August 26, 1915
Phillies vs. Cincinnati Reds
Athletics @ St. Louis Browns
Welcome back! Today,
100 years ago, Mother Teresa turned five years old. Also, on this date five years from now, women
will be granted the right to vote everywhere in the United States.
When we last left the National League pennant race on August
14th, the first-place Phillies were holding the Dodgers back by the
skin of their teeth, the Boston Braves were surging, as they are apt to do at
this point in the season, and the rest of the league was were struggling to
stay relevant. Since then each team
played about eleven games. Amazingly,
two of the best teams over that stretch sat in the basement for most of the
season. The Cardinals and Reds, both of who
were significantly behind the pack just two weeks ago, pulled themselves out of
the realm of insignificance. St. Louis
managed eight wins, including a sweep of the New York Giants at the Polo
Grounds, and jumped over both Pittsburgh and New York to occupy fifth
place. While Cincinnati didn’t get to
claim a new position in the standings, they did cut the lead of the seventh-place
Giants to just a half-game.
The other team burning up the league was the Boston
Braves. On August 8, the Braves lost to
the Cardinals to fall to sixth place, 4.5 games back of first. Since then they were 9-4 (they did tie one
game, as well) and hopped over three teams to take third place. In the past six days Boston sandwiched a
sweep of the Pirates between wins against the Cardinals and Cubs for a six-game
winning streak. The Braves’ demolition
of the Pirates essentially eliminated Pittsburgh from the pennant race; at this
point they sat 8.5 games back and had to skip over five other teams for the
flag. Despite the fact that the Dodgers
remained in second place and trailed Philadelphia by 2.5 games, the Braves were
the club that truly made the Phillie faithful tremble with nerves. Brooklyn proved all season that they were
particularly great when playing at home, but away games gave the Dodgers fits and,
thanks to a lopsided schedule, Brooklyn played most of their home games in the
beginning of the season. The going was
about to get tough as the season turned down the final stretch, and it would be
the Dodgers first time facing the strain.
Most writers, therefore, expected Brooklyn to fall off. But it was Boston that had the track record
of staying calm and performing during strenuous stretches and eventually
overcome enormous odds. Could Boston
pull the miracle two years in a row?
Philadelphia found their winning ways, overcoming the
resurgence of the anemic hitting that haunted them two weeks ago, and looked
all the while like the class of the league.
Since August 14, the Phillies scored two runs or fewer only two times
and otherwise averaged 4.5 runs per game.
The pitching remained an issue, but thanks to all of the newly minted
runs scored, it wasn’t a showing up as a problem in the standings.
Manager Pat Moran must have had concerns about the staff
because he finally deployed a weapon he had been saving all season: Grover
Cleveland Alexander. I know, I know,
Alexander has pitched in thirty-seven of the Phillies 112 games played so far,
and that seems like a lot, but it was actually a small decrease in Old Pete’s
expected workload. In the previous four
years, Alexander made, on average, over ten relief appearances, which burned
his arm out towards the end of the season.
This year Moran decided he was going to hold his old warhorse back until
he was truly needed to pitch those extra innings. Well, apparently August 17 was that
day, because since then Alexander made five appearances in nine days and
pitched twenty-nine and a third innings.
Just to give you some context, since Opening Day Alexander averaged 2.1
innings pitched per day; from August 17 to August 25 he threw 3.23 innings per
day. Now, obviously he didn’t pitch every day, but this just goes to show
his increase in work over the past two weeks.
Alexander actually averaged three days rest between appearances since
April, yet over the past nine days he only received two. So far Moran’s strategy worked. Alexander was 4-2 in that stretch, losing
once when the Phillies were shutout and the other by a single run, and the club
played 6-2 in their last eight games.
Today the Phillies played the Reds in the third game of this
four game series. The first two games
were played yesterday in a doubleheader; both games went into the win column
for the Phils. Alexander pitched his
ninth shutout of the season in the first game and Al Demaree triumphed in a
close 6-5 contest during the evening match.
Coincidentally, Pete Schneider was the losing pitcher in both
games. It was the second time this
season that Schneider was the pitcher of record in both games of a doubleheader
against the Phillies. Now there’s a stat
for you!
Erskine Mayer got the start for the Phillies, though this
was only his third start since August 9.
You’ll remember he had pitched terribly for the previous six weeks or so
and Moran gave him some time to rest up and get his head right. In the two starts he had one horrendous
outing (1.2 innings, five runs, five hits, a walk, and a big L) and a pretty
good one (8.1 innings, eight hits, three runs, five strikeouts, and a no decision). Today, the old Erskine Mayer, that one that
made performed so spectacularly in the beginning of the season that he brought
comparisons to Alexander himself, took the mound at the Baker Bowl. Over nine beautiful innings, Mayer only made
one mistake: a second inning home run by Tommy Griffith accounted for the Reds
only run of the afternoon. Otherwise
Mayer was in control, only walking one batter and scattering four meaningless
singles. It was his best performance on
the mound since his July 29 one run complete game victory over the Cardinals.
Offensively, the Phillies played with a decided
advantage. The Reds pitcher Gene Dale
had an injured side (don’t know what that means, but that’s all the information
provided in the paper) and had difficulty bending over. In the first the Phillies scored two runs,
but soon they were having problems of their own eyeing up Dale’s
curveball. Moran flipped up his tactics
and did what any sporting man of grace and class would do in this situation:
attacked Dale’s weakness. He told his
batters to bunt the ball so that only Dale would be able to make a play on
it. Dale would have trouble bending over
again and again and eventually he would lose his touch. For the most part this strategy worked as
they made seven base hits, six of which were singles, and on top of that caused
Dale to walk five batters. The only
problem was the wearing down process did not result in runs until the bottom of
the eighth. Luckily Mayer was grooving
along at this point, so it didn’t matter too much. After the game, which Philadelphia won 4-1,
Dale complained that after about the fifth inning every pitch he threw caused
agony, but he refused to be lifted for a reliever until his team was in a
position to win. Ah, the guts and/or
stupidity of Deadball Era pitchers.[1]
The win kept the Dodgers at bay as they beat the Cardinals
in Brooklyn, but remained 2.5 games back.
Boston played to a tie against the Cubs, so Philadelphia actually gained
half of a game on those clubs. At this
point in the season, the second tier teams (Pittsburgh, St. Louis, New York,
and Cincinnati) can all be written off from the pennant race. They are, at
best, 8.5 games back, and with only forty games left to play, the chances of
making up enough ground to pass four teams is all but zero. The Cubs, despite tying the hottest team in
the league today, were only holding on to any hope by their fingernails. A simply devastating July, in which they lost
twice as many games as they won, combined with the .500 ball they have played
since the calendar flipped probably means the writers were correct months ago
when they said Chicago peaked four months too early. That leaves only the Phils, Dodgers, and
Braves left in the race. And, as it
turns out, significant date passed in this regard while I was away. On August 20, Brooklyn tied the Phillies for
first place (though, in reality the Phillies had a better record by mere
percentage points). This was the closest
any team would get to the Phillies for the remainder of the season. With the benefit of hindsight we know Boston
and, to a lesser extent, Brooklyn will hang around for the final month of the
season, but the next few weeks are when the Phillies really put some space
between them and their competitors.
[1]
“Federals’ Offer To McInnis May Tempt Athletics’ Star,” Evening Ledger, August 27, 1915, accessed August 26, 2015, http://1.usa.gov/1LwzKnV.
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