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Johnny Evers – The Players
The following article was written by Hall of Famer Johnny Evers. It appeared in “Baseball in the Big Leagues” (The Reilly & Britton Company 1910).
Johnny Evers – The Players
There is scarcely a sport known to the world in which professionalism does not exert a lowering influence. Cricket, golf, even the turf, draw strict lines between the amateur and the professional. In most branches of athletics to become a professional means to take a step backward in the social scale and in the estimation of fellow men.
The great exception to this rule is baseball. The chief reason for this is that baseball in the United States and Canada no longer is upon a doubtful basis, but ranks as an established and honourable trade. In addition the game requires exceptional qualities of body and mind, and in consequence perfect physical condition, involving moral restrictions, not only is insisted upon, but brings exceptional rewards.
In earlier days of the game professional players were looked upon, in many cases justly, as ruffians or at best itinerant ne’er-do-weels. In many towns and cities of that time the atrocious conduct of the hired athletes, their carousals and misbehaviour on and off the field, gave the sport and its players a bad name. Players of that day were recruits who looked upon the game as a means of gratifying nomadic tastes. Few of them expected to continue in the sport, and regarded an engagement as a summer outing, to be devoted to having a good time.
The end of that era came when baseball became a paying commercial venture and was placed upon a business basis. During the early days of the National League, as well as the smaller leagues, club owners, managers and backers invested in the game for the love of the sport itself and without much thought of getting any monetary returns. They expected to lose money; or possibly to regain it through the advertising the team would give them or their cities, rather than in actual receipts at the gates. They organized and operated their teams from that standpoint. Some of the owners were wealthy men, backing teams as an amusement or from personal pride. There was no recognized basis for salaries, but the average was low, and attracted only the adventurous or the tough, scrappy athletes from the back lots and bottoms of cities. While here and there were men of character and of education, decent clean young men who loved the game, the average of the players was low, morally and intellectually.
When the owners began to perceive that the sport was the latent rival of the theatre in financial possibilities and possibly might become the greatest amusement enterprise in the world, the necessity of curbing rowdyism among the players and of obtaining men of higher moral and mental equipment impressed itself upon some of them. A few still held out for the old order of things. The majority, however, became wiser. They had seen crowds suddenly cease to attend games; whole cities turn in disgust against teams and their tactics; as happened in Cleveland, Baltimore, and once in New York. The owners then decided to cater to the patrons; to protect them from the insults and revilings and the coarse words and acts of some of the men. Much of the “commercialization of baseball” is to be regretted from some standpoints, the fact that it has abolished rowdyism, brought a higher, cleaner and more sportsmanlike class of players into the game and put a premium on brains, commends the business administration. With the beginning of financial prosperity to owners, who had long struggled against loss and sometimes ruin, a higher class of men was attracted to the profession. The colleges sent some of their best men; young athletes who were under the ordinary conditions would have remained at home and entered business were lured to the game by the chances of big salaries and some honors.
This revolution of conditions began before the Brotherhood fight which culminated in the revolt of the players in 1890. The game was beginning to prosper after years of struggle, salaries were growing higher and higher, and club owners were bidding against each other for the services of the best players. In that respect, baseball is one of the oddest of all business ventures. Eight club owners in the league are partners in business, sharing receipts, sharing prosperity and adversity. Yet all the time these business partners must strive to beat each other on the field and to take each other’s players away from them. The National League has almost from the start been mercenary, and in this unavoidable condition, which reduced profits largely, the club owners sought to abolish by agreeing to enforce salary limit, whereby the highest salary paid to any player was to be $2,000. The players revolted against this reduction of salaries, organized a rival league, and salaries leaped to five times that figure, bringing disaster upon everyone concerned. The restoration of peace reduced salaries once again, but they increased steadily during the next ten year period, as the game grew in popularity and returned large financial receipts. The National League had inaugurated another salary reducing campaign in 1899, which ended abruptly when the American League invaded the field and sent salaries to a war-time footing again by bidding for players. At the restoration of peace salaries had reached so high a figure that baseball offered a chance of quick riches to a high class of youths who speedily enlisted. Salaries fell after the peace pact, but have continued to increase steadily and healthily to the present time.
The reforms among the players which the National League had striven in vain to bring about were accomplished as a result of war between the American and National Leagues. Up to that time the rowdy element in professional baseball had been rampant; and the players of greatest prominence considered themselves almost beyond control of their managers. The young players entering the profession in many instances fell under the influence of the disorderly element and became their allies. The American League, raiding the National, took away most of its star players, but also got most of the disorderly element. These men, scattered through new clubs and sharply curbed, lost much of their power and influence. The American League found itself compelled to adopt stern repressive measures while the National, with clubs of young and aspiring recruits, was relieved of the necessity of repressing them, and started right with the new men by placing a premium on decency and good behaviour.
The establishment of two major leagues of equal or nearly equal calibre immediately doubled the demand for the first-class players, and developed the fact that, with perhaps 100,000 active players in the minor leagues, college, semi-professional and strong amateur teams, it was extremely difficult to find 325 men good enough, and with experience enough, to fill the sixteen clubs of the two major leagues. This famine in athletes not only acted to increase the demand for players, and to add to salaries, but it impressed upon both owners and managers the necessity of keeping good ball players in condition. The live stock, upon which the fortunes of the owners depended, had become so valuable that any depreciation found its way into profit and loss figures, and the watchful eye of managers over the morals and physical grooming of players insured good behaviour. As the game advanced and developed toward perfection, the demand of men above the average in mentality as well as in strength and speed became greater and greater, and the value of players rose steadily.
The finding and developing of players is the greatest problem in the modern game. There is a dearth of really good players; men of brains, speed and strength, coolness and character. The major leagues alone demand nearly two hundred players each year to fill gaps in the ranks, and of these not more than twenty, or one in ten, is good enough to remain with the major league teams as a substitute even, and perhaps not more than an average of eight for the sixteen clubs secure regular positions, replacing veterans.
It is almost impossible to purchase players of worth, but outside of all monetary considerations it is certain that the manager of a weak major league club cannot, even if given his choice of all the players in America outside the major leagues, get together a team good enough to raise his city into the first division unless phenomenal luck attends his efforts and a half dozen players develop suddenly after being promoted.
There have been instances of teams being thrown together that fitted exactly, but they are baseball miracles. The modern manager has as much chance of putting together a wining team in one season as he would have of throwing a handful of mud into the air and having it come down as a Sevres vase. John Grim, who has managed baseball clubs in almost every league and state in the United States, once put together a team of ten men to represent Portland, Ore., in the Northwest League. He had two weeks in which to create a team out of nothing and a few thousand dollars. IN ten days he gathered from all over the United States ten players, most of whom he never had seen before and knew little about. He moved to Portland with his squad. Every man in the squad developed into a good ball player. All ten remained with the team through the entire season, and with only one recruit they won the championship from three other teams of experienced players.
Sometimes players are found in coveys, like quail. Hornellsville, N.Y., once gave to the major leagues six players in one year. Lowe, Long, Ganzel and Bennett went from one team into fast company. There was a team which at one time represented Franklin, Pa., in the Iron and Oil League which, without making any spectacular showing in that humble organization, proved a gold mine. In one season that team developed and sent into the major league Jimmy Slagle, Claude Ritchey, Emmet Heidrick, Bill Taylor, “Sox” Seybold and Nichols, the Pittsburgh left-handed pitcher, every one of whom at once sprang into prominence and most of whom afterwards came to be regarded as famous players.
In the fall of 1908 Connie Mack, finding his all star Philadelphia Athletics decaying rapidly and threatening to become a hopelessly slow club, discarded practically his entire team, and starting afresh to build a new club, retaining only a few of the veterans to balance the new men and teach them the tricks of the trade, had the phenomenal luck to develop a team which came near being of championship calibre. He discovered Collins, whose infield play was the sensation of the American League in 1909, and Krause, a left-hander, who stepped directly into the front rank of the pitchers of the country. Beside these he found several men better than those he had cast off. But such records are freaks. Usually when a team passes its prime and begins to retrograde, years are required—years and fortunes—before another winning team is produced.
In the earlier days of the game players usually came in pairs, a pitcher and a catcher together; and were mainly recruited from cities. The reason for this was that they started together, throwing and catching back of the shop during the noon-hour recess. Half the players entered the profession either as pitchers or catchers and found their other positions after joining the team and failing in battery positions. Such a thing is next to impossible under modern conditions, because baseball today is one of the most highly specialized of all trades. A second baseman is as distinct from a shortstop as the paying teller of a bank is from the individual ledger man. The right fielder may be able to play left field, but not nearly so well as he can his own position. Why a player is fitted for one position and useless in others is explained later in the individual study of the positions, the men and their duties.
 The supply of players of major league calibre is so small that the owners of clubs in the American and National Leagues, and the higher minor leagues have resorted to dragnet methods to discover them and to pull them from the back lots, the college fields and the country playgrounds. Each club employs a scouting force, usually composed of veteran players or retired owners. The duty of these scouts is to scour the entire country, league after league, club after club, seeking men who by their playing show promise, or who by their actions or hitting ability give signs of future development.
Each club receives hundreds of letters every week proclaiming the skill of players of distant places, and immediately the name of the player listed, his records examined, his past history looked into, the evidence of persons who have watched him play is sought, and finally, if he seems to give promise, a scout is dispatched to see him work, and to report every detail of his build, his speed, his personal character and his habits. Money is not considered if the player shows sufficient ability, in the opinion of the scout, to play in the major leagues, either that year or within the next year, and the man is purchased outright immediately, often at surprising figures.
The extent to which this scrutiny of players is indulged in by the owners and managers of major league clubs is almost unbelievable. Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the Pittsburgh club, has books in is offices in which are recorded the names, addresses, descriptions, batting and fielding averages, character and general makeup of thousands of players of whom the baseball world never has heard and probably never will hear, except when they are produced in the form of Wagner, a Leach or a Jay Miller. The country schoolmaster, playing ball at recess with the big boys, may be watched by a major league scout who sits on the fence. The minor league player may lay off some day to rest a sore finger and discover afterwards that a scout, who had travelled thousands of miles to see him play, was in the stands, and that he lost his chance of promotion by remaining idle that day.
It is related that Dreyfuss was sitting in a buggy on a dusty country turnpike near Goshen, O., watching the schoolmaster playing “Anthony-over” with the boys. The schoolmaster caught the ball, wound up, and instead of throwing it back over the roof of the school, curved it around the building and hit one of the boys in the back. Dreyfuss thereupon climbed out of his buggy, and signed the schoolmaster to pitch for Pittsburgh, thereby discovering Sam Leever, one of the greatest of pitchers.
Dan O’Leary, when he was manager of the Indianapolis club, arranged an exhibition game with the team representing a small town near the Indiana capital. The small town looked fairly strong, but complained that their best player had been forced to work that day, refusing to remain idle when he could make $2 at his trade. O’Leary volunteered to persuade the player to get into the game. He hired a horse and buggy, drove three miles into the country and found the player busily engaged in shingling a barn. O’Leary agreed to pay him $3 if he would play against Indianapolis that afternoon. In the game the lanky Hoosier twice hit the ball out of the pasture in which they were playing. O’Leary offered him a position on the Indianapolis team and took him away with the club that night. The carpenter was Sam Thompson, who developed into the greatest batter of his day and one of the hardest hitters the game has ever known.
Hans Wagner became a ball player because George Moreland, who owned the Youngstown, O., club needed a pitcher and could pay only $35 a month. Wagner’s brother Al Wagner, suggested that he try Hans, who accepted the offer.
There was one discouraged scout about ten years ago who lost one of the greatest pitchers ever developed because the pitcher was under a heavy handicap. Frank Bancroft, still-hunter after baseball talent of all sorts, was informed that there was a pitcher named Charlie Pickerel at Lynchburg, O., who was as good as any man on the Cincinnati list. Bancroft hastened into the country and watched Pickerel pitch. He was amazed at the speed and curves of the amateur nad was on the point of making him an offer when he discovered the one weakness of the man. He could not pitch with his shoes on. Every inning when he went to the slab Pickerel removed his shoes, took a toe hold on the rubber and was another Rusie, but Bancroft feared complications and allowed him to escape.
Tom Ramsey, who perhaps was the most remarkable left-handed pitcher in the history of baseball, was discovered scientifically. He was a brick-layer, and being accustomed to gripping brick with his left hand while breaking them with his trowel, he had cultivated a marvellous power in the thumb and forefingers. The Louisville club secured him on the report of a player who had seen Ramsey twist the cover of a baseball by pressure of his fingers. The player figured that a man with such power in his throwing hand ought to be a great pitcher, and Ramsey within a short time after joining the team, pitched curves of such wonderful speed and such quick breaks that he became the sensation of the game. James A. Hart, when he was managing Louisville, studied the secret of Ramsey’s success and instead of looking for ball players in the minor leagues, went scouting for left-handed brick-layers, trailing them to the tops of buildings, but he never discovered another Ramsey.
Nat Hudson, who won the World’s Championship for St. Louis in the famous series between the St. Louis Browns under Comiskey and the Chicago White Stockings under Anson, was found in peculiar manner. Comiskey was a Chicago man, and in the middle of a season he went to Chicago with his St. Louis club, being in desperate need of a pitcher. He was in a barber shop when the barber suggested that he try Hudson, of whom Comiskey never had heard. On hunting for the pitcher Comiskey found that he lived directly across the street from his own home, so after searching the entire country for the pitcher, he got his star at his own doorsteps.
But there are few such discoveries made under modern conditions. The men are watched under modern conditions. The men are watched by scores of clubs; and records of habits, dispositions, speed, hitting ability and intelligence are kept almost from the day they start to play. At one time in the early part of 1907 four scouts representing four major league clubs were in the stands at Springfield, Ill., at one game, watching Doyle, for whom eight clubs had already made bids. The New York club, fearing some other club would get the player, paid $4,500 for him by telegraph without seeing him play, thus securing a great second baseman. In 1909 eleven clubs were bidding at one time for Blackburn, of Providence, who went to Comiskey’s Chicago team. “Tad” Jones, the Yale catcher and football player, received offers from every major league club in the country during his senior year, but he refused to become a professional.
Competition for services of players became so great that club owners of the major leagues threw out dragnets and bought or drafted every player in the minor leagues who had signs of promise, frequently recruiting as many as fifty players for one club. The practice, of course, strengthened the strong and wealthy clubs ad weakened poorer ones, until in 1909 an agreement was reached by the club owners limiting the number of players each club could recruit. This step was taken to protect the financially weaker clubs of the major leagues, as well as to prevent the major leagues from disrupting all the smaller organizations by wholesale raid upon the players.
Of the 325 (approximately) players carried on the pay-rolls of the major leagues during the season, not more than one hundred are really finished and competent players. It is extraordinary if ten out of the army of recruits tried out each spring develop even enough strength to hold a substitute position with the major league clubs, and the discovery of a really great player is as unusual as the finding of a Koh-i-noor. There is a moderate supply of “good” players, men of the ordinary ability, but extremely few of the Cobb, Wagner, Speaker, Mathewson, Brown, Kling, and Leach class.
This scarcity of “great” players as distinguished from “good” players has been one of the sources of trouble to organized baseball, because it has served to make both classes dissatisfied. The ‘great” players think they should be paid proportionately great salaries, and the “good” players, even when admitting the superiority of the others, cannot be persuaded to figure the difference of ability in dollars and cents. Beyond doubt, also, there has come with the securing of absolute power over the game and its players, a desire of the club owners to hold down salaries, especially of young and ambitious players. Frequently the aspiring player is offered far less by the major league club than he received in the smaller leagues. He sometimes accepts in order to win promotion, but the policy has served to reduce further the supply of really good players.
The close specialization in the modern game would amaze persons who rate all players merely as “ball players,” forgetting that the president of a railroad is a “railroad man” just as the brakeman is. Players now come as specialists in certain positions and insist upon signing to play that position alone. There are rare men, such as Leach of Pittsburgh, Parent of the Chicago White Sox, Hofman of the Cubs, and Wagner, who can play almost any position. In a way this specialization has assisted the makers of teams greatly. Each team-builder knows exactly in what position his club is weak, and under the close classification in the modern game he is not compelled to look over the entire field for his man. If he needs a second baseman he seeks through that class instead of among “infielders.”
Yet some of the biggest baseball “finds” of years have resulted from the fact that managers knew better than men themselves where their proper positions were. In many instances men taken from one position and placed in another immediately showed remarkable improvement. Frank Chance, the “Peerless Leader” of the Chicago Cubs, was a catcher. He declared he could not play first base and refused to play there, threatening to retire from baseball when Manager Selee ordered him to that position. Even then he balked until Selee offered him an increased salary, when he reluctantly consented to make the attempt. Roger Bresnahan imagined he was a pitcher, tried the infield, failed at both places, but then developed into one of the greatest catchers. Fred Parent, after a brilliant career as a short stop and a fair showing as a second baseman, late in his career discovered that he was a better player in the outfield than in the infield. Joe Tinker refused to play short stop, insisting that he was a third baseman, and was persuaded with difficulty to try the position at which he became famous.
Sometimes this specialization by players is imagination on the part of players who fail to study their own physical shortcomings and advantages in order to fit themselves into the proper place. A third baseman, for instance, does not need the speed required to play short stop, but he must have weight , be able to start forward quickly, and have the strength and the courage to block hard line drives. Besides these things he must be able to throw either underhand or overhand ball, and be a hard, fast thrower.
A short stop must be able to move toward his right rapidly, start forward quickly, and at the same time must be able to move to his left, toward or back of second base, and recover quickly after making stops in a necessarily awkward position. Above all things, he must be able to throw either underhead or overhead from any position. An example of the possibilities in short stop acrobatics was a play made by Doolan of Philadelphia, who while in the act of throwing to first base spiked in the neck a base runner en route from second to third. He must have thrown with both feet off the ground.
The second baseman must have a fast snap throw from any position, especially an underhand snap throw while scooping slow balls at top speed, and he must be able to move faster toward his left than to the right. The outfielders specialize in regard to their ability to come in or go out, and whether they run faster to the right or to the left, the center fielder always being the best of the three in going outward and catching balls over his head.
The needs of each position are treated later in detail, in studying the peculiarities of the duties of each part of the machine.
Baseball players of the major leagues now are an intelligent, clean, set of men; this of necessity, regardless of moral scruples. They are being recruited from higher levels of social and educational development and they occupy a position unique in sports. They are professionals, yet are received and regarded as higher amateurs. The player who reaches the major leagues has reached the post-graduate course of a moral and physical training school and proved his worth. He is the surviving fittest of the game. A few unfit survive, but not for long. Ball playing, as a profession, is now regarded as an honourable means of livelihood and a field for profitable use of talents.
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This was an email received from Alan D.:
Read mister evers article. Did you know that he is from Troy, New York and that he owned a sporting goods store for many years in Albany, New York. When they closed the store in the 1980's they found in a file cabinet a ball with some of the 1908 Chicago Cubs names on it. I got to see that ball at a old timers reinactment, and also got to hold one of his bats that he used in the major leagues. His grandson had brought it to show off to people were there to witness the reinactment. Thought I would pass this along. Alan D.
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| Posted by: Mendoza1 |
Mon, 01/11/2010 |
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