The Baseball

by Zack Hample

  RAY CHAPMAN

  Raymond Johnson Chapman was born in Beaver Dam, Kentucky, in 1891. He made his major league debut with Cleveland in 1912 and quickly established himself as the team’s everyday shortstop. If there had been All-Star Games back then, Chapman probably would’ve played in a few; in 1915 he hit 17 triples and scored 101 runs, in 1917 he stole 52 bases and hit 67 sacrifice bunts (a single-season record that still stands), and in three of his last four seasons he batted .300 or higher.

  That final season was cut short by tragedy.

  The date was August 16, 1920. The Indians were in New York, facing Yankees superstar pitcher Carl Mays, a fiery competitor who exploited a batter’s fear as well as anyone. Not only had he led the American League in hit batsmen just three years earlier, but his repertoire included an erratic spitball, and his submarine-style delivery made all of his pitches tough to see.

  By the time Chapman stepped to the plate in the top of the fifth inning, he faced two additional challenges that reduced his visibility. First, the late-afternoon sun was casting shadows on the field, and second, the ball itself was dirty. Very dirty. In 1920—the season before Reuben Berman’s successful lawsuit—the same ball would be put back into play repeatedly, batter after batter, even inning after inning, until it was scuffed, misshapen, and discolored. But it wasn’t just the routine wear and tear that darkened the ball; pitchers often spat tobacco juice on it and rubbed it with dirt to make the horsehide as dark as possible.

  No one’s sure what type of pitch did Chapman in. It might’ve been a spitter, it might’ve been a fastball, but whatever it was, he didn’t see it. He didn’t even flinch as the ball cracked him on the left temple. The sound of the impact was so loud that Mays thought the ball had hit Chapman’s bat, so he fielded it and threw it to first base. Chapman, meanwhile, was sprawled on the ground with a fractured skull and blood pouring out of his ear. He was rushed to the hospital and died 12 hours later. The spitball, along with other doctored pitches, was banned the following season, and umpires were instructed to take dirty baseballs out of play.5

  MIKE COOLBAUGH

  Back in the old days, ballplayers were more concerned with being tough than being safe. Thus, after Chapman’s death, it took 21 years before a major league team was willing to experiment with batting helmets—and then it took an additional three decades for helmets to become mandatory. But change came about much sooner after a wayward line drive struck and killed minor league first-base coach Mike Coolbaugh in 2007. Starting the following season (with predictable resistance from a handful of old-school guys), every first- and third-base coach in professional baseball was made to wear a helmet.

  Coolbaugh, a former major league third baseman, was hired on July 3, 2007, by the Tulsa Drillers, the Rockies’ Double-A affiliate. Nineteen days later, while standing in the first-base coach’s box during a game in Arkansas, he was hit in the neck by a line drive off the bat of Drillers catcher Tino Sanchez. The impact crushed Coolbaugh’s left vertebral artery and caused a severe brain hemorrhage that killed him almost instantly.

  The incident was particularly tragic because Coolbaugh left behind a pregnant wife and two young boys, who had prompted him to take the coaching job because they loved seeing him in uniform on a baseball field. Later that season the family got a much-needed boost, both emotionally and financially, when the Rockies clinched the National League Wild Card and unanimously voted to give Coolbaugh’s widow a full share of their playoff money. That bounty rose to $233,505.18 as the Rockies swept the Phillies and then the Diamondbacks to reach the World Series.

  FAN FATALITIES

  When the National League was founded in 1876, none of the ballparks had protective screens in place to shield fans from foul balls—and guess what? It didn’t really matter. Back then, the pitcher’s job was simply to help start the action by giving the batter an easy pitch to hit; pitchers were forced to throw underhand, and batters could request a high or low pitch. It wasn’t hard for batters to hit the ball into fair territory, nor was there any strategic advantage in wasting pitches by intentionally hitting them foul. But over the next few seasons, as the rules evolved and pitchers gained the right to throw hard, there was a surge in the number of foul balls and fan injuries. The section of the grandstand located directly behind home plate became known as the “slaughter pens” because of all the injuries that were taking place there, and in 1878 the Providence Grays became the first team to do something about it. They put up a screen in their home ballpark, the Messer Street Grounds, and by the turn of the century most ballparks offered similar protection.

  Nowadays, despite the fact that protective screens are a given and fans get warned repeatedly about the danger of foul balls, there are still a disturbingly large number of injuries at professional baseball games—more than 300 every season that are severe enough to send fans to hospitals. Most of these accidents take place in the minor leagues (where there are more games and where fans sit closer to the field), but there’ve been plenty of gruesome injuries at the major league level. There was a two-year span when Tigers fans were hit especially hard—in 1999 at Tiger Stadium a woman lost her left eye after getting struck in the face by a foul ball,6 and in 2000 at Comerica Park a young boy suffered a fractured skull and developed a life-threatening hematoma after getting drilled by a line drive—but every team’s fan base has fallen victim to the ball. One of the best-known incidents took place in 1982 at Fenway Park, when a six-year-old boy sitting behind the dugout was literally saved by Hall of Famer Jim Rice after a foul ball fractured his skull. While everyone in the stands waited helplessly for medical personnel to arrive, Rice stepped out of the dugout, reached into the crowd, cradled the boy in his arms, and rushed him to the trainer’s room inside the clubhouse.

  Incredibly, with all the stadiums and teams and games and defensive two-strike swings, only one fan in the history of Major League Baseball has ever been killed by a foul ball. That fan was a 14-year-old boy named Alan Fish, who was hit behind and above the left ear by a Manny Mota line drive on May 16, 1970, at Dodger Stadium. The impact knocked Fish unconscious and caused a hairline fracture, which in turn caused an intracerebral hemorrhage—part of his skull was pushed into his brain and caused it to bleed—but no one realized the severity of his injury at the time. That’s because Fish regained consciousness after a minute, and although he was disoriented at first, he said he felt okay and stayed in his seat. Then, when he was taken to a first aid station later in the game, the doctor examined him quickly, gave him two aspirins, and sent him on his way. Fish felt fine for the rest of the game and even chased another foul ball at one point, but by the time he got home he was feeling dizzy and shaky. His parents (who had not attended the game) rushed him to the hospital, where his condition quickly deteriorated. It was only then that he was properly diagnosed, but the emergency surgery was too late to save him, and he died several days later.

  The only other ball-related death in major league history was the result of an errant throw from a player who probably shouldn’t have been in the majors in the first place.7 On September 29, 1943, in the first game of a twi-night doubleheader at Griffith Stadium, Senators third baseman Sherry Robertson fielded a routine grounder and airmailed Mickey Vernon across the diamond. (Robertson was a mediocre hitter and an even worse fielder, but he lasted in the major leagues for a decade as the nephew of team owner Clark Griffith.) The ball sailed into the front row of the stands and hit a man named Clarence D. Stagemyer on the head. Stagemyer, a 32-year-old Civil Aeronautics Administration employee, initially shook off the injury but was convinced by the Senators’ physician to go to the hospital. It turned out that he had suffered a concussion and a fractured skull, but it was too late to save him, and he died the next day.

  While flying baseballs pose a constant threat, far more fans have been killed in fights or by falling off escalators or—as was frighteningly common in the old days when ballparks were made of wood and overcrowding was prevalent—by entire sect
ions of the grandstand collapsing. Just as players have to deal with an array of safety hazards, the same is true for fans. There has even been a case of a fan getting hit and killed by a car outside a stadium. Granted, it wasn’t a major league stadium—it happened in March 1988 at the Pirates’ Spring Training facility in Bradenton, Florida—but the tragic event still deserves an honorable mention because the man, a 42-year-old named Daniel McCarthy, was hit while chasing a foul ball that had flown out of the stadium.

  FOWL BALLS

  On June 11, 2009, the outcome of the Royals-Indians game at Progressive Field was determined by a bird. With runners on first and second, a flock of seagulls dawdling in shallow center field, and the score tied at 3–3 in the bottom of the 10th inning, Cleveland’s Shin-Soo Choo ripped a line drive up the middle that deflected off one of the birds and skipped past center fielder Coco Crisp to plate the winning run. Everyone was able to laugh about it later because the stunned gull had managed to fly away, but there’ve been several other games in which birds were not as lucky.

  The incidents that have caused the least uproar involved pigeons that were killed by batted balls. That’s because it was always assumed to be an accident and—let’s face it—because no one likes pigeons, at least not in New York City, where the birds lurk everywhere and poop on everything. It was in New York that a pigeon was famously killed in 1987 by an otherwise routine fly ball hit by Atlanta’s Dion James. As Mets shortstop Rafael Santana gingerly picked up the carcass and handed it to the ball girl, the only thing upsetting to Mets fans was that the bird had caused the ball to drop in front of left fielder Kevin McReynolds, allowing James to motor into second base with a double. There’ve been other pigeon fatalities, including one at Fenway Park in 1974 thanks to a foul ball hit by Tigers left fielder Willie Horton, but again, no one really cared. You want uproar? Enter Dave Winfield.

  It was August 4, 1983. Winfield, then playing center field for the Yankees, was just finishing his fifth-inning warm-ups in Toronto, and when he fired the ball back in, it struck and killed a seagull that had been walking across the field. Yankees manager Billy Martin later joked about it, saying it was the first time that his outfielder had hit the cutoff man all year, but it was no laughing matter to the peaceful people of Canada. Many of the 36,684 fans in attendance believed that Winfield had done it on purpose and immediately began pelting him with debris. After the game, Winfield was arrested for animal cruelty, a charge that could’ve brought a six-month jail sentence had it not been dropped the next day.

  Twenty years later, during batting practice at a minor league stadium in Daytona Beach, Florida, a teenaged pitcher named Jae Kuk Ryu intentionally threw several balls at an osprey that was perched on a utility crossbar above the field. Witnesses claimed that Ryu hit the bird on his fourth attempt, causing it to plummet onto the warning track 25 feet below. The bird was blinded in one eye and died six days later. Ryu received numerous death threats and was demoted to the lowest level of the minor leagues; he turned his career around, however, and earned a major league call-up in 2006.

  Then there was the unfortunate dove that crossed paths with a Randy Johnson fastball. (There are video clips of the incident online; do a search for “randy johnson bird” and you’ll find them.) It happened on March 24, 2001, during the seventh inning of a Spring Training game in Tucson, Arizona. Just after Johnson unleashed a mid-90s heater, the bird swooped in front of catcher Rod Barajas, took a direct hit, and exploded in a puff of white feathers. The ball (in addition to the bird) was called dead, and the play was ruled “no pitch.”

  4 Tiger Stadium, home of the Tigers from 1912 to 1999, was named Briggs Stadium from 1938 to 1960. The ballpark was known as Navin Field before that.

  5 The 17 pitchers who had depended on the spitball in 1920 were allowed to continue throwing it for the remainder of their careers. The list of grandfathered pitchers included three future Hall of Famers: Stan Coveleski, Red Faber, and Burleigh Grimes, who threw the last legal spitball in 1934.

  6 She was reaching for her boyfriend’s popcorn and didn’t see the ball coming. She later sued the Tigers for $10 million, but because of the “assumption of risk” and printed disclaimer on the back of her ticket stub, she collected just $5,000—the maximum amount that the Tigers’ insurance policy permitted. Injured fans often sue, but rarely win.

  7 No, this is not a story about Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who hit Keith Olbermann’s mother in the face with a bad throw in 2006. (She survived.)

  CHAPTER 4

  STUNTS

  SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS

  During Spring Training in 1915, Brooklyn Robins1 manager Wilbert Robinson attempted a feat that was thought to be impossible: catching a baseball dropped out of an airplane. He might have succeeded if not for the fact that a grapefruit was dropped from the plane instead.

  Aviation pioneer Ruth Law made the historic flight and circled her biplane hundreds of feet above the field—that much we know—but there are two different versions of the grapefruit portion of the story. It has been widely reported that Casey Stengel, then an outfielder with the team, made the fruity substitution, either as a practical joke or to protect his manager from the destructive force of a rock-hard baseball. Some historians, however, claim that Stengel wasn’t even in camp at that point, and Law herself stated years later that no one had put her up to the switcheroo—she simply dropped the grapefruit because she had forgotten to take a ball. Regardless, as the speeding grapefruit descended, its force became so great that it splattered all over Robinson and knocked him on his back.

  “Help me, lads!” shouted Robinson. “I’m covered with my own blood!”

  Even after discovering that his body was intact, Robinson still wasn’t happy because he’d lost his chance to enter the record books. In 1908 Senators catcher Gabby Street had become the first person to catch a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument—555 feet above the ground. Never mind that Street was 25 years old and still needed 13 attempts to make the catch (in large part because the wind blew the balls all over the place); the overweight, 51-year-old Robinson was inspired by the stunt and wanted to one-up him.

  After Street earned his place in baseball lore, he said, “The ball I caught hit my mitt with terrific force, much greater than any pitched ball I have ever caught, and I have caught some pitchers who are given credit for having wonderful speed. Though my mitt is three or four inches thick, the force of the ball benumbed my hand.”

  According to a story published the following day in the New York Times, it was estimated that the ball had been traveling “slightly over 140 feet a second,” or a shade above 95 miles per hour, when Street caught it—an estimate, given the lack of technology at the time, that was remarkably precise. More than 80 years later, in his seminal book The Physics of Baseball, Yale University’s Sterling Professor of Physics Robert K. Adair proved, among many other things, that “the terminal velocity of a ball dropped from a great height is but 95 mph.”

  Street wasn’t the first person to attempt to catch a ball dropped from a great height, and Robinson wasn’t the last. Paul Hines, an outfielder who debuted in 1872 with the Washington Nationals, could have become the first to catch a ball dropped off the Washington Monument, but he chickened out (perhaps because baseball gloves were not yet in vogue) shortly before the stunt was supposed to take place in 1885. Nine years later, Chicago Colts catcher Pop Schriver made an unpublicized attempt to catch a ball dropped from the Monument, but was quickly chased away by police after two failed tries. For years after the fact, there were inconsistent reports that Schriver had made the catch, but his teammate and accomplice, Clark Griffith, who had dropped the balls from high above, eventually admitted that they had not succeeded.

  In 1910 White Sox catcher Billy Sullivan caught several balls that had been dropped and thrown from the top of the Washington Monument, although it took two dozen attempts before he snagged the first one. In 1925 another White Sox catcher, named Ray Schalk, caug
ht a ball dropped from the newly constructed 462-foot Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago. The following summer, in a stunt that took place at an army aviation field in New York, Babe Ruth caught a ball that was dropped from an airplane flying at an altitude of 250 feet and a speed of 100 miles per hour. (Can you imagine Derek Jeter attempting this?) In 1930 Cubs Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett bested Ruth and set a record that still stands: catching a baseball dropped from the greatest height. The Cubs were in Los Angeles for a preseason game when Hartnett grabbed a ball that was tossed from a blimp 800 feet above the field. In 1938 Frankie Pytlak and Hank Helf—both catchers on the Indians—caught balls dropped from Cleveland’s Terminal Tower at a height of approximately 680 feet. They still hold the record for catching balls dropped from the highest structure.

  (Photo Credit 4.1)

  Among all the successful attempts, there’ve been numerous failures, but none worse than that of Joe Sprinz in 1939. A former catcher whose brief career had ended with the Cardinals six years earlier, Sprinz agreed to participate in a publicity stunt at the World’s Fair in San Francisco. The baseball was supposed to be dropped from an airplane flying more than 1,000 feet high, but it ended up being released from a blimp at 800 feet instead. Sprinz, to his credit, managed to get his glove on it, but the force of the ball smashed his glove into his face. The impact broke his jaw, knocked out several teeth, severely cut his lips, and caused him to drop the ball—and to make matters worse, the mishap discouraged future generations from attempting anything similar.