CHAPTER XVIII

The men who play—What they are like off the field—Mere human beings like other people—The road trips—Days in the hotels—Fads and fancies—Koenig an expert pianist—Hoyt a great reader—Huggins a financial student—Shawkey a great hunter—Baseball, with them, not a game but a business—The men who play are business men.

What are they like, these ball players? What do they talk about and think about as they go traveling around the country? What do they do and say off the playing field?

These are common questions—questions that are constantly being asked by kids and grown-ups.

The answer is simple enough. They’re much the same as other men, interested in the same things, living the same sort of lives. They are neither better nor worse than the same number of lawyers, or doctors, or business men, picked from the four corners of the nation. They have their families, their children and their homes to occupy their spare hours.

They discuss politics, or finance, or farming or any other subject that appeals to the normal man. They eat, dress, sleep and live much the same as Mr. Smith the merchant, or Mr. Brown the banker. Which to many people will perhaps come as a surprise.

Come and visit the Yankees some evening, as they sit about the hotel after the game. Suppose it’s in St. Louis, some hot night in mid-summer. You’ll find Huggins and O’Leary and Fletcher sitting over in a corner, enjoying their cigars. Chances are they’ll be discussing politics or the stock market. Huggins is a keen financial student. He reads all the financial papers and journals and follows the market as closely, almost, as a city broker.

And in Fletcher he has great company. Fletcher, during the off season is a successful middle Western farmer, the type of successful farmer who takes a hand in county politics: serves on the school board and is a director of the town bank. Fletcher does all these things, and holds all these offices.

Mark Koenig you’ll find perhaps, playing the piano in the reception room. Mark does pretty well as a musician, and he plays not jazz but classical stuff. And if he’s playing the chances are Waite Hoyt and Benny Bengough will be around somewhere near, listening quietly, or perhaps doing a bit of harmonizing. Benny is a musician too—in fact he’s engaged in giving me lessons on the saxophone right now, and a tough job he has too.

Hoyt not only has a good singing voice, but he’s something of an actor as well. A lot of theatrical folks who know, tell me that Waite could make a success on the stage as well as in baseball. But he isn’t interested. During the off-season, instead, he spends his time at his profession. He’s a mortician, and has an office with his father-in-law in Brooklyn.

Waite is a great reader too. I’ve been traveling with him a good many years and I never saw him start out on a trip without one and probably three or four books in his bag.

Bob Shawkey is almost sure to be off in a corner somewhere discussing his annual hunting trip. Bob is one of the best hunters in the business, and knows the moose trails of Canada as well as most of the professional guides.

We have a lot of real movie fans on the Yankees too. Lou Gehrig is a nut on movies, and usually sneaks off to the nearest theater each evening. Earl Combs likes them too, and Benny Paschal. Those three are pretty apt to be together—though now and then Lou will pass up the movies to sit in on a bridge game with some of the rest of us.

We started a bridge game during the spring training trip of 1927 that lasted clear through the season. Gehrig and I played against Mike Gazella and Don Miller. Miller is the young pitcher from the University of Michigan who joined us last year.

You know most ball players are good card players. But on the Yankees at least, there is very little poker playing. Once and a while the boys will start a game. But pinochle and bridge are the two favorites. Gazella is a good bridge player. Ernie Johnson and Everett Scott were the champions when they were with the club. Pat Collins and Woodie, the trainer, are pinochle nuts. And they’re always looking for a game.

Cy Moore and George Pipgras like to play “Hearts.” It’s a funny thing about Cy. He’ll go out there on the mound before 50,000 raving fans, with the bases full and nobody down, and he’ll be as calm and cool as though he was pitching hay. But put him down in a heart game and he’s like a little kid. He yells, and shrieks and laughs until you can’t stay in the same room with him.

Once on a western trip last season he got so bad that we ganged on him and put him back in the car with the newspaper boys. He had to promise to keep quiet before we let him come back to his berth.

The two quietest men on the Yankee club are Bob Meusel and Tony Lazzeri. They never say a word to anyone. At that I think Tony talks more than Bob does. I’ve seen Bob go through a whole day when I don’t believe he spoke a word, unless it was at the dining table when he asked somebody to “pass the bread.”

Fellows who talk a lot we call “barbers.” Freddy Hoffman, the old Yankee catcher, was one of the best barbers I ever knew. Freddy would talk the arm off any one who cared to listen, and he didn’t care what particular subject he talked about either. Earl Combs is another pretty good barber. Wallie Pipp, when he was with the club, was a champion. And what Wallie enjoyed more than anything else was to get hold of some baseball nut and then kid him into serious conversation about inside baseball. He and Joe Dugan would pull the stunt together. They’d get the poor guy surrounded, and get him to telling all his pet baseball theories.

“Gee,” Wallie would say, “That’s a great idea. I don’t know why no one ever thought of that before.”

“Certainly is,” Joe would chime in. “Now what do you think should be done to stop a hitter like Hornsby?”

The fellow would open up on that subject, and when he was through Joe would probably remark:

“Say, you’ve certainly got the dope. I think you ought to go around to Huggins and tell him about that. He’d probably be willing to pay big money for ideas like that.”

I’ve seen Joe and Wallie spend a whole evening just stringing some poor bird along—and they’d have him so fussed finally, that he wouldn’t even know his name.

A lot of people still cling to the idea that professional baseball players are rough necks, hardly fit to associate with real folks. And of course there are good fellows and bad, among the players. But then the same thing might be said of lawyers or doctors or business men. Believe me, playing side by side with a man through season after season, living with him in hotels, traveling with him on the road, eating and sleeping with him month after month, gives a fellow a pretty good line on just what sort of fellow he is.

And I say to you that in my experience I’ve found ball players to be just as much gentlemen as any class of men I ever knew. Nine times out of ten they’re a lot better than the people who criticize them.

A couple of generations ago they may have been different. In those days the corner saloon was the hangout for the baseball crowd, and players who had finished their playing careers turned into bartenders. But they don’t do it any more. Ball players are getting smart. They learned long ago that it takes pretty careful living and pretty steady training to keep up with the parade. I don’t mean that ball players are plaster saints. They’re not. But keeping in physical condition is just as much a part of their business as knowledge of discounts is of the business of a banker. And ball players today are business men first, last and always.

I’ll never forget the disappointment of a friend of mine one evening in Detroit. He expressed a desire to see the players off the field so I took him around. He got his first shock when we went to the Book-Cadillac hotel. That’s the newest, most expensive hotel in Detroit and one of the best in the country.

“Why the ball players don’t stop at this hotel, do they?” he asked, with some astonishment.

“They certainly do,” I replied, “and I’ll lay a little wager right now that you won’t be able to pick the ball players out from the rest of the guests either.”

And he couldn’t do it.

He recognized Meusel, for he had met Bob before. And he knew Gehrig. Once you’ve seen Lou down on the playing field you can’t mistake those shoulders and legs anywhere. But the rest of them he didn’t know. He was a surprised young man.

He expected the ball players to stand out from the rest—to be different. Maybe he expected to see a lot of loud-talking rough looking touts in caps and checked suits. I don’t know. But anyhow, when I pointed the boys out to him, he looked a bit embarrassed:

“Why they look just like anyone else,” he said, “They’re just like ordinary people.”

It’s funny how a whole ball club will take up a certain fad. One fellow brings it around, and then the whole gang takes it up. The Yankees for a year or two, were nutty over cross-word puzzles. Walk into the hotel lobby and you’d see fellows sitting all around working puzzles.

Ward and Pat Collins were responsible for that. Then Merkle took it up, and Mike Gazella. Shocker got the craze, and the first thing you knew the whole club was doing cross-word puzzles. I suppose it was a fine thing. They certainly added a lot of new words to their vocabulary as a result. And I think I picked up a couple of jaw-breakers myself.

Mah Jong came near wrecking the Athletic team a few seasons ago. One of the fellows got a Mah Jong set and took it on a road trip. Before long every man on the club was interested in the game. They had six or seven sets of Mah Jong that they carried right along with them in the uniform trunks, and the boys used to start their games in the morning and run right through to game time. Finally it got so bad that Connie Mack had to call a halt—and I think he still blames the loss of the pennant on that Mah Jong craze.

Most ball players like all other forms of outdoor sport. Fishing and hunting are ever popular subjects of discussion. Lou Gehrig, for instance, would rather fish than eat. Lou never misses a chance to go cod fishing, and most any day in winter you’ll find him out on the banks after cod. This college kid is one of the queerest ballplayers I ever knew. It seems he never feels the cold weather. The coldest day in winter he’ll come swinging down Broadway without an overcoat, his coat open and no vest. Never wears gloves and half the time goes bareheaded. Some of the boys claim he never had an overcoat on his shoulders until he joined the Yankees.

Lou is a great eel-fisherman too, and in the summer after the ball game he will take his mother in his car and go shooting down to Long Island to spear eels. His mother pickles them and now and then she will send a big jar of pickled eels around to the clubhouse. Last year when the boys struck a big hitting stride they got the idea that it was the pickled eels which were responsible for their hitting and for more than three weeks they wouldn’t go into a ball game until they all had taken a couple of bites of pickled eel.

The big leagues are full of players who are great hunters. Old Chief Bender, the Athletics’ pitcher, was one of the best trap shots in the country, and the Chief can still handle a mean shot gun, long after his pitching days are over. Ty Cobb is a great hunter too—and at the end of every season he goes chasing off to the mountain country in Canada or the Western United States for a month of shooting. His home at Augusta, Georgia is filled with trophies. Among other things he has some of the finest bear and deer heads I’ve ever seen.

Other great hunters are Eddie Collins, Joe Bush, Sam Jones, Benny Bengough, Bob Meusel, Freddy Hoffman and Bob Shawkey. Shawkey is one of the best in the country and for years has been making annual trips into Northern Canada for a months outing after the season ends.

Eddie Collins is a queer hunter. Eddie likes to get out in the woods and tramp around with a gun, but so far as anyone knows he never takes a shot at anything. Eddie is too tender-hearted. He attempted to shoot a wounded deer once, but when the deer turned its head and looked at him sort of sad, Eddie hadn’t the heart to pull the trigger. And I don’t think he ever will. Anyway he makes the trip with the other fellows every fall, and during the season is one of the best conversational hunters in the business.

I like to hunt myself, but I’d sooner have bird shooting to anything else. One of the greatest kicks I ever got in my life came last fall when I was out on Long Island with Bill McGeehan and Bozeman Bulger, the sport writers. For two days we lay around in the blinds without a single shot. Then a flock of geese came over and we got five of them. It’s the first time I ever shot a wild goose, and I got as much thrill from it as I ever got from hitting a homer with the bases full. The best part of hunting, though, so far as a ball player is concerned, is that it keeps a man in fine condition. You can’t tramp around over the country all day long, packing a heavy gun, unless you’re in shape.

Golf is another game in which ball players are fairly expert. They say that Walter Hagen, the great golf pro, would have made a great ball player if he hadn’t gone in for golf. Well, Jigger Statz of the Brooklyn Dodgers, can hold Walter even. Jigger has had plenty of opportunity to turn golf pro if he hadn’t been in baseball.

Statz is about the best of the ball player golfers I guess. But there are some others who are almost as good. Poor old Ross Young, who died in San Antonio last winter, was one of the best. Bob Shawkey is a fine golfer, and so is Sam Rice of the Senators. Nick Altrock is another boy who can play pretty close to par, and Dazzy Vance, Aaron Ward, Bucky Harris and Eppa Rixey are others who swing a deadly mashie.

One thing most ball players can do on the golf course is drive. They may be bad on their approaches, and their putts may be terrible—but they all of them can sock that old ball from the tee. One of the longest drivers I ever saw is Sam Jones, the pitcher. Sam doesn’t know much about the game, and he isn’t always sure which direction the ball is going—but he certainly can sock ’em from the tee.

A lot of big league managers forbid golf playing during the regular season. The story is that the golf swing ruins a player’s hitting swing. Swinging at a stationary object like a golf ball, they say, ruins the timing in swinging at a moving object like a baseball.

Personally I never noticed it, and I play a lot of golf during the year.

And if you ask me, the chief objection managers have to golf isn’t the actual playing at all. It’s the conversation. Golf is one of the “talkingest” games in the world. If fellows would go out in the morning and shoot their eighteen holes, then come in and keep quiet it would be alright. But they don’t do it. They play the game over again each afternoon on the bench, and it gets a manager’s goat to have some guy doing an imaginary mashie shot from a trap right when there’s important business out on the ballfield.

What I’ve tried to show in this chapter is that the big league ball player is much the same as any other human being. He lives his own life; has his family, his home, his hobby and his outside interests just the same as the banker, the clerk or the professional man.

Baseball is his life work and he studies it carefully. Thrown in a mixed crowd your baseball man will talk politics, or finance or any other subject that average men discuss. But put three or four ball players together and they talk—baseball. Laymen I know find something fascinating in the thought of a big league ball club traveling around the country. To the outsider, those hours on the train together, and the hours in the hotels are a sort of magic.

To us they are only routine. We have a lot of fun because we’re all good fellows together. Card playing is a favorite ♦past time while traveling. Music helps to pass away many hours. For the past six or seven seasons I have never made a single trip that I didn’t take with me a portable phonograph with a couple of dozen records. And from the time we get on the train until we leave, that phonograph is working overtime.

♦ “pasttime” replaced with “pasttime”

The boys frequently organize quartets and many a bit of close harmony has been carved out in a Pullman smoker.

What do we do while traveling?

Here’s a typical scene. The club is enroute on a long jump, say from St. Louis to New York.

In one section a card game is in session. Meusel and Bengough, Ruether, Koenig, and Lazzeri are playing “black jack.” They have their coats off, their collars discarded and their shirts open at the neck. They’re kidding and laughing over the game. The colored porter stands by watching the fun, and the conductor stops on his rounds to “sit in” for a few hands.

Down the car a bit Hoyt sits reading a book. Further on the fussy foursome is busy at bridge. That’s Gehrig, Miller, Gazella and myself.

Shocker is reading the newspapers, and his berth is messed up with a dozen sports pages, torn from as many different papers. Now and then he makes some discovery and pauses to discuss baseball with Pennock who is writing letters across the isle.

A hearts game is going on at the far end of the car, and above the noise of conversation you can hear Cy Moore shouting and laughing like a little kid as he passes Combs the queen. Pipgras is in the game and Paschal and a couple of the newspaper men.

In an adjoining section Jules Wera is giving the phonograph a workout, and occasionally Koenig pauses in the business of playing cards to lift his voice in the chorus of some song the phonograph is playing.

Pat Collins is busy over a cross-word puzzle, and cusses Woodie out when the trainer pesters him about starting a pinochle game. There’s the tapping of typewriters as a couple of the newspaper men pound out their yarns for early editions.

Through the open door of the drawing room you can see Huggins, smoking his pipe and talking with O’Leary and Fletcher his assistants. Thomas comes along and slaps Wera with a folded paper and Wera in return smears him with a pillow. They tussle about the car.

Out in the smoking room some of the boys are whooping it up on “Sundown” with one of the newspaper men playing a harmonica accompaniment.

Fun? Sure, it’s fun. And the reason is that we’re all one big gang together. We know each other, trust each other, like each other. Baseball has had its share of wonderful friendships and most of them have started aboard rattling, old Pullman cars when the boys get a few hours to themselves and have a chance to act natural.