intended to remain there in splendid isolation until his beloved Indians had fought back to their rightful place of honor at the top of the American League.

Through that long, hot summer of 1949, Charlie Lupica held to his promise while the Indians, champions of the baseball world only the previous season, stumbled and staggered through a most unsuccessful time. It should have inspired them that Charlie Lupica was up there, like a brooding eagle, waiting on their fortunes through storm and calm, and even through the birth of his fourth child. Finally, after 117 days, the management of the Indians in the person of Bill Veeck mercifully prevailed on Lupica to end his outstanding demonstration of faith and loyalty. The flagpole to which he still clung was uprooted and transported through city streets, precariously dodging live electric wires . and the like, all the way to Cleveland Stadium. There, in center field, Lupica descended to the cheers of thousands of fans and to be greeted by his wife, who smothered him with kisses, and by Bill Veeck, who smothered him with gifts. Near the flagpole was some freshly turned earth where only a few days before, the pennant that the Indians had won the previous year had been interred in suitably grave ceremony, while Veeck and a stadium full of mourning fans stood by with bared heads.

That’s a suggestion of the way it was in Cleveland when Veeck ran the baseball team called the Indians. It was a typical Bill Veeck stunt; the sort of thing Cleveland had come to expect and to enjoy under this master promoter who had reawakened the interest of the people in major league baseball. Even more, he had made the immediate post-war era in Cleveland the liveliest, most flamboyant, most memorable period of sports success ever experienced, perhaps, in any American city.

Veeck always denied that he had any part in Lupica’s flagpole adventure other than to applaud it and help bring it to a suitably ceremonious end. It is likely that he spoke the truth because he was a remarkably candid man. The fact is that Veeck had set into motion a kind of sports madness in Cleveland that engendered its own eccentricities. And that burial ceremony in center field was more appropriate than anybody could have known because the wonderful Veeckian outburst, as colorful and as ephemeral as the fireworks displays he liked to stage in the stadium after a ball game, already was dying. Shortly after the end of the 1949 season, the ownership of the Indians passed into new hands and the era was officially closed.

The magic number in Cleveland sports history probably always will be 1948. That was the year the madness reached optimum level and the heady wine of victory set the populace reeling in the streets. That was the year the baseball Indians won their first American League pennant in twenty-eight years in what probably was the most thrilling race in the history of the American League. At the end of the 154-game schedule, the Indians were tied with the Boston Red Sox. The pennant was decided by a playoff game with the Red Sox in which the Indians capped their storybook year with a decisive victory.

The World Series between the Indians and the Boston Braves was something of an anticlimax, but again the Cleveland team triumphed. Even as the players and management of the Indians were exuberantly pouring beer and champagne over each other’s heads in the wake of victory, the attention of many Clevelanders already had switched to the professional gridiron, where the hometown representatives, the Browns of the All-America Conference, had been quietly rolling to one victory after another under the leadership of Coach Paul Brown.

The Browns never did get around to losing a game in 1948. It was, as has been suggested, that kind of a year in Cleveland. The Browns played fourteen games and won all of them, a feat which has not been matched since in professional football. Then they beat the Buffalo Bills by a score of 49-7 for their third championship in the AAC in as many years.

Even Cleveland’s entry in the American Hockey League, the Barons, had skated to a loop title in the winter of 1947-48 and then went on to win the Calder Cup playoff by way of an encore. This was the first suggestion that 1948 would be a very special time in the history of sports in Cleveland. The poker-faced bookies realized it more quickly than anyone else, and they made it highly unprofitable for anyone to bet on a Cleveland team on the grounds that it no longer constituted a gamble to do so. Sportswriters who had lost their objectivity early in 1948 unabashedly referred to their beloved hometown as “The City of Champions,” and this became the rallying cry of the whole community. Some city councilmen even toyed with the idea of passing an ordinance which would make losing in any sport illegal, but cooler heads persuaded the city fathers that the idea was impractical, perhaps unAmerican, and decidedly unsportsmanlike.

To view this giddy time in its true perspective, it is necessary to know that victory hitherto had never been anything more than a casual, sometime visitor to Cleveland, in spite of the fact that the history of sports in the city abounds with great names and heroic deeds.

Cleveland got into the baseball act early. Its original professional team, the Forest Citys, opened play on June 2, 1869, against the Cincinnati Red Stockings. The local nine dressed in white pantaloons and bright blue stockings, while the redoubtable Cincinnati squad, the nation’s leading exponents of rounders, also set the pace in style by wearing racy knickerbocker-type pants for the first time. The game was played on Case Commons, an unfenced park on Putnam Avenue (East 38th Street), between Scovill and Central avenues. It was a contest that should have been a tipoff to the rather bleak years ahead; the Cincinnatis beat the Clevelands by a score of 25-6. The same two teams played again later that summer and another hard-fought battle ensued. This time the visiting Red Stockings beat back the Forest Citys 43-20.

Historian William Ganson Rose has traced the formal beginning of baseball in Cleveland to 1865, when the first amateur team was organized. It, too, was called the Forest City Club and it, too, had something less than an auspicious debut when it lost to a team from Oberlin, 67-28.

Cleveland’s second year in professional baseball, the 1670 season, was highlighted by a sparkling exhibition between the home nine and the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, New York, in which the hometowners dazzled the visitors with their expert play, and especially their batting punch. The score at the end of the fifth inning had the Cleveland team out in front, 132-1. The Forest City players admittedly outdid themselves in that one, thanks to a big first inning (fifty-two runs) and another spirited rally in the third inning (fifty-four runs).

The nation’s first professional baseball league, the National Association of Baseball Players, was formed late in 1870 and Cleveland was represented in the 1871 season, as were Rockford, Illinois, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Troy, New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago. It was the beginning of a series of haphazard league affiliations, an in-and-out association that prevailed during the following three decades-the formative years of American baseball.

After dropping out of play in mid-1872 because of financial problems, the city won a new National League franchise in 1879 and held it until the end of the 1884 season, moving to the American Association in 1887. Again, in 1888, Cleveland returned to the National League with a team called the Spiders, a nickname stemming naturally out of the spindly physiques of the players. But in 1890, the city hit the jackpot by fielding two teams in two professional leagues- the National League Spiders and an aggregation of players who wore the Cleveland colors in the new Brotherhood League, a short-lived loop, also known as the Players League, that went out of business the following year. One of the leading figures in this unusual experiment in sports, with players and management sharing profits, was AI Johnson, brother of Cleveland’s Tom L. Johnson, future mayor.

The most noteworthy baseball happening in that 1890 season in Cleveland was the purchase by the Spiders, for $250, of Denton True Young, who was pitching for a team in Canton, Ohio. Young, a native of Ohio’s Tuscarawas County, was untutored in the pitching skills, but he was roaring fast-so fast the sportswriters quickly hung the nickname of “Cylone” Young on him. That was inevitably shortened to “Cy,” and under that tag he went on to become one of baseball’s real immortals. His career in the majors lasted until 1912, most of those years with Cleveland, and when they totted up the totals at the end of the trail, they found that Cy Young had won 511 victories against 315 defeats.

From 1891 through 1896, Cleveland had one of the classiest teams in the National League. The Temple Cup playoff of that time was the forerunner of the modern World Series, and the Spiders made the finals in 1891 against an Eastern powerhouse called-straight stuff-the Boston Beaneaters. The Beaneaters were too much for the Spiders, and little wonder. But the team rallied and fought its way back into the Temple Cup playoff again in 1895. This time their opponent was the Pittsburgh team, whose manager, a likely young comer named Connie Mack, acknowledged the Spiders’ victory in that series by saying: “I am happy that gentlemen have won the Temple Cup.” It was Cleveland’s first professional championship, but the glory was brief. The team lost the cup to the old Baltimore Orioles the following season. Presumably, though, they continued to conduct themselves like gentlemen.

As far as Cleveland baseball fans were concerned, that 1898 season marked the end of the Gay Nineties. The owner of the Spiders, Frank DeHaas Robison, late that year became the owner of two teams in the National League when he landed a franchise also in St. Louis. That winter of 1898-99 he sent most of his Cleveland stars to stock bis new club; men like Cy Young and the team’s great catcher, Chief Zimmer. The Spiders, plundered of their talented players, were dubbed “the Misfits” by Cleveland fans. Franklin Lewis, describing the season that followed in his history of Cleveland baseball, The Cleveland Indians, wrote:

“The fans, scorching because Robison had removed from League Park all the old favorites, stayed away from the grounds in such large numbers that, after 27 games there, the team became a road troupe exclusively. It probably was the worst professional team of all time. Its record of 134 defeats and only 20 victories stands out like a festered lip on baseball’s strong face.”

The city was completely disenchanted with its National League misfits when Ban Johnson, president of the Western League, visited Cleveland in 1900 with his plan for another major league-the American League. It was a most propitious time for him to advance his idea. A baseball enthusiast, Davis Hawley, president of the Cuyahoga Savings and Loan Association and onetime secretary of the Spiders, introduced Johnson to a pair of young sportsmen- businessmen, Charles W. Somers and John F. Kilfoyl. They readily agreed to organize and support a Cleveland team in the new league.

The team they put on the field followed local tradition by wearing blue uniforms and was named, in fact, the Cleveland Blues-but not for long. Too many fans took to calling the players “Bluebirds,” a cognomen which displeased the baseballers mightily, leading the management to rename the team the Bronchos in 1902. Again, in 1903, the team adopted still another name, the Napoleons, or “Naps.” The name was chosen by the vote of fans in a newspaper contest. Their choice was, of course, signal recognition of one of baseball’s legitimate superstars, Napoleon Lajoie, who had been acquired by Cleveland in 1902.

Lajoie, a fancy-dan second baseman and a powerful hitter, was one of many players who jumped from the National League to the new circuit. He and Pitcher Bill Bernhard had deserted the Philadelphia Phillies to join Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. In his first year as an American Leaguer, Lajoie won the batting championship with a 422 average. Facing legal pressure from the Phillies, Mack sold the two stars to his dear friend in Cleveland, Charlie Somers, who earlier had acquired another Phillies star, Elmer Flick.

Charlie Somers was the dear friend of almost every other team owner in the American League. It might truly be said that, at the time, he was the American League, for without his generous, unstinting support, the league would have died. It is estimated that he drew on his own financial resources to the extent of a million dollars during the first three years of the American League venture. He loaned money to Charles Comiskey to finish construction of Comiskey Park in Chicago, thereby enabling the White Sox franchise to gain a foothold. He loaned money to the owners of the St. Louis club, the Boston owners, and-with Ben Shibe, a sporting goods manufacturer-be supplied financial assistance to Connie Mack in Philadelphia.

Somers’ lavish outlay of money for his own Naps brought together a team that was the most feared in the league by 1903. In addition to Lajoie, Bernhard, and Flick, the Naps also had purchased the previous year a tall, graceful pitcher named Adrian C. (“Addie”) Joss, who quickly established himself as one of the best hurlers in baseball. With all these stars, the Naps were favored to win the pennant year after year, but they consistently disappointed the experts and their followers, although they came as close to victory in 1908 as any team could when they lost the pennant by only four percentage paints. The finish that year was so dramatic that it still stirs the memories of baseball fans. The Naps, Chicago White Sox, and Detroit Tigers arrived at the closing days of the season virtually in a dead beat. Chicago and Cleveland opened a two-game series in League Park that likely would decide the race. Addie Joss pitched for the Naps, Big Ed Walsh for the White Sox. It was a classic pitchers’ battle; a head-on meeting between two masters of the mound whose performances that day brought the pitching art to its highest level of achievement.

Big Ed Walsh, who had pitched and won both games of a double-header just three days previous, allowed Cleveland four hits and struck out fifteen in that “crucial” game. But Addie Joss was better. He threw a perfect game-up to that time only the fourth in the history of professional baseball-and the Naps won, 1-0. The city celebrated that night, to be sure, but the roses were strewn prematurely on the streets. The Naps had won a spectacular battle but, as it turned out, they would lose the war. They dropped the second game to the Sox and then lost to the St. Louis Browns, finishing behind the pennant-winning Tigers in the final standings by those four percentage paints, a margin so slim as to be hardly measurable except with a slide rule.

The letdown was almost too much for the fans, and apparently the defeat took some of the heart out of the players as well. At any rate, in the following 1909 season the Naps dropped to sixth place, slumping in spite of the fact that owner Somers had brought back to the Cleveland fold not-so-young Cy Young, who performed the incredible feat that season of winning nineteen games for a second-division team at the age of forty-two. This, plainly, was a troubled team. The classy Lajoie, who had been manager since 1905, discovered that one of the facts of baseball life in Cleveland, as in most cities, is that the fans have very little patience with a manager who does not deliver victory. He submitted his resignation as manager late in the season, staying on in the lineup as a player while one of his former coaches, Jim McGuire, took over the managerial reins.

Purely as a historical sidelight to indicate how far baseball has traveled in its trip to the place where the Don Drysdales and the Sandy Koufaxes can negotiate for contracts totaling a million dollars, Lajoie in 1909 was paid ten thousand dollars and was acknowledged to be the highest-paid player of his day. In return for that princely salary, he managed the Cleveland team, played the greatest second base perhaps of anybody in the history of the game, and batted .324. When the word got around that he was paid ten thousand dollars, everybody wondered what the world was coming to when a baseball player could make that kind of money.

Lajoie stayed with Cleveland as a player for five years after quitting the managerial post, but even though he was back in the playing ranks, the team name continued to be the Naps-and he continued to be the big man on the field. In 1910, for instance, he batted .384. It wasn’t until 1915, following his departure, that the Cleveland club took on the name of the Indians.

That was a year of significant change in the fortunes of Cleveland baseball. Charlie Somers reluctantly sold the Indians to Sunny Jim Dunn of Chicago because his baseball philanthropies had mired him in serious financial difficulties. Ironically, the success that had eluded Somers during the fifteen years of his ownership came rather quickly to his successor. One of Dunn’s first moves-purchase of the holdout star center fielder of the Boston Red Sox, Tris Speaker-proved to be the key to the team’s successful future.

The prematurely gray Speaker made Dunn look like a genius in his very first year in Indian uniform, 1916, when he batted .386 and beat out Ty Cobb for the batting title. The manager of the team that year was Lee Fohl, a longtime Clevelander. He was popular and competent, but when he yielded the managerial reins to Speaker halfway through the 1919 season, such was the popularity of the Cray Eagle, as Speaker had been nicknamed by the sportswriters, that the fans approved the change. Perhaps they sensed that Speaker was the man Cleveland had been awaiting to lead them into the Promised Land of baseball. He did not disappoint them. In his first full year as manager, Speaker led the 1920 Indians to the city’s first American League pennant and then on to the ultimate heights, a World Series victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers.

There never had been a more interesting, satisfying baseball year than 1920. It was a time filled with interesting characters, high drama on and off the field, unbelievable heroics and, finally, full triumph. But there also was tragedy. It occurred on the hot afternoon of August 16 in the Polo Grounds in New York. There, in a game with the Yankees, the popular Cleveland shortstop star, twenty-nine-year-old Ray Chapman, was hit in the temple by a ball thrown by pitcher Carl Mays of New York. Chapman was the leadoff batter in that inning and the ball that struck him was the first pitch. He fell immediately to the ground, unconscious. Umpire Tom Connolly took one look, turned to the stands, and called for a physician. Players from both teams gathered around the fallen player, among them Yankee catcher Herold “Muddy” Ruel, a coach and front-office executive with the Indians in later years.

Chapman recovered consciousness after a few minutes, following the ministration of two doctors who came onto the field, and he tried to talk, but no words became audible because the blow had caused a paralysis of the vocal nerves. His teammates helped him to his feet, finally, and with the assistance of two of them he began to walk toward the clubhouse. When he was partway across the infield, his legs collapsed under him again and he had to be carried the remainder of the way, to the waiting ambulance.

At the hospital it was discovered Chapman had suffered a multiple skull fracture. As his pulse grew steadily weaker, surgeons decided on an emergency operation. Chapman’s condition seemed to improve immediately after the operation, but shortly before dawn he had a relapse and died.

The news shocked the nation. Never before in the fifty-year history of the sport had any player died as the result of an accident on the professional baseball diamond. More shocked than anybody, of course, were Chapman’s teammates. They heard the news with disbelief, and more than one of them joined Tris Speaker in weeping openly. The fallen player had been one of Speaker’s best friends and he had been something of a counselor to the younger players. Only twenty-nine, he nevertheless had been considering retirement when the season opened, but had stayed on in the belief he could help the Indians to their first pennant. The previous October, Chapman had married Kathleen Marie Daly of East Cleveland, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Martin B. Daly. Her father was president of the East Ohio Gas Company.

With word of Chapman’s death, some players on the Detroit and Boston teams began to draw up petitions asking for the banishment of Carl Mays from organized baseball. Word of this movement drew angry comment from Speaker.

“I do not hold Mays responsible in any way,” he told reporters. “I have been active in discouraging my players from holding Mays responsible, and in respect to Chapman’s memory, as well as for the good of baseball, I hope all talk of this kind will stop.

“I can realize that Mays feels this thing as deeply as any man could, and 1 do not want to add anything to his burden. I do not know what prompted the action of the Boston and Detroit players. For my part, I think it is deplorable.”

Speaker’s surmise about Mays’ reaction was accurate. The New York pitcher had paced the floor of his locked hotel room all night, refusing even to talk with his teammates. When he heard that Chapman was dead, he was unconsolable.

The Cleveland manager was among those who accompanied Mays to the office of New York’s assistant district attorney, John F. Joyce. The pitcher gave the following testimony on the previous day’s happening: “It was a straight fast ball and not a curved one. When Chapman came to bat, 1 got the signal for a straight fast ball, which I delivered. It was a little too close and I saw Chapman duck his head in an effort to get out of the path of the ball. He was too late, however, and a second later he fell to the ground. It was the most regrettable incident of my career, and I would give anything if I could undo what has happened.”

All the festivity went out of the 1920 baseball season with the death of Ray Chapman, and the American League stood still. The game between the Indians and the Yankees, scheduled to be played on the afternoon of the shortstop’s death, was canceled. The Cleveland team went home to attend the funeral service which was held in St. John’s Cathedral. Some two thousand persons crowded the cathedral for the solemn high requiem mass, celebrated by Reverend William A. Scullen, chancellor of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese. More than three thousand other Clevelanders stood outside the church, blocking East 9th Street and Superior Avenue during the service.

The last sad rites ended, the Indians entrained for Boston and a return to the pennant race. Three teams were in competition-Cleveland, New York, and Chicago. The loss of Chapman had to hurt the Indians’ chances. Chapman had been the team’s star shortstop for eight years, the best in the league at that position. He also had been a .300 hitter and a dervish on the base paths-his record of fifty-two bases stolen in a single season is still a team mark. A reserve infielder named Harry Lunte replaced Chapman in the lineup, but when he hurt his leg in a Labor Day doubleheader, the desperate Indians called up a promising rookie on the roster of the New Orleans farm club, Joe Sewell. And in an effort to bolster the pitching staff, the Tribe officials also called up a left-handed submarine pitcher, Walter (“Duster”) Mails, from Portland in the Pacific Coast League. With these two moves, as it turned out, the Indians turned the tide of fortune. Sewell proved to be a brilliant shortstop and Mails won seven games, without defeat, in the tension-packed final weeks of the tumultuous season.

All through that eventful 1920 American League race there had been an unsettling, ominous undercurrent of rumor about dishonest doings at the World Series crossroads of 1919. There was, sotto voce, persistent talk about a “fix” the previous year-a dishonest deal that had enabled the Cincinnati Reds to beat the Chicago White Sox. The ugly rumors finally came to the surface and were given official recognition in late September, just as the Indians and White Sox were about to begin an important three-game series in Cleveland. When the two teams came together on the field of League Park on the afternoon of Thursday, September 23, they were separated by 1 1/2 games, with Cleveland in first place. But suddenly the outcome of the game and the series, however influential in deciding the pennant winner, was secondary. Cleveland and Chicago were playing in fine, clear weather, but a heavy, dark cloud hung low over the field. It was put there by a statement issued by the president of the American League, Ban Johnson.

“I have evidence,” Johnson said grimly, “and much of it is now before the Grand Jury, that certain notorious gamblers are threatening to expose the 1919 World Series as a fixed event unless the Chicago White Sox players drop out of the current race intentionally to let the Indians win. These gamblers have made heavy bets on the Cleveland team.”

Johnson’s words were linked with other startling allegations that Cleveland had become the center of a far-flung baseball betting racket. President John A. Heydler of the National League, who visited Cleveland for a personal investigation of gambling, charged that one hundred thousand dollars or more was wagered daily in the city on baseball.

The biggest scandal in sports history finally broke out in all its sordid detail on September 28, as a Chicago grand jury returned indictments against eight White Sox players who had appeared in the 1919 World Series. Baseball was plunged into the darkest days it ever has known. The White Sox team that hitherto had commanded so much admiration now found itself contemptuously renamed the “Black Sox.” Of the eight players named in the indictments, seven had been active members of the Chicago squad. They were summarily fired by owner Comiskey.

The Indians, the Yankees, and the weakened White Sox played out the few remaining games, but now there was no longer a question of Cleveland’s eventual victory. In the final standings, the Indians topped second-place Chicago by two games, New York by three.

It probably was the best outcome that baseball could have asked. The game desperately needed some players cast in the heroic, clean-cut mold to renew the romantic image of the national pastime. Cleveland, in large measure, answered that need. Much was made of the fact that Ray Chapman, a prototype of the clean-cut, high-minded athlete, had given his life playing the game to the hilt. Pitcher Jim (“Sarge”) Bagby had won thirty-one games for the Indians that year. George Uhle, a native of the city, had gone into a Cleveland uniform directly from the sandlots and won a place on the pitching staff immediately. Pitcher Ray Caldwell, who had to fight the bottle as well as the opposing teams, came back to win twenty games for the Indians by way of rewarding Tris Speaker for his faith in him. And, on the hitting side, the Cleveland club had ten batters sporting a season average of .300 or better!

The 1920 World Series turned out to be baseball’s best reply to the cynics; the best possible antidote to the poisonous scandal. The Indians and the Brooklyn Dodgers slugged it out, toe to toe, in a seven-game series that still stands out as a classic. Cleveland won the first game; Brooklyn took the second and third, and the Indians won the fourth. In the fifth game, played on Sunday in Cleveland’s newly renamed Dunn Field (League Park), Burleigh Grimes started for the Dodgers and found himself in trouble in the first inning. Charlie Jamieson singled. Bill (“Wamby”) Wambsganss Singled. Tris Speaker bunted and was safe at first when Grimes slipped and was unable to field the ball.

The Cleveland right fielder, Elmer Smith, was the batter in this bases-loaded situation. Grimes worked the count on him to one ball and two strikes before he threw the pitch that would help Smith make history. The Cleveland batter connected with the ban solidly and sent it high over the right field screen, far into Lexington Avenue beyond. It was a blow heard around the baseball world-a grand-slam homer in a World Series game! It had never happened before.

But the same game produced still another sensational feat to thrill fans everywhere, even the sad-eyed Brooklynites. It happened in the fifth inning. Cleveland’s pitcher, Sarge Bagby, had put himself in the record books in the fourth when, with two runners on base (Steve O’Neill and Doc Johnston), he hit a slightly Oriental home run inside the temporary bleachers that encroached on right-center field. Possibly Bagby was still enraptured with the thrill of the achievement when be took the mound in the fifth inning. At any rate, the first two batters, Pete Kilduff and Otto Miller, hit singles. The Brooklyn pitcher, Clarence Mitchell, was the next batter. He got hold of the third pitch and drove a hot liner toward right-center field. Second baseman Wambsganss leaped into the air and caught the ball, stepped on second base to double Kilduff and then, spotting the surprised Miller standing in frozen disbelief on the base path between first and second, Wamby ran to him and touched him with the ball.

It took a few seconds before the Dunn Field crowd, and even the players, realized what had happened. It finally came to them that they had just witnessed the first and only unassisted triple play in World Series history, and the old park became Bedlam. People spilled into the streets as the word spread around town-there was no radio-and the city rocked in a delirium of joy.

The remaining games of the 1920 series, all well played, were anti-climactical, as one would expect. Pitcher Stanley Coveleski joined the company of heroes with three victories and Cleveland went on to win the world championship and in so doing helped to restore some of the sheen to a sport that had been so recently tarnished. Another twenty-eight years would pass before the Indians would taste the heady draught of a pennant victory. They were not uneventful or uninteresting years, though, nor were they without hero-athletes. The roster included such outstanding players as Jack Graney, Mel Harder, Wes Ferrell, the Sewell brothers, Joe and Luke; Steve O’Neill, Lew Fonseca, George Burns, Joe Shaute, Willis Hudlin, Earl Averill, Dick Porter, Johnny Burnett, Odell (“Bad News”) Hale, Joe Vosmik, Hal Trosky, and Johnny Allen.

On the managerial side, Tris Speaker gave way to Jack McCallister after the 1926 season, followed by Roger Peckinpaugh in 1928. Then came Walter Johnson, 1933; Steve O’Neill, 1935; Oscar Vitt, 1938; Peckinpaugh again in 1941; and Lou Boudreau in 1942. The favorite description of Cleveland by that time among baseball men was “the graveyard of managers.” If this were not actually true, it hardly could be said, nonetheless, that the bubbling waters of the Cuyahoga effected any noticeable prolongation in the lives of the managers who dared to hold the reins of the Indians during the 1920s and the 1930s.

Change was the order of the period, and it reached even into the non-athletic department housed in the front office. Sunny Jim Dunn died in 1922 and his widow turned active direction of the club over to E. S. Barnard, who became president of the American League five years later, in 1927. That same year, a syndicate of wealthy Clevelanders, including John Sherwin, Sr., George Martin, Percy Morgan, Joseph C. Hostetler, Newton D. Baker, and two sets of brothers- Alva and Charles Bradley and O. P. and M. J. Van Sweringen- purchased the Indians for approximately one million dollars. Alva Bradley, a real estate- shipping tycoon, assumed the club presidency.

The most notable development in Cleveland baseball of the 1930s perhaps even the Depression-struck city-was the completion in 1932 of the largest and most impressive stadium in the United States. Cleveland Stadium was built at a cost of $2,640,000 on lakefront fill land north of downtown, directly below the high bluff on which City Hall and Cuyahoga County Courthouse sit in massive dignity. Beyond its worth as a home for baseball and football, the stadium was a CIVIC asset of incalculable value. Built in a time of economic disaster, it was a symbol of a city’s faith in its future. Its location in the very heart of the city and its extravagantly large dimensions were bold innovations that won national attention. The horseshoe-shaped stadium, a two-deck structure, had 78,129 permanent seats-about three times the capacity of old League Park. The playing field was the largest in the major leagues; so large, indeed, that Babe Ruth, upon viewing the great pasturage, was moved to comment: “The Duly way a man can play this outfield is on a horse.”

The first athletic event-if such it can be called-to be held in the still unfinished stadium was not a baseball game but a championship heavyweight fight between Max Schmeling, the German titleholder, and W. L. (“Young”) Stribling, Jr., the American contender. It was held on July 3, 1931. The crowd of 36,936 persons was almost lost in the great arena, but presumably they comforted themselves with the knowledge that even if the fight were a ho-hum affair they were participating in a historic occasion. Which, to be sure, they were.

It wasn’t until more than a year later, July 31, 1932, that the Indians played the first baseball game in the stadium. There were 80,184 fans on hand, as well as most of the celebrities of the game. The Philadelphia Athletics were the opponents. Lefty Grove pitched for the A’s and Mel Harder for the Indians. With such great pitchers, and the wide open spaces of the vast stadium wasteland, it isn’t surprising that a pitchers’ battle ensued. Philadelphia won, 1-0.

Next to the construction of the stadium, the most noteworthy baseball happening of the Depression was the arrival in Cleveland in 1936 of a seventeen-year-old farm boy with rolling gait and peach fuzz on his face. Robert William Andrew Feller of Van Meter, Iowa, had been discovered the previous year by an Indian scout, Cy Slapnicka, a fellow Iowan. Before being shipped off to a minor league club, Fargo-Moorehead, the high school boy was called in for a once-over inspection. His first performance in Cleveland was on a sandlot diamond in Woodland Hills Park, where he pitched for the Rosenblums, a team sponsored by a downtown clothing store and competing in the city’s amateur class A division. He won a 3-2 victory in twelve innings. The next day, recalls Feller in his autobiography, Strikeout Story, Slapnicka opened the door to his future.

“You looked very good,” said the scout. “Now, I’ve got a big surprise for you. How would you Wee to pitch against the St. Louis Cardinals?”

The Indians had an exhibition game scheduled with the famous Gas House Gang on July 6 in League Park. The St. Louis lineup included Frankie Frisch, Dizzy and Paul Dean, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin, Leo Durocher, Terry Moore, and Rip Collins- an array of talent calculated to disarrange the composure of an experienced major leaguer, much less a seventeen-year-old who never had pitched a ball in a professional game.

“Don’t worry,” said Slapnicka.

Veteran George Uhle pitched the first three innings against the Cards. Feller was to pitch the middle three innings, with Manager Steve O’Neill catching.

O’Neill’s instructions to him were simple. Feller Simply was to throw fast balls. He followed his orders without question. The first batter, Catcher Bruce Ogrodowski, struck out. So did the second batter, Leo Durocher.

“I was fast that day,” Feller wrote. “Probably as fast as I ever was or ever will be. I didn’t try curves. I just kept pumping the fast ball up there and the Cardinals kept swinging…”

In three innings, the schoolboy struck out eight of the famous St. Louis Cardinals. The sports world blinked and took note. After the game, a photographer asked Dizzy Dean if he would pose for a picture with young Feller. The man who was at that moment the greatest pitcher in baseball replied: “If it’s all right with him, it’s all right with me. After what he did today, he’s the guy to say.”

The performance ended Feller’s minor league career before it began. On August 23, 1936, Manager O’Neill announced that Feller would start for the Indians against the St. Louis Browns. The boy responded by making baseball history that hot Sunday afternoon in League Park, striking out fifteen of the Browns as he won, 4-1. His total in that game was within one of Rube Waddell’s American League strikeout record, set in 1908. It was the highest strikeout total in the American League since Bob Shawkey struck out fifteen men in 1919.

Master Feller had been a curiosity before, but now he was a celebrity. The best was yet to come, however, in that sensational first season of his. On Sunday, September 13, Feller struck out seventeen in a game with the Philadelphia Athletics, setting a new American League strikeout record and tying the major league high set in 1933 by Dizzy Dean. Feller had to wait until 1938, his second full season in the majors, to set a new mark of eighteen strikeouts in a game with the Detroit Tigers. All things considered, though, it was agreed in 1936 that he had established himself as a pretty promising lad.

Feller fulfilled that promise in the years that followed. His was a long, record-studded career, of such distinction as to make his election to baseball’s Hall of Fame the surest ballot bet since Alf Landon ran against Franklin D. Roosevelt. It spanned twenty-one years, including four years in the Navy in World War II-four years subtracted from his career when he was at his physical peak. Rapid Robert, as he was identified by the sportswriters, still managed to pitch three no-hit games (a feat matched only by Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers and Cleveland’s Cy Young), twelve one-hitters (the previous record was seven, held by Cleveland’s Addie Joss), and to set a new season’s record for strikeouts, 348, in 1946. The previous record, 343, was held by Rube Waddell. Feller kept company with the great from the very beginning, and he more than held his own in the select circle of baseball’s pitching superstars.

The postwar era in Cleveland baseball will be remembered always in the city’s sports annals as the time when Bill Veeck limped onto the scene and took over control of the Indians. His reign in Cleveland was short- a mere 3 1/2 years-but neither the Indians nor the old sport were quite the same thereafter. Neither, for that matter, was the city.

Veeck, young and husky, came into Cleveland with a leg that throbbed from a service-incurred injury, and some burning ideas on how a major league baseball club should be operated. Before he sold his interest in the Indians in 1949, he had lost the leg, but had won a pennant (1948), a World Series (1948), and, most of all, he bad won the affection of the fans.

The blond burrhead with the corrugated forehead limped and thumped his way up and down the city’s avenues in open-throated splendor, laughing at the rain, the snow, and all the other club owners as he preached his unorthodox tenet that baseball was a game and should be fun. It is no overstatement to say that he shook the national baseball establishment as it had not been shaken since the Cincinnati Reds daringly experimented with knickerbockers in place of pantaloons. For the great American pastime was-and still is-in the bands of an element more conservative than is to be found in the halls of high finance or in the groves of the Academy. Under their sober direction and cautious counsel, a simple game has been turned into a complicated contest, clothed in conservative gray flannel and encumbered with strategy and statistics until it is nigh on to death at the hands of the sobersides.

Contrarily, under the ministration of Veeck, baseball in Cleveland stirred and fought the bonds of civilized restraint that had made the game about as exciting as a Sunday outing of the Watch and Ward Society. He put comedians on the playing field (sometimes intentionally), gave away nylons and automobiles to the fans, introduced fireworks exhibitions after the ball games thereby, incidentally, distracting attention away from the score, and shuffled ball players in and out of town in such bewildering numbers that at times even the scorecards were obsolete because the linotypes were lagging hours behind his trading maneuvers.

The Indians went right on losing ball games in 1946 under Veeck, but be had caught the attention of the fans. There was interest, if not hope. But everybody recognized that Veeck’s brand of baseball was fun and games, in that order. Clevelanders and fellow Ohioans responded to this advanced philosophy in stirring numbers. When Veeck took over, close to midseason, the team had drawn .289,000 persons. In the ensuing laughter and confusion, another 763,289 fans fought their way into the ball park, raising the season total to 1,052,.289. And hardly a man or woman in the vast outpouring thought to be critical of the ball club for its failure to rise above sixth place, probably for fear of being called party poopers. Such was the spirit of the time. League Park and the lakefront stadium, used on weekends and for special games, were the places to be seen in those giddy days, and the object was a good time.

Veeck, the iconoclast of the front office, knew wisely that 1946 was but prelude and that in 1947 he would have to provide a different kind of a season; one that included a better showing on the field. The clowns in motley would have to yield to the shining knights in armor; amusement would have to yield to admiration; laughter would have to make way for cheers. In the words of the old aphorism, faith without works crashes, and Veeck knew he had to justify the faith the fans had shown in him with a more effective baseball machine if he was to hold their attention. He put it this way, spelling out his philosophy for the shocked eyes of the wing-collar camp in his autobiography, Veeck – as in Wreck:

“We did not draw crowds simply by putting on a show. Cleveland had been without a pennant winner for 26 years, the longest of any American League city, and we communicated our determination to produce one. I agree completely with the conservative opposition that you cannot continue to draw people with a losing team by giving them bread and circuses. All I have ever said-and, I think, proved-is that you can draw more people with a losing team plus bread and circuses than with a losing team and a long, still silence.”

The Indians, considerably improved by trades and purchases, finished fourth in 1947 and drew 1,521,978 persons. The following year, 1948, the team won the American League pennant in the thrilling finish that called for the first playoff game in league history and then won the World Series. Attendance in that fateful year was 2,620,627, a new major league attendance record. In that same season, the Indians set a new high mark for single game attendance with a crowd of 82,781 on June 20.

Of all Veeck’s precedential moves during his brief tenure as owner of the Indians, perhaps the most Significant to the future course of the game was his smashing of the color barrier that had prevented Negro players from winning a place on an American League team. Branch Rickey had pioneered in the National League by hiring Jackie Robinson, but it took Veeck to blaze the way in the junior circuit by signing a promising infielder named Larry Doby, who eventually developed into a hard-hitting, fleet center fielder for the Indians. Doby joined the team in early July 1947. The following July, 19411, Veeck hired the legendary Satchel Paige over the protests of the stuffed shirts-some of whom were upset not so much by the fact that Paige was a Negro, but that he was somewhere in his forties-a very old man, as baseball years are counted. They accused Veeck of another hippodrome stunt and of making a mockery of the game. Old Man Satch provided Veeck’s defenses by winning six important games for the team in the final stretch of the pennant drive.

The stunts, the entertainment and, most of all, the aura of victory that Veeck created in Cleveland were significant contributions to the city’s well-being. It was not a happy city that be found in 1946. The downtown area was run down at the heels and the mood of the people was troubled. It was a kind of melancholia that had been a long time growing; too much depression and too much war; too much subsistence living and subsistence dying. The wheels of the urban economy were still turning, but slowly and squeakingly. The people were querulous and impatient with one another and with the city in which they lived.

Cleveland, in short, needed the encouragement that comes from being a winner. The Indians and their colorful front-office boss gave the city something to cheer about and the opportunity to bask once again in a favorable national light. What it came down to was a matter of civic pride and self-respect, and most people were grateful to Veeck for this, even recognizing that he had his own selfish motives, as all enterprising people do. But he was not ordinary. He was singular in his appearance, disarming in his approach, genuine in his determination to succeed. He never wore a hat or an overcoat or a tie, no matter what the weather or the occasion. Dining room captains winced at his informality and some of them protested, but it did them no good. They should have known that an individual who will not wear another man’s collar will be just as quick in his refusal of another man’s tie. The informal accouterments favored by Veeck represented his way of expressing his own protest against the kind of formalism and convention that tend to hem in and bind us all. The stuffy-style dictators, the pompous and petty dining room managers, the selfish, myopic traditionalists in major league baseball-all were natural foes to Veeck and while he fought them, thousands of little people cheered. People love a free spirit. They take heart from the brave and the venturesome. And there never was any question-even among the many who disapproved of him-that Bill Veeck was both-in good measure.

Veeck sold the Indians in 1949 at the end of the baseball season to a syndicate headed by a Cleveland insurance executive, Ellis Ryan. Hank Greenberg, who had been an aide to Veeck as well as a stockholder, stayed on with the new regime and became general manager. In this post, he dared to do at the end of the 1950 season what Veeck had wanted to do in 1947, and luckily had not-he fired Lou Boudreau, the people’s choice as manager of the Indians. His successor was AI Lopez, who had been waiting in the wings. The senor from Tampa, Florida, was a natural leader and the Indians flourished under his expert guidance, placing second five times and winning the pennant once. That triumph came in 1954, a memorable year in which the Indians set an American League record for the most victories in a season, winning 111 games. The only thing that baffled baseball experts was how the team could lose even forty-three games with a pitching staff that included Bob Feller, Early Wynn, Mike Garcia, Bob Lemon, and the best relief pair in the game, Don Mossi and Ray Narleski.

The pennant-winning 1954 season unfortunately was blighted by the distressing series of happenings at World Series time; namely, four consecutive defeats at the hands of the New York Giants, who did not figure to do much more than show up in full uniform. It was a humiliation that shook the Cleveland organization all the way down to its farm system roots. Out of that system, the next year, emerged two rookies named Rocky Colavito and Herb Score. The latter, whom the sports writers refrained from dubbing “Hasty Herbert” with considerable restraint, was a fireball-throwing lefthander who made the varsity immediately. He won twenty games in 1956 and led the American League in strikeouts. Seldom has baseball seen a more brilliant prospect. Some very wise observers predicted Score would he better than Bob Feller, better than Walter Johnson, perhaps better than any pitcher who had come before him.

Herb Score, in short, could not miss- but he did, through no fault of his own. The 1957 season hardly had gotten under way when, in a game in Cleveland, a New York Yankee infielder, Gil McDougald, caught hold of a Score fast hall and drove it right hack at the young pitcher. It happened too quickly for Score even to raise his glove to protect himself. The ball hit him in the right eye with a cracking sound that could be heard all over the stadium. Score fell to the ground, blood running out of his nose and mouth, clutching that part of his face around the eye.

The wonder of the accident, to those who saw it, was that Herb Score was not killed on the pitcher’s mound that night, or that he did not lose his eye. He recovered and the sight returned to his injured eye, but the career leading him to certain immortality as a baseball superstar was ended by that shot off McDougald’s bat. Score returned to pitch, but he had lost the precious something that had made him great. After two lackluster years in an Indian uniform and a few poor years with the White Sox, he retired to become a television broadcaster.

The decade that followed the pennant-winning season of 1954 was full of changes and frustrations for the Indians. Manager Lopez moved on to take over the White Sox helm in 1957, and the parade of his successors began that season with Kerby Farrell. Bobby Bragan took over for part of the 1958 season, yielding to an old Indian hero, Joe Cordon, who lasted as manager until August of 1960. At that time, the general manager of the Cleveland club, Frank Lane, pulled off the first managerial trade in baseball history-Manager Joe Cordon of the Indians for Manager Jimmy Dykes of the Detroit Tigers. Mel McGaha took over from Dykes in 1962, followed in 1963 by George (“Birdie”) Tebbetts, and in late 1966 by Joe Adcock.

If there was confusion on the playing field-and there was-the same kind of restlessness prevailed in the front office. Myron H. (“Mike”) Wilson succeeded Ellis Ryan as president of the club in 1953. Financier William R. Daley, once an usher at League Park, became principal stockholder and board chairman in 1956. Gabe Paul took over as general manager of the club in April 1961, and as principal stockholder and president in 1962, and began anew the quest for the magical combination of men and circumstances that can turn a staid city into a frenzy through their victories on the baseball playing field. Vernon Stouffer, nationally known restaurateur, purchased control of the Indians in late 1966, but Paul remained as general manager.

What a city seeks, in tying its emotional hopes to the ups-and-downs of a collection of grown athletes in modified knickerbockers, is precisely the hallucinative type of joy that gripped Cleveland in 1948, when all the world looked good in spite of the contradictory facts to be found in reality.

What Cleveland has been seeking since 1948 is just what Bill Veeck described in his autobiography when he told of being offered a “tremendous sum of money” at the peak of his Cleveland success if he would run for the United States Senate against the distinguished incumbent, Robert A. Taft.

Veeek, a Taft admirer, refused the political invitation, but expressed his conviction that if he had chosen to run against the famous senator, he would have been elected.

“You still don’t think I’d have a chance against Taft?” he wrote. “Well then, you weren’t in Cleveland during those three-and-a-half years when the Indians pushed the world news from the front pages. You weren’t in Cleveland in those years when the Indians brought the people of the city so close together that it was as if everybody was living in everybody else’s parlor. You weren’t in Cleveland in those days of cheer and triumph when every day was Mardi Gras and every fan a king.”