Bonehead Play

“A dispute historic in baseball, which enriched the language with two exceedingly forceful words, ‘bonehead’ and ‘boner,’ arose over whether Frederick Charles Merkle did or did not touch second base.” Mark Sullivan, “Our Times”

As a baseball historian, I knew about the bizarre conclusion to the 1908 National League season, when a make-up game between the Cubs and the Giants was necessary to decide the pennant due to 19-year-old Fred Merkle’s “bonehead” baserunning mistake. With the score tied in the bottom of the ninth at New York’s Polo Grounds, Giant shortstop Al Bridwell hit an apparent game-winning single, sending Moose McCormick home from third.  On first, Merkle saw fans swarming onto the field and ran into the dugout without first touching second base, a common practice in those days. Cubs second baseball Johnny Evers, however, noticed the gaffe and brought it to the attention of the umpires.  In fact, in a recent game against the Pirates the exact thing had occurred only there had only been one umpire, Henry O’Day, who missed what happened so the rule wasn’t enforced.  Largely because of the fuss Evers put up at that time, two umpires were assigned to the Cubs-Giants game, including the one who’d failed to see what happened against Pittsburgh.  According to David Hinckley, details of exactly what happened are hazy, “lost in the mists of time – mists that closed in rapidly”:

  In most accounts, Giants pitcher "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity dashed from the first base coach's box to intercept the ball Art Hofman threw back to the infield and fling it deep into the stands. That was that, McGinnity figured, except Evers was still yelling. If that ball was gone, he wanted another one. Eventually he found one. Some say it was the real one, ripped away from a fan in the stands by little-used relief pitcher Rube Kroh. Others say it was another ball, relayed to Evers by shortstop Joe Tinker and maybe even third baseman Harry Steinfeldt, in a bizarre alternate version of the Cubs' famous Tinker-to-Evers-to Chance double play combination.

  Whatever the ball's origin, Evers secured it, touched second base and asked the umpires – R.D. Emslie at second base and Henry O'Day behind the plate – to call Merkle out on a force play, which would nullify McCormick's winning run. Emslie, who fell to the ground avoiding Bridwell's single, said he didn't see whether Merkle touched second and therefore couldn't make a call. O'Day said he did see and no, Merkle did not touch second. Therefore, yes, he was out. 

Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem, known as the “Old Arbitrator,” who officiated games for 36 years beginning in 1905, decried the decision as “the rottenest” he’d ever come across.

Prior to the playoff game a week later, “Iron Man” McGinnity, who wasn’t scheduled to pitch that afternoon, attempted to pick a fight with Frank Chance, hoping that both would be ejected; but the ruse didn’t work.  The Cubs went on to defeat Giants ace Christy Mathewson, 4-2, setting off a riotous aftermath, as described by David Rapp:

  The bad feelings ran so high, acknowledge a New York paper, that “the Chicago men were bombarded as they left the field, kicked, and reviled.”  Hundreds of rabid fans took to the field, growling and out for blood. Tinker, Sheckard, and others took hard knocks to the head, while someone slashed Pfiester on the shoulder with a knife. Another hooligan chased down Chance from behind and delivered a wicked chop across his neck.  The blow broke some cartilage and temporarily snuffed out his voice.

  When the team made it to relative safety in their dressing room, the doors barricaded, armed guards had to stand outside to hold the mob back.  The Cubs eventually were secreted back to their hotel in a patrol wagon with two cops inside and four more riding the running boards.  They hustled out of town that night for Detroit, site of the upcoming World Series, by slipping out the back door and running down an alley, escorted by a swarm of policemen.

The Cubs went on to defeat the Detroit Tigers 4 games to 1, their last championship for 108 years. Chance outplayed future Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, garnering 8 hits to his 7 and swiping 5 bases to his 2.

Baseball historian Trey Strecker wrote about another unfortunate incident involving Merkle in the deciding game of the 1912 World Series against the Boston Red Sox:

  Fred was poised to be the hero when his single in the top of the 10th inning scored Red Murray from second to give the Giants the lead. The bottom half began with Fred Snodgrass' infamous muff in center field, allowing pinch-hitter Clyde Engle to reach second base. After Harry Hooper flied out and Steve Yerkes walked, Tris Speaker hit a high foul near the first-base coach's box. Though most observers agreed that it was his ball, Merkle backed away when Christy Mathewson called for the catcher, Meyers, to make the catch. The ball fell to the ground, giving Speaker another chance, and this time he slashed a long single to right that started the Sox's winning rally. In New York, the headlines the next day read “Bonehead Merkle Does It Again.”

Sports writers employed “bonehead” during the NBA playoffs when Cleveland Cavalier J.R. Smith grabbed an offensive rebound in a tie game with seconds remaining and dribbled away from the basket rather than attempt a shot.  Even more egregious was Michigan All-American Chris Webber calling time-out with 11 seconds remaining in the NCAA championship against Duke when his team had none left, resulting in a technical foul and loss of possession.

Bridge Bulletin used this Larry Sherman letter under the heading Déjà vu?::

  I was called to a table at a game I was directing. North said someone had scored on their line.  East then chimed in that they had already played this board.  I tried to clarify whether East-West had played this board at another table.  North then realized that the handwriting on the traveler line was her own.  They had played the same board twice at thistable with a different contract and a different result.  That was a first for me.

In duplicate Dottie Hart and I finished with a 57.29 percent, good enough for third place and half a master point.  My only bonehead move came after Dottie opened one No-Trump and the person on my right bid 2 Diamonds.  I held 5 Hearts but just 7 points and using a transfer system would have said 2 Diamonds had my opponent not beat me to it.  I bid 2 Hearts and Dottie, believing that indicated a five-card Spade suit, responded 2 Spades.  When I bid 3 Hearts, she raised to 4 Hearts and I got set 2.  What I should have done initially was double 2 Diamonds. Then when Dottie bid 2 Hearts, I could have passed. On another hand, I got high board holding 6 Hearts, including the Ace, King, Queen, 5 Spades to the Queen and 2 singletons. I bid Hearts 3 times while Dottie kept passing and the opponents bid Clubs and Diamonds. Dottie had only one Heart, but a lucky 3-3 split enabled me to make the contract. Last week in a similar situation, a 5-1 split proved disastrous and resulted in a low board.

Bridge opponent Helen Booth mentioned having been a neighbor of Post-Tribuneowner H.B. Snyder, who committed suicide by walking into Lake Michigan.  Snyder’ss wife socialized with Heywood Braun and other members of New York City’s “Smart Set.” She’d write Post-Trib“Travel” columns about her trips abroad. Gary Mayor George Chacharis nicknamed Snyder, his arch-enemy, the “Duke of Dune Acres.” IUN professor Garret Cope’s parents worked for the Snyder family as cook and chauffer.  Helen lent me “Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness” by her brother-in-law James A. Haught. The title seemed particularly relevant given the horrific headlines about atrocities committed by hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania and subsequent church coverup. Haught signed the copy, “From a total heathen.”

 above, Christy Mathewson; below, Fred Merkle

Baseball goat Fred Merkle was an avid bridge player, often partnering in the New York clubhouse with Christy Mathewson, born in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, a graduate of Bucknell (my alma mater), and winner of 373 games during a stellar career.  Mathewson enlisted in the army during World War I and was accidentally gassed, resulting in tuberculosis and an early death in 1925 at age 45.  He was buried in Lewisburg Cemetery near Bucknell’s campus, known in the early 1960s as a “make-out heaven.”

Bonehead was the name of a children’s TV series that ran for three seasons on BBC beginning in 1960 and featured a dim-witted trio of crooks, Boss, Happy and Bonehead. 

All in Good Humor

“These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

         F.P. Adams, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”

In 1910 New York Evening Mailcontributor Franklin Pierce Adams, a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, penned a couplet for his “All in Good Humor” column that was destined to become, next to “Casey at the Bat,” the most famous baseball poem of all time. The Cubs had just defeated their archrival New York Giants, thanks to a rally-killing, shortstop to second to first double play. At the behest of a copy editor, Adams added six lines, making use of a medieval Italian word – gonfalon -  meaning a banner or flag:

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double-

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

F.P. Adams in the 1920s was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, matching wits with the likes of Dorothy Parker, who once said, “One more drink and I’ll be under the host,”  and Robert Benchley, who quipped:“I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.” Adams once defined middle age as “when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.”  Hard to imagine that golf was once considered an old man’s sports.  F.P. Adams probably never dreamed that thousands of fans would pay to watch 43 year-old Tiger Woods finish second to 28 year-old Brooks Koepka in the hundredth annual PGA Open.

Baseball’s first matinee idol, according to David Rapp’s “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” was Michael “King” Kelly, who during the 1880s led the forerunner of the Chicago Cubs, the White Stockings, to five pennants. A charismatic showman and vaudeville performer during the off-season, Kelly was the first sports celebrity to sign autographs for fans.  He invented the hook slide and inspired the 1889 hit “Slide, Kelly, Slide.”  Prints of a painting showing Kelly sliding head-first into second adorned countless Windy City saloons. A catcher when not playing the outfield, he kept up a line of patter to distract hitters, a favorite tactic of my old Porter Acres battery mate Omar Farag, whom I ran into at Miller Sunday Market, carrying a bouquet of flowers.

As the contestants on Jeopardy’s 2017 Tournament of Champions, a summer rerun, were introduced, one covered his eyes, the second his ears, and the third his mouth, referencing the 3 wise monkeys who embodied the proverb, “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”  Nobody knew Final Jeopardy, the state capital since 1805 whose first four letters were the same as the state’s last four letters.  Answer: Montpelier, Vermont.  Final Jeopardyin this week’s initial college Tournament of Champions was: which twentieth-century U.S. president was inaugurated twice within 14 months?  Easy: LBJ. Two young folks (a math and a science major) got it incorrect, guessing TR and Grover Cleveland.

In Richard Russo’s “Voice” a brilliant but mute college student with Asperger Syndrome suffers a breakdown in an English seminar.  Nate, the instructor, is blamed for the incident and replaced in mid-semester.  Given Russo’s comic sensibility, “Voice” contains humorous asides, such as comparing a jealous husband to a neighbor’s dog who bit you once and acts like he’s still got more unfinished business.  And this: “Next year, in place of the Jane Austin seminar, he’d been offered a section of comp, an indignity that put him in mind of e.e. cummings’s Olaf, who from his knees declares there is some shit he will not eat.”  Sensitive Nate has an obnoxious brother, Julian, who calls him “Prof” in a pejorative manner (Nate: “How the word rankles”),uses words likeuncuntedand befucked to describe him, and is seldom right about anything but, according to Russo, never in doubt, much less self-doubt.  On a tour in Venice, Nate comes upon a so-called art piece that, in essence, is a half-ton of dirt poured onto the floor, which gay guide Klaus, whom Julian continually mocks, calls provocative.

“FOX and Friends” commentator and former Trump aide David Bosse told African-American Joel Payne, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”  Payne responded: “I’ve got some relatives who picked cotton, and I’m not going to sit here and allow you to attack me like that on TV.  You better watch your mouth.” Just months before, FOX sports announcer Brian Davis was reprimanded for using the exact phrase to describe Russell Westbrook’s high level of play. And that was meant as praise while Bosse’s intent was clearly ridicule.

On the cover of Time: Spike Lee, director of “BlacKkKlansman,” based on a true story about African-American policeman Ron Stallworth going undercover to join the KKK. “BlacKkKlansman” stars John David Washington (Denzel’s son) as Ron Stallworth. It opens with a scene from “Gone with the Wind” and closes with the 2017 alt-white Charlottesville riot.  At times bitingly funny, like the 1963 Cold War critique “Dr. Strangelove,” the film, to quote critic Simon Miraudo is also “stunningly effective as a call to arms” – as is true of most all Spike Lee pictures.

Joaquin Phoenix assumes the role of quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan in the biopic “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” the title a punchline from a cartoon panel showing a posse coming across an empty wheelchair in the desert. Before he killed himself, Robin Williams was set to play the part in tribute to his friend Steve Reeves.  Disabled at age 21 due to an auto accident, Callahan employed a unique brand of “sick humor” in such publications as the New Yorkerand Penthouse.Callahan’s first published cartoon was of a panhandler holding a sign reading, “I am blind and black but not musical.” A subsequent one had the caption, “Refuse to have a nice day.”   In one depicting two cowboys in wheelchairs an old-timer draws a gun on the other and says, “This town ain’t accessible enough for both of us.”  New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross recalled this Callahan anecdote:

  He was waiting for the light in his electric wheelchair, and some evangelical comes along and goes, “Boy, boy – believe in Jesus and get up and walk!”  And John looks at him and says, “I have five thousand dollars invested in this chair!”

 Sean Penn as Spicily

On TV I watched two Eighties comedies, “Back to the Future” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the former with only mild interest and the latter with my interest piqued upon learning that it was written by Cameron Crowe.  Sean Penn played stoner Jeff Spicoli, whose character reminded me of Jam in “Detroit Rock City,” my favorite comedy of all time, along with “Fargo,” the Coen brothers darkly comedic murder tale.  While Roger Ebert called “Fast Times” a “scuz-pit of a movie,”it had its funny moments and the music was great, especially numbers by the Go-Gos, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, the Ravyns, and, of course, the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” during the pool fantasy scene.

Former Cubs hurler Rick Sutcliffe, 16-1 during the memorable 1984 season, was in the broadcast booth prior to singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He recently worked a game with Cubs 2016 World Series hero David Ross, who evidently takes frequent bathroom breaks.  One inning Ross got back late and Sutcliffe asked, “And what do you think of that, David?”Ross had no idea what he was referring to. Sutcliffe got a laugh, but I didn’t think it was funny.  In the rubber game of a series with Washington, Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins sang during the seventh inning stretch. The Cubs trailed 3-0 in the ninth when Jason Heywood scratched out a hit and, with two out, Nationals closer Ryan Madson plunked two batters in a row.  Then rookie David Bote hit a 2-2 pitch into the bleachers for a walk-off grand slam. I immediately called Dave, who said he’d almost turned off the TV when Washington scored 2 runs in the top of the inning. Next morning on AM 670 Lin Brehmer played Vince Lloyd’s dramatic home run call, culminating with these words: “It has a chance.  Grand slam. Cubs win. (pause) Listen to this place.” Pretty moving.

High school friend Vince Curll sent me an article by historian William H. Thiesen that appears in the current issue of Sea History entitled “First Lady Harriet Rebecca Lane and the Cutters That Have Borne Her Name.”  The first Harriet Lane, commissioned for the Revenue Cutter Service in 1858 while Harriet’s Uncle James Buchanan was President, was an 180-foot side paddled steamer that fired the first naval shot of the Civil war in Charleston Harbor near Fort Sumter. Harriet Lane II was commissioned in 1926, designed to interdict whisky smugglers during Prohibition and later a Coast Guard air-sea rescue vessel.  During the 1990s Harriet Lane III helped rescue thousands of Haitian and Cuba migrants and is still in use, primarily in counter-drug operations but also, sadly, to catch Latin Americans fleeing from poverty and tyranny.

 USS Harriet Lane forces USS Nashville to show its colors in 1861

Harriet Lane III

I haven’t seen Vince Curll in over 50 years, but he obviously recalled that President Buchanan was my ancestor (great-great-great uncle).  His accompanying note indicated that his politics differed from mine, as he wrote: “In your own inimical way, feel free to use the enclosed material to exaggerate, embellish or create however you deem appropriate.  I have yet to encounter an avowed “Lefty” that allowed confirmable facts to interfere with the attainment of his target.  Lineage be damned.” I replied: 

  As you were my good friend and mentor in high school in the ways of the world, I must defend “Lefty” historians.  I believe our quest is for the truth, and where politics enters the equation is in the choice of subjects to research: poor people, minorities, immigrants, women, environmental inequalities, etc.  Most classmates that I’m in touch with are, lamentably, conservative, including Skip Pollard, Phil Arnold, Wayne Wylie, even onetime bad boy Pat Zollo.  That doesn’t prevent me from enjoying their friendship.  Chuck Bahmueller broke off communication with me after we argued politics at our thirtieth reunion (how sad).  Among the few liberal exceptions are LeeLee Minehart, a Peace Corps grad whose father was a Democratic officeholder, and Gaard Murphy, whom I talk with weekly and shares my distaste for our current administration.  

I’d like nothing more than to rekindle the friendship with Vince.  He taught me that it was more important to be yourself than to follow the crowd. In the late 1950s, while we were in high school, the swampland where Vince used to trap muskrats (I occasionally tagged along) became an industrial park.  One summer  the two of us made the rounds looking for employment and we got hired by the company that published the weekly Ambler Gazette to work the overnight shift once a week during the press run. In tenth grade, after I had my driver’s license, we double-dated and ended up on adjoining couches in my date’s rec room.  Vince seemed so self-assured, I copied his every move.