April 27, 1915
Phillies vs. Brooklyn Dodgers
Athletics @ Washington Senators
Today, 100 years ago, the Athletics went down to Griffith Stadium to face the Washington Senators, taking the loss in a jaunty one hour and forty minute game. The A’s managed twelve base runners but could only push one run across the plate. Bob Shawkey made his third start and pitched well enough to deserve the win. Even though he only allowed three hits and walk while striking out seven, the Senators scored two runs and Bob picked up his second lose of the season. The A’s were not 3-7 and stuck in seventh place, but was help on the way? Eh, not quite. The rumor all year was the Frank “Home Run” Baker, star third baseman of the A’s legendary $100,000 Infield who had been holding out all year because of a contract dispute with Connie Mack, was in Philadelphia to sign a contract, though it was with a dairy farm team that played in the independent Delaware County League. The speculation was the Baker was using this news as a way to spur Mack into giving in to his demands. But the fact was that Athletics’ fans were tired of the whole damn story. The back and forth bickering, the quotes from both Mack and Baker saying that they don’t need each other when they so obviously did, the drawn out narrative of who was right and who was wrong. Enough! It was all too much. The team was no good and adding Baker would only make them into a slightly less embarrassing bad team. The train wreck season continued for the A’s.
Today, 100 years ago, the Athletics went down to Griffith Stadium to face the Washington Senators, taking the loss in a jaunty one hour and forty minute game. The A’s managed twelve base runners but could only push one run across the plate. Bob Shawkey made his third start and pitched well enough to deserve the win. Even though he only allowed three hits and walk while striking out seven, the Senators scored two runs and Bob picked up his second lose of the season. The A’s were not 3-7 and stuck in seventh place, but was help on the way? Eh, not quite. The rumor all year was the Frank “Home Run” Baker, star third baseman of the A’s legendary $100,000 Infield who had been holding out all year because of a contract dispute with Connie Mack, was in Philadelphia to sign a contract, though it was with a dairy farm team that played in the independent Delaware County League. The speculation was the Baker was using this news as a way to spur Mack into giving in to his demands. But the fact was that Athletics’ fans were tired of the whole damn story. The back and forth bickering, the quotes from both Mack and Baker saying that they don’t need each other when they so obviously did, the drawn out narrative of who was right and who was wrong. Enough! It was all too much. The team was no good and adding Baker would only make them into a slightly less embarrassing bad team. The train wreck season continued for the A’s.
The Phillies faced the Brooklyn Dodgers...or Superbas…or was
it the Brooklyn Robins? Actually, it was
all three. Baseball-Reference has the
1915 Brooklyn club’s nickname as the Robins, the New York Tribune addressed the team as the Superbas, and the
Philadelphia papers called them the Trolley Dodgers; any of these will do for
our purposes. On the mound for Brooklyn
was Nap Rucker, a fire-balling lefty that was one of the top pitchers of the
Deadball Era. He was known for being the
best pitcher on a terrible team; often writers would say that if it weren’t for
Rucker, Brooklyn wouldn’t even be competitive in the National League. He tied the record for strikeouts in a game
(16) and held the claim until Dizzy Dean topped him by one in 1933. Rucker maintained for his life that he struck
out seventeen in his record-tying game and that it was lazy score keeping from
Abe Yager (Nap remembered his name for the rest of his life) that cost him his
title. Whether it was 16 or 17, Rucker
was a force to be reckoned with. From
1907 to 1913 Rucker averaged 6.6 fWAR a season and never dipped below his
rookie tally of 3.7 fWAR. During his
height he was responsible for winning about 27% of the Brooklyn victories. But, by 1914, his fastball was starting to
fade. He supplemented it with a huge,
looping curveball that was known as “the slowest ball in the history of the
majors.” The new pitch didn’t help him
enough to keep him relevant in the major leagues. It was quick fade for the son of a Georgian
Confederate soldier; after a sub-par 1915 Rucker was given a couple of innings
of mop-up work in the 1916 World Series and retired shortly thereafter.[1]
He was still in that limbo between resurrecting his career
and being completely burnt out when he faced the Phillies 100 years ago. Gavvy Cravath found out in the second inning
that that slow curveball could looked as big as a watermelon coming to home
plate. He took a few outside pitches to
start his at bat before planting a curve delivered to him on a platter in the
left field bleachers, giving the Phillies a 1-0 lead. George Chalmers started for the Phillies,
making his second start of the year. He
had one of those games where he certainly didn’t pitch great, but he wasn’t
exactly lucky either. The box score says
he gave up 12 hits, but six of those didn’t leave the infield and a seventh
fell because Possum Whitted misplayed a pop fly. He was knocked around in the third, but only
allowed two runs, and settled down to shut the Dodgers out for the final six
innings. Shortstop Dave Bancroft bailed
Chalmers out a twice by starting rally-killing double plays.
In the bottom of the fourth, with the Phillies down 2-1,
Chalmers helped his own cause by blasting a 2-run double. The score remained tight until the
seventh. Cravath was walked intentionally
by Rucker to load the bases. If Nap’s
goal was to avoid having Cravath hurt him with another big hit, the strategy
backfired when Possum Whitted strode to the plate. If we’ve learned one thing so far this season
it’s that Possum Whitted is on fire and pitching to him hasn’t worked out well. He promptly roped a single into center,
scoring two, and putting the game out of reach.
Whitted was well on his way to becoming the new baseball hero in
Philadelphia. [2]
[3]
The scribes from across the country that had written with
admiration and curiosity about the Phillies hot start were starting to turn
into naysayers. There was no way the
Phillies could keep up this pace! After
all, let’s remember that this team was not selected to compete before the
season started and, yes, it’s cute that they’ve won 10 of 11, but soon they
would falter and drop back in the standings, probably all the way back to their
normal second division finish. The Phils
were everyone’s rooting interest to start the year because they were the bad
team makes good, but now they had maintained long enough to become a threat to
the traditional powers in the National League.
It’s no wonder that New Yorkers would go out of their way to write that
the Phillies were always a mediocre team or for the Boston Braves to through a
fit when they only managed one win against the Phillies; this was a changing of
the guard, and those that were on top were now on alert about a new threat to
their position. Maybe the Phillies would
fall back, or maybe they would win 100 games, either way, the rest of the
league was now treating them as the adversary they were and not the silly
sideshow they had been.
[1]
Eric Enders, “Nap Rucker,” SABR Bio Project, accessed April 27, 2015, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/22be16b1.
[2]
“Nap Rucker, One of the Game’s Greatest, Has Seen His Day,” Evening Ledger, April 28, 1915, accessed
April 27, 2015, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045211/1915-04-28/ed-1/seq-12/#date1=1915&sort=date&date2=1915&words=Phillies+PHILLIES&sequence=0&lccn=&index=19&state=Pennsylvania&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=phillies&year=&phrasetext=&andtext=&proxValue=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=10.
[3]
“Bancroft Aids Phillies to Humble the Superbas,” New York Tribune, April 28, 1915, accessed April 27, 2015, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1915-04-28/ed-1/seq-14/#date1=1915&sort=date&date2=1915&words=Phillies&sequence=0&lccn=&index=7&state=New+York&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=phillies&year=&phrasetext=&andtext=&proxValue=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=7.
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