This Day in Baseball History (Yankees’ Pennock Outduels A’s Grove Over 15 Innings)

July 4, 1925—The 50,000 fans who took advantage of the Independence Day holiday to throng Yankee Stadium thought they were watching an extra-innings pitchers’ duel between the Bronx Bombers and the Philadelphia Athletics. But actually, they were present at the creation of two mini-dynasties whose rivalry would play out over the next half-dozen years, with the two competing to dominate the American League.

When it was over two hours and 50 minutes later, the A’s highly touted, 25-year-old rookie, Robert "Lefty" Grove, lost on a sacrifice fly in the 15^th inning by the New York Yankees’ catcher Steve O'Neill, while 31-year-old veteran Herb Pennock (pictured) used guile to survive and come away with the 1-0 win in the first game of a double-header.

(If you want to know: the second game that day was shorter and less eventful: a 2-hour, 8-5 loss for the Yankees.)

Fans have witnessed some remarkable Independence Days at Yankee Stadium over the years—notably Dave Righetti’s 1983 no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox and a dying Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth” in what was, in effect, the first Old Times Game. But two Hall of Fame pitchers matching zeroes had to be extra special.

I have no idea of the full extent of what Grove and Pennock endured that afternoon because I can find no record for the temperature and pitch counts then. Even so, the two lefthanders had to surmount considerable frustration, knowing that their offenses could give them no breathing room.

True to form, the cool, unflappable Pennock pitched to contact and painted the corners, finishing the day with five strikeouts, four hits and, equally important, no walks. Grove notched 10 strikeouts—every one of them a necessity to get out of jams, as he yielded five walks and 14 hits.

Powerhouses that had formerly won World Series, both the Yankees and the A’s were being retooled by their front-office executives, Ed Barrow with New York and Connie Mack (who doubled as manager) for Philadelphia.

The Yankees, having won three straight pennants from 1921 through 1923 and a World Series in the latter year, fell to second place in the American League in 1924. In the first half of 1925, they had to deal with two months without Babe Ruth, with a medical ailment dubbed the "Bellyache Heard Around the World." After sitting on the bench for two years, the promising Lou Gehrig did not replace Wally Pipp at first base until June 1. 

The team that became immortalized as “Murderers’ Row” was making do, as much as they could, with pitchers that Barrow had acquired since coming over from the Red Sox, such as Pennock, George Pipgras, and “Sad Sam” Jones.

The A’s had gone through a fallow period after their 1910-14 pennants, but Mack was now assembling a talented young squad that included future Hall of Famers Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, and Jimmie Foxx. 

But, as I wrote in this post from 2011, the most ferociously competitive of this bunch was Lefty Grove—so volatile that, after (another) hard-luck 1-0 loss that deprived him of a chance for a 17^th-consecutive victory, he wrecked the A’s stall lockers, not to mention his uniform.

Neither the A’s (88-64-1, good for second place in the AL) nor the Yankees (69-85, seventh place) gave their fans much to cheer about in 1925. But they would return to form the following year, with the Yankees winning three straight pennants and two World Series from 1926 through 1928 and the A’s doing likewise from 1929 through 1931. Both teams have fair claims for being considered among the greatest of all time. 

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 (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.)

This Day in Baseball History (‘Home Run’ Baker Starts Year-Long Holdout)

Feb. 16, 1915—Connie Mack, forced to rebuild his artfully constructed dynasty, further dismayed fans of The Philadelphia Athletics by announcing at the team’s annual banquet that Frank “Home Run” Baker (pictured) would be retiring. What really had happened, though, was that the slugging third baseman, still at the height of his ability but unable to renegotiate a contract he had signed the year before, had simply refused to show up at the team’s spring-training camp in Jacksonville, Fla.

The fallout from this clash of wills in one of baseball’s first labor-management disputes was immediate and unfortunate for both parties. Baker, a smooth-fielding, .321 career hitter at the time, never reached the heights he had achieved earlier. Mack, with nobody promising or even particularly adequate to replace his star infielder, saw his team--World Series champs three of the last four years-- stumble through a 43-109 campaign—not only 58.5 games out of first place, but an appalling 56 games off  their pennant-winning pace of the year before.

I’m writing this particular post because of a conjunction of events and longstanding interests of mine. I have long wanted to post something about Mack, a genteel figure who bestrode several generations of baseball history. Then, the curious case of Alex Rodriguez (see this post of mine from the other day) made newly relevant the question of whether a star third baseman, after being forced to sit out an entire season, could ever return to anything like his old form.

At the time of this contract dispute, two forces—one restraining player freedom of movement, the other loosening it—were in direct opposition to each other, in a way they would not be again until the 1970s, when the free-agent system came into being.

The reserve clause, started in 1879, went far beyond the standard one-year contracts signed between player and team. In essence, a player was bound, in perpetuity, to a team, which was free to play him or trade him wherever it wanted, with no input by him into the matter. In their desire to control payroll costs, owners not only were circumscribing players’ ability to choose the employer of their choice—a restriction that no other industry exercised at the time—but dooming many long-suffering fans to long-term mediocrity, or worse.

In response, all that players could do was employ a weapon of mutually assured destruction: the holdout. But by 1914, the Federal League had formed, creating a third major league—and another option for players seeking more money. Its specter haunted the American and National Leagues, including the A’s, two of whose players, Eddie Plank and Chief Bender, jumped to the new circuit.

This new force caught Mack in a financial vise. A quarter-century before, as a 28-year-old catcher, he had been among those players opposing the National League’s salary cap and reserve clause. But now, as a part-owner of the A’s, he had become far more cognizant—and self-interested—about the other side of the financial ledger.

Even despite winning the pennant for the fourth year in a row, the A’s were only fifth in the American League in attendance. The fans had become spoiled by having a dynasty, Mack figured (though the impact of a 23-month national recession also couldn’t be discounted). Moreover, a giant scoreboard across from City Hall, put up by The Philadelphia Record, was enabling fans to catch the action for free outside the stadium. Now his players were clamoring for more pay. What should he do?

The course that Mack chose will be familiar to teams today in secondary markets: bite the bullet, economize and rely on the same eye for talent that had built one championship contender to create another.

That meant trading second baseman Eddie Collins, threatening to bolt to the Federal League, to the Chicago White Sox, and releasing Jack Coombs—who, though a World Series hero just three years before, was now 32 years old and coming off two straight seasons of illness and injury. But Mack still had three-quarters of his infield left and, with an older but cheaper Nap Lajoie, an all-time great who would adequately replace Collins.

At this point, he heard noise coming from Baker’s Maryland farm—and it wasn’t from the livestock.

While Baker didn’t mind Lajoie making $9,000 per year, he couldn’t help comparing the older man’s situation with his own: a 40-year-old on the downside of his career, vs. a 28-year-old just hitting his prime—but only making $6,666 per year.

Baker wanted his salary upgraded—but it covered three years rather than one. Mack was not ready to renegotiate. Still, at the banquet where he made the announcement, the manager sought to spin the situation: “He’s just sick of traveling and he wants to settle down for good on his Maryland farm. His wife has been at him for years to quit and it has been a tussle to make him sign each season…The boy isn’t dissatisfied. He doesn’t want more money, and he isn’t flighty.”

Of course, “more money” was exactly what Baker wanted. He was certainly willing to give Mack a hometown discount off what other teams might offer, but he did want to see an improvement.

But, for all his courtliness (he would never embarrass anyone before the press or even teammates), Mack had limited sympathy for the players’ point of view. Forced into a Dickensian job cutting soles in a shoe factory during his teen years, he, like many Irish-Americans of the Victorian Era, regarded baseball as a ladder out of poverty. Ballplayers should regard the game as a privilege, not a business.

The wound that Mack felt from Baker was personal, as well: the manager had believed in the raw young ballplayer when others did not. Bow-legged and awkward-looking in the field, Baker had convinced other experienced baseball hands that he would never make it. But Mack sensed that part of the reason behind the player’s ungainly lunges and off-balance throws lay in hyper-aggressive defense. Mack stuck with his gut. Baker might make more errors than others at his position, but, covering far more ground, he also had many more chances and outs at the hot corner.

For the first several years he was under contract, Baker rewarded Mack’s patience by becoming the best third baseman of his age. His defense, fine baserunning, and excellent batting average would, by themselves, have made Baker a cornerstone of Mack’s “$100,000 infield.” (The other members were first baseman Stuffy McInnis, future Hall of Famer Collins, and shortstop Jack Barry.)

But his power, especially in clutch situations, is what propelled Baker into legendary status. It is jaw-dropping nowadays to think that it took only 11 homers for Baker to lead the league in this category in 1911. But he led the league in homers for four straight years—and belted round-trippers off the majestic (and previously untouchable) Christy Mathewson in the World Series. A 46-ounce bat only added to the mystique created by the Boys in the Press Box of “Home Baker” Baker.

Fundamentally modest, even shy around strangers, Baker still knew what he was worth, and dug in his heels against Mack. Players wrote to him but received no answer back. A month passed, then Opening Day arrived.

At this point, Baker showed up—but not to play. Would Mack mind if he opted out of his contract and played semipro ball, he asked? Not at all, Mack said, so long as he played nowhere near Philly.

And that is how things went for the rest of the year. Baker didn’t get much beyond his farm on the semipro circuit, playing only Saturday and holiday games. Mack tried 14 different players at third base for the A’s in 1915, with very little luck. Wally Schang, the team’s catcher in 1914, who had never played third base before, got the most work, playing 43 games and making 18 errors, with Larry Kopf not far behind at 42 games. As the team’s misfortunes worsened, so did Mack’s mood, to the point where the normally mild-mannered skipper announced that he didn’t want to hear Baker’s name mentioned from then on.

With his holdout for the year over, Baker sat down with his lawyer and Mack after the 1915 season in the brewery office of New York Yankees owner Jake Ruppert and signed a three-year, $36,000 agreement. It was a healthy raise from what he was making with Mack, but his best batting average for a season, .306 in 1918, was still off his career pace with the A’s.  Moreover, he was forced to sit out yet another season (1920), this time because the death of his wife from scarlet fever left him with the responsibility of his two young girls. The one consolation was that in his final two seasons, he made it back to the World Series, on the shoulders of a power hitter more prodigious than he or anyone could have imagined: Yankee teammate Babe Ruth.

Bill James, in his New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, took due note of the impact of Baker’s two lost seasons: “It is certainly possible, and I might even argue that it is likely, that had he not done this [i.e., sat out two seasons], he would rank still today as the greatest third baseman of all time.” Even so, Baker ranks number 5 on the baseball stat maven’s list of all-time great third basemen, behind Mike Schmidt, George Brett, Eddie Mathews and Wade Boggs. (He would go on to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.)

The one player missing among these third basemen is Alex Rodriguez, who at the time of the book’s publication (2001) was still a shortstop. Now, the question becomes whether A-Rod, like Baker, is fated to experience a decline after a year’s layoff.

The answer, I think, is simple: The Yankee third baseman had already been mired in a decline for several years before his season-long suspension. The real question now is how quickly the end comes for him. He could, like Jason Giambi, stick out several more seasons with radically reduced productivity, simply for love of the game. Or--my guess--some combination of injuries and dismay over fan resentment might drive him out sooner.

Of course, there are second acts in baseball, and few perhaps as lustrous as Mack’s. More than a decade after he had dismantled one dynasty, he had put together another, featuring more Hall of Famers like Baker and Collins: first baseman Jimmie Foxx (discovered by Baker), leftfielder Al Simmons, catcher Mickey Cochrane, and starting pitcher Lefty Grove. A 1996 Sports Illustrated cover story posited that the 1929 squad, not the 1927 Yankees “Murderers’ Row,” was the best baseball squad of all time.

Again, though, Mack decided that the combination of escalating player salary demands and straitened economic circumstances required him to tear apart his dynasty. This time, there would be no comeback for the team. The Great Depression devastated attendance for the A’s far more—and for far longer—than the 1913-14 one recession had, and, unlike competitors such as the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mack was slow to recognize the value of investing in a minor-league system. The A's became perennial cellar-dwellers.

When Mack retired, after half a century as a manager and seven decades in pro baseball, following the 1950 season, “The Tall Tactician” was celebrated as the Grand Old Man of the national pastime—an unusual figure who dressed not in a uniform but in a business suit featuring a high starch collar, and who made field adjustments with a wave of his scorecard. But he stayed too long at the fair, not only unable to arrest his team’s long-term decline but having left no clear figure to succeed him. By mid-decade, the A’s had left Philly for Kansas City, then onto Oakland.

This Day in Baseball History (Lefty Grove Loses Bid for Record—and His Cool)

August 23, 1931—Although batters didn’t want any part of Philadelphia Athletics ace Lefty Grove during this special season, on this date it was his own teammates who didn’t want to be around him. After a contest in which he lost his chance at a record 17th consecutive victory, Grove displayed his nasty stuff—not in the form of his blazing fastball but his blazing temper.

Following a 1-0 loss to the St. Louis Browns—a defeat that occurred because of an error by a substitute leftfielder--"I went in and tore the clubhouse up—wrecked the place, tore those stall lockers off the wall and everything else,” the surly southpaw related, in uncharacteristic tranquility, later. (The “everything else” included tearing off and shredding his uniform.)

Nor was Grove done yet. Even after his one-man wrecking-crew routine, the pitcher still hadn’t vented all his anger. But this time, instead of releasing it on hapless sub Jimmy Moore, he took it out on the man being replaced, leftfielder Al Simmons.

Why, Grove wondered, did Simmons have to choose this day—one in which the pitcher was trying to break the consecutive-win record jointly held by Walter Johnson and Smokey Joe Wood these last 19 years—to go to the doctor? Had Simmons been in the field instead of Moore, the pitcher felt, that routine line drive by the woebegone Browns’ Sky Melillo would have been caught and Grove would have been out of the inning without any damage.

Some guys explode, then forget all about it in a matter of minutes. Not Grove. For a full week, he wouldn’t talk to anyone. It would take several more years before he forgave Simmons.

When reading the vague outlines of this story, I wondered if the pitcher might have been better off changing his name to Lefty Grudge. This kind of competitiveness that curdles into churlishness, I reasoned, is the sign of an abnormal person—particularly since Simmons probably won, oh, 15 games almost singlehandedly for every one he “lost” for the A’s ace, what with a league-leading .390 batting average and a reputation as his team’s clutch hitter.

But as I read a bit more about “Bucketfoot Al” (a nickname derived from his unusual batting stance), I wondered if Grove might have had a point. Simmons enjoyed a Hall of Fame career, but he felt chagrined that he retired some 70 hits from the magic 3,000 circle. Had he not had to check out of games early—or miss some altogether—because of hangovers, he reasoned, he might have been able to pick up a few more hits along the way.

Surely Grove knew about this. I haven’t been able to discover the cause of the ailment that sent Simmons to the doctor (if that was indeed the true story), but if the slugger had to miss the game because of alcohol, maybe Grove had a right to be peeved.

Grove didn’t lose many other games that year. When he was finished for the season, he led the American League in earned run average (ERA), shutouts, strikeouts, winning percentage and wins, and tied for complete games. Then consider some of his other achievements in this period:

* A 46-4 record from July 25, 1930, through September 24, 1931—believed to be the best 50-game stretch by any pitcher in baseball history;

* An ERA of 2.06 in 1931, less than half the league average that year;

* Coming out of the bullpen to save five games.

Grove was instrumental in helping the A’s capture 107 regular-season games in 1931—and, more important, take the pennant by 13½ games over the New York Yankees, who still had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in their primes. In fact, in a 1996 cover story called “The Team That Time Forget,” Sports Illustrated writer William Nack made a creditable case that the 1929-31 A’s belonged in any conversation with the ’27 and ’61 Yankees as the best team in baseball history.

There are all kinds of testaments to Grove’s greatness, including that he won 300 games in his career despite not pitching regularly in the major leagues till age 25, or that, even after an injury made him lose some speed, he continued to enjoy winning records each year till he retired at age 41. Stats maven Bill James has come right out and asked, “What argument, if any, could be presented against the proposition that Lefty Grove was the greatest pitcher who ever lived?”

But no statistics convey the quality of the lanky, fierce southpaw at his best more than an opposing player who said his fastball looked “like a flash of white sewing thread coming up at you.”

Given all that I’ve just written about Grove’s volatile temperament, many of my readers, I think, might look at the photo accompanying this post and wonder, as did Esquire in running one particular image of Richard Nixon throughout the 1970s, “Why is this man smiling?” (Well, sort of smiling, anyway: This was probably as close as Grove got to it in his career.) In Grove’s case, the occasion was the American League MVP trophy he won for his sensational 1931 season.

In case you’re wondering: unlike Ty Cobb’s, Grove’s temper subsided quite a bit after his playing days were through. Fellow residents of his hometown, Lonaconing, Md., and, later, Norwalk, Ohio, actually found him to be quite a friendly guy in the three decades between his retirement and his death in 1975. Who'd have thought it?