Tuesday, June 7, 1927: New York City
Relief
Schoolboy Hoyt is clearly the ace of our staff. Right now he’s 7–2, and both of his losses were one-run games, one of them a 2–1 loss to the Indians’ George Uhle, who had 27 wins last year for the Tribe. Herb Pennock is also having a great start at 5–2, and Urban Shocker is 6–3. But the pitcher everyone is talking about this season is Wilcy “Cy” Moore, a 30-year-old rookie.
Ed Barrow, our business manager who oversees scouting and player acquisitions, found Cy at the end of last year while reading the Sporting News. He was grazing through the end-of-season minor league stats and saw some guy named Moore was 30–4 for the Greenville Spinners in the Sally League. Barrow sent a Yankee scout down to South Carolina who reported back that Cy looked too old. Barrow, who previously had dismissed Lazzeri’s 60 home runs in the minors, this time replied to his scout, “Hell, anyone who can win 30 games in any league is worth signing.”
Before the Yankees offer sheet arrived in his mail, Cy was actually about to quit the game and head back home to his cotton farm and his mules in Oklahoma. (Ruth, who can never remember Cy’s name, simply calls him, “Plow.”) Instead of heading back out west, Cy went south to St. Petersburg, where he had a tremendous spring training, leapfrogging me and becoming Huggins’s first call out of the bullpen.
For most of his minor league life, Cy had only been a fair-to-good pitcher; then two years ago his throwing arm was fractured by a batted ball. When he tried to come back, it hurt him too much to pitch with his old motion, so he started tossing sidearm. The result was a new delivery that suddenly gave his pitches a different spin from everybody else’s — something the batters aren’t used to. In Cy’s case the result is a sinker ball that’s producing more groundouts and double plays than Henry Ford produces Model T’s. And that makes Cy the perfect fireman when one of the starters have tired with runners on base.
In his first major league appearance, the old cotton farmer suddenly found himself pitching relief in Yankee Stadium during our third game of the season, and he showed some nervousness. Since then, he hasn’t shown a hint of nerves, no matter when Huggins has brought him in the game, no matter how many runners are on base, no matter the inning, no matter the score.
“It’s just baseball. Hell, it ain’t as tough as farmin’ or trying to get a mule to do what ya’ needs him to do,” Cy was telling me the other day while we were were taking a break from running in the outfield. Cy speaks so slowly that Ty Cobb in his heyday could have made it around the bases before he finished that last sentence. Cy’s not dumb, honest, but to be fair, there don’t appear to be a lot of ideas competing for space inside his head. And I think that helps him out on the mound.
“I just throw sinkers and ground balls,” I’ve heard him tell the boys in the press a hundred times — in about the same amount of time as it would take a chatterbox like Ruth to recite the Gettysburg Address.
For some players, baseball really is a thinking man’s game. For others, like Cy, it’s an unthinking man’s game.
Urban Shocker is the ultimate thinking man’s pitcher. He studies everything he can about the batters, scouring newspapers for batting statistics and articles about players, and keeping his logbook, which he reads every night like Earle Combs reads his bible. Herb Pennock is less of a student than an artist on the mound, brilliant at setting up batters in a more instinctual way and always keeping them off balance and guessing.
As for the unthinking men, Wilcy Moore is right up there with the Babe, back when Ruth was a pitcher on the Red Sox — and not just any pitcher, but the best pitcher in the league for three seasons. Herb Pennock played with Ruth on the 1915 and 1916 Red Sox teams that won back-to-back World Series and were managed by Bill Carrigan. Last year, Pennock told me this gem about sitting with Ruth in Carrigan’s office, while the Sox manager unsuccessfully attempted to talk pitching strategy with the Babe before a game:
“We’re playing the White Sox,” says Pennock, “and Bill Carrigan says, ‘Ok, Jidge, how are you gonna pitch to Shoeless Joe?’ And the Babe says, ‘Fastball, up and inside. Curveball, low and away.’
“Carrigan then asks, ‘How ya’ gonna pitch to Eddie Collins?’ And the Babe says, ‘Fastball, up and inside. Curveball, low and away.’
“Next Carrigan asks, ‘How ya’ gonna pitch to Buck Weaver?’ and the Babe says, ‘Fastball, up and inside. Curveball, low and away.’
“Carrigan and Babe do this dance for all eight ChiSox fielders, and then Carrigan says, ‘And what about Cicotte?’ The Babe says, ‘Who’s he?’
“Carrigan shouts, ‘For Chrissakes! He’s the pitcher!’
“‘Oh, yeah,’ says Babe. “The pitcher? Fuck him. Fastball, up and inside. Curveball, low and away’.”
Ruth won 23 games that year, led the league with nine shutouts and had an era of 1.75 — batters simply didn’t have a chance against him. I saw him pitch twice in ’16, and he was the most dominant pitcher I ever saw — and that includes Walter Johnson, who the Babe regularly beat when they pitched against each other.
Cy’s mind is just as uncluttered as the Babe’s. He’s either throwing a sinkerball or setting up a sinkerball.
Sunday, against the Tigers, Cy got his second start of the year. I think Hugg is wrestling with whether to keep him in relief or have him replace Dutch Ruether as the fourth pitcher in the rotation.
On the mound, Cy was all sinkers and ground balls — 20 of them by the end of the sixth inning. A couple got through for seeing-eye singles, and the Tigers managed to get two balls up in the air for a double and a triple, but Cy was impressive. At the end of six strong innings we were up 3–2, thanks to Ruth’s 17th home run of the year.
Cy looked to me like he had a lot of gas still left in the tank, but between innings Huggins had me start warming up. Sure enough, in the seventh, Cy started showing signs of fatigue — when he gets tired, his ball spins with less velocity and stays up in the zone — and the Tigers got under a couple of his pitches and tied up the game, 3–3.
Cy walks back to the dugout to the applause of 35,000 Yankee fans, and now I’m standing on the mound with runners on second and third, talking with Huggins, Johnny Grabowski and Tony Lazzeri. On most teams it would just be the manager and the catcher, but even though he’s just a kid, Lazzeri’s become the leader of the infield. Huggins instructions are pretty succinct. “Walk one. Get one.”
“Walk one.” Christ, I really hate it when Huggins brings me in to walk a guy, instead of having the pitcher who’s leaving the game walk him. Look, I’ve just spent 10 minutes warming up, working on my concentration and my control, and the last thing I want to do when I finally get to the mound is throw four goddamn balls — even if they are intentional. But Huggins does it to stroke the starters, so if anything catastrophic happens the run for that walk will be charged to the reliever, rather than the starter. It’s all part of the pitching pecking order. And it’s the last thing I should be thinking about right now.
Grabowski stands up and holds his mitt far outside the plate, and we play catch for four pitches, after which the Tigers’ catcher Johnny Bassler trots merrily down to first to load the bases. Two outs. Bases loaded. Tie score. Top of the eighth, and each one of those 35,000 fans are on their feet. I love it. There’s a wave of energy that comes over me from all sides of the Stadium.
Tiger manager George Moriarty is letting their pitcher Earl Whitehill hit for himself, and with good reason — he’s batting close to .300. With an out at any base, my aim is to get a ground ball out of him.
Grabowski and I have a brief conversation as to how I’ll pitch to Whitehill. We both figure that with the bases loaded, he’ll be taking until I throw him a strike, so we start him off with a fastball, low and on the outside corner. His bat stays on his shoulder, as expected. Strike one.
Next we tie him up low and inside, with a forkball that drops off the table. Strike two.
“Let’s not waste any pitches” were Grabowski’s last words to me. And I don’t. I throw Whitehill another strike. But this one’s a mistake — too high and right over the plate.
Whitehall, expecting I’d be throwing him another forkball — my out pitch — gets too far under the ball and pops it up to centerfield where Earle Combs makes a routine catch of my mistake.
I head back to the dugout, where Cy is the first to greet me with thanks for getting the team out of his jam. Benny waits for the other players to settle down and then he sits next to me.
“Always better to be lucky than good,” he whispers. “You’re too pumped up, which is why that pitch was high.”
He’s right. I didn’t use the Stadium’s energy, I let it use me.
Combs leads off our half of the eighth with a walk, getting on base, just like he does almost half the time. Next, Koenig gets hit by a pitch. Ruth then singles to right, scoring Combs. Gehrig walks to load the bases, and Benny Paschal — who’s playing for Meusel, who’s resting a strained leg muscle — lofts a sacrifice fly to deep left-center to score Koenig. Lazzeri ends the inning by hitting into a double play. Now I’m walking out to the mound with a 5–3 lead and a chance for my third win of the season.
Harry Heilmann, one of the top hitters in the league, leads off the Tiger ninth. A righty, he acts like he owns the plate. To fight him, I need the outside corner, so I throw inside to brush him back — or try to. Instead, my first pitch hits him.
Jesus Christ!
That’s the nicest thing I hear from the 35,000 fans who are now wondering if I’m going to blow a two-run, ninth-inning lead.
Despite hitting Heilmann, I’m still feeling in control. The Tigers send in a pinch runner, a kid named DeViveiros (I think). I look over my shoulder to keep him close to first, but unless he gets greedy with his lead, I’m not throwing over there. There’s no need to let him distract me, especially with Grabowski behind the plate and his cannon of an arm. He’ll give me a signal if he thinks the kid is taking too big a lead.
Charlie Gehringer is next. He’s another youngster with a sweet swing. We played together in the minors in Toronto in ’25 and as a 22-year-old he was already the best hitter on the team. His bat is quick, and he knows my stuff, so I won’t be able to throw many pitches by him. But he can still be fooled. I throw him a fastball low and away. He doesn’t bite. Ball one.
Except for the one mistake to Whitehill, everything has been down low and with speed. My next pitch to Gehringer is a curveball with some bite, which he delivers on a slow arc into Combs’s glove in right center.
My next victim is Al Wingo, another former teammate of mine in Toronto. Finally, Johnny Bassler, the Tiger catcher that Huggins had me walk when I first relieved Cy. He flies out to Ruth in right field to end the game.
It’s over.
Three appearances in in eight days. Three wins.
I’m starting to feel like a real part of this team.
- Bill Carrigan
- Eddie Cicotte
- Eddie Collins
- Bernie DeViveiros
- Charlie Gehringer
- Shoeless Joe Jackson
- Harry Heilmann
- George Moriarty
- HERB Pennock
- BABE Ruth
- George Uhle
- Buck Weaver
- Earl Whitehill
- Al Wingo
- 1927 Yankees
- May 20, 1927: “Uhle Downs Hoyt in Pitching Duel”. New York Times article and Box Score.
- June 5, 1927: “Ruth’s Two Blows Upset Tigers, 5–3”. New York Times article and Box Score.
“A Walk Through Central Park, A Shoe Shine, and the Man Who Fixed the World Series.”
Myles begins his rare off-day in a uniquely New York fashion, by visiting his favorite elephant at the Central Park Zoo. Heading South, he meets up with his friend Steven on Wall Street, where he gets an impromptu lesson in true American entrepreneurship at a shoe shine stand. Unexpectedly, Myles finishes his afternoon by dining with the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.
At least half a dozen of our “off” days are spent playing even more games, exhibitions around the country against a variety of semi-pro clubs, with another half dozen spent on trains, rolling from stadium to stadium.
In the end — after exhibitions, travel days, rainouts and make-up games — over six months we’ll get six days off, if we’re lucky.
Yup, it’s a long season.
