June 21, 1915
Phillies @ Pittsburgh Pirates
Athletics vs. New York Yankees
Athletics vs. New York Yankees
We had a real progressive article in the Evening Ledger 100 years ago today. In his article, “Should Husbands Learn To
Cook?,” Perry Balsam ponders the question of why on good God’s green Earth a
man would ever need to learn how to cook in a non-professional setting. Sure, men know how to cook outside on
barbeques and campfires and the like, but you certainly can’t light the
kitchen on fire to cook something!
Right? What Mr. Balsam concludes,
though, is that, yes, men should learn to cook, but ONLY to have the necessary
skills in case of emergency. But where
will these men learn to cook? Certainly
not with their mothers! “Mothers are too
indulgent. They have not sufficient grip
of their sons’ time and attention. With
the small minority who remained fast to their mother’s apron strings we have
nothing to do. They are happily the
exceptional few, and when they come to make husbands they fall into that new
and despised class of husbandettes. We
are dealing with men.” So, obviously, it
is up to the man’s wife to teach him to cook, but for God’s sake don’t teach
him anymore than scrambling an egg!
You’ll ruin him! Only husbandettes know how to do more than
scramble an egg. The article ends by
allowing that “grouches and self-appointed champions of men’s rights” may say
they will never learn to cook, but those types “lack breath of imagination and
have narrow souls. You will find their
kind glooming the divorce courts or else shaking their bars in prison cages.”[1]
Baseball, now there’s a manly pursuit right up there with
cooking! The Philadelphia clubs both
participated in make up games: the A’s played a doubleheader against the
Yankees while the Phillies made a pit stop in Pittsburgh on their way back east. Both of the A’s and Yankees
games combined took less than 4 and a half hours, but they were jam packed with
offense. The day started in the usual
Athletics fashion by letting the Yankees jump out to a 6-0 lead in the fourth
inning. But today was the A’s day! They fought back, scratching and clawing out
six runs over the next five innings.
Eventually the game would go to extra innings where Mack’s Miserables
(as the papers began to call the club) scored to take the win. The seven runs the A’s score in game one were
more than they scored in the previous series against the White Sox. Game two was almost a reverse of the
first. In this case the A’s scored nine
runs in the first three innings and allowed the Yankees to come back. The death blow came when the Athletics scored
three in the eighth, halting New York in their tracks and winning the game
12-7. Two wins today for the
Mackmen! Unfortunately these wins were
an island surrounded by a sea of losses.
Pittsburgh wasn’t much better for the Phillies. They were making up a game cancelled on June
15th and the Pirates were happy that that meant they didn’t have to
face Grover Cleveland Alexander again.
Instead they got Erskine Mayer, going for his eleventh win of the
season. His winning-streak was cut short
when he last pitched in Cincinnati, but Mayer still had the skills to dominate
like an ace. There were hiccups of
trouble for Mayer in the second and fourth innings when the only two runs he
would allow scored, but he otherwise was brilliant. It was his teammates that put him in the
position of being yet another tough luck loser in the Phillies rotation.
The Pirates pitcher was Babe Adams, possibly the only
pitcher in the National League to not have a career year in 1915. In fact, this was one of his worst seasons as
a starter, but he still managed to post a 3.0 rWAR season. Coming into today’s game he was 4-5 with a
2.92 ERA. Not great. But luckily for him the Phillies were not
willing to make him work hard for outs.
For the second day in a row, the hitters could not manage a run through
the first six innings. But in an instant
the offense decided to wake up. In the
seventh, Possum Whitted hit a RBI single that made the Pirates lead one. Then, in the ninth, down to their last
chacnce, Gavvy Cravath and Fred Luderus roped back-to-back doubles to tie the
game at two. Extra innings! Neither team mounted an assault in the 10th
or 11th. Bert Niehoff put the
Phillies ahead in the 12th with a single that drove Dave Bancroft
home. Finally, this team once again
showed the grit and fight we saw when they were stringing wins together like it
was their job. They were able to battle
back and take the lead late in the game.
Ironically, just when the hitters showed up to do their part for a win,
the pitching staff fell apart. Eppa
Rixey, who relieved Mayer in the eighth, gave up the tying run in the bottom of
the 12th and the game-winning run in the bottom of the 13th,
though Bancroft’s throwing error didn’t help, either. Just like that it was another defeat snapped
from the jaws of victory.[2]
After a great middle portion of the western road trip the
Phillies were once again struggling. Oh
how far the mighty have fallen. Since
beating the Cubs in Chicago the Phils were 2-4 and had now dropped into third
place in the National League. The loss
today meant that they would finish below .500 for the trip. The hitting was so bad that even the stellar
pitching wasn’t enough to pull them out of this sinkhole. All of these things were gut punches. What an incredible disappointment from a team
that was hitting on all cylinders not even a week ago. The good news was the team had one stop in
New York to play the sixth-place Giants before they finally got to sleep in their own beds. Three more games and then they would get to
spend a full month at home playing games at the Baker Bowl. I’m sure you could feel the hitters desire to
get back to that bandbox so they could start slugging the ball all over the
park. But it would be going too far to
say the Phillies were overlooking their final road series. The games were against their archrival Giants
and that old so-and-so John McGraw.
Tensions were always high and the play contentious when these two clubs
met. Maybe New York would act as a smelling
salt to this drowsy Phillies team.
[1]
Perry Balsam, “Should Husbands Learn How To Cook?,” Evening Ledger, June 21, 1915, accessed June 18, 2015, http://1.usa.gov/1IRlWTM.
[2]
“Pirates Outgame Phillies,” The Sun,
June 22, 1915, accessed June 18, 2015, http://1.usa.gov/1Rd54ZM.
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