This Day in Baseball History (Birth of Rogers Hornsby, Irascible ‘Rajah’ of Hitting)

Apr. 27, 1896— Rogers Hornsby, still considered a century after his prime to be the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball history—and a certain part of any all-star lineup of the sport’s surliest characters—was born in Winters, Texas.

Like virtually all baseball fans, I was first intrigued by Hornsby through a number associated with him: .358, giving him a lifetime batting average second only to Ty Cobb.

But my attention was gripped by him even more when I came across Fay Vincent’s Wall Street Journal piece from a few weeks ago. The former baseball commissioner had a tough time restraining his scorn for one of those new-school metricnomes who suggested that Jeff Kent might be the best righthand-hitting second baseman of all time.

Not a chance, Vincent countered, pointing to a stat that, he thought, was about as unlikely to be broken as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game consecutive hitting streak: Hornsby’s five-year stretch from 1921 to 1925, when the St. Louis Cardinal compiled a collective .402 batting average.

That achievement would have amazed Hughes’ teammates when he came to the majors in September 1915, when the thin youngster hit only .246 in less than a month. After the season, the young shortstop asked St. Louis Cardinals manager Miller Huggins what he should do. Huggins said, “Kid, you’re a little light, but you’ve got the makings.  I think I’ll farm you out for a year.”

Hornsby took Huggins’ colloquial advice more literally than was intended, immediately going to his uncle’s house, where during the offseason he performed as much farm labor, ate fried chicken and steak, and drank as much milk as he could stand.

When he returned to the Cardinals in the spring, Hornsby had added 30 pounds to his thin 135-pound frame, all of it muscle (and with none of it subverted by the common banes of that era, drinking and smoking). The strategy was the exact opposite of the one employed over this past winter by the Toronto Blue Jays’ first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who, after an aggressive conditioning program, has sweated off 42 pounds since last July. But the results were the same: a higher batting average (.313 for Hornsby, .338 for Guerrero at this point in the season).

Power would come in time: 301 homers during his 23-year career, to go along with two Triple Crowns, two MVP trophies, and seven National League batting titles.

What accounted for this power surge? The aforementioned muscle, along with standing back more in the batter’s box, abandoning choking up on the bat, and benefiting from the end of the “dead ball” era that saw the fadeout of the spitball.

But nobody could overlook Hornsby’s volcanic intensity and commitment to the game. "People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball,” Hornsby once drawled. “I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

"The greatest right-handed hitter?" fellow Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner asked Marty Noble in a 2013 article. "Doesn't it have to be him? Who else did what he did?"

Who else indeed?

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story for “The Rajah” (a nickname meant as a counterpart to Babe Ruth’s “Sultan of Swat,” and, of course, a play on his first name). Baseball historian Bill James picked him for “the biggest horse’s ass in baseball history.” In the mega-contract, steroid era of the last three decades, Hornsby has gained some stiff competition for the title, but the following characteristics continue to keep him ahead of the pack:

*Superstitious: Hornsby refused to go to movies because he believed cinemas’ flickering lights would damage his eyesight, and offered the same reason for why he professed to read nothing more than newspaper headlines. As former commissioner Vincent noted waggishly in his Hornsby piece: “Genius often comes wrapped in eccentricities.”

*Cocky: He came by it early. Complimented as a 15-year-old about his play at second base, he responded, “Yeah, and there are eight other positions I can play just as good,” according to an article for the Society of American Baseball Research by C. Paul Rogers III.

*Irascible: Spelling his first name without the "s" was the least thing guaranteed to set the player off. “Hornsby knew more about baseball and less about diplomacy than anyone I ever knew,” one sportswriter observed about Hornsby. Calling his teammates “stool pigeons” one season was among the milder of his insults. The tactlessness was even worse when directed publicly towards individual players.

*Aloof: He didn’t bother communicating to players, fleeing the clubhouse as soon after a game as he could.

*Unhygienic: His quickness out of the clubhouse was enhanced by his speed in the showers—on the occasions when he deigned to take any.

*Unfaithful: With his cold personality, I’m not sure how Hornsby managed to get any woman at all, but he wed three—and, after his playing days were over, employed a mistress as his secretary. After being named in a divorce suit by an irate husband, he married the woman involved, Jeannette Pennington Hine. (Andrew Martin described the litigation—as well as the driving and gambling issues that also surrounded the slugger—in a 2011 article, "The Troubled Life of Rogers Hornsby.") I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that, over the course of three decades with Hornsby, Jeannette took to drink.

*Antisemitic: While managing the Cincinnati Reds in 1952, Hornsby—unaware that Gabe Paul was Jewish—made an antisemitic remark to the general manager. After the season, Hornsby told a reporter he believed this was the real reason he was fired. Possibly—plus the fact that Hornsby never apologized.

*Racist: Veteran sportswriter Fred Lieb claimed that Hornsby had admitted to membership in the Ku Klux Klan. That assertion has never been verified. But Hornsby did occasionally boycott playing against black teams. That could not have eased his embarrassment when a young Satchel Paige struck him out five times in a barnstorming game.

*Toxic: Though he managed the Cardinals to a memorable World Series win over the New York Yankees in 1926, Hornsby continually wore out his welcome in the clubhouse. At the major-league level, he managed—and was fired from—six different ballclubs. He gambled so heavily on horses and accumulated such a frightening amount of debt that he was traded from the Cardinals after the 1926 season and fired as player-manager of the St. Louis Browns in 1937. In 1952, hired again by the Browns, he lasted only 51 games before he was terminated by Bill Veeck. The grateful players gave the owner a three-foot trophy that they had inscribed, “To Bill Veeck: For the greatest play since the Emancipation Proclamation.” 

Hornsby remained committed to his hard-bitten style all the way to the end of his life. Only he could have written, a year before his death in 1963, a memoir entitled, My War With Baseball.

This Day in Baseball History (Hornsby Out of Windy City, in Grimm Tale)

Aug. 2, 1932—As the baseball season entered late innings, the Chicago Cubs let go player-manager Rogers Hornsby, naming as his successor a man whose sunny personality didn’t match his surname, Charlie Grimm. Peace reigned again, after a seemingly interminable interval, in the Windy City. Half a continent away, if he could break his attention from his resurgent New York Yankees long enough, Joe McCarthy would have let out a gruff guffaw.

At the end of the 1930 season, with only four games left to play, Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley had decided to replace McCarthy, a tough but shrewd skipper who instilled discipline, with Hornsby—as pissed-off in the dugout as he was peerless on the field. “The Rajah,’’ as sportswriters nicknamed him, was halfway through a career taking him to Cooperstown—seven National League batting championships, on his way to compiling a lifetime batting average of .358, second only to Ty Cobb. 

The trouble was, as one writer put it, “Hornsby knew more about baseball and less about diplomacy than anyone I ever knew.”

For all the fireworks he was responsible for on the field, Hornsby created considerably less welcome explosions off it. Leave aside, if you can, the fact that Hornsby was anti-Semitic and racist. For all his single-minded desire to win (his response, upon being asked what he did in the offseason: “I stare out the window and wait for spring”), for all his admitted knowledge about hitting, he was simply tactless—and, like many men excellent at their work, impatient with those who couldn’t grasp the lessons he tried to impart.

Yet this was still the era of the player-manager—maybe not quite what it was at its 1876-1910 height, when nearly half of the more than 200 player-managers in the history of “The Show” worked, but nevertheless an age when one of the nine on the diamond might be raised among his fellows to call the shots. Besides Hornsby, other prominent player-managers of the 1930s were Bill Terry, Jimmy Dykes, Joe Cronin, Mickey Cochrane and Frank Frisch. Owners might find this an intriguing concept—it meant that the two jobs could be done on only one salary—but, in the case of Hornsby, they would find, all over again,  the dangers of this dual job.

The other day, I heard former Yankee outfielder and current broadcaster Paul O’Neill say that players on contending teams tended to enjoy the period after the late summer trading period, because the team knew who it would be “going to war” with in pursuit of a World Series ring. Hornsby’s idea of “war” was less metaphorical than O’Neill’s, and more akin to the famous statement by Ernest King, Commander in Chief, US Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations in WWII: “When a war starts, they send for the sons of bitches.”

In St. Louis, Hornsby’s reputation was set, for better and worse. He led the Cardinals to a dramatic World Series victory over the Yankees, even ending the game in the decisive seventh contest by tagging out Babe Ruth at second. But he also showed little willingness to de-escalate disputes. Arguing with the Philadelphia Phillies’ Art Fletcher, he suddenly punched him in the face. Asked why later on, he responded simply: ““Well, I wasn’t making any progress trying to talk to him.” 

When the Cardinals’ owner balked at his demand for a raise (this after his batting average dropped from .403 to .317), he was traded to the New York Giants, where he ran afoul of manager John McGraw. Another trade, this time to the Boston Braves, followed, and though Hornsby rebounded to his old form at the plate, the Braves flopped when, a month and a half into the season, he was asked to take the helm.

That brought him to the Cubs. Hornsby insisted that he and McCarthy had gotten along fine. Teammates, including the well-regarded Grimm and Gabby Hartnett, thought otherwise. When Wrigley delivered the coup de grace to McCarthy with the season not even over, Cubs president William Veeck, Sr. was so upset that he could only be talked into coming back through the owner’s assurance that he would never interfere with the team again.

Lack of interpersonal skills continued to plague Hornsby. Billy Herman, who would go on to become one of the best infielders in the league that decade, came to the Cubs in The Rajah’s first season as manager. “He ignored me completely,” Herman recalled years later, “and I figured it was because I was a rookie. But then I realized he ignored everybody.”

Most dangerous for his relationship with those he directed was the way Hornsby let money run through his fingers. He had no real hobbies besides playing the stock market and the ponies—and he was a lousy handicapper at both. At one point, he had lost so much money at the racetrack that he had to borrow money from his own players.

When the end came for Hornsby at Chicago, the team was out of first place by five games. But with the more even-keeled Grimm in charge, the Cubs rallied and overtook the Pittsburgh Pirates to take the National League pennant.

All Charlie Grimm did in 1932 was get the Cubs into the World Series—something they’d only done three times since 1908—a feat he’d repeat again in 1935 and 1945. It wasn’t his fault that his squad fell to a Yankee team under McCarthy that was returning to glory—especially one powered by a highly motivated Babe Ruth, who, incensed by razzing he’d recently taken, clouted a dramatic homer that may or may not have been “called.”

As for Hornsby, his best days in the majors were behind him, both on the field and in the dugout. He would manage six different big-league teams by the time of his death in 1963. But he would never again repeat his moment of glory in St. Louis.

Hornsby had a deep and genuine charitable streak when it came to children, and he seems to have worked decently with minor-leaguers. But he was totally at a loss in motivating grown men. Ron Fimrite, writing for Sports Illustrated, may have summed him up best: Hornsby was “cold-blooded, pigheaded, humorless and obsessive, a curmudgeon who regarded as utterly worthless anything that did not involve throwing, catching or hitting a baseball.”