This Day in Baseball History (Mel Ott Sets Runs-Scored Record)

August 4, 1934—Slugger Mel Ott scored six runs in a game, a record he would tie 10 years later, and help the New York Giants overwhelm the Philadelphia Phillies, 21-4.

Recently a friend piqued my interest in the squad that has recently taken a back seat to the other three major-league teams in the Big Apple over the years (the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Mets). He informed me of a project sponsored by the Yankees, Mets, Jets, San Francisco (baseball) Giants and New York (football) Giants--all former tenants of the fabled Polo Grounds--to restore the last remnant of the baseball Giants' glory days: the John Brush Stairs, which lead from a park to the former stadium site.

Ott is not only emblematic of the early greatness and later eclipse of this team, but also a fascinating case study, in and of himself, of the nature of enduring fame in the national pastime.

Before writing this post, the following facts, for no apparent reason, stuck in my mind about Ott:

* He accumulated 511 homers over the course of his career;

* He had an unusual swing, with his right leg kicking upward before he made contact. Nevertheless, the results of the odd motion were impressive enough that his first manager, John J. McGraw (a skipper otherwise distinctly unenamored by the lure of the long ball), warned associates in the organization (including Casey Stengel) not to mess with it.

* He died in an auto accident in 1958 (a terrible year for baseball legends in that regard—the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Roy Campanella was involved in a devastating car crash that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life);

* More than 35 years after his untimely demise, he was still receiving letters, postmarked New York, with no return address but sealed with a lipstick print on the back of the envelope, from a woman known only as “Mary”, dividing bemused observers into two camps over her identity: either a lady who never really knew the slugger, or one who knew him extremely intimately.

* He was the last refuge of lazy crossword puzzle-makers who needed two three-letter words to fill out their work.

I wondered why I hadn’t read or heard more about Ott. Before the steroid era, after all, 500 HRs were nothing to sneeze at. So, I began reviewing the possibilities for why his prominence has dimmed somewhat over the years.

Maybe he didn’t have the chance to star in the offseason, I thought at first, or play a crucial role in a pennant race, as Carl Yastrzemski did in 1967, when every one of his Triple Crown statistics were needed to push the Boston Red Sox to the World Series.

But that turned out not to be the case—Ott played in three World Series from 1933 through 1937, batting .295. In 1936, he practically carried the Giants to the postseason singlehandedly, driving in 18% of the team’s runs.

Maybe, I thought again, Ott’s talents were one-dimensional, largely offensive-oriented. But that turned out to be even more incorrect than my first assumption: he recorded 26 outfield assists in 1929, and thereafter opposing players learned never to take advantage of his arm again.

So why has Ott—so famous in 1944 that, in a nationwide vote by war bond holders, he outpolled Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jack Dempsey, and Joe Louis as the greatest sports athlete of all time—been treated as something of an afterthought by today’s sports aficionados, even those based in New York? Herewith, some hypotheses:

* Ott’s persona paled next to the far more distinctive ones created by his contemporaries: larger-than-life Ruth, tragic Gehrig, all-around talent DiMaggio, hitting-obsessed Ted Williams.
His playing field affected retrospective evaluations. Baseball historian Bill James noted that 60% of Ott’s homers occurred at the Polo Grounds. People talk about the “short rightfield porch” of Yankee Stadium, but the 296 feet from home plate to the right-field foul pole had nothing on the 258 feet along similar lines at Coogan’s Bluff.

* At the same time, much of his early career coincided with the “dead ball era” of baseball. In one way, this benefited the Giants, and particularly ace Carl Hubbell, but it restrained the offensive totals of Ott, who never surpassed the 42 homers he hit in 1929 at age 20.

* He was given an entirely inadequate nickname. Any player worth his salt, if he wants to be remembered, needs a terrific nickname: The Babe, The Yankee Clipper, The Iron Horse, The Say-Hey Kid, The Splendid Splinter. Even 1970s reliever Al Hrabosky, for heaven’s sake, got “The Mad Hungarian.” And Ott’s? “Master Melvin.” That moniker was meant to evoke his naivete and precocity (he played his first big-league game at age 17 and, like fellow Cooperstown legends Robin Yount and Dave Winfield, never played a day in the minors). Instead, it sounds awfully close to “Milquetoast Melvin.” If I’d been him, I would have gotten a halfway decent PR firm to plant at least a good nickname with the press, something to evoke either his value to the team (“Magnificent Melvin” or “Melvin the Magician”) or the size of his homers (“Monstrous Melvin”).

* He was a helluva nice guy—perhaps too much for his own good. The fans loved Ott. So did owner Horace Stoneham, who named him player-manager in 1942. But after several seasons in which his teams kept finishing out of the running, Stoneham fired Ott as skipper, replacing him with the recent manager of the odious Brooklyn Dodgers: Leo Durocher, a man who, watching Ott and his squad in 1946, came out with the following (or something close to it): "Nice guys finish last."

can’t quite end with Leo the Lip getting the last word. So, you say, Durocher won three pennants, while Ott won none. Let’s look at Durocher’s record more closely: How many of those pennants were won honestly? Only two—that we know of, anyway.

The most famous of Durocher's pennants—1951, with the Giants—did not come as a result of his between-the-lines strategizing, we now realize.

For more than a century, baseball fans thrilled to the “Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff”—the Giants’ improbable comeback from 13 1/2 games back on August 11, 1951, that climaxed with Bobby Thomson’s walkoff homer against Dodger reliever Ralph Branca. Little did fans know (though many in the game’s cognoscenti—including the redoubtable Jackie Robinson—suspected) that the Giants benefited from an elaborate electronic apparatus that enabled them to steal signs and flash them to their players. (The story was confirmed definitively in 2001 by The Wall Street Journal's Joshua Harris Prager.)

Imagine if, only 32 years after the “Black Sox” scandal, baseball had gotten caught up in another scandal that damaged the reputation of the summer game.

I’ll take “Master Melvin” over “Leo the Lip” any day of the week.