Lefty, page 8
Before the game Bud Farley had wandered off, so Lefty asked Tom Keena, the Novato catcher he knew from Foresters’, to warm him up. “Gnoss and Oliva were watching us carefully from the Novato bench,” Keena said. “Gomez’s fastball was whistling like the wind, hopping all over the strike zone.”
But Oliva could pitch as well, and not too much money was pulled from the chicken wire that day; going into the bottom of the eighth, Point Reyes was nursing a 1–0 lead. That didn’t mean money wasn’t changing hands, however; spectators were betting on every pitch.
Lefty held Novato in the eighth and Point Reyes didn’t score in the ninth. Bill Gnoss sat on the Novato bench, gnashing his teeth at the prospect of being shut out again by Gomez. But in the ninth, Novato managed to get a man to second with two out. The next hitter was Gus Oliva. Lefty, who assumed that the opposing pitcher wasn’t going to be any better a hitter than he was, grooved a fastball. But Oliva could hit and he put the pitch into orbit. Novato won 2–1.
Novato fans were giddy, but Bill Gnoss knew his baseball and was fully aware that the victory had been a fluke. Lefty had made a kid mistake. “Forget about Oliva,” Gnoss told Nick Williams afterward. “He’s a good pitcher but he’s not going to the bigs. You’d better go out right away and sign Gomez.”
Williams responded as he had for three years. “He’s got a great arm, Bill, but he’s a bag of bones. I’ve got a two-hundred-game season. He’ll be dead halfway through.”
But Gnoss was adamant. “Stop fooling around, Nick. Get his name on a contract. He’s hurling bullets. If you don’t, someone else will.”
It evidently hadn’t occurred to Williams that his prejudice against skinny pitchers might not be universally shared. The idea of Lefty pitching for a competitor finally got Williams’s attention. “Okay, okay, Bill. I’ll go down and sign him up.”
It had taken three years, but Lefty had indeed worn Nick Williams out.
1 Fred Perry had another story about the Bay Area sandlots, this one about a future teammate of Lefty’s. “We all lived baseball in those early days. There came a time when I was player-manager of the Merchants that my legs were always like a toothache. Ballplayers quit on account of their legs. I gave my spikes away but kept my glove and bat, just in case. One Saturday morning I went from Sausalito over to the San Francisco markets to pick up produce for the store. When I got there, everyone ran up to tell me that Joe Gregarro’s looking for me. Joe was a fireball, manager of the John D. Martini team, one of the best in San Francisco. So I find Gregarro and he says to me, ‘You got to help me out with tomorrow’s game, Fred. I need a shortstop.’ I told him I’d hung up my spikes. He kept at me, so I finally told him I’d play. Then I asked what the problem was. ‘Joe DiMaggio’s quit playin’ baseball,’ Joe told me. ‘His father doesn’t want him to mess up his hands for the accordion.’ ”
8.
PING, BABE, DUSTER, SLOPPY … AND LEFTY
But Lefty was not yet of age, so he needed a parent to co-sign the Seals contract. Coyote refused, so Lizzie signed instead. Contract negotiations took place at Claeys’s Meat Market; Lizzie got the details on the telephone while Lefty bought pork chops.
Coyote’s refusal to make his mark, surprisingly, did not create a rift between father and son. They seemed to understand each other, these two indomitable men, forty-five years apart in age. The Gomez family remained close-knit and, in the important things, fiercely supportive of one another despite the ongoing war of wills between its oldest and youngest members.
And even at this point Coyote’s apprehension was hardly baseless. For all his talent, Lefty was still raw, and pitching semipro was not the same as facing professional hitters. What’s more, the 1928 Seals roster was loaded. The pitching staff was led by another lefty, Dutch Ruether, who had spent eleven years in the majors, winning 137 games. Ruether had pitched for the Yankees the previous year, winning 13 games for the world champions. In fact, he was something of a World’s Series magnet. He had also been on the Yankees during their 1926 series appearance, after coming over from the Washington Senators and their World’s Series team in 1925. Six years before, he had started two games for Cincinnati in the infamous 1919 Black Sox World’s Series against Chicago. But even at thirty-four years old and back in the Pacific Coast League, Ruether would maintain sufficient guile to win 29 games in 1928. Three other Seals starting pitchers had or would have extensive major league experience: Elmer Jacobs, Walter “Duster” Mails, and the wonderfully named Hollis “Sloppy” Thurston.
With position players, the Seals were even more impressive. Earl Averill, whose major league career overlapped Lefty’s almost to the year, would end up in the Hall of Fame.1 Other future major leaguers included Frank Crosetti, Smead Jolley, Babe Pinelli, Ping Bodie, Gus Suhr, and Buckshot May.
Seals players were as quirky as they were good. Pinelli, in particular, was an oddity. When his playing days were over, he turned to umpiring and ended his career calling balls and strikes for Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.
“If ever there was an umpire hater,” Lefty said, “Babe Pinelli was the man. He used to take off on a slide and ten feet from the bag, he’d start screaming, ‘No! No! I’m safe!’ Then he’d come up madder than a landlord during a rent freeze and wail for twenty minutes. It wasn’t a surprise when Pinelli turned into a good umpire. He’d umpired twenty years before he ever put on a blue uniform.”
Ping Bodie was another character. His real name was Francesco Stephano Pezzolo, but he adopted “Ping,” for the sound of a ball hitting his 52-ounce bat, and Bodie for the old prospecting town in which he grew up. He stood only 5 feet 8 but weighed almost 200 pounds, with long arms, a prominent chin, and a more prominent nose. He was the first Bay Area Italian American to make it to the majors, blazing a trail for Tony Lazzeri, Ernie Lombardi, Frank Crosetti, and the DiMaggio brothers. Ping had been Babe Ruth’s first roommate after Ruth’s sale to the Yankees. He said of the carousing slugger, “I don’t room with Babe. I room with his suitcase.” Ping was not shy about his own abilities with the bat. “I really hemstitch the horsehide,” he was fond of observing. Although no one knew precisely what that meant, the gist seemed clear. He could also “whale the old apple” or “smack the old onion.” When he was seventy-three years old and asked if he could still hit, Ping replied, “Give me the mace and I’ll drive the pumpkin down Whitey Ford’s throat.”
Lefty remembered him well. “When he played ball at Old Rec, he brought his two pigs with him to the ballpark. While Ping shagged flies in the outfield, they did lunch beneath the grandstand, eating the peanuts and candy bars the fans threw down on the field. After the game, Ping led the squealing swine out of the park and back to their pens at his home in the Cow Hollow section of San Francisco. ‘How can I keep them down on the farm,’ Ping asked me, ‘after they’ve seen Old Rec?’ ” He also found time to oversee an automobile service station he owned near the Seals’ ballpark.
Then there was Sloppy Thurston. He got his name because he was perhaps the most impeccably dressed man in baseball, a trait he was convinced made him more attractive to female fans. Sloppy had won 20 games for the White Sox in 1924 and later, as a scout, would discover a young power hitter named Ralph Kiner.2
If the Seals players were quirky, they only reflected the team owners. In 1918, then owner Henry Berry fell victim to a series of bad investments and put the team up for sale at a bargain price. Charley Graham, a former minor league catcher, manager, and erstwhile Latin and Greek teacher at Santa Clara University, wanted to buy the club but lacked the means. He recruited Alfie Putnam, sports editor of the Sacramento Bee, but even together, they only had enough for a down payment.
Demonstrating either great confidence or enormous stupidity, Graham and Putnam signed an agreement to purchase the Seals, putting up everything they had to secure the contract with not the slightest notion of where to get the rest of the money. They then announced that the team was theirs, waxing on about the glorious future of the franchise to local sports editors.
While shuttling between newspaper offices, Graham happened to notice a large billboard proclaiming the dental services of one Dr. Charles H. Strub. Similar signs were planted all over town, which had caused Dr. Strub to be labeled the “advertising dentist,” a term not necessarily used in admiration. Graham grabbed Putnam by the arm. “That’s our man.”
Strub, it seemed, had once been a left-handed-hitting infielder who had played in college and briefly in the low minors. He quit baseball to set up his dental practice, just in time for the earthquake. When the dust cleared, his new practice was in shambles, so Strub approached the manager of the Sacramento Cordovas and asked for a job. The manager, the very same Charley Graham, had expressed sympathy for young Strub’s predicament and signed him up. Strub had played out the season, then returned to San Francisco to reestablish himself as a dentist. By 1918, in addition to his widely visible practice, Strub had made a small fortune in real estate.
Graham and Putnam went to Dr. Strub’s office and offered him a third of the club. All Strub had to do was put up almost all of the money. As reported in the Sporting News, “Dr. Strub removed his white professional jacket, put on his hat and coat, and the three marched to the Chronicle building and had their pictures taken as the new owners of the Seals. It was puzzling to the lads on the sports staff. Two owners one hour; three owners the next. But the story was explained in detail and it made excellent reading the following morning.”
The three were well suited to one another. Graham was a top baseball man, Putnam a natural promoter, and Dr. Strub as sharp a businessman as could be found in any sport. Strub purchased a bottling plant so that the team got full revenue for all the soft drinks sold at Old Rec; he bought another plant to roast peanuts, which were then bagged and sold to the fans. But mostly what Strub did was raise the price of players sold to major league teams. In 1922, he sold Willie Kamm, a solid but hardly brilliant infielder, to the White Sox for $100,000, the same price the Yankees paid for Babe Ruth. Strub eventually took in well over a million dollars peddling players while Graham and, later, Nick Williams provided a steady stream of new talent to fill the holes. For his first four years as an owner, Graham managed the Seals as well.3
That such revenues could be garnered from the teams back east was, as Graham and Strub were well aware, because baseball was a game in transition and there was a shortage of players with skills for the more modern game. In standard baseball lore, the “dead ball” era ended in 1920 and a new home-run-crazed period began. Certainly, with batters seeing the ball better, they could hold the bat closer to the knob at the bottom and increase torque and thus the power the swing generated. To the disgust of purists such as Ty Cobb, an offense based on bunting, squib hitting, and the Baltimore chop had without question passed into history. But the cork-centered baseball, the “live ball,” had been introduced in 1909. True, a new model came into use in 1920, one in which a tighter yarn was used over the cork center, but this was tested against the ball used the previous year and found to carry no farther.
Rather than the decade of the home run hitter, Babe Ruth notwithstanding, the 1920s were actually the decade of the line drive hitter. In 1927, for example, when the Babe hit his 60th and Lou Gehrig finished second in homers with 47, the third-place home run hitter in the American League hit only 18. The more significant increases were in batting average and other extra-base hits.
Between 1915 and 1919, National League batting averages ranged between .248 and .254. In 1920, the league average jumped to .270, then to .289 in 1921, and it did not drop below .283 for the remainder of the decade. In 1930, National League batters hit an astonishing .303 against National League pitchers, the highest league average in history. In the American League, results were similar. From 1915 to 1917, the league average remained at a measly .248, rising to .254 in 1918 and .268 in 1919. In 1920, American League batters hit .283, then for the remainder of the decade stayed in the .280s and .290s. Between 1911 and 1920, only three men had hit .400, with Ty Cobb doing it twice. Between 1921 and 1930, seven men would achieve the same feat, with Rogers Hornsby doing it twice.
And batters were not fattening their averages only with singles. In 1919, major league hitters stroked 2,922 doubles, 1,048 triples, and 447 home runs. By 1921, those numbers had jumped to 3,981 doubles, 1,364 triples, and 937 home runs. In 1927, major leaguers hit 4,148 doubles, 1,150 triples, and 922 home runs. In 1927, despite Ruth’s and Gehrig’s output, National Leaguers actually hit more homers than American Leaguers. There were 3,333 more runs batted in during 1927 than there had been in 1919. Between 1900 and 1920, forty-nine no-hitters were pitched in the major leagues. Between 1921 and 1940, that number dropped to seventeen.
But pitching was evolving every bit as much as hitting was. While some young hurlers, notably Carl Hubbell, would become stars based on breaking balls or trick pitches, many of the new crop—Lefty Grove, for example, of whom it was said “could blow a lamb chop past a wolf”—threw smoke.
As a result, with an astute eye for talent and some first-class salesmanship, Graham, Putnam, and Strub turned the Seals into the most successful franchise in minor league history. The three became known as “The Vanderbilts of Valencia Street.” Not only did the Seals make money and watch a parade of players go off to the majors, but the team won four PCL pennants in the decade.
So for all the oddballs, both between the lines and in the front office, the dilapidated ballpark, the Booze Cage, and the Gamblers’ Section, the Seals were big business. And if Lefty thought his new contract was going to vault him instantly to the mound at the Old Rec, throwing fastballs past a string of former or future major league hitters, he was mistaken.
1 But Averill would be best remembered for hitting the line drive in the 1937 All-Star game that broke Dizzy Dean’s toe, ultimately ending the great Cardinal pitcher’s career. Lefty would be the winning pitcher in the same game.
2 The debate as to which era of baseball boasted the best players will never resolve but in nicknames the players of Lefty’s era beat later generations flat. During Lefty’s first year with the Seals alone, along with the usual complement of Dukes, Babes, Docs, and, yes, Leftys, the Pacific Coast League sported—in addition to Sloppy, Ping, Duster, Buckshot, and Junk—Ox Exhardt, Frenchy Uhalt, Monk Sherlock, Cuckoo Christiensen, Skinny Graham, Pug Cavet, Bevo Lebourveau, Dud Lee, Truck Hannah, Boot Nose Hoffman, and Yats Wuestling.
3 Charles Strub didn’t stop with baseball. Horse racing was legalized in California in 1933, and he immediately applied for a permit. He then built Santa Anita, one of the largest and most beautiful racetracks in the world. Some wags scoffed that Strub could not tell an infield from an outfield, but he attracted the world’s best Thoroughbreds to his track by offering large purses and rendered it, as with almost all of his ventures, an enormous success.
9.
CLASS D BASEBALL SEVEN DAYS A WEEK
“So here I am,” said Lefty, “the skinniest man on the club and I can’t even hit my weight. On the mound, I knew only what I’d picked up from the bush league diamonds, which wasn’t much. Charley Graham was one of the most wonderful men I’ve ever met in baseball. Like other club owners in the PCL, he made his living peddling ballplayers to the majors, but he always had my best interests at heart. The ink wasn’t dry on my contract when Nick Williams said he wasn’t going to slot a greenhorn into the pitching rotation. He wanted veterans on the mound, guys who would keep fans in the stands and players in the money.”
Charley told Lefty that he needed to hone his craft, someplace where he “could learn something every time out,” and he couldn’t do that “riding the pine boards in San Francisco.” Graham told the press that Lefty would be a sensation the following year, but for the 1928 season, the Seals were farming him out to the Salt Lake City Bees of the Utah-Idaho League, where he could gain professional experience. “Nick Williams also hopes he’ll pick up some weight and stamina,” Charley added.
The Utah-Idaho League consisted of six teams: Salt Lake, Pocatello, Ogden, Idaho Falls, Boise, and Twin Falls. Lefty’s teammates would be teenagers like himself, sent to these outposts to learn fundamentals and the nuances of the game. The manager was another baseball lifer, Bob Coltrin. Only thirty-seven years old, Coltrin had retired as a player two years before, never making it past the very level in the low minors in which he was now managing after fifteen years of trying to break through. He would remain in the game, shuffling around the West as a low minors manager and scout, working virtually until the day he died in 1945. But anyone on the Bees who wanted to move up could do so only with Coltrin’s approbation.
For his last weekend before leaving for Utah, the first time in his life he would be out of California, Lefty invited Jake Jorgensen, the Point Reyes first baseman, to join him in San Francisco. Lefty had been given temporary accommodation at the Hotel Royan, the Seals’ lodging facility, across the street from Recreation Park. All Lefty could hope was that he would be back here on a more permanent basis.
After a day in town, Lefty and Jake drove back to Point Reyes to watch a Sunday doubleheader against Mill Valley, the team Lefty did not get to face in the spring of 1927. But Lefty was returning as a professional and he received a huge cheer from the crowd. Jake had arranged for dates for both of them and after the games the girls wanted something to eat. Unfortunately, Lefty and Jake were both broke. They even needed to borrow ten dollars for gas from friends just to get the girls home. A hungry date is not a happy date and the two glumly rode back to San Francisco. The next morning, Jake saw Lefty off and they agreed to see each other after the season. They got together sooner than they planned.
After Lefty’s train left, Jorgensen returned to work. The construction crew he was working with was grounded because of heavy rains, so Jorgensen took a job driving a Caterpillar. “One morning, my sheepskin jacket got caught on a pulley and spun me around. My head hit the tractor three times and knocked me unconscious.”
