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.'”)

This Day in Baseball History (Future Hall of Famer Pie Traynor Hits for Cycle)

July 7, 1923—Midway through his second full season in the major leagues, Pie Traynor gave his strongest indication yet that he would be one of the most consistent, productive hitters of the Roaring Twenties, as the 24-year-old third baseman hit a single, double, triple, and home run—“hitting for the cycle”—in leading the Pittsburgh Pirates to a blowout 18-5 victory in an away game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

Over the years, I had heard in passing, in histories of baseball, about Baseball Hall of Famer Harold Joseph Traynor. But I had no idea, until I listened to “The Life of Pie” episode of the “This Week In Baseball History” podcast hosted by Mike Bates and Bill Parker, just how good Traynor was at his peak, and his surprising afterlife once his career as a premier player began to wound down.

Most of all, I hadn’t realized that many considered him baseball’s best third baseman until the arrival of Eddie Mathews in the 1950s.

Since then, with Brooks Robinson, George Brett, Mike Schmidt, and Chipper Jones now also in the mix, Traynor’s preeminence at “the hot corner” has fallen several notches further. Baseball historian and stat maven Bill James dropped him down to #15. The blog “The Hall of Miller and Eric” even gave an entire post over to Traynor in a post provocatively titled, “How the Hall Failed – Pie Traynor.”

I’m having none of the new revisionism. I could remind you that Traynor was the first third baseman elected to Cooperstown by writers rather than the Veterans Committee when he was inducted in 1946.

I could tell you that after being tried at shortstop and second base, he had adjusted so well to third that he was considered perhaps the best defensively at the position for the rest of the 1920s. (One quote I love, from longtime Yankees GM Ed Barrow: “He looked like a real ballplayer, even though he seemed to be all arms and legs and [had] feet like violin cases.  He also had big hands and scooped up every ball hit at him.”)

But I would also tell you that Traynor (who, for the curious, got his nickname as a boy, when he consistently requested a slice of pie after a game) was a money player, one of the essential cogs on a Pirate team that won the World Series in 1925 and the National League pennant in 1927.

Even after back, shoulder, and eye problems eroded his defensive skills in the 1930s, Traynor retained his offensive consistency, finishing his career with a .320 batting average. Remarkably, he only struck out 278 times in his entire career—an average of only 23 strikeouts for a 162-game average.

His offensive production bought Traynor time as the Pirates pondered where to put him in the infield. The year 1923 was when he erupted as a force at the plate.

A tip from righthanded batting wizard Rogers Hornsby—use a heavier bat—led Traynor away from being a strict pull hitter into one who could send line drives into right field and right center, too. That year, he cracked 208 hits, leading the league with 19 triples, with a career-high 12 HRs, 101 RBIs and a .338 batting average.

In hitting for the cycle against the Phillies (the only time that comparatively rare offensive feat was recorded in the majors in 1923), Traynor had 6 RBIs—the most for a game that golden season. It was one of five 4-hit games he’d have that year, and came amid a blistering 24-game hitting streak.

As great a player as he was, Traynor was unsuccessful when he took over as the Pirates’ manager in 1934. Just as his wife predicted, his tendency to worry as a player was magnified when he had to mind an entire squad, and he was simply too nice a guy to discipline players when they needed it.

For several years in the late Thirties and early Forties, Traynor stayed within the Pirate organization as a scout. Then, for two decades, he served as a radio sportscaster with his own show. Most surprising, after that gig ended in 1966, he served several years as the voice of Studio Wrestling.

As a co-owner for two years of a sporting-goods store with Honus Wagner and a friend to younger stars Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Richie Hebner, Traynor served as living link across the generations for the Pirates. The sadness at his passing in 1972 was massive and genuine. A couple of weeks later, at their home opener, the club he had served so faithfully posthumously retired his uniform number 20.

This Day in Baseball History (Hall of Famer Foxx Clubs Last HR)

Sept. 9, 1945— For one last, shining moment—after his skills had diminished through injuries and the self-medication he used to deal with the resulting pain—Jimmie Foxx reminded baseball fans of the awesome power that made him one of the game’s greatest players, hitting a home run and double while driving in five runs in a game for the city where he became a star.

But the circumstances had changed greatly since he had started his career as a prized prospect 20 years before, with a Philadelphia A’s team building towards two World Series trophies and three American League pennants. This time he was a part-time player with the crosstown Phillies, a 42-94 squad—and this seventh homer of the season would be the 534^th and last of his career.

In the 1930s, no player could match Foxx for either power (415 HRs, 1,403 RBIs) or versatility on the diamond (though he primarily played first base, he also cheerfully filled in at third base and catcher if his team needed him there). His speed even astonished those who judged him solely on his bulk. Not surprisingly, he earned three Most Valuable Player Awards in the decade, and twice hit more than 50 home runs.

Long before the advent of the “tape-measure” home run, Foxx sparked gasps at how far he could hit the ball. In the late 1960s, the retired Yankee pitching great Lefty Gomez joked that astronauts had discovered on the Moon a ball that Foxx had hit off him three decades before.

By September 1940, when he reached the 500^th home run of his career at only age 32 with the Boston Red Sox, many observers—including his worshipful younger teammate, Ted Williams—thought it entirely possible that he might surpass the once-unthinkable 714 HRs compiled by Babe Ruth.

But few baseball superstars have descended as rapidly as Foxx. In an article for the Society for American Baseball Research, Bill Jenkinson plausibly argues that the effects of a beaning in a 1934 barnstorming tour began to catch up with this superb athlete. His drinking, previously moderate, increased sharply in 1941 as the problems with vision and sinuses resulting from the beaning led him to drown out his pain.

On June 1, 1942, the Red Sox, believing he’d been fatally slowed by injury, placed him on waivers. His performance for the team that picked him up, the Chicago White Sox, was so poor (a .205 batting average) that the discouraged slugger sat out the entire 1943 season.

With WWII depleting major league rosters and with an acrimonious and costly divorce impacting his finances, Foxx was convinced to give the major leagues another try. He played a handful of games as a player-coach for the Chicago Cubs and also became interim manager of Portsmouth in the Class B Piedmont League.

In 1945, Phillies manager Ben Chapman had come to believe that Foxx’s vision was so poor that he could no longer be a viable everyday player, so his time at first base would be limited. But Foxx had performed so well in a brief stint as, of all things, a pitcher when he was coaching the minor-league Portsmouth squad that Chapman decided to press him into service in that role in the big leagues, too—even though the last time Foxx had done so with any regularity had been as a teenager.

Chapman first tried Foxx on the mound in two July games. “Double XX” performed creditably enough that Chapman took the next logical step, naming him as his starter against the seventh-place Cincinnati Reds on August 19. After having difficulty with his location, Foxx improbably won the game. After that, he pitched six more times for the Phils, all but once in relief.

Whether watching Foxx bamboozle batters on the mound or take an opposing pitcher deep, as he did in his final homerun at Forbes Field against the Pirates, fans had come to savor these infrequent flashes of glory from a player who had displayed much more in the prior two decades. He continued to attract hordes of autograph seekers and just plain well-wishers when he retired for good at the end of the season, and in 1951 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

The most notable aspect of Foxx’s post-major league career might have been his 1952 stint as manager of the Fort Wayne Daisies, a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. 

But unlike Jimmy Dugan, the washed-up alcoholic skipper played by Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, Foxx was a genial sort who would never dream of barking at a tearful young woman, “There’s no crying in baseball!”

(The image accompanying this post is how most people associated with baseball in his time preferred to see Foxx--in his youthful prime with the Philadelphia A's. This figure, not the broken-down one of 1945, ranks #29 on Bill James’ Top 100 baseball players, behind Mel Ott and ahead of George Brett.)

Quote of the Day (Two Yankee Scouts, on the Future of Prospect Derek Jeter)

“ ‘Isn’t this kid going to Michigan?’ [New York Yankees scouting director Bill] Livesey asked. 

" ‘No, he's not,’ [scout] Dick Groch shot back. ‘The only place this kid's going is Cooperstown.’"—Ian O’Connor, The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (2011)

O captain! My captain! Nearly 30 years after this conversation, you are indeed heading for Cooperstown. Congratulations! Thanks for the memories, Derek Jeter—and for the five more World Championships during your tenure at shortstop!

This Day in Baseball History (Willie Mays, Bicoastal Giant Legend, Born)

May 6, 1931—Swift, smooth-fielding slugger Willie Mays was born in Alabama, in America’s most viciously segregated era—a long way from the East and West Coast cities where he broke through as perhaps the greatest in the first generation of African-American players.

Gotham fans of a certain age—or even those just fascinated by sports history—would tell you that the golden age of New York baseball lasted for a decade, from 1947 to 1957, and especially the last six years of that period. The city was big enough to hold three franchises: the Yankees in the American League, and, over in the National League, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. One, sometimes two, of these teams made it to the World Series in each of these 10 years. Not so coincidentally, all three teams had sluggers in center field, each with their own rabid fans: the oldest, Duke Snider, for the Dodgers; Mays, for the Giants; and a player who, like Mays, entered the major leagues with rookie travails in 1951, Mickey Mantle.

All these years later, I am not going to choose a “best” among these three magnificent center fielders who inspired countless arguments among midcentury New York fans about who was the greatest. I simply want to celebrate the achievement of one, Mays, who made a difference in the life of baseball and in two great American cities.

(One of those cities, let it be noted, was NOT Boston. While still holding out against integrating their team—a stance they would maintain until a dozen years after Jackie Robinson came to Brooklyn--the Red Sox sent a scout to assess Mays, then playing not far from where he grew up, with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays, the scout reported, was not the Sox kind of player.  Undoubtedly, at least part of the reason why the Curse of the Bambino extended longer than it had to was because of the Curse of the Color Line in Beantown).

In one of his great columns in which he summed up a sports figure by addressing him in the second person, sportswriter Jimmy Cannon conveyed the magic that this gifted ballplayer held for countless city youths:

“You're Willie Mays of Fairfield, Ala., who is part of the small talk of New York. This shall be your city as long as your talent lasts….Kids forget the squalor of their childhood as they emulate the shambling urgency of your gait. They speak as though you lived on the same block with them.”

When you think about it, the time that Mays had to make his mark as a member of the New York Giants was relatively short compared with his entire career. He missed the 1952 and 1953 seasons entirely because of military service, and after 1958 he followed when the Giants left the Polo Grounds for San Francisco’s damp, foggy, windblown, altogether miserable Candlestick Park. He was not part of a New York team again until 1972 and 1973, when he played for the New York Mets, at a point when his considerable awareness of the subtleties of the game could not compensate for his declining physical skills and injuries.

That left 1951, when he earned National League Rookie of the Year honors despite not being called up till late May (and not getting a hit in his first 12 a-bats); 1954, when he became Most Valuable Player; and only three more full seasons in which he played the game with a flair never seen before and seldom if ever glimpsed since. 

Here was a player who could not only slug the ball out of the park but also run so fast that he’d lose his cap, who could catch flies with his unorthodox but devastatingly effective “basket catch,” and—in the 1954 World Series—sprint into the canyon of center field in the Polo Grounds to catch a line drive by Vic Wertz, haul it in with his back to the infield, then whirl around to fire perfectly to the cutoff man. (It’s a sign of Mays’ consistent brilliance that he doesn’t even regard this play—one so iconic that it’s known simply as “The Catch”—as his best.)

The fans could see what he was like on the field, where his skill was evident. What they could not see was his leadership in the clubhouse, where his ebullience, pragmatism, even temperament and intelligence at least kept teams from self-destruction, and occasionally (as in the ’62 and ’73 pennant races) helped his squads reach the World Series. A few examples will suffice:

* He helped the San Francisco Giants come from behind in the pennant race, then defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers in a best-two-of-three playoff series, in 1962, despite having to be hospitalized down the stretch from exhaustion;

*He staved off a rebellion two years later by African-American and Hispanic players angered by racially insensitive remarks by manager Alvin Dark, successfully arguing that, no matter how angry they might feel, forcing a mid-season managerial replacement could only lead to catastrophe;

*He was virtually the only player on the field to keep his head a year later when a benches-clearing brawl broke out between teammate Juan Marichal and Mays’ friend on the Dodgers, Johnny Roseboro—eventually managing to separate the two before a riot could have broken out; 

*He made a key speech to the executive board of the baseball players union in 1972, urging them to stick together on the eve of their strike; and 

*He joined teammate Tom Seaver and manager Yogi Berra, among others, in persuading Mets fans to allow the game to proceed after a nasty slide by Pete Rose into Bud Harrelson led to a bottle being thrown at Rose from left field and to the umpires threatening the Amazin’s with a forfeit in this bitterly contested 1973 playoff game.

There was another quality, over and above all of his leadership qualities, even, which Mays summed up this way during his induction speech into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979:

“This country is made up of a great many things. You can grow up to be what you want. I chose baseball, and I loved every minute of it. I give you one word –love. It means dedication. You have to sacrifice many things to play baseball. I sacrificed a bad marriage and I sacrificed a good marriage. But I’m here today because baseball is my number one love.”

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on the Steadiness of Joe Torre)

“What has set apart the Torre era is not just winning but a sense of attachment and identification that he effortlessly inspired among the fans and the players and the millions of sports bystanders. Already known by the fans as a strong-swinging Brooklyn-born catcher (and, later, a third baseman) with an eighteen-year career with the Braves, the Cardinals, and the Mets, and then for his long tenure as a semi-distinguished manager of the same three teams, he became a sudden celebrity, a Page Six sweetheart, in his first season with the Yankees, when his brother Frank Torre, another former major leaguer, underwent successful heart-replacement surgery the day before the last game of the World Series. The fourth game, in which the Yankees, trailing the Braves by 2–1 in the Series and 6–0 on the scoreboard, came back to win in extra innings, beginning their rush to the championship, changed New York to a Yankee town overnight. Torre’s composure and steadiness in hard times became as familiar as his odd, tilting trudge from the dugout to the mound to call in a fresh pitcher. A habitual modesty interwoven with an awareness of the difficult daily grind powerfully secured him to his players. Whenever someone brought up the batting title and National League M.V.P. award he had captured in 1971 with a .363 average, he threw in a reminder about his .289 mark the following year. Mid-July often brought on a retelling of a game of his as a Mets third baseman in 1975, when he batted into four double plays and also committed an error. This ease with himself and his profession set the tone in his pre-game and post-game press conferences, delivered every day to thirty or forty writers, plus TV and radio and Japan.”—New Yorker fiction editor and baseball writer Roger Angell, “Comment: So Long, Joe,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2007

When I heard a few days ago, as I had hoped for the last few years, that Joe Torre had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, there really was only one baseball writer whom I wanted for a “Quote of the Day” about the former Yankee manager.

On more than one occasion, Roger Angell has written lyrically about what he called “the web of the game,” in a classic piece on a collegiate mound deal between future big-leaguers Ron Darling and Frank Viola. 

But six years ago, as the New York Yankees allowed Torre to walk away from the job, under circumstances they mistakenly hoped to spin to their advantage, Angell--perhaps inspired by the example of his subject’s “habitual modesty”--turned in a piece more subdued than usual for him but equally inspired. 

It aptly capturing the qualities, “composure and steadiness in hard times,” that lent the Torre-led Yankees what they had not enjoyed in 20 prior years under George Steinbrenner: normality. (Is it any wonder that the manager’s relationship with the diva-ish Alex Rodriguez was so uneasy?)

The Bronx Bombers have long since mended fences with Torre, and, following the news of the Hall of Fame enshrinement, they have taken the rapprochement with their former skipper to the next level by announcing they will retire his number. 

(The blogger at Bleeding Yankee Blue speaks for many of us when he wonders about the possibility that the Yankee brass might one day also honor the “Core Four” who came to prominence under Torre—Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada—who would “stand at the mound on George Steinbrenner's birthday [July 4] and have their numbers retired together.”)

As it happens, Cooperstown is joining the Yankees in correcting an injustice, though hardly as stinging a one. 

For years, the Baseball Writers' Association of America did not include Angell on its roster because membership was largely confined to writers who either cover baseball full time or write about the game for a newspaper, news service or major website. Angell’s ad hoc pieces at The New Yorker (where, of course, he labored for years as a fiction editor) somehow didn’t count, no matter how graceful.

Now, however, these baseball scribes have fittingly voted to give Angell its annual J.G. Taylor Spink award for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing." A long time coming, and infinitely well deserved.

(The photo accompanying this post—of Torre in another pennant race in September 2005, heading to the dugout after changing pitchers—illustrates the kind of walk to which Angell refers in the above quote.)