“Few of the 4,000-odd fans knew the modest little shortstop was setting a record,” the Boston Globe wrote, “but the rest of the Red Sox did and gave him a rousing reception in the dugout after he had taken his first stand at the bat.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer erroneously added that Scott had broken “all major league records for consecutive games,” apparently having missed the Associated Press’s dispatch about Pinkney’s streak that circulated before the season. But when Scott went by Pinkney on June 21, 1920, and definitively established the all-time record, the Associated Press sent another story across its wires, setting readers straight about the consecutive-game record.
Several weeks after that, when Scott reached 600 straight, the Associated Press sent out yet another story, its third in seven months on the subject. Sportswriters around the country chimed in with commentary, many taking note of baseball endurance for the first time. On July 16, 1920, the Milwaukee Journal’s unidentified “Sports Insider” columnist wrote:
Sometimes we baseball fans overlook players like Everett Scott of the Boston Red Sox. Athletes who are more spectacular seem to monopolize the public prints and grab our attention by their home run clouts and circus stunts. So occasionally it may appear that we do not appreciate the steady, unheralded and yet invaluable services of a player like Scott.
He recently established the record for consecutive games played in the major leagues. He completed his 579th game in a row. It was thought that he made the record some time ago when he passed the mark set by Luderus of the Phillies, who played in 533 games without interruption. But always some statistician bobs up to take the wind out of one’s sails. In this instance, it was found that way back in the late 1880s one George Pinkney of Brooklyn played 578 games in six seasons without a break. Therefore Scott had to set out again to surpass Pinkney, and he is quite likely to go right along and establish a record that won’t be equaled for a long, long time.
Scott has been playing steady and consistent baseball since 1916 and made his record in five playing seasons. He is a sterling and reliable shortstop and has won a prominent niche in baseball’s hall of fame.
The Milwaukee Journal column—based entirely on numbers, confusion over them, and the feat they signified—reflected a change under way in baseball and its coverage. There was a developing interest not just in statistics but also in achievements that were years in the making.
Until then, only single-game and single-season statistics received significant attention. In Balldom, his 1914 encyclopedia, George Moreland included dozens of pages of such achievements but ignored career statistics and streaks lasting years. Even pitcher Cy Young’s astounding lifetime total of 511 wins went unmentioned.
Eight years later, Ernie Lanigan also focused on records and feats from individual games and seasons in The Baseball Cyclopedia, while reserving little room for career numbers and streaks. Ty Cobb had established dozens of well-known benchmarks by then, but they were all from single seasons, such as his 248 hits in 1911 or his 96 steals in 1915. Cobb’s career totals were seldom publicized.
It seems unfathomable now that players, sportswriters, and fans simply did not consider career totals and streaks lasting years. Today, a century later, such numbers are as integral to baseball as balls and bats. Career statistics and years-long streaks generate attention, determine salaries, and help decide who gets inducted into the Hall of Fame. But baseball was just beginning to note such achievements as Scott’s consecutive-game streak grew.
Shortly after his 600th straight game, in 1920, he developed a large boil above his right eye and could barely see when he wrapped his head in a bandage. Barrow, still Boston’s manager, told him to stay away from the ballpark one game day, and Scott complied, thinking his streak had ended. But a thunderstorm soaked Boston that afternoon, canceling the game, and Scott’s boil “broke” that evening, enabling him to play the next day and continue his streak. The Boston Globe reported on his good fortune. It seemed his playing streak had become newsworthy.
Hard as it is to believe now, the New York Yankees were a mediocrity when Jacob Ruppert and a partner bought them before the 1915 season. Previously known as the Americans, Hilltoppers, and Highlanders before adopting the Yankees nickname in 1913, they had never won an American League pennant, and they rented the Polo Grounds from the National League’s Giants for their home games, most of which drew few fans.
After they finished more than 40 games out of first place on average in the three years before Ruppert bought them, a Baseball Magazine writer asked, “How much longer shall the American League allow this glaring business blunder to exist?” The Red Sox ruled their league, and the popular Giants, managed by John McGraw, New York’s preeminent baseball figure, ruled their city.
Ruppert expected better. His family had brewed one of New York’s favorite beers for almost a century, amassing great wealth and Tammany Hall political clout. Ruppert, a 47-year-old bachelor who spoke with a thick accent that reflected his German heritage (he would call his most famous player “Root”), favored expensive clothes, slicked-back hair, and a bushy mustache. His favorite possessions included racehorses and show dogs, but he was hardly an idle playboy. Rather than start at the top in the family business, he began as a barrel washer. Once he was in charge, he modernized and expanded the brewery, which occupied an entire block in Manhattan. Along the way, he served four terms in the U.S. Congress, a measure of his family’s stature.
A baseball fanatic, he repeatedly tried to buy the Giants, but McGraw’s club was not for sale. Finally, McGraw arranged for Ruppert to buy the Yankees with Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, an enterprising former army engineer who had profited during the rebuilding of Cuba after the Spanish-American War. They shared the purchase price of $450,000, a bargain.
From the outset, Ruppert and “Cap” Huston did not get along. They had little in common other than their love of baseball. Huston’s fortune was earned; Ruppert’s was inherited. Huston was rumpled, impulsive, a risk taker; Ruppert was fastidious and methodical.
Their chances of getting along ended permanently when the Yankees hired a new manager, Miller Huggins, in 1919. Ban Johnson, president of the American League, had recommended Huggins, a diminutive former second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals who had preached fundamentals as a player-manager in recent years. Huston wanted to hire Wilbert Robinson, who had played and coached for John McGraw and managed Brooklyn to the National League pennant in 1916. When Huston went overseas as part of the war effort, Ruppert hired Huggins.
Furious, Huston would exact revenge in the coming years by steadfastly supporting players who feuded with Huggins. He eventually grew so frustrated that he sold his share of the club to Ruppert. But despite their differences, Ruppert and Huston forever altered the Yankees. With the thoughtful, pipe-smoking Huggins in charge, the club would surpass the Giants and become both New York’s favorite team and baseball’s premier franchise, playing in America’s grandest ballpark.
By 1919, Ruppert had become friendly with the owners of several other American League clubs, including Harry Frazee, a New York theatrical producer who owned the Red Sox. Frazee had an interesting problem. Ruth had become baseball’s top box office attraction, but he was also increasingly a pain to both management and the other Red Sox players, who did not care for him. Meanwhile, Frazee needed money to buy Fenway Park, which he rented for games. Ruppert offered to buy Ruth’s contract for $100,000, considering it a win-win proposition. The money would enable Frazee to buy Fenway, and the Yankees would get an indisputably exciting player who sold tickets. With Prohibition looming, Ruppert realized he needed to start finding other ways to make money besides selling beer.
They struck the deal, Ruth jumped from the Red Sox to the Yankees, and neither club was ever the same. Ruth was still a pain, but he was worth the trouble, piling up home runs while leading the Yankees to baseball’s pinnacle. The Red Sox, meanwhile, would not win another World Series until the twenty-first century.
In 1920, his first season in New York, Ruth slumped early, obviously feeling the pressure to produce. But he knocked a ball completely out of the Polo Grounds on May 1 and wound up hitting 11 home runs that month, setting a major league record for home runs in a month. Then he hit 13 in June. It was an unheard-of pace. Three seasons earlier, the Yankees’ Wally Pipp had led the major leagues with nine home runs. In 1920, Ruth hit 54.
Fans flocked to see him. On May 16, the Yankees drew nearly 39,000 to a game at the Polo Grounds, a record. Although they finished third in the American League that season, they drew 1.2 million fans to their home games, becoming the first major league team to draw more than a million fans in a season. It was time for them to have a ballpark of their own. Ruppert and Huston had scouted prospective locations for several years, having grown weary of their rental arrangement with the Giants. They finally found a suitable location in the Bronx, and construction began on what would be called Yankee Stadium.
Meanwhile, Boston’s manager, Ed Barrow, joined the Yankees as general manager and began raiding his former team. The Yankees had already acquired Ruth and pitcher Carl Mays from the Red Sox, and now they acquired pitchers Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock and catcher Wally Schang. With Ruth hitting 59 home runs to lead the way, the Yankees won their first American League pennant in 1921. After they lost the World Series to the Giants, Barrow vowed to improve the club and targeted Scott, who had hit .262 for the Red Sox in 1921 while exhibiting his usual top-notch defense. In January 1922, the Yankees acquired Scott and pitchers Joe Bush and Sam Jones in exchange for shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh and pitchers Bill Piercy, Rip Collins, and Jack Quinn.
“My transfer to New York was, of course, a very acceptable move,” Scott would tell Baseball Magazine.
As with many of Frazee’s deals, it would prove to be a lopsided transaction favoring the other team.
The challenge of playing an entire season without a day off was easier in Scott’s era than when George Pinkney toiled for Brooklyn. Players now wore gloves in the field, so they suffered fewer bruises and cuts. They could come out of a game early if the manager so desired. Off the field, they traveled on faster, more comfortable trains and stayed at nicer hotels. A generation of new steel-and-concrete ballparks featured smoother playing surfaces and spacious clubhouses.
That did not mean it was now easy to play a full season without a break. The same physical dangers existed. Base runners slid in with their spikes up. Pitchers threw at hitters, sometimes breaking bones. Players collided at home plate. And the season itself was longer. Pinkney never played in more than 143 games in a season in the 1800s, but Scott played in at least 152 in every season except those shortened by World War I.
His durability was not an accident. Scott worked at it. In an era when few players exercised in the off-season, he jogged throughout the winter and performed calisthenics. During the season, he wrapped his boils with bandages for an hour before each game and wore special cleats with extra padding to keep opponents’ spikes from gashing his feet. “There were days when Deacon’s shoes looked like a remnant sale at the ribbon counter, but his little tootsies were safe,” a teammate said later.
When pressed to explain his streak after being traded to the Yankees, Scott pointed out that he was not a heavy drinker or eater and went to bed early—hours before Ruth on many nights, no doubt. “I guess the care I take of myself and some good luck have carried me through,” he said. “Being in good condition is only a matter of right living. Since regular hours are an important part of good health, I have always made a point to keep them.”
He also said there was “no doubt” he had been blessed with good fortune. “I have been spared the kind of injuries that lay up infielders from time to time,” he said.
Late in the 1921 season, his last in Boston, Scott reached 800 games in a row. Newspapers noted the milestone, but the sports world was more focused on Ruth’s home run barrage and the possibility that gamblers had influenced the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Eight White Sox players were on trial for getting paid to intentionally lose the Series.
Though a jury acquitted the players on August 3, 1921, the sport’s new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, wielding virtually unlimited powers, banned all eight players from the game for life. “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball,” Landis said.
Baseball had been cast in a dark light before. Players were often lampooned as drunkards in the 1800s, and they were deemed unpatriotic for going to great lengths to avoid frontline military service during World War I. The Red Sox and Phillies did not help matters when they threatened to walk out on the 1918 World Series because of a pay cut while thousands of Americans were fighting and dying overseas.
But the “thrown” World Series represented a new low. The sport suddenly craved positive news, anything that cast it in a favorable light. After acquiring Scott before the 1922 season, the Yankees aggressively marketed him to local sportswriters as an upstanding citizen, hoping he could help restore the public’s faith in the game. Scott was “in bed early and enjoyed wholesome hobbies such as bridge, whist, poker, fishing, and bowling,” one article noted. Grantland Rice, the syndicated columnist whose work was read by millions, praised his durability. “After Everett Scott is dead, we expect to see his ghost out there playing short through force of habit. No such shallow barrier as the grave will ever check the Deacon’s tireless pace,” Rice wrote.
Having toiled for years in the shadows of more famous teammates, Scott liked the attention. His durability had gone mostly unrecognized and unappreciated in Boston, but on Ruth’s Yankees in the early 1920s, he was suddenly at the epicenter of the sports and media worlds, his feats writ large. Eleven daily newspapers assigned beat writers to cover the team. Columnists and feature writers were always hanging around, looking for material. Scott’s playing streak was nothing if not unique. He gave several interviews about it before he played a game for his new team, telling some reporters his goal was to reach a thousand straight games. Then, worried that he appeared self-centered for saying that, he told the New York Times’ John Kieran he actually did not have a numerical goal. Finally, when columnists praised him as “baseball’s endurance king,” he confessed that, yes, he did want to reach a thousand straight games. No one else in history had come anywhere close to that.
7
Ripken
INFLUENCES
By the time Cal Ripken Jr. put on an Orioles uniform for the first time, in 1981, the Orioles’ decision makers were no longer debating whether they should have made him a pitcher. It seemed clear he would become an everyday player in the major leagues; they had made the right call. But after the 1981 season, they were debating a new question: should he play shortstop or third base?
Ripken had mostly played third in the minors, but Weaver envisioned him as a replacement for Mark Belanger, the slick-fielding shortstop who was leaving the Orioles after running the infield for 15 years. (He signed with the Dodgers as a free agent.) Weaver had grown up in St. Louis watching six-foot-four Marty Marion play shortstop for the Cardinals in the 1940s, so he did not believe Ripken’s size would hinder him in the middle infield.
Weaver lost the battle. On January 28, 1982, the Orioles traded their third baseman, Doug DeCinces, to the California Angels, clearing the way for Ripken to take over at third. Weaver was against giving up DeCinces, a dependable fielder who hit for power, but the manager felt better about the situation after watching Ripken belt a home run in his first at-bat on Opening Day and then sprint around the bases, his enthusiasm apparent. How could you not love the kid?
After that, though, Ripken fell into a terrible slump, collecting just four hits in 55 at
-bats. Weaver called him in for a talk. “Look, we traded DeCinces. There’s no one in the minors to come up. We’re not sending you back. Just go do what you can do,” Weaver said. When Ripken continued to struggle, Weaver pinch-hit for him several times and also hinted that he should consider altering his stance and philosophical approach at the plate. Ripken grudgingly accepted being hit for but did not like the idea of changing his philosophy. Senior quietly told him to stick with what had worked until now.
An on-field conversation with slugger Reggie Jackson helped ease his mind. Jackson, now playing for the Angels, was on third base when several Orioles and Angels began to brawl one night at Memorial Stadium. Instead of joining the fight, Jackson turned and spoke directly to Ripken. They knew each other. Jackson had played for the Orioles in 1976, when Senior was Weaver’s bullpen coach and Junior, then in high school, hung around the clubhouse.
“Look, Junior, you’ve made it to the big leagues; just hit the way you want to hit,” Jackson said.
Ripken heeded the advice, calmed down, and eventually began to heat up. His average was near .240 when the Orioles played a doubleheader against the Toronto Blue Jays at Memorial Stadium on May 29. After going 1-for-4 in the first game, he was held out of the second game. Weaver was trying to identify an everyday shortstop, and one of the candidates, Floyd Rayford, needed at-bats, so Weaver let him take Ripken’s spot at third for a game. (Lenn Sakata and Bob Bonner were the other shortstop candidates.) Ripken was back in the lineup the next day, May 30, batting eighth and playing third. He went 0-for-2 with a walk as the Orioles lost to Toronto, 6–0. No one could have imagined that a day so forgettable would become such an important historical marker—the beginning of the sport’s longest consecutive-game streak.
The Streak Page 9
