Gray Truth about Travel
Retelling the 1920 Indians story
Those of us who listen to a lot of baseball games on radio or television are familiar with the tired rant of broadcasters about scheduling.
They will lament the insanity of playing March games in Cleveland and August day games in Texas. They will share, without being asked, that they arrived in town at 3 a.m., the completion of a six-day trip to points west. Then they whine about being required to wake in time for a 1 p.m. game. When I had to put my sons to bed at 8 p.m. and be at work in time for a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, I had a personal appreciation for difficult schedules.
These days, I’m a retiree who wakens when I damn please and go to sleep whenever I get tired because there is no extra-inning game in Seattle to keep me up. Few things would please me more than to be a broadcaster getting off his charter, riding an Uber to Progressive Field and telling everyone how tough life can be. Suffering without sympathy might be modern, but it’s not fun. We feel an obligation to share.
Here’s a reminder that we can always find someone who had it worse.
This week’s blog is directed to the users of modern detergent capsules and the even-more-modern children who eat them. Yes, this is about the 25 shades of gray worn by baseball teams of the old days when road trips could determine pennants. Finding an open laundry in St. Louis late on a Saturday afternoon was possible but it was learned long before 1920 that travelling with white, let alone clean, uniforms was an unreasonable expectation.
It is not just a lack of style and coping with BO that makes winning on the road tough, it’s finding an edge wherever you can.
Last week we learned about the Philadelphia Athletics who were told by city fathers, and maybe a few mothers, that playing on Sunday was a sin. Faced with an alternative of a six-day week, they decided to end their home stand and do their sinning in Cleveland that day. They lost, of course.
Those teams, the A’s and the Indians, were to follow a divergent schedule that played a significant factor in determining the pennant winner. Advantage Cleveland.
The A’s were heading home for a six-day, seven-game slate. They would split four with the White Sox, the defending champions, and lose three to the Senators.
Then it was back on the road for a single Sunday game in Washington, four in Boston, five in New York, four in Cleveland, four in Detroit, four in S. Louis, three in Chicago and four more in Washington.
That’s 29 consecutive road games. They won five. Four of those victories were against the Indians’ main rivals at the time, the Red Sox and Yankees. The did oblige the White Sox by losing three in Chicago.
For the season, the A’s played 79 road games and only 75 at home.
In the same period, the Indians were on the sunny shores of Lake Erie for a 27-game homestand, including 18 wins. They finished the season with 78 home games, winning 51, a .654 winning percentage.
It’s tempting to say the Indians were destined to win the American League by two games over White Sox. When we live in what is strangely called “real time”, destiny is a cloudy concept. One of the beauties of baseball is that as we see balls bounce the wrong way for a clutch hit in May and we cannot know if it will be significant or not. It all seems important.
We all know the 1920 Indians had more than their share of tragedy, drama and the relatively minor issue of fundamental baseball to tend, but in the season when every game counted, this period is as important as any other from a baseball standpoint.
First came a four game series, including a doubleheader, against the White Sox. They won three. Another doubleheader came against the Tigers two days later on Memorial Day. There would be four doubleheaders in the 27-game homestand. They got four days off.
The Plain Dealer was ready to crown the Tribe from the start.
“Up on their toes every second, the Indians never overlooked a chance,” the PD reporter wrote after witnessing the May 29 doubleheader split with the White Sox. “If ever a team looked like a championship aggregation it was Cleveland, and yet it lost for the reason it was weak in the center of the diamond. Elmer Myers, who went the major portion of the route, was ineffective. Jim Bagby, who was called up for relief work, was unable to locate the plate despite the fact it was the same plate they have had a league park for several years. Three runs were forced across in the final round.
“The Indians got the early breaks but they made every one of them. They took chances on the bases and brought about a series of wild throws that benefited themselves. In fact, they played their heads off to win and could not turn the trick because the pitching end for the defense was the weak link in the chain.”
This was Henry P. Edwards’ convoluted way of describing a ninth-inning disaster. Three pitchers, five runs leading to an 8–5 defeat.
And then the hitters got credit in the Game 2 victory:
“The hitting of the two Rays, pitcher Caldwell and shortstop Chapman, were the predominating factors in the victory of the Indians in the second contest as Chapman’s home run accounted for three runs while Caldwell drove in two others.”
The White Sox wound up losing three of four to the Indians before trudging off to St. Louis for a Memorial Day doubleheader split with the lowly Browns. It ended a four-day, six-game road stretch with only one win. They were six games behind the Indians when they got home.
The Indians played two against the Tigers on Memorial Day, at the time called Decoration Day by many people. The morning game started at 10:30.
Edwards resumed praising the hitters.
“Running true to form, the Indians triumphed by their hard and timely hitting, a branch of the game in which nearly every redskin participated and Speaker and Garner excelled,” he wrote in the Plain Dealer. “The manager of the tribe was up five times in the morning, making a sacrifice, three singles and a double, scoring two runs and driving in another. He grabbed a single and a home run in four times up in the afternoon, driving in two runs and scoring another.
“Gardner distinguished himself by make his hits count. He hit George Dauss in the morning for two doubles and a home run, driving in five runs. He drove in three more in the second battle with a sacrifice fly and a single.
“Dauss was bombarded for seventeen hits for a total of twenty-six bases, the Indians coming up from behind, as they did Sunday, tying the score in the sixth and winning in the seventh. Johnston, O’Neill and Niehaus collaborated in producing the tallies for a Cleveland victory.”
It was easy enough to blame the pitcher again for the morning loss.
“Elmer Myers started in the forenoon struggle for the tribe, but when he demonstrated in the second he had nothing up his sleeve with which to deceive the Tigers, Speaker yanked him and substituted Niehaus, who stopped the visitors, with the exception of the fifth inning, when an error aided in Detroit scoring twice. But the rest of the way Niehaus had Cobb, Veach, Heilmann & Co. baffled with his slow teasers and change of pace. He held them to three hits, two in the fifth and one in the sixth.”
Previous blog posts:
The Spitter Starts Sliding Out of Baseball
It Happens Every Spring — in Cleveland Anyway
Cleveland Fans Party — Tribe Style
Throwing it around in the old days
Bagby Flashes but Soon will Fade
Dave Scott was a newspaper writer and editor for 40 years. He is a lifelong baseball fan and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research for decades, although SABR records might indicate I skipped my dues on occasion! DavidAScott@gmail.com I owe a great debt to the Cleveland Public Library for its excellent resources.
I make no money from this blog. Please consider sharing it on your social media. New editions come every Wednesday. Let me know if you want an email notice when it is posted.
The following have helped me tremendously with editing, error correction and technical advice:
David Bodemer
Ken Krsolovic
Joe Shaw
Vince Guerrieri
Thanks to all of you!
Playing it again
Strat-O-Matic offers a variety of ways to make the recreation of major-league games more realistic. They vary because the game has changed over the years.
These days, teams keep an eye on pitch counts as a way of determining how long a pitcher should stay in a game. In the old days, such as 1920, the decision had more to do with the pitcher’s effectiveness. They might reason: if he hasn’t allowed any runs through eight innings, keep going even if he has thrown 120 pitches.
For this reason, I chose the standard pitcher fatigue rules in our recreation of this double header.
In the first game, Indians starter Ray Caldwell went nine innings giving up 15 hits,eight runs and two walks. You would never see that line these days. His opponent, Roy Wilkinson, gave up 12 hits in 7 2/3 innings and only two earned runs.
Those results might be eye-popping these days, but there not unusual in 1920.
In the second game I let Elmer Myers go eight innings because he only allowed two runs but 10 hits. My opposing manager, calling himself Wash.Generals this time, let RoyWilliams go all nine because he only allowed five hits and one run, a good performance in any era.
Jason was happy with the win, a constant in any era:
Wash.Generals: I get a doubleheader sweep, after going 0–3 against you earlier!
Wash.Generals: Pitching was weak in this game. I got lucky with 19 baseruners against Caldwell
Wash.Generals: Wilkinson pitched out of a lot of jams for CHI. Lucky to get a 9th inning DP hit to Swede “e56” Risberg.
In explained my reasoning for the pitcher fatigue rules.
Wash.Generals: 4 Sox had 3-hit games, and I got 2 HRs out of Happy Felsch, 4 months before his ban.
Wash.Generals: Wilkinson got tired in the 8th so I brought in Kerr for the save, and he got the job done. That’s realistic, the Sox did use him to close out games in the real 1920
I hope to have a Netplay game each week, so if you are a Strat-O-Matic player, let me know you would like to play. DavidAScott@gmail.com
