Flashback, June 1925: Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Collins Notches 3,000th Hit

Eddie Collins laid down another marker as perhaps the greatest second basemen in baseball history in early June 1925 by belting a single (and then a second) to center for the 3,000^th hit of his career, sparking the Chicago White Sox to a 12-7 victory over the Detroit Tigers. 

Only five players—Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Ty Cobb, and Tris Speaker—had achieved this feat before him—and, of the nearly 21,000 known players in the history of the major leagues, only 27 have done so since. Yet remarkably, nobody observed the milestone at the time.

Even now, I have seen or two different dates in this week 100 years ago for when Collins reached that point.

I became interested in Collins for a couple of reasons:

*He preceded Lou Gehrig as a student at my alma mater, Columbia University, who ended up inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame;

*Though captain of the White Sox during the 1919 World Series, he was considered so honest that he wasn’t even approached by any of the ringleaders of the notorious group that threw that series at the behest of gamblers;

*He was, simply, a superb player, so respected that New York Giant manager the best ballplayer I have seen during my career on the diamond.”

If ever there was a “money player”—one not just well-compensated (for his time) during the regular season, but in baseball’s World Series, where additional money and glory accrue—it was Collins. He remains the only non-Yankee to be part of the same team winning five or more World Series.

Consistently over his 25 seasons in the big leagues, he could do nearly all—hit for average, walk, bunt, hit-and-run, steal bases, and play excellent defense. (The only skill he did not possess was hitting home runs, but that was not important in the “deadball” era in which he spent the first half of his career.)

The nickname given Collins was “Cocky.” Joe Posnanski’s 2021 book on what he considers the greatest players of the national pastime, The Baseball 100, insists that “on the field, he was all arrogance and bluster and condescension.” But baseball biographer Jack Kavanagh has written that the nickname came “not because he was arrogant, but because he was filled with confidence based on sheer ability." (Indeed, unlike Pete Rose, he was, by most accounts, oblivious to his assault on the record books.)

Whatever the case, he believed he could rise to any occasion—and he nearly always did.

Intelligence bolstered Collins on and off the diamond, and set him apart from many of his teammates. Not the fastest of players, he developed his prodigious base-stealing prowess by scrutinizing pitchers’ motions, then taking off when he detected the point in their delivery he was waiting for. A left-handed batter, he would slap outside pitches past third base if the defense played him to pull the ball—a discipline that many modern players have never learned.

Masterful at adapting, Collins went from a core member of Connie Mack’s famous “$100,000 Infield” with the Philadelphia Athletics to an equally key member of the Chicago White Sox.

Despite his athletic accomplishments, Collins succeeded in triggering resentment, possessing levels of class and education that teammates from more hard-scrabble backgrounds did not enjoy. He grew up in a comfortable middle-class environment as the son of a railroad freight agent who could afford sending him to boarding school. He had planned to become a lawyer after graduating Columbia until he realized he could make decent money as a baseball player. He was college educated (and Ivy League, at that) in a time when that was beyond not just most big leaguers but most Americans.

The animosity of some A’s teammates first surfaced in 1914, when they suggested that a series of magazine articles he wrote alerted rivals to flaws he detected (such as tipping pitches) and enabled them to correct these.

But this annoyance took on more significant dimensions in 1919 when he rejoined the White Sox after his WWI military service concluded. That team, he later concluded, though more talented even than the Yankees’ immortal 1927 “Murderers’ Row.” was “torn by discord and hatred during much of the '19 season. From the very moment I arrived at training camp from service, I could see something was amiss."

Collins and Ray Schalk headed what baseball maven Bill James called the “gentlemen’s faction,” while Chick Gandil headed a more discontented clique. So loathed by this group was Collins that he was frozen out of pregame infield practice through much of the season.

Nobody ever suggested that Collins was part of the “Black Sox” scheme that autumn. But accounts have varied about how much Collins might have suspected, and what he did to stop it. At one point, Collins observed that he had heard something might be amiss, but dismissed these thoughts as preposterous. In a second account, he said he had approached Charles Comiskey in early September with the rumor, only to be dismissed—a claim that the White Sox denied.

Whatever the case, though Collins expressed some sympathy for Shoeless Joe Jackson for not having enough education to sense he was being manipulated, he supported baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s ironclad ban on the eight group members who knew about the fix.

The White Sox began a slow but inexorable long-term passage from contention that even Collins couldn’t prevent when he served as player-manager from the end of 1924 through 1926. He was then traded back to the A’s, where he concluded his career in 1930.

After retiring as a player, Collins served as general manager of the Boston Red Sox, trading for top-line players like Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove before building the team for the long term by spotting and signing future Hall of Famers Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams.

But he only granted a tryout to African-American players when subjected to public pressure—and even then, in 1945, he failed to pursue Jackie Robinson, whose subsequent career demonstrated that he was the same kind of intelligent, aggressive game- and team-changer that Collins had been.

(Dan Holmes' 2017 post from the "Baseball Egg" blog calls Collins "the greatest second baseman of the Deadball Era" and ranks him third overall at that position for all major league history. Many would rank him even higher. 

But Holmes succinctly summarizes his postseason excellence, and offers a delicious piece of trivia: Collins "buried his bats during the off-season in shallow holes in his backyard that he called 'graves' in order to keep them 'lively.'”)