Infinite Inning 368: Baseball, War, and the Day the $100,000 Infield Buried a Child

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I don't know how much overlap there is between the listenership of this show and my readership

at baseball, prospectus, my terms at BP, bookend, the birth of this program.

So I believe I have listeners who go back before that and I probably have a bunch who

joined me since I returned.

But because I'm unsure of that and BP is paywalled and the show is not, I'm never sure

how many people I might be repeating myself to if I go into too much detail here about

something I said there or wrote there or vice versa.

Normally I try to keep them very distinct anyway because everyone involved has the right

to expect original material.

As an editor, I've worked with people who seem to be selling the same article to more

than one publication at the same time, which is not good, or I once worked with someone

who's articles seem to be rather than independent things, just signposts pointing to their

independent productions.

And I don't want to ever be guilty of any of that or for anyone to even have a thought

about accusing me of that.

So I'm pretty scrupulous, but I do think it's fair game when appropriate to take some

similar material thoughts that I might have had subsequent to writing about something

or talking about it here and expanding on it in one or the other place because as I've

said before, sometimes a story is more appropriate, more suited to BP's pages rather than infinite

inning sound waves and sometimes it's the other way around.

It's not just a feel thing, but it's also a question of time because some stories, as you

know from listening to this show, this often long show, need to be delicately unpacked and

then spread out all over the bed before you put them away in the drawers, whereas others

can be told in a concise thousand or 1500 word space.

So what would be an enjoyable listen here would try your patience there.

I hadn't intended to go into that much detail, but here we are.

And the reason is that this week at baseball perspectives, this is a part I normally tell

you later.

Well, I'm telling you now, I was struck by the incongruity of opening day during wartime.

As you know, the baseball schedule is slowly unscrewing.

As I speak to you, some of the first games are still happening or are about to conclude

as I do this recording.

Some teams are on their second game and some teams are on their first.

As you well know, the nation is at war and it seemed odd to me wrong in a sense that

we're having what is a joyous thing at the same time as so much danger and risk to so

many people, not all of them Americans, but certainly some of them.

And what I wanted to do was see what that looked like in 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945.

So I simply juxtaposed some of the things that happened in baseball on those days and

what was going on on the various battlefields at the time, what people were saying, both

in the game and outside of it.

Now because of the aforementioned limitation of space that I mentioned before, I should

say I barely scratched the surface of what was going on in the outside world or indeed

in baseball.

Most of those days, 16 teams were at play in eight different games.

There were two exceptions.

One of them was simply that the Cleveland at Chicago game was postponed due to wintry

conditions.

In 1943, for reasons that weren't important for me to figure out, but I might guess it

had something to do with wartime travel restrictions.

Baseball staged something similar to this year's Netflix stunt one game and it happened

to be the athletics and the senators to clubs that hadn't been terribly relevant for a while.

That was 1943 and that gave me the opportunity to talk about some key players from those teams

who missed time due to the war.

Now again, with more time, more space and if I were writing a book, I would have done

that for every team.

I could have talked about say young St. Louis Cardinals ace Johnny Beasley, who won 21 games

in 1942 with a very low ERA and then was never good again because he hurt his arm pitching

in the service, possibly even in an exhibition game against the Cardinals.

Now then again, it's odd talking about pictures in that context because it might have happened

to him at any time to any pitcher at any time and it generally did or does even today.

What's more acute are position players, players like senators, shortstop and third baseman

Cecil Travis, who came up at 19 and 1933 and he had his last pre-service season in 1941,

not every player left as soon as Pearl Harbor happened to that point in his career.

He had hit 327 with a 381 on base percentage and a 436 slugging percentage, excellent

of course for a shortstop and he had just led the American League with 218 hits.

You know that 1941 was Joe Dimaggio's big hitting streak, Cecil Travis had more hits

than Jolton Joe.

Then he not only missed three years, but he was one of those baseball players who actually

fought in combat in the direct aftermath of the battle of the bulge.

You will recall that that happened in deep winter.

He suffered frostbite on two toes and either because of that or simply because he had just

spent too much time away and his skills atrophied.

He couldn't get it going again in his career and it quickly.

Then there's his teammate, Buddy Lewis, who flew air transport and supply in the Burma

theater.

An outfielder and third baseman, Lewis was only 24 years old when he left, but he'd been

up for a while.

So in six seasons as a regular, before the war happened, he had scored over 100 runs

four times.

While hitting 304 with a 372 on base percentage and a 432 slugging percentage and before

you think those power numbers are low, you have to keep in mind that he played in one

of the toughest hitters parks in baseball.

His home road split in that pre-war period when it came to home runs 39 on the road 14

at home.

And not saying he would have been a 40 homer guy or even a 30 homer guy in a neutral environment,

but the padding average would have been about the same as it was on the road, but he probably

would have had fewer doubles, fewer triples and several more balls pass over the fences.

He had 1112 hits at 24 and you don't have to be a savant to realize that he had his

career not been interrupted would have piled up assuming health, which we can assume.

But all things being equal at the rate he was knocking him out beforehand, he's probably

missing for the three and a half seasons that he spent in the service about 600 hits.

And all else being equal before we talk about anything else that happened to him subsequently,

that would have put him at about 2100 hits for his career.

He also would have sailed past 1000 runs scored and for all I know at some point, Clark

Griffith might have gotten tired of paying him and traded him to the Yankees Red Sox or

someone where he would have put up even larger numbers.

He returned midway through his age 28 season and he could still hit.

He still could play.

He hit quite well in his first season and a half back, but then injuries set in and he

also as he later admitted, kind of lost his motivation being in a war affects people

emotionally.

That's a very obvious thing for me to say.

It can be hard to get up for even the privilege of playing a kids game for a living if you've

been through the kinds of things that these men went through.

In short, order his career fell off and wrapped up.

Now we can't know again what would have happened had Travis and Lewis stayed or Beasley or Ted

Williams had stayed, but they might have been players while Ted Williams still is.

But the rest who would have become if not Hall of Famers, then at least remembered among

the leading stars of their day, instead of subjects for obscurantists like me to bring

up to you.

And you might say, well, yeah, that's, that's sad.

That's somewhat tragic, but it was a just war, a necessary war, remember Pearl Harbor

and all that.

And I agree, especially agree when it comes to the United States of America being attacked.

It's worth remembering by the by that the bit about war crimes and crimes against humanity,

the Holocaust by Nazi Germany.

No one was aware of that, at least for the most part in public America in December of 1941

or prior to that.

A lot of it hadn't happened yet.

And even where there already had been mass killings, the public didn't know.

What they did know, and this was good enough, was that Japan, Germany and Italy had expansion

on their minds, conquering a very different way of life from the one that was traditionally

historically, politically exercised in the United States and the other democracies.

And they didn't care who they had to kill to do what they wanted to do.

Further, they were already killing Americans, whether it's sinking our ships in the Atlantic

or just attacking outright as it parole, as in the Philippines and other places beginning

that December.

My greater point though, is that whatever the justification, the loss of time is a loss

especially to an athlete.

In the grand scheme of things, that's trivial.

The baseball part is trivial.

What isn't is the disruption, the deflection and sometimes the outright termination of

plans, goals, relationships, lives, and in war, that is suffered by everyone.

It's a taking regardless of how unavoidable it is, how required it is.

It is still a loss.

Last week, I was reading of all things, Dune Messiah, the first sequel to Dune.

Parentatically, I am out as of that book.

I just wanted to conclude the story of the main character of the first two books and now

I'm done.

I don't need to know more.

And should I choose to see the third movie I'm prepared?

I have my doubts about that, but I imagine I will at some point.

The author Frank Herbert has his leading man remark that since our time is not fungible,

that replaceable, that the difference between taking someone's time and hour of their

life and taking their life altogether are crimes that differ only in degree or extent.

In both cases, the perpetrator is winding your clock closer to the end in a way that

you are powerless to recover, and that's war.

Even if it doesn't kill one, even if one doesn't serve, I mean, think of all the parents

who largely didn't see their sons or in some cases daughters for a year or three or

more.

This is something that is very acute for me as a parent myself to imagine experiencing

that.

And again, put aside the rightness of the cause or even the evil of it on the other side

and just know it's the fate of most of us to be toys in the hands of so-called great

men.

That's the theme by the way of Dune Messiah.

Great men suck, meaning Timothy Chalamet, not the actor, but the character.

In Buddy Lewis's War, Hitler, Mussolini Tojo, Hirahedo, Roosevelt, Chamberlain Churchill,

and dozens of people around them decided for us that this was what we were going to do.

This was the game we were going to play.

They weren't.

They were in charge.

They weren't going into the line.

Ordinary people all over the world were going to do that, and even those who weren't

in that group were going to have their lives disrupted or destroyed.

Just one small corner of that war that I often think about, preliminary to our brave heroic

invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

The Allies returned to Europe, don't forget, only the Russians were fighting the Germans

on the continent to that point, preliminary to that invasion.

We killed a whole lot of French civilians with our bombings, which were meant to soften

up German forces in the region and destroy transportation systems, and we did that on

the theory.

It was said then, as it is said today, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few

eggs, the eggs being human beings, and that's the value of life once we get this particular

game off the shelf.

And so it was a very small thing for ordinary people, like Buddy Lewis, to have a giant hand

reach down out of the sky infisibly, pluck them off the baseball diamond, and drop them

in a plane going over the Himalayas.

I feel like very few of us around today have had the experience of being little kids and

someone saying to you, and what do you want to do when you grow up, Johnny, and we reply,

I want to be a fireman.

I want to be a police officer.

I want to write comic books.

I want to write Batman, and we start taking our tuddling steps towards those destinies

or whichever ones we come up with once we're a little further down the line.

I want to be an anesthesiologist, but suddenly the king, the president, the prime minister,

somebody just says, nah, you're going to take a few years away.

And you know how in that great song, take me out to the ballgame.

We all saying, I don't care if I never get back, well, you might not get back.

Life is what happens while we're busy making other plans, haha.

Thank you for those words of wisdom, Mr. President.

I'm sure we're all very grateful and enlightened.

And remember not every leader was cavalier with the buddy, Lewis's of their particular

sphere.

If German tanks rolled across their borders, they were at war, whether they liked it

or not.

And the choice was existential and the game was fixed because either you were going

to fight and die or you were going to surrender and die.

Wars of choice.

Of which there have been many in the history of most countries, including all too frequently,

the good old USA are a very different matter for the leaders, it's a game of civilization.

But for us, it's about the smallest, most insignificant one of us whose life is altered

by the decision to go forward.

And then as part of that, just a little side part of it, a Cecil Travis gets frostbite

on his toes and doesn't get to take a run at 3,000 hits or Joe Demagio doesn't get

to rewrite some large portion of the record books or in another part of the ledger, 100,000

GIs get dear John letters and they're romantic and even genetic destinies are irrevocably altered.

Yeah, they're 4F so-called best friend Scott made time with Mary Sue while they were

gone.

And Mary Sue, she wasn't true, she went for that bastard Scott's line.

Now Scott and Mary Sue are having kids that would have been dear John's, all because

that oily Scott was a disloyal bird dog, Mary Sue was lonely and therefore weak and

a fascist is just a serial killer with a uniform and the kids will never know, but all

of the rest of them, Cecil, Buddy, Joe D, Scott, Mary Sue, dear John and Rose and Rose

of Headstones have moved, forever, whatever plans they had made their destinies had been

irrevocably reassigned to the infinite inning.

Well, hello there and welcome back to the show.

This is the infinite inning and you are listening to episode number 368 in an ongoing series.

Don't worry, there isn't the kind of continuity where you won't know who the characters are.

The characters are, for the most part, historical ball players and sometimes current ones and

sometimes other historical figures.

As I always say at this time, I am your host Stephen Goldman, I don't know how convivial

I'm feeling.

I'm feeling convivial towards you, but it is a difficult time for us to take our usual

trip to the past on a mission to better understand the present and oh boy, do we need to understand

the present?

The time machine as ever is the game of baseball, but what is there to say at times like this

that baseball can reflect on we haven't been in this exact spot before a couple of hours

ago as I speak these words, the United States suffered more casualties and Iranian missile

and drone strike on the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia injured 12 American troops

two of them seriously.

My heart goes out to them and their families and they have my my urgent wishes and hopes

for them to recover and be able to resume their lives without pain.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about before the overtures started.

We have an all-volunteer military at this point in our history, so to some extent those

12 people chose to be there.

I don't know if they chose to be assigned to the Prince Sultan airbase at a time of war,

but they did undertake the risk of signing up and fair enough, but that doesn't mean

that their lives or their health or their well-being should be spent lightly.

And now they are, as the reports say, at least two of them seriously hurt and of course,

as you know from your own life, any injury is painful.

It could be a broken arm which you would not call serious, but it's serious in the context

of your existence and your own suffering, a cut finger could be serious in the context

of your own life and your own suffering.

As you well know, I traded the vision of one eye to be able to survive cancer.

Is that serious?

I don't know, but I do know it affects me every single day of my life even though that

was the obvious correct move to make.

But if someone had said to me, you're going to lose it just because you happen to be in

the wrong place at the wrong time or because someone made a decision, a not terribly well-supported

or well-researched decision to put that eye in harm's way, not to mention the rest of

you, I would feel very differently about it.

Those twelve, as you know, are not the first.

The first Americans to suffer in this war and there are, of course, thousands of others

throughout the theater of, well, the Middle East as a whole who have been hurt or killed

since this started almost a month ago.

I don't know how it's going to end.

I just know that there's going to be more given the constraints that we're in to make

far too light an analogy.

There's a scene at the end of the movie Animal House in which one of the denigrated fraternity

members played if I recall correctly by one of the guys who actually wrote the movie.

He leads an entire marching band down a blind alley and they all kind of impact and pile

up on the back wall.

That's pretty much where our war policy such as it is has gotten us.

I find myself thinking about something that I failed to do during that first run at

baseball prospectus that I mentioned earlier.

This is even before I was editor in chief, but I was editor of the annual book as I was

for eight or nine years.

At that time, our last Middle Eastern adventure was in full bloom.

We had soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan and because the military had not adequately

been prepared for the mission, there were a number of severe casualties.

Some constantly heard, for example, that our military transports, I'm talking about

trucks, were not sufficiently armored to withstand a attack or explosive devices that might

have been embedded in the roads.

At that time, we undertook an annual tour to support the book and Washington was always

a big stop on that trip.

In fact, it was the best stop because the wonderful bookstore politics and prose is there.

And well, not only would I speak, but I would buy stuff from the remainder section.

We always got our largest crowds there.

They do a fantastic job.

So I knew I would be going there and we also had some BP team members who lived either

in Washington or in the vicinity.

So it was easy to gather a large number of people for the event.

And I got it into my head with the war on that we should go to Walter Reed hospital and

try to cheer some veterans, give out some books, talk about the upcoming baseball season,

casually do what we could.

I said to publicists at two different publishers, can you arrange this?

And they'd say, yes, Steve, I'll look into it, but they never really did.

I don't think I called Walter Reed myself.

I couldn't talk to anyone.

I emailed and got no response.

And finally, I happened to run into someone in the active military.

And I said, can you help me with this?

And first he said, are you really sure you want to do that?

Some of those guys aren't a pretty picture.

And I said, I think that that's the least we can do.

If you think they'd enjoy it, and he said, yeah, I'll look into it for you.

But again, I don't think he did.

And I was unable to follow up with him.

So we never did get to go there or anywhere like it.

Maybe I should have called my senator or congressman.

It didn't occur to me until, well, now, but here's the sad thing.

It's good that it occurred to me because it seems like we're going to get another chance

to do it.

And just like then, I'm not sure what it is that we're going to accomplish in exchange

for all of that loss.

And I love talking about baseball, and if I can use that little quirk of mine and that

of my colleagues to assuage someone's pain, especially pain that they received in the

service of their country, whether I consider the decisions that were made to put them in

that position, correct or incorrect, I would like to do it before we turn things over to

the inevitable break and then proceed to the second act of the show for a segment that

well is kind of down, I guess, but I was struck by it and I wanted to share it.

How often do I use that excuse?

I've already told you what I did at BP this week and I hope you will read it and check

it out.

I'll know if you leave a comment.

I watch the comments as you'll see if you look I reply whenever there's a reason for

me to this week at Patreon dead player of the day series to reach number 50 this week's

quartet of players was Cleveland slugging for spaceman for two seasons at Morgan.

The Dodgers momentary reliever Chuck churn, I was just seduced by his name, 1927 Yankees

catcher Pat Collins, whom Babe Ruth called the horse nose and great Cardinals third baseman

Whitey Karrowski and at this point, I'm going to take a brief break of one week so I can

get ahead again and also because as I describe there, I have a tranche of doctor's appointments

coming up when you are a cancer survivor.

As I alluded to earlier, there's a lot of maintenance you have to do, a lot of checks

that you want to make because these things have a way of coming back and forewarned is

forearmed.

I don't know if forewarned is really possible, but early is better than late.

I'm sure you already know that and somehow I've contrived to pile most of them into the

same week or a couple of weeks.

So right now there on this April October cycle, the baseball season starts.

To get cleared to watch another baseball season, then right before the post season, we do

it all over again.

The one benefit of that is that all these guys want blood work.

So rather than my going to the time and expense of being stuck multiple times, I just do all

the tests at once and then forward the results to whoever's name wasn't on the prescription

that I supplied.

Although I made a mistake when I did it about a week ago because I said to the phlebotomist,

is there a name that's more misleading than phlebotomist, which sounds funny like it's

someone who makes balloon animals or something, but no, it's someone who sticks you with needles

and takes your blood away.

And I said, look, I'm going to give you three different prescriptions, but there's some

overlap in what those doctors want.

They all want, let's say cholesterol.

And I said, so please just take enough blood for one cholesterol test and send out the

results three times, rather than take enough blood for three cholesterol tests.

And I am not kidding.

She told me, nope, our policy is we take enough blood for all the tests that you give us.

And then we figure it out later.

And I'm sitting there watching myself exaggerate, did you ever read Robin Hood, not the movies

which never go to this part?

But the Howard pile book that really popularized the myth, he takes Robin right up to the very

end of his life in spoilers, he's kind of murdered and in the most passive way possible,

he lets a nun, an evil nun, I guess, bleed him out.

He's supposed to be getting a medicinal bleeding and she decides to just empty him.

And he just lies there and takes it.

Reading that as a kid, I was like, what?

But here I was just sitting there doing the same damned thing in a dilapidated strip

mall medical office, at least he was in a priori or something.

As always I digress, I thank you for supporting the dead player of the day series at Patreon

and the show in general in whatever way you do with your ears.

Or by subscribing and reading the post I have made as I said before, one out of every five

or so free, so even if you are unable or uninterested in subscribing, then please do drop

by and read those.

I think Ed Morgan was the one that I made free this week.

I will understand, I've said this before, I hate the aspect of this that involves asking

people to do this because I'd rather just share it all.

And I also know how many other writers and artists I like who are soliciting exactly

these sorts of contributions in return for work that they can do with whatever skills they

have.

I'm constantly saying to myself with an infinite amount of time and money, I would support

this one and this one and that one, but I don't have either of those things.

So I understand exactly what you're going through.

And I well know we have many more listeners than we do have supporters at Patreon, so don't

think that I'm mad at you or anything if you haven't done it yet, and I'm doing the best

that I can do.

I feel like it's inadequate.

I'm very jealous of the artists because what they often do is they'll have some great

online series and they'll say now if you subscribe to Patreon, I've drawn all the characters

for you, but naked.

And I have as much, if not more, purine curiosity than the average bear.

So that is if this is the appropriate word, I think it is seductive for me, but I still

stop and I say that there are lines on a page, brother.

I don't know if that's worth $75 for a year.

You know what else you can do with that $75, don't you?

Other than satisfy your curiosity about the lines on the page, use your imagination,

friend.

Not as far as Patreon goes, have that particular arrow in my quiver.

The best I can do is say that if you enjoy the stories I tell here and you enjoy the idea

of someone like me taking a kind of random player challenge and just trying to find something

interesting or revealing to say about whoever comes up, someone like Chuck Churn, and that

might be it.

In fact, just the name itself, I went further than that, but still to borrow from Abraham

Lincoln, if that is the sort of thing you like, then you will like this sort of thing.

And I do hope you will join me because the more of that that happens, the more of this

I can do.

It's really that simple, just like everybody else, I'm under the economic and inflationary

pressures.

You know how it is.

We're all in this together.

And having said that, I think that makes a good segue into a break because directly

following that, we will travel back over 100 years to an occasion in which the athletics

found themselves all in it together as well, but for the most tragic of reasons.

So resist if you will, the temptation tom to yourself, Chuck Churn, don't make it bad

and bear with me through this very brief intermission and on the other side, we're Philadelphia

bound.

Lucky us.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books.

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It Lowes.

Let me say right off the bat that I acknowledge that this story, this thought that I'm going

to explore at length is rather modland, but it's also a truism that life inflicts terrible

and inexplicable pain on us at times and then it's over.

And few things symbolize that for me more than an object that happens to be in the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York City.

You can find it online and I posted an image of it to the Facebook group.

I should put it on Patreon as well.

Paranthetically, if you happen to find yourself in the area and you can visit the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York City, you absolutely should.

If you've never been here, it's almost worth the trip by itself.

I might even schedule two days just for that because it's so big and rather than rush

through it and being exhausted, you might want to savor it in portions.

There was a time in my life when I spent more time in the city and by myself for work

and if I had a spare hour somewhere, I would just make a quick run, throw on the headphones

and go in by myself and just listen to music with the appropriate mood as I looked at

the various items and those were some of the happiest hours of my life, I think, in

that category, whatever category you call that.

In fact, I encountered this item for the first time on one of those trips.

It's a still, which is kind of a grave marker with a story included.

It's not a whole one, a good chunk of one as time has shattered it and misplaced some

important pieces.

It dates to about 400 years BCE in Greece, so about 2,400 years ago.

It depicts a woman holding a baby on her lap.

The inscription I warn you is gutting.

It reads,

My daughter's beloved child is the one I hold here, the one that I held on my lap while

we looked at the light of the sun when we were alive and that I still hold.

Now that we are both dead, don't go away.

It's only a life.

What was your name?

What was the baby's name?

I don't know and it doesn't matter at all.

Both are universal.

They represent all of us and so in different ways does Harry Davis.

Harry Davis was a first baseman, a slugger by the standards of his time.

They called him Jasper for reasons that are obscure.

He led the American League in home runs in four consecutive years, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907.

Of his 75 career round trippers, 13 were of the inside the park variety and he also had

four bounce homers which today would be ground rule doubles but baseball was still figuring

out some of these fine details.

It was the dead ball era.

Still it's clear he was hitting them far to get those results.

If we look at only isolated power, which is slugging percentage with the singles taken

out during the core of his career, which was 1901 through 1910.

He ranked 10th among all players to have at least 2500 played appearances in that period

not too far behind Hall of Fame Superman like Wahoo Sam Crawford, Napp Lajue, Ty Cobb

and Hans Wagner.

Again those guys were hitting 330, 350 sometimes 400 that wasn't Harry's bag but a greater

percentage of the hits that he did make were going for extra bases.

Now having said that, it would be an oversimplification to look at Davis and mentally translate his

statistics into that of I don't know Steve Balboni or some other modern day slugger.

I think he was a much better hitter than Steve Balboni.

First, we'd have to get to him in infancy Philadelphia 1873 and give him some steak and

sushi so he would grow up to be bigger than 5 foot 10.

More significantly, we would have to understand that despite his innate power, his entire approach

would have been geared to the requirements of the dead ball era and shoving him into a

time machine and bringing him forward would at minimum require a great deal of coaching

hit up not down.

For example, while Davis wasn't exactly a frequent punter, he still laid down more sacrifices

per annum than Aaron Judge has in his entire career, which is zero and that's right.

But again, different time for Judge than it was for Harry when sometimes one base was

all you needed.

Davis had the kind of coming to baseball story that now is more typically applied to players

from the Dominican Republic and even their things have become so regimented, it might

not be wholly applicable.

His father died when he was young, his mother was unable to support herself and her four

children so at five years old Davis was taken from the family and placed in a school

for orphans.

There's some similarity to the later Babe Ruth story here, except that whereas the

Zavarian brothers taught Ruth to be a tailor, Davis learned a countancy.

He was apparently pretty good at it too, both before and after baseball, he was employed

by banks, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the city of Philadelphia.

All of his obituaries say he was elected to Philadelphia City Council, but I can't find

direct references to that.

I think part of it is that midway through Harry's playing career, Philadelphia revised the

way that their city council was structured.

So whereas they at one point had something like several hundred guys on it, they went

down to like eight.

I think he was in the several hundred guys period.

Speaking of his business acumen later in his life, Harry said, I guess if I had stayed

in regular business side of made my pile, but I would not swap my memories for a fistful

of money.

The good as Davis's career was and it included his becoming the first player in American League

history to hit for the cycle that happened in 1901, which was also the first season in

American League history.

He had the captaincy of the A's beginning in 1905 and was kind of an assistant manager,

positioning the defense and so on.

He had five years as a player coach with the team and the disastrous three-fourths of

a season as manager of the NAPS.

He's still missing some time on the career side because he flopped as a national league

player in the late 1890s.

The gay 90s, not so gay for Harry, he first came up with the Giants and played more outfield

than was good for him.

Certainly his hitting didn't outpace his fielding.

In 1896, the Giants gave up, traded him in theory, mid double header to the pirates

for veteran first baseman, Jake Beckley, an eventual Hall of Famer, Connie Mack notified

Harry Davis as he came in from left field in the fourth inning, reported the Pittsburgh

press.

Heck of a way to figure out that you've been dealt, hey buddy, not that dugout over here,

over here, you got to switch dugouts, you can get your clothes later.

At the end of Davis's life, the Philadelphia inquirer wrote, he could and did spend endless

yarns of the days when he was home-run king for four successive years when he tipped younger

teammates to Christy Matthewsons every pitch when he enjoyed the distinction of having

been the only player ever traded between games of a double header.

But see that wasn't true, it was widely reported as happening as I just related to you during

one of the games.

The trade by the way, wasn't Pittsburgh manager Connie Mack's idea, the owner made

the deal.

Beckley was pretty mad about it too, parenthetically, Beckley is credited with 2938 career

hits.

He's there in the record book with Sam Rice, who finished with 2987.

They both had the misfortune to play before someone decided that back when Moses went

up Mount Sinai and received the commandments from the Almighty that somewhere on those tablets,

it said 3000 is the holy number, no one knew, Moses didn't tell anybody, then he smashed

the tablets when he saw the golden calf, they must have missed those bits when they picked

them up, they just left them there on the desert floor, kids, it's arbitrary.

There's nothing special about 3000 at all, it's just something someone thought of one time

and others picked up on it and said, yes, that must be the number.

And I tell you this over and over again as I do about 500 or 300 or any other damn thing

that human beings have designated as somehow foundational to our existence, though in fact

they have no basis in science or history or anything.

What else that were taught to automatically believe is just made up?

This is perhaps a digression and I don't even know if it's true because you can't trust

anything you see online nowadays even a video which appears to be legit because it might

have just popped out of somebody's prompt to an AI.

But I was looking at some nature type stuff on a sleepless night and I saw a video of

a sperm whale birth and the sperm whales had teamed up around mom to help her with the

parturition and in particular to lift the sperm whale calf once it was out of the mom

up out of the water so it could breathe.

And the implication was that those whales have a sense of community and we know that they

have pods which is a community of kind and we know that they have language and yet we

spent hundreds of years hunting these pork creatures to the edge of extinction for oil

for lamps despite the fact that they have these qualities which might be a hint and a

half that were not alone here but we won't take the hint.

I can go just up I 95 to any number of whaling museums and it's like a monument to to

a vanished culture yes but also a monument to carnage.

In Harry Davis's time people really believed that the other living creatures on this planet

were just toys for human beings to play with and to squash if they wanted to and many

of us still believe that Harry Davis's day was also the day of the X bird on ladies hats.

We claimed to be a religious animal and yet some of God's handiwork was nearly extincted

because some young women thought it would be cool to wear a corpse and some men said

capitalism tells us that we must open factories to pursue this and make our fortunes.

That was true in Harry's day it may or may not be true in hours conversely 3000 hits

not true in Harry's day believed religiously in hours but we might be just slightly more

aware of the value and irreplaceable nature of our fellow inhabitants of this ball of mud.

That wasn't exactly a digression but this is just let me say this before we throw to

the second and final break of the episode the sperm whale thing reminds me of this the

value of community which is irrevocably tied to empathy maybe for the whales it's transactional

I don't know you rub my well I'll rub yours empathy might be a step too far for an animal

species I'd like to think that it isn't but I feel like I'd be accused of being naive

or personifying them if I said that it were however I have often seen recently right wing

psychopathic types decrying empathy saying that it's the worst thing that ever could have happened

to the human species friends it's the only reason the human species exists it's the only

reason that we developed stuff like language which of course helped us develop our brains

no empathy no cooperation no communication we would just have been solitary and kind of dumb

creatures roaming about the African belt and picking berries off of bushes they don't like it

because it's a restraint on their behavior it doesn't allow them to be as rapacious as they want

to be they are essentially the descendants of the original robbers when humans divided into

farmers and hunter-gatherers we also birthed the first people who said I like what they're doing

but I don't like the labor of it so once they get that rice in once they get that weed in let's

run up and hit them over the heads and steal their rice and weed go watch the magnificent seven

Eli Wallach is playing that guy just in Mexico in the 19th or very early 20th century I forget

same idea but guess what that's a cooperation of a kind too and that one is totally transactional

but still it springs from the same ancient roots all right I need to get back to Harry Davis

and the fact that the trade that sent him to Pittsburgh was not very successful for anyone

but it had a huge impact on his life and I'll tell you why right after this very brief

intermission go on out to the lobby grab yourself an ice cream sandwich from the cooler

tell him Steve sent you I don't know what they'll say nothing nice I expect

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now where did we leave uh oh that's right you were enjoying a nice cream sandwich did you get one

of those that doesn't just have the gooey chocolate sandwich bits but chocolate chip cookies because

those tend to go quickly as I said the trade had a huge impact on Davis's life because mac was

Pittsburgh's manager their initial association didn't last long both because Davis played poorly

and because mac was let go at the end of the season I don't think those were related except that mac

probably initially wasn't too thrilled to get Davis because beckley was a much better player

but as a person mac love Davis thought he was a great player had a fantastic team oriented

personality and he made it a point to require him when the a's came into being which was a great

thing for Davis because he was kind of in baseball purgatory at that moment he actually had a

good year for the pirates in 1897 hitting 305 with a 359 on base and a 473 slugging percentage

with a league leading 28 triples but the knock on his defense got him bounced from Pittsburgh

to Louisville which was a national league team at the time to Washington in 1899 also a national

league team but only for about five seconds more the national league folded Washington that year

so Davis had to spend a season in providence of the eastern league before Connie finally rescued him

he was 27 by then and he only had 10 years before age beavered away his skills but he

made the most of them I've already told you some of what Harry did once he became an athletic

and finally blossomed from 1901 through 1908 he hit 288 with a 339 on base percentage and a 430

slugging percentage which as baseball reference measures things was about 30% better than league

average in terms of production in addition to his four home run titles he led the league in doubles

three times peaking with 47 he also led in RBI's twice and runs scored once Davis was not

a Hall of Fame level player as we have come to define that but he had more black ink than

many players who do have plaques that takes us from his age 27 season through his age 35 season

he didn't hit much after that and increasingly was a part-time player or a coach who got into a game

occasionally you could do that then he also played in three world series 1905 1910 and 1911 and

came up a winner in the last two they didn't hand out world series MVP awards when Harry played

and I imagine if they had awarded one after the 1910 a's beat the cubs in five it would have gone

to Frank Baker home run Baker who didn't hit a home run or Eddie Collins both of whom averaged

400 in the five games or maybe pitcher Jack Coombs who followed up his 31 win regular season by

going three and oh with three complete games Harry was very good too though hitting 353 with three

doubles and scoring five times beginning in 1911 Mac replaced the aging Davis with young stuffy

McGinnis whose name I twice misread as slutty in old newspapers while working on this story

even though I will know who he was sometimes it's fun having poor eyesight that change from

Harry to slutty was the birth of the one hundred thousand dollar infield as it came to be known

stuffy cocky Collins Jack Barry and home run Baker somehow Barry was the only one not to get a

cool nickname or a sort of cool nickname well I guess he did because his real name was John Joseph

Barry so Jack was his nickname does that count it's not as evocative as stuffy cocky or home run

Davis dipped out briefly to manage Cleveland but the team didn't accept him and vice versa they

were some hard characters and so he left midseason and went back to Mac as a player coach Harry

played lightly very lightly in 1913 getting into just seven games though he did hit 353 going

six for 17 in that tiny bit of playing time mostly he was a coach the a's won the pen and played

the giants in the world series Harry was entirely on the sidelines for that one stuffy played

first base and even if Harry had been eligible to play I think he was Connie Mac didn't use a

single pinch hitter in the series the athletics wanted in five but in the end it didn't matter

because the human condition intervened world series game five the last game had been played in

New York on Saturday October 11th Harry who lived in Philadelphia year round returned home to see

his wife Eleanor and his two sons Harry Jr. and Eugene who I believe was called Ted on Monday the

13th Harry Jr. died at age 13 victim of illness aggravated by his enthusiasm and joy at the victory

of the athletics Harry crossed in Davis Jr died suddenly yesterday at his home reported the

Philadelphia inquirer they and his doctors speculated to he'd been suffering from some kind of

ongoing liver complaint and getting excited over the world series had somehow triggered some

sort of flare up he went to bed on the night of the 13th woke up feverish and passed away before

the doctor could arrive the Davis is lived in as I said Philadelphia just a few blocks from shy park

I actually dropped a map in the Facebook group if you want to check out where they lived it was

a short walk if you like the idea of ball players living in the neighborhood and walking to the game

well Harry Davis was the man for you and not just Harry the nearness of his home to shy park must

have made his residents attractive to other players and he put up several of them over the years I

assume he charged them for the privilege for for taking them in his borders but either way he had

players living with him over time players who became part of the family so the a's new and loved

his son his son was also around the ballpark a lot just like players kids today he shagged flies

he also worked as an usher not a bad job for a kid in his first attempt at making a few dollars

showing people to their seats for what I assume were pennies or nickels back then it beats the hell

out of fast food point is at least as much as other players kids throughout time if not more so

the Philadelphia athletics new Harry junior so whereas I imagine a child in jeopardy is always a personal

thing to a team or to a clubhouse think of Freddie Freeman or Alex Vesia with the Dodgers in the

last few seasons this was like everyone had suffered the loss of a family member appropriately the

$100,000 infield buried Harry junior his Paul bearers were not only pictures chief bender

and Gettysburg Eddie Plank who had been and I think still was one of Harry Davis's borders but

Jack McKinnis Eddie Collins Rank Baker and Jack Barry the day Harry junior died that is before they

knew that it had happened the inquirer reported on the winter plans of the various a's Harry would

remain in the city the paper said but first he was going on a duck shooting and fishing trip down

the river on the slope Connie Mack imagine he didn't do that life is too often like that

is it right to say that it tends to dash your plans by assaulting them with tragedy it probably is

and maybe this is trait two but I'm struck by how long ago all of this was and just how long

everyone involved has been gone Harry as I said was born in 1873 and has been gone since 1947

Eleanor died unexpectedly in 1925 age 53 after contracting pneumonia their younger son Eugene

was also described as dying unexpectedly in 1953 when he was 49 or 50 years old that was 73 years

ago this January there's a picture at find a grave which I often use to try to figure out some

details of these stories it purports to be the resting place of all of those people but

either it's been totally overgrown by grass or it's just not there a caption on the picture by

the person who posted it says no monument was there a monument at some point I don't know

there's just a plot five miles and a trip across the school kill river from where shy park used

to stand Harry junior passed over 112 years ago functionally it's the same amount of time as the

woman and the baby on that stealth from 400 BCE except that we know his name and a few more

details of his story but from the missing grave to the way that time so rapidly erased the family

demonstrates for me the mercilessness of the river in which we all swim the past is kind of like

a fire hose and if you're not paying careful attention and it's impossible to pay careful enough

attention then you might miss stories like this there's simultaneously no reason to know it and

every reason to know it because similar to what I was saying about 3000 hits are the changing

status of whales which may have been optimistic it's important to understand the capricious

and arbitrary way in which our lives are shaped and spent and not just by other people or people

in power although as we've seen there's way too much of that but just random happenstance

you in a world series you lose a child and they're not connected except by a kind of

unthinking cruelty and unmotivated unthinking cruelty that just happens and yet

they kind of made it Harry's fault and I know this is a dour story and I'm sharing it

because I was deflated by it I was all set to tell you the story about this cool late blooming

player has one more home run title than Aaron judge and three more rings you can't say three times

as many because you can't multiply by zero and then just as he had been at least a small part of

winning that third ring not only did he lose his firstborn son but the doctor said that the very

act of winning it had so overstimulated his kid as to cause his death and yes that sounds suspect

but we can't be sure that Harry didn't take that as the truth and blame himself he had over 30 years

to live with that loss and that seems like too long five minutes seems like too long I'm not just

being cute or punching the button on my catchphrase when I say that this is the nature of the infinite

inning that so many of our victories are in some way tinged with loss despite what you hear about

gray clouds with silver linings all too often it's the other way around silver clouds gray linings

black linings and having to accept that whatever we do there's a toll keeper the leering skull

leaning out of the booth who demands payment for all our joys with coins of sorrow

man why do I put us through this stuff I hope you're okay I'm okay I hope you understand and

empathize when I say that I'm happier knowing that story than not knowing it should you wish to

converse with me on this or any other subject you can do so on social media at stevingoldman.bsky.social

and you can write us by which I mean me at infinite inning at gmail.com there remains a facebook group

you go to facebook you search on infinite inning and bang you're there as I said I put up the map

of mr. davis's neighborhood and a picture of the evocative still from the metropolitan museum collection

should you wish to support the show and I very much hope you do please visit patreon.com slash the

and on that note I gratefully acknowledge the joining up of jerry yay jerry thank you so much

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review and subscribe and if your pot catcher doesn't let you do those things I lost track of what I

was going to say when the cat who lives under the microphone walked in front of me so I'll just say

adopt a cat this time of year there are always plenty of animals up for adoption you've seen

bambi right nature unfortunately can be like that in the spring hour theme song which you are

hearing now and happen listening to throughout the episode was a co-composition of myself and

dr. Richard moring who says what you expect me to say something cute after a down show like that

yet add a hear well I think I'll take that advice and should I be able to avoid stumbling into

any holes as I go I'll be back next week with more tales from inside the infinite inning

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