Monday, August 15, 1927: Chicago
“You Can Say That Again, Hamlet.”
We’re on the train from Washington to Chicago.
It’s the third leg of our longest trip of the year, one day shy of a month. We’ll be on the road from August 9 until September 8 — almost as long as it took for Sherman to march from Atlanta to the sea — and along the way we’ll travel almost 4,000 miles and play 26 games and three exhibitions.
What’s most amazing is that whoever schedules the American League has managed to give us a road game in our own town:
Near the end of our trip we come home for two days, we barely get off the train, and then we’re right back on for a week in Philly and Boston.
Thanks to Bix, I’ve taken to sneaking out and riding on top of the train, especially when we’re rolling late at night.
I’ve done it on all three legs of our trip so far — New York to Philadelphia, Philly to D.C. and now D.C. to Chicago — I climb up and take off my shoes, so I won’t make any noise and then tiptoe to the center of the roof of the car like a cat burglar. There I find myself sitting for hours, thinking about life, my career (or what’s left of it), Stanwyck — or just letting my mind go blank.
If Huggins or any of the other players finds out, I’m sure they’ll immediately buy me a ticket for the next train to Bellevue. That’s why the only one who knows about my rooftop excursions is Benny. I figured I needed to tell my roomie, just in case someone came looking for me. So, as we were heading down to Washington, I took him outside between the last two cars and showed him my ladder.
“Rooms, you’re kidding me, right?”
“No, Rooms,” I replied, “if you need me, I’ll be up there.”
“What if someone misses you?”
“Let’s say Huggins wants to talk to me and no one can find me,” I tell him, “That’s when I need you to say you’ll go look for me, and then come out alone to this ladder.
“Anyway, nothing’s going to happen. Huggins hasn’t been looking for me on the field, I don’t think he’s he’s suddenly going to look for me on the train.”
The 1927 New York Yankees — the team the press and even a couple of opposing managers have been calling the greatest team of all time since mid-July — have hit our first rough patch of the season.
We’ve been playing decidedly mediocre ball for the past two and a half weeks — 8–7 in our last 15 games. According to Ford Frick, the press box professor of statistics, the Babe is only batting .241 with two home runs during that span. So much for Ruth breaking his own home run record of 59 this season — that’s clearly out of the question now.
What’s also become clear is no matter how great the other players on the team may be — Combs is batting .349, Meusel .346, Lazzeri .307, and Gehrig is hitting .383 with 132 RBIs and 38 home runs (two more than the Babe with 42 games still to go) — the formula is still the same:
As goes Ruth, so go the Yankees.
So we stumble into Washington having lost five of our last eight. But in D.C. we take three of four games from the Senators. Thanks in no small part to Pants Rowland.
Pants is unanimously regarded by players, coaches and management around the American League as a great guy — and the single worst umpire in the game. Maybe the worst the game has ever seen.
Prior to becoming an ump, Pants was a manager, and a very, very good one. In 1915 he was managing in the minors when Charles Comiskey hired him, only because Pants was cheaper to hire than anyone else around. The next two seasons Rowland and Chicago won 93 and 89 games, finishing third and second. Then in 1917 Pants and his White Sox took the pennant, winning 100 games — and a World Series title, beating John McGraw’s Giants, four games to two.
Midway through the next season, with his club playing below .500, Pants quit.
I can’t think of another manager who has won a World Series and then either quit or was fired the following year. It was a strange turn of events, to say the least.
Jack Quinn, a pitcher on that 1918 White Sox team that Pants quit, told Schoolboy and Sailor Bob that he believed Pants quit that White Sox team in midseason because he had a feeling the ChiSox were throwing ball games — and this was back in ’18, a year before the Black Sox threw the World Series to the Reds. That’s something they never mention in the papers when they write about Pants.
After he left Chicago, Pants went back to managing in the minors, and then in ’23, completely out of the blue, he started wearing the blue — with no prior experience.
“He was the worst umpire in the league right from the start,” says Schoolboy, “and every year he’s gotten worse.”
Schoolboy was on the mound for us when Pants was behind the plate in the first game of last week’s series against the Senators. It took Pants less than three innings to put his mark on the game.
In the bottom of the third, Pants calls Bucky Harris, Washington’s player-manager, out on a third strike. Harris, who has a great eye, is sure the pitch was both high and outside — very high and very outside — and he goes ballistic.
“Was it a strike?” I ask Schoolboy as soon as he comes off the mound and gets back to the dugout.
“Absolutely,” he says, “if Bucky were seven feet tall, and the plate was three feet wide.”
The Senators are in second place, 11 games behind us, but Bucky acts like they’re half-a-game-out nuts. Then he bumps Pants, which of course gets him tossed from the game.
Bucky takes his sweet time leaving the field. And the fans are going insane — the Washington fans hate the Yankees as much as any fans in the league — and suddenly it’s Bastille Day in Griffith Stadium. The mob starts raining the field with hot dogs and sodas. Someone even flings a briefcase at Pants.
“Christ!” shouts Benny, “I swear I just saw a fan buy a couple of hot dogs just so he could throw them at Pants!”
It’s a great day to be a hot dog vendor in Griffith Stadium.
The next inning, Bucky sneaks back into Washington’s dugout — get this — disguised as a fan. He slinks in wearing a suit and a straw hat, and he stays in the shadows, standing just inside the tunnel that goes between their dugout and locker room. We all see it.
“Doesn’t Huggins see Harris, under the hat?” I ask Sailor Bob. “He must, right? Why isn’t he complaining to the umps?”
“He sees him,” says Sailor Bob. “But for whatever reason he’s not going to make a federal case out of it.”
“It seems to me,” says Schoolboy, “that Washington, D.C. is exactly the place to make a federal case. Even over a food fight like this.”
We lead the disguised Senators 4–3 going into the bottom of the ninth. Then, with one out, their third baseman, Ossie Bluege gets hit by the first pitch — or so he thinks. He starts trotting down to first, only to be called back by Pants, who says no, Bluege wasn’t hit, and he has to get back in the batter’s box.
Normally, this is exactly the time a manager would come storming out of the dugout to argue a bad call and defend his player, but of course Bucky Harris can’t do it, because even though he’s in the dugout, he’s incognito — and, were he to be found out, he’d probably get suspended, if he isn’t already for bumping Pants.
So Bluege just gets back into the box, and grounds out. And once again it starts raining soda and dogs.
And then the fans start coming over the railings.
The cops grab a couple and haul them off, and the place quiets down enough for Wilcy Moore, who’s relieved Schoolboy, to get one last groundout to end the game.
Pants is ushered under the stands, but a mob of fans gathers outside the stadium, and Pants has to wait for the cops to escort him out of the ballpark.
“I think Pants just changed his name,” Schoolboy says, as we sit in the team bus watching what’s going on from a safe distance.
“To what?” I ask.
“To Shitting In His Pants.”
Three days later, Pants gets his revenge. Once again behind the plate, he calls 10 walks on the Washington pitchers, to help us win 6–3.
Benny is catching for us, and he keeps coming back to the dugout between innings shaking his head at the audacity of Pants.
Later, back at the hotel, he still can’t get over it.
“Think about that, Rooms,” he says laughing. “Good ole Pants gave us 10 free base runners today.”
“You know what I’m thinking about, Rooms?”
“What?”
“Where was Pants when I needed him?”
Late at night on top of the train, I just lie back and stare at the stars.
Tonight I try and pick out the constellations that Schoolboy made up, back in St. Louis: the baseball bat, the Hornsby, and the McGraw. But I can’t see any of them.
Jesus, I’m not sure I can even find the Big Dipper any more. I’ve pretty much lost my compass.
It’s the darkness I’m seeing now, more than any starlight. I can actually feel the blackness. It’s weighing on me. Even here on top of the train, underneath the supreme canopy, it feels like everything is closing in around me.
My high school teacher, Mr. Banton, used to make us read plays aloud in class. We would all take turns — two or three of us reading our parts for a few minutes, and then he’d have us pass our textbooks along to the kid sitting next to us. That way after a couple of classes everyone had a chance to play a role.
But Mr. Banton was a ham, so there were some passages he would keep for himself. Second generation Irish, he would practically sing the soliloquies.
Riding on the train, I stop searching the sky. I close my eyes and hear my old teacher’s voice.
This most excellent canopy, the air — look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
The train slowly rolls on.
It appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
Goddamn, I would have loved to have seen the Yankees’ head scout, Paul Krichell’s scouting report on Hamlet:
Great arm. Great velocity. Excellent movement on his fastball, and his curve.
But thinks too much. Indecisive on the mound.
It was Krichell who wrote the reports on Gehrig, after he discovered Lou playing ball up at Columbia before anyone else noticed him, and on Lazzeri, who Krichell saw play in Salt Lake City.
I wonder what Ed Barrow would have done if Krichell, upon seeing Gehrig, had simply written Barrow a note saying:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.
That describes Lou.
And Lazzeri.
And Combs.
And Meusel.
And Schoolboy and Pennock.
And most of all Ruth.
The paragon of animals.
And then I remember the next line.
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither.
You can say that again, Hamlet.
“You can say what again?”
It’s Benny. The first thing that comes out of my mouth is:
“Did you take off your goddamn shoes?”
“Yes, I took off my shoes,” he says with a smile.
Now I’m feeling guilty for not having faith in Benny. It’s much worse than not having faith in myself.
“You’ve been up here quite a while,” he says.
“How long?”
“Hours. You ready to come down?”
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I just need some more time.”
“Did you get him?” I hear another voice ask.
It’s Gehrig.
“Don’t worry,” says Benny. “He took his shoes off.”
“What’s going on, Myles?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Lou, the worst thing that’s ever happened to you on the diamond was cured by a jar of pickled eels. I don’t think you can understand what I’m going through.”
“So you can’t pitch. So what?” he says.
“Who can’t pitch?” another voice asks.
It’s Hoyt.
“Don’t worry,” says Benny with a smile. “No shoes.”
While I appreciate everyone’s concern, I’m getting a little ticked off that instead of riding alone on top of the train, it now feels like I’m riding in an elevator at Macy’s.
By the time Sailor Bob, Lazzeri and Huggins make it up top, I’ve lost count of how many we are.
Then I hear Ruth playing his sax. It doesn’t sound nearly as good as it did when he was playing with Bix. It sounds like a train whistle.
Goddamn! It is a train whistle! We’re pulling into Union Station and I’m still on top of the goddamn train.
I wipe my tears and climb back down to my berth.
Maybe I do need that ticket to Bellevue.
- BENNY Bengough
- Ossie Bluege
- LOU Gehrig
- Bucky Harris
- WAITE Hoyt
- Paul Krichell
- Jack Onslow
- Pants Rowland
- Jack Quinn
- 1927 Yankees
- August 10, 1927: “Ruth’s №36 Wins; Police Called Out”. New York Times article and Box Score.
- August 13, 1927: “Yanks Go Walking And Trim Senators”. New York Times article and Box Score.
