sla book review: the unforgettable season

the unforgettable season

Reviewed by Mark Noe

MAY 25, 2006 archive

The record book would suggest that Fred Merkle had a solid, successful baseball career: more than a dozen full-time seasons, over 1500 games as a first baseman, appearances in five World Series, a lifetime .273 batting average, nearly sixty homers in a dead ball era. Respectable. Very respectable. What American kid wouldn't be tickled to achieve a dream like that? What American middle-aged male couldn't build a fine insurance business with a record like that? But Fred Merkle made a stupid mistake when he was a nineteen-year-old, a second-year player mostly riding the bench and waiting to break in as a regular. It was a bonehead mistake, and it shackled Merkle with a nickname he would live with to his dying day. And it made the 1908 season legendary. All Bonehead Merkle did on that day in late September was what many other players still did at the time: as the runner on first in the last of the ninth, with another runner on third, Merkle ran only partway to second after a base hit. The runner on third had crossed the plate, so what else mattered? It had long been accepted practice to skip running out that play; no one questioned the mere technicality involved. It was so common, in fact, that it had happened not three weeks before in Pittsburgh, when the Cubs lost a game after a Pirate single with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. Johnny Evers, the Cub second baseman, saw the runner at first go partway to second, then break for the bench, never getting closer than thirty feet from second base. Because the umpire, Hank O'Day, had also moved toward an exit, he didn't see Evers get the ball from Jimmy Slagle, the center fielder, and touch second, effectively forcing the runner and negating the run. Long discussion and even a protest followed, but the call went against the Cubs because the umpire (working alone at that game) did not see the play.

That was September 4. On September 23, in the midst of a tight three-way race featuring those same Cubs and Pirates, along with the New York Giants, the Cubs played the Giants in the Polo Grounds. With the score tied at 1-1 in the ninth, a surprisingly similar situation occurred. Runners were at the corners when Giant shortstop Al Bridwell singled to center. The runner on third scored easily, and Bridwell crossed first. But the runner on first, young Fred Merkle, substituting that day to give the injured Fred Tenney, the regular first baseman, a day off, ran only partway to second, then jogged off toward the clubhouse. Evers astutely called for the ball, and Circus Solly Hofman, the centerfielder, threw it toward him. Iron Man McGinnity, coaching third for the Giants, had also moved in the direction of the clubhouse, saw what Evers was trying to do, and intercepted the ball on its way to Evers. A bit of a melee ensued, the ball wound up among a group of fans, already wildly trying to take over the field, yet somehow Joe Tinker, the Cub shortstop, came up with the ball (or a ball, anyway) and threw it to Evers, who promptly stepped on second base. The base umpire (this time, there were two officials) had been watching the play at first and was out of range of this action. The home plate umpire, however, was near the pitcher's mound, anticipating this eventuality. That's because it was Hank O'Day, the same umpire who had missed the identical play nearly three weeks earlier. He was determined not to miss a second time.

O'Day called Merkle out at second. That left the game a tie after nine innings. Chaos reigned at the Polo Grounds, though, and it was impossible to control the marauding fans, many of whom left that day thinking the Giants had won. They hadn't. League president Harry Pulliam, as he consistently did in such situations, backed his umpire, ruling the game a tie. The season played out with a sequence that would make good fiction but would never be accepted as fact: The Cubs and Giants were both 98-55, with the Pirates a half game back at 98-56. The September 23 game would have to be replayed to determine which team would end at 99-55. It was, on October 8, and Three-Finger Brown beat Christy Mathewson, 4-2, at the Polo Grounds. The Cubs went on to what has become their last World Series success.

G. H. Fleming transmits this whole story to us in the words of the original recorders of it. Using contemporary newspaper accounts, he brings not just this game but the entire season to life, as it was experienced by those who followed their teams through the reporters covering those teams. With minimal editorial commentary, he records the day-to-day events related to the season, from hot-stove league activities between November 1907 and February 1908, then spring training preps (and it's a spring training far less structured than what we see today), and finally each Giants game from April to October. Because he lets the voices of 1908 do the speaking, what we read is often funny, sometimes shocking, occasionally painful. There was a frankness in reporting then, an openness undeterred by political correctness or, at times, even human decency. Players, both home team and visitor, were frequent targets of sportswriters' gentle gibing; at times, though, the gentleness disappeared and they were regaled with ethnic slurs of an astonishing directness. Side comments not infrequently demonstrated outright bigotry. Repeated examples make clear why we exercise some restraint today: the alternative, when experienced as routinely as was the case a hundred years ago, borders on the uncivilized.

The book offers a curious glimpse into other elements of baseball past. It shows some things have changed: Fred Tenney started his career as a left-handed catcher, a quantity essentially unknown today; Yankee owner Frank J. Farrell spent over $97,000 to run the team in 1907, with about $40,000 of that player salaries; many cities prohibited Sunday baseball, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Other things seemingly never change: wild throwers were a concern ("Ames would be a great pitcher if he had any knowledge of the direction likely to be taken by the ball after he lets go"); rather than change rules to increase batting averages, many proposed simply modifying the innards of the baseball itself; Cub manager and first baseman Frank Chance was booted from a game when he threw a bottle into the stands after that same bottle had been thrown at him. Reading routine newspaper reports through an entire season is a remarkable education for any fan. The immersion in the period provides a perspective often difficult to effectively capture in a standard historical narrative.

Perhaps the great flaw of this volume is the somewhat one-sided nature of the view. Although Fleming uses newspapers from around the league, along with two weeklies (Sporting News and Sporting Life), it's the Giants season, not the whole season, that we track, and the bulk of the story is told through a collection of New York dailies. While he does provide accounts of important goings-on elsewhere, it's the ride of the Giants that we get.

Small complaint that, however. The story is a magnificent picture of a time lost to many now. And it's an education about a great pennant race and mythic heroes, about some foundations of major league baseball as we know it, and about America as it was coming of age.

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