A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (8 page)

The National League—yes,
the league
—hit .303, and thirty-three National League players hit .300 or better. Three American League teams and twenty-nine American League players hit .300 or better. Although the Phillies’ Chuck Klein hit .386, he lost the National League batting crown by 15 points to the Giants’ Bill Terry, who hit .401. The Cardinals had more than ten .300 hitters. Six major leaguers drove in more than 150 runs each, and thirty-two had 100 or more. The offensive pyrotechnics were on display at Wrigley Field on May 12, 1930, when the Cubs scored 12 unanswered runs and still lost to the Giants, who’d had a 14–0 lead before the Cubs scored their first run, in the fifth inning. Guy Bush had these mind-bending numbers for the season: He allowed 291 hits and 86 walks—377 base runners, not counting hit batters—in 225 innings and had an ugly 6.20 ERA, yet his won-lost record was a respectable 15–10.

Pitchers that season worried about their physical safety as well as their professional standing, and this only made the onslaught worse. Joe Tinker, the retired Cub shortstop, said pitchers were afraid to throw as hard as they could because their follow-throughs might leave them exposed to line drives; Giants manager John McGraw suggested moving the pitcher’s mound closer to the plate to give pitchers an advantage. Even Yankee owner Jake Ruppert—whose star player, Babe Ruth, had ignited the craze for long balls
and big innings—wanted to see the spitball, which had been banned in 1920, made legal again in order to tame the surge of offense.

No one seems to know what was done to the ball, when it was done, or at whose behest it was done. A livelier ball may have been introduced during the 1929 season; such a ball clearly was in use in 1930. And by 1931, the owners recoiled from the wretched excess of the previous year.

From 1926 through 1930, Hack Wilson batted in 708 runs in 738 games, an average of 141.6 a year. Only Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Jimmy Foxx have matched or exceeded Wilson’s 708 over five seasons.

Wilson’s 1930 rampage started fast and then accelerated. In August, he hit 13 home runs and drove in a stupendous total of 53 runs. On September 15, he drove in his 176th run, breaking Lou Gehrig’s season record set in 1927, the year Gehrig’s teammate Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. Wilson finished with 56 home runs, a National League record that would stand until 1998, when two pharmacologically assisted sluggers, the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa, hit 70 and 66, respectively. McGwire would hit 65 in 1999; Sosa would hit 63 in 1999 and 64 in 2001. But leaving aside these empty tributes to better numbers through chemistry, Wilson’s record of 56—itself a product of a somehow-enhanced ball—stood until the Diamondbacks’ Luis Gonzalez hit 57 in 2001.

Wilson’s major league record of 191 RBIs was challenged the next year when Gehrig drove in 184. In 1937, the Tigers’ Hank Greenberg drove in 183. Since the
Second World War, the highest RBI totals in either league by players not suspected of cheating with steroids, human growth hormone, or some other substance are 159 by the Red Sox’s Vern Stephens and Ted Williams in 1949, 155 by the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio in 1948, and 153 by the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis in 1962.

Bill James, baseball’s Newton, who has done as much as anyone to teach baseball how to see itself from new perspectives, believes that Wilson’s RBI record has become more secure as team lineups have become more laced with power hitters. In Wilson’s day, most teams had few home-run hitters, and they could feast on the RBI opportunities provided by singles hitters getting on base ahead of them. “
In modern baseball,” James writes in his
Historical Baseball Abstract
, “
everybody
tries to hit home runs, spreading the offense top to bottom, but creating no ‘clusters’ of RBI opportunities.” Which is to say, extreme RBI totals have declined as baseball has become better, with more power distributed throughout batting orders.

From his pinnacle in 1930, Wilson plunged with stunning swiftness. The Cubs changed managers for 1931, replacing Joe McCarthy, who had considerable tolerance for the off-field behavior that accompanied Wilson’s on-field accomplishments, with Rogers Hornsby, who, to put it politely, did not specialize in positive reinforcement. The greatest right-handed hitter of all time, Hornsby was such a focused fanatic about being in peak condition to play that he avoided movies, lest they strain his eyes. He was a relentless critic of Wilson, who did not take this well. But neither the managerial change nor whatever was done to restore the ball to its pre-1930 condition explains Wilson’s downward spiral. His 1931 salary of $33,000 was the National League’s highest, but as often happens in baseball, the Cubs were paying for the past, not the present—and certainly not the future.
Recalling the winter of 1930, Wilson said, “I spent most of that off-season in tap rooms.” He reported to spring training twenty pounds overweight. In 1931, he hit 13 home runs, a decline of 43 home runs from the previous season—a collapse without equal in baseball history. On September 6 of that year, he was suspended without pay for the remainder of the season following a fistfight with reporters on a train in Cincinnati. That winter he was traded to the Cardinals, for whom he never played an inning; they traded him to the Dodgers, for whom he had a productive season (23 home runs and 123 RBIs). But his decline was
apparent, and in the middle of the 1934
season, the Dodgers released him. He signed with the Phillies, for whom he had twenty at bats before being released. Less than four seasons after his spectacular 1930, he was out of Major League Baseball. After a season with the Single-A Albany Senators of the New York–Pennsylvania League, he retired. He was thirty-five.

Hack Wilson: “suet and swat.” (
photo credit 1.7
)

On August 16, 1948, Babe Ruth died. More than one hundred thousand mourners filed past his casket as it lay in Yankee Stadium, and an estimated seventy-five thousand jammed Fifth Avenue outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where his funeral mass was performed. On November 23, 1948, Hack Wilson died, in Baltimore. He had moderated his drinking, but too late. He died destitute. His body was unclaimed for three days. Ford Frick, the president of the National League, wired $350 to pay for Wilson’s funeral. The mortician donated a gray suit for Wilson’s body.
Shortly before his death, Wilson had given an interview to CBS Radio. This was part of it:

Talent isn’t enough. You need common sense and good advice. If anyone tries to tell you different, tell them the story of Hack Wilson.… Kids in and out of baseball who think because they have talent they have the world by the tail. It isn’t so. Kids, don’t be too big to accept advice. Don’t let what happened to me happen to you.

In 1949, a new Cubs manager, Charlie Grimm, who had been Hack Wilson’s teammate, framed that portion
of Wilson’s last interview and hung it in the Cubs’ Wrigley Field clubhouse, where it remained for many years.

One Cub’s career conformed to the sentimentality that surrounds Wrigley Field because he was practically a boy from the neighborhood. He is also the answer to a nifty trivia question: Who is the only player who was in the major leagues when Babe Ruth hit his last home run, in 1935, and when Henry Aaron hit his first, in 1954? Phil Cavarretta. He graduated in 1934 from Lane Technical High School, which then was 4.7 miles from Wrigley Field. At Lane, as he would with the Cubs, he played first base and outfield, but he also pitched eight one-hitters, and his final game was a no-hitter. He signed with the Cubs before he graduated, at seventeen. The Cubs then sent him to their Peoria farm club, where he slugged a home run in his first at bat as a professional, in a game in which he hit for the cycle. He was eighteen when, on September 16, he joined the Cubs in Brooklyn. On September 25, he hit a home run in his first Wrigley Field at bat to win a 1–0 game. He played in the Cubs’ last three World Series: 1935, 1938, and 1945, the year he was named the National League’s most valuable player. He played for the Cubs for twenty years, a team record, and was a player-manager in the last three, beginning in 1951.

On March 29, 1954, at a spring training meeting with Philip K. Wrigley, Cavarretta annoyed his employer by saying the Cubs could not compete for the pennant, that they were a “second division team.” Cavarretta promptly acquired the distinction of being the first manager ever fired during spring training. He was, of course, right about the team. The Cubs’ 64–90 record—their fourth season with 90 or more losses since 1948—landed them in seventh place.

William Wrigley had died in January 1932 at his winter home in Phoenix, where, with the assistance of a Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright, he had built the Biltmore Hotel. The Cubs fell into the lap of his son, Philip, who in at least one way was like his father. He was a promoter. His product was baseball.

Or maybe not. The product was actually the Wrigley Field experience. His father had loved baseball; Philip never really pretended to.
When, in 1934, he became the team’s president, he said, “God knows, I don’t want the job.” By inertia he acquired responsibility for the Cubs, and because of filial piety—he had assured his dying father he would not sell the team—he kept it until his own death, in 1977. Philip’s son would sell the Cubs to the
Chicago Tribune
in 1981.
Carefully parse the words Philip said publicly after his father’s death: “The club and the park stand as memorials to my father. I will never dispose of my holdings in the club as long as the chewing gum business remains profitable enough to retain it.” He did not expect the team itself to be profitable. He seems to have expected it to be a loser financially as well as athletically.

1948:
Annus horribilis. Et tu
, Norman Rockwell? (
photo credit 1.8
)

Some people buy major league baseball teams as a ticket to celebrity. Wrigley, a painfully shy man, endured his inheritance.
In 1958, Wrigley told
Sports Illustrated
, “I
don’t think I’ve ever done anything I’ve wanted to do or ever will.” So determined was he to fade into the background of life that he tried to avoid being photographed. “My ambition,” he said “is to go live in a cave somewhere with no telephone and roll a big rock over the door.” He was commonly called P.K., which he detested because there was a brand of Wrigley gum called P.K. He insisted, implausibly, that it was named not for him but because a Wrigley gum slogan was “Packed tight, kept right.”