World Series Game 2. “We Want Cuyler!”
Thursday, October 6, 1927: Pittsburgh
Graham McNamee has done it again.
Yesterday, almost exactly two weeks after he screwed up the broadcast of the Dempsey-Tunney championship fight by completely missing the “Long Count” — having no idea that he was witnessing the most controversial moment in the history of sports! — McNamee brought his unique brand of incompetence to the first-ever national broadcast of a World Series game.
“Bet you didn’t know you boys beat the Giants yesterday,” Gallico says as I join him in the hotel dining room for breakfast this morning.
“What are you talking about?”
“McNamee in his radio call told millions of Americans yesterday that the Yankees were playing the Giants.”
“Come on!”
“It’s true. We had two radios on, up in the press box, and we heard it all. He also repeatedly referred to a Yankee shortstop named, ‘Gehrig.’”
“Good thing Mama Gehrig’s already in the hospital,” I say, “or that would have put her there.”
“And,” says Gallico, “since Gehrig was playing short, Koenig, naturally, was playing first.”
“Who’s on second?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dugan?”
“No, he’s on third,” Gallico says. “McNamee got that one right. But it got so bad that half the press box was howling for the radio to be turned off, while the other half was hollering to turn it up louder.”
“Which were you advocating?” I ask him.
“Both.”
“In the fifth,” Gallico tells me, “when Schoolboy struck out Kremer to start off the inning, McNamee got all excited and said, ‘Boy, Hoyt’s fastball just got over the plate on time.’ At that point Vidmer stood up and screamed, ‘I can’t take it anymore! I want to commit a double Van Gogh!”
“What does that even mean?”
“You know, Van Gogh? The painter? He cut off his ear.”
“Right.”
Gallico, a Columbia man, tries to size me up.
“You do know who Vincent Van Gogh was, right?”
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound as offended as I possibly can. “I went to Penn State.”
“Does that mean you know who Van Gogh was, or not?”
“Both.”
After breakfast, Gallico and I are heading back to our rooms in the Roosevelt Hotel when we see Schoolboy and Joe Dugan charging up to the front desk.
“We’ve been robbed!” shouts Jumpin’ Joe.
The Roosevelt just opened this week and not all the construction is complete. Unbelievably, none of the doors on our floor had locks in them yet. Benny and I secured our room by jimmying a desk chair under the doorknob, so the door couldn’t be slid open, but apparently Schoolboy and Dugan didn’t take similar precautions.
“How much did you get hit for?” I ask Schoolboy.
“Three hundred bucks.”
“How about Dugan?”
“Eighty. Plus some other stuff that was in his wallet.”
“It wasn’t just stuff!” shouts Jumpin’ Joe. “They stole my goddamn Elks Club membership card!”
Last month the Yankees held “Joe Dugan Day,” and among the gifts presented to Jumpin’ Joe was a lifetime membership in the Elks Club.
“Sorry about that, Joe,” I say. “But that should make it easy to solve the crime.”
“Yeah, how’s that?” he asks.
“They can just send the cops to the local Elks Club. The thief is bound to show up there sooner or later, right? After all, everyone wants to go to the Elks club.”
Jumpin Joe just stares at me and says, “You really are a fucking communist, aren’t you?”
At 9:15 a dozen players, the coaches and Doc Woods board the early team bus, and head up the hill to Forbes Field.
As we make our way to the ballpark, we travel along the Monongahela River and past the source of Andrew Carnegie’s great wealth, the steel mills that line the waterway.
Steel — the backbone of the American colossus — is forged by Pittsburgh muscle working brutal 12-hour shifts, in temperatures that rise above 130 degrees. The mills operate around the clock, nonstop, 365 days a year, belching smoke from the West Virginia coal that fuels their ovens.
They turn day into night.
Our bus takes a left hand turn on Second Avenue, and as we roll through the Hill District toward Forbes Field, we quickly rise above the smoke.
Most of the ballparks in the majors are built inside their cities — the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, Fenway, Shibe Park, Wrigley — having sprouted up in neighborhoods where their fans lived. But when Barney Dreyfuss built Forbes Field 20 years ago, he planted his ballpark in the clear air of Oakland, out near the Carnegie Institute and away from the darkness of the mills.
High above the black clouds of Pittsburgh, Forbes Field is a slice of heaven. Standing at home plate and looking out toward left field, you can see the giant oak trees on the hills, and the monumental Carnegie Library behind them.
It’s funny, Dreyfuss is a Jew, but Forbes Field has almost no traces of commerce. There aren’t even advertisements on the outfield walls.
A t batting practice today, Gehrig slams three balls in a row into the upper deck of the right field grandstands. The stadium is nearly empty, so we can hear each shot bang off the seats.
“Sounds like shelling from a battleship,” says Sailor Bob, who served on just such a boat during the Great War.
“And those guys look shell shocked,” I say, pointing over to a group of the Pirates who’ve come out to watch the Babe take batting practice.
“If I was managing that club,” says Sailor, “I wouldn’t even let them into the stadium until Lou and Jidge were done with batting practice. I’m serious.”
“Wow, look at that,” I say, pointing over to the Waner boys, who are both shaking their head in disbelief at the display of batting power by Gehrig and Ruth.
“Those two kids have the wrong nicknames,” says Schoolboy.
“What do you mean?”
“Big Poison and Little Poison? It’s dumb. Neither one of ’em is big. Jesus, if you put ’em together they’d barely weigh as much as Ruth does in the offseason.”
I turn to Gallico. “You’re the wordsmith, what would you have named them?”
“Little Poison, and Slightly Bigger Poison,” he says with a smile.
“Little Poison, and Little-er Poison,” scoffs Hoyt.
A couple of the newspapers the other day made a big deal after our first batting practice, about how the Pirates were intimidated by Ruth and Gehrig.
I didn’t see any evidence of it when I was out on the field, and none of the guys were talking about it afterwards, so I thought it was all a bunch of bullshit the papers had made up. Sportswriters make up crap every day, especially quotes. They put all sorts of words in our mouths, while they try and make themselves sound like O. Henry. Even the good ones do it.
There are two exceptions to this art of fiction. One is Frank Graham of the New York Sun, who often sits in our dugout before a game listening to our banter, and then writes a column that’s an accurate transcript of what we’ve said. This week Graham wrote another gem. Nothing that we said would ever make the front page, but Graham’s column captures the moment as well as any photograph ever could. I’ve pasted his most recent account below.
The other exception is Gallico. If he ever leaves the press box, he actually could become the next O. Henry.
Sometimes sportswriters manufacture our quotes because, well, no newspaper could ever print some of the stuff we actually say. For example, Monday at the hotel, a Pirate fan challenged the Babe, shouting out to him, “Hey, Ruth! You ain’t hitting no homers off of our boys! Get ready for some National League pitching!”
The New York Times reported that the fan received a reply from Little Eddie Bennett, who was with the Babe. According to the Times, Little Eddie hollered back, “Come out to the ball park, and the Babe will show you a sample of what he’s going to do in the Series.”
Now, it’s true that Eddie was with the Babe, but it was actually Ruth who replied to the fan — and his rejoinder was much shorter than the Times reported.
“Fuck you! And fuck the National League!” is what he shouted.
Followed by a loud and friendly laugh that cracked everyone up, including the Pirate fan — who’s now a big fan of the Babe. He even had his picture taken with Jidge.
So, considering the editorial practices of your average sportswriter, I didn’t give much credence to the newspaper accounts of the Pirates being intimidated after our batting practice — and Pittsburgh certainly didn’t appear to be intimidated by us yesterday.
But today was a different story.
Pipgras starts the game for us.
Before the series Shocker was penciled in to start Game 2, but Huggins had some sort of a hunch while watching the Pirates in Game 1. Yesterday, while Pittsburgh was batting in the seventh inning, he motioned for Pipgras to sit next to him, and told George that he would be starting the game, and that Shocker would be the first guy out of the pen.
Lloyd Waner leads off the game for the Pirates, and Pipgras feeds him nothing but fastballs.
Little Poison, a lefty, slices the fourth one down the third base line. Silent Bob sprints after it — no one can accuse him of loping on this one — but he has trouble digging it out of the corner, and Waner’s in with a triple.
The next batter hits a deep fly ball to Ruth in right, and Waner comes sprinting home on the sacrifice fly.
Pipgras strikes out Big Poison on three pitches, and then gets gets Glenn Wright to fly out to Ruth.
In the top of the third, we score three runs on four base hits, helped by a Lloyd Waner error in center field. Just like his big brother did yesterday, Little-er Poison misplays the ball, which rolls past him. This time it’s off the bat of Koenig, who ends up on on third, while Earle Combs scores in front of him, to tie up the game, 1–1.
Ruth follows with a sacrifice fly to deep center field. Then Gehrig crushes a ball to right-center for a double. Meusel, up next, hits the ball hard — the Pirates shortstop, Glenn Wright, is playing him deep and gets to it, but has no chance to make a play; Silent Bob is just too fast. Then the W*p hits one close to the warning track for another sacrifice fly. We lead 3–1.
No home runs. But Murderers’ Row has made its point.
In the eighth, the Pirates fall apart in a way that makes it clear to us that they don’t think they can win the Series.
Silent Bob leads off with a single to center, and Lazzeri follows with a flare to right. Meusel shows his smarts and speed by sprinting all the way to third on the W*p’s bloop single. Most telling is the fact that Paul Waner is late on the ball and not at all aggressive with his throw. It’s a play that reeks of lack of confidence.
The Pirates’ starting pitcher, Vic Aldridge, who has thrown a ton of pitches at this point, now throws a wild one that allows Silent Bob to score and the W*p to advance to second.
The Pirates are unraveling.
Then Aldridge loads the bases by walking the eighth and ninth hitters, and is replaced on the mound by Mike Cvengros — who immediately proceeds to hit Earle Combs, forcing in another run. The Pittsburgh players now all have slumped shoulders.
Koenig follows with a single to score the third run of the inning.
The Pittsburgh fans are silent.
As Pittsburgh takes its turn at bat, their fans begin to come alive. Their chant starts softly, but soon their voices are ringing throughout the stadium.
“We want Ky-Ler!”
“We want Ky-Ler!”
Kiki Cuyler was runner-up MVP in the National League last season. He was having another swell season this summer, until the Pirates’ rookie manager, Donie Bush, became enraged after Cuyler overthrew the cutoff man (yet again). Cuyler’s response was to dare Bush to bench him, and Bush took him up on the offer. That was two months ago.
It’s impossible to imagine Huggins pulling such a petty stunt. When Hugg suspended Ruth in 1925, the Babe’s offenses were far graver than habitually missing the cutoff man. By not playing Cuyler, Bush has meted out a death sentence for jaywalking. And now it’s killing the Pirates.
The fans down the leftfield lines have banners proclaiming, “We Want Cuyler,” and now they’re chanting “We want Ky-Ler!” louder than they sang the Star Spangled Banner before the game.
Yesterday the fans were hollering for Bush to put in Cuyler during a pinch hitting situation. Bush ignored them then, and today he’s playing deaf again. It appears Cuyler — one of the best players in baseball — will spend the entire Series glued to the bench.
The Pirates score one run in the eighth, but that’s it.
When we checked out of the hotel this morning, the manager behind the front desk, who was wearing a Pirates button, said to me, “Have a safe trip back to New York. Hope to see you next year.”
No one in this town thinks we’ll be coming back to Pittsburgh for another game.
(Here’s that Frank Graham account.)
- Kiki Cuyler
- Barney Dreyfuss
- JOE Dugan
- Paul Gallico
- Frank Graham
- WAITE Hoyt
- Graham McNamee
- BABE Ruth
- SAILOR BOB Shawkey
- Lloyd Waner
- Paul Waner
- 1927 Yankees
- “Crime Wave Hits Infuriated Yankees”. October 7, 1927. New York Times.
- “FROM THE PRESS BOX: ‘PIRATE TALK’”
- “THE LONG COUNT”
- “M’Namee’s Eye Not On The Ball”. October 6, 1927. The New York Sun.
- “Yankees Win Again As Youthful Pipgras Baffles Pirates, 6–2.” October 7, 1927. New York Times.
- Game 2 Box Score.
