A BLACK DAY FOR BASEBALL, The Death of Ray Chapman

 

I am writing this on yet another oppressive August afternoon. It is baseball weather, when all Americans should be surrounded by the comradely of strangers in shirtsleeves, with a penciled box score in hand and green pastures before them, a land upon which time dare not intrude. Baseball in August is an endless limitless existence,  from which other realities retreat, and which may be savored patiently until the final out is called.  

But I am thinking now of one particular afternoon, almost a century before this August, the hot and humid afternoon of 16 August, 1920.  In my mind's heart I am at the Polo Grounds, a bathtub  shaped ballpark along the Harlem River, at the very northern tip of Manhattan. 

It is home to the National League New York Giants, but since 1913 the American League Yankees have also leased time on the field. And as fans gather in the Coogans Bluff (above) stands beyond right center field, we are witness to a battle of the two best teams in the American League. The Yankees are hosting the powerful Cleveland Indians. And time is about to pause, to catch its breath, to teeter, balanced for a micro-second between one era and another. And as the fifth inning begins, this is the instant of transition.

The Yankees are using their best pitcher, the crafty right hander Carl Mays (above). He once praised another pitcher, saying, “That fellow has no friends and doesn’t want any. That’s why he’s a great pitcher.” The friendless Carl Mays may be the greatest pitcher in baseball at this moment. He was part of the Boston Red Sox dynasty that dominated baseball in the first two decades of the 20th century. But in 1919 he demanded to be traded. The Yankees paid $40,000 and gave up two players to be named later to put Carl in Yankee pinstripes. 

They wanted his “submarine” (underhanded) pitch, his blazing sidearm delivery (above), his un-hit-able spitball, and his reputation for brushing back batters who crowded the plate. In 1920 he was on his way to a 26 win -11 loss record with six shutouts. Today, 16 August,  he is pitching out of rotation because the game is so important and because Carl Mays is going for his 100th major league win.

The batter is the top of Cleveland's order, the veteran Indian speedster, short stop Ray Chapman. The cheerful songster is fondly known around the league as “Chappie”.  After nine seasons in the majors he is at the very top of his game. So far this season he is batting .303, and he has a lifetime 93 runs scored and 671 runs batted in. 

Chappie also has 233 stolen bases and he wields one of the finest defense gloves in the league.  But he made his reputation laying down the bunt. He crouches down, hunched over the plate, at the very back of the batters box, thus leaving the pitcher with almost no strike zone to aim for. 

It is this stance, and his blazing speed to first base - he once rounded the all four bases in 14 seconds - which have given Chappie an impressive on-base average of .358. 

But only a few close friends know that Chappie is planning on getting out while he is on top. He was married the year before, and has made plans to go into business with his new father-in-law. And some World Series earnings would certainly smooth his way to retirement.

As Chappie steps to the plate at the top of the fifth inning, it is a humid 82 degrees under a cloudless blue sky. The 24,000 fans lean forward in their seats. When Chapman is at the plate, things happen. In the first inning Chapman had laid down his 34th successful bunt of the season. Thanks in part to Ray's speed on the base path, Cleveland is now leading the Yankees 3 – 0. In the third inning Chapman had popped up. And now, as the fifth inning begins, Ray steps into the batters’ box and digs in.

On his very first pitch Carl Mays delivers a winding, rising, side armed fast ball bullet. With extraordinary velocity the spinning ball hurtles toward the plate, almost faster then the eye can register it. And in that second of time, between the ball leaving Carl's fingertips and it's arrival at the plate, baseball changes forever -  an era ends and an era begins - what might have been becomes what once was, what used to be. It is the blink of an eye. It is the passing of a shadow through a life. 

There is a loud ringing thud. As Mays steps out of his delivery he sees the ball is rolling quickly back toward the mound. Thinking Chapman has hit it with the handle of his bat, Mays adroitly retrieves the ball and throws a peg down the line to first base. And only then does Carl Mays realize that Ray Chapman is crumpled on the ground. 

The Polo Grounds gasp as if a single soul. 

The umpire, Tommy Connolly (above), sees blood coming out of Chapman’s right ear and nose. He asks Ray if he is alright. Receiving no reply he calls into the crowd for a doctor. At that shout, Ray opens his eyes and staggers to his feet. A few people in the crowd began to applaud. 

But after taking only a few steps down the first base line, Ray Chapman collapses again, in a broken heap. His teammates carry Ray into the club house where he mumbles a request for his wedding ring, which he’d given to a trainer for safe keeping. Feeling the ring in his hand seems to comfort Ray.

Meanwhile, on the field and with a new ball, the game resumes. Mays retires the next nine batters in a row and the Yankees fight back to tie the game at 3 - 3. It is a Yankee relief pitcher who gives up the winning Cleveland run; leaving the final score 4 – 3.  

Called in Cleveland, Ray’s wife, Katie (above, left), boards the next train for New York City.

Hospital X-rays show Chapman has a depressed fracture of his skull. The doctors operate and remove a 3 ½” section of Ray's cranium to lessen the pressure on his brain. The surgeon tells the Cleveland manager that not only is the right side of Ray's brain lacerated from the impact with the ball, but so is the left side, where it  bounced off the inside of his skull.  At 4:40 the next morning Ray Chapman is declared dead, the only person to ever die while playing a Major League Baseball game. 

A family friend meets Katie’s train from Cleveland at 10:00 am the next morning. But she does not tell the young woman of her husband’s death until they got to the hotel. Once behind closed doors, and told the horrible news, Katie collapsed in a faint (above).

That one pitch can stand as the unofficial end of the "Dead Ball Era", when the game was hit and run, steal and bunt, when the leather was mightier than the wood. It was a time when the game was more strategy than brute force, more brains than brawn, more spunk and more a team sport than it is today. 

It was a time when baseballs' greatest slugger was Clliford "Cactus" Gravath,  who in 1915 hit a record 24 home runs, 11 more than his closest rival.  It was not unusual for a league batting champion to have fewer than 10 home runs in a single season. It was a  time when Owen "Chief" Wilson (above), playing for Pittsburgh, set a record of 35 triples in a single season  - a record which still stands today, a century later.

And then, in 1920 the New York Yankees decided that their new $100,000 acquisition, Babe Ruth, who had earned fame as a pitcher, should stick to batting. In 1920, his first year as a Yankee, "The Sultan of Swat" hits a record 54 home runs, more than all but one of the other entire teams in baseball combined.  He also batted for a .376 average, and his .847 slugging average (total bases earned divided by total at bats) was a Major League record until 2001. The game had changed in a fundamental way after 1920, and the tipping point had come at the moment between Carl Mays releasing the ball, and it impacting Ray Chapman's skull.

Wearing black arm bands in Chappies’ honor (above), The Cleveland Indians beat out the New York Yankees for the pennant that year, and went on to win the World Series. The Yankees finished a distant third. The Cleveland team voted Katie Chapman a full share of the winners’ purse, about $4,000 (worth $45,000 today). Six months after Chappie's death, Katie gave birth to his daughter and named her Rae. A few years later Katie remarried, to businessman J.F. McMahon and he moved them to California. But she still mourned Chappie. In 1926 Katie committed suicide by drinking cleaning fluid. Three years later little Rae contracted German measles and died as well. 

Both bodies were brought back to Cleveland,  to be buried in Calvary Cemetery under the name “Chapman”. Ray is buried alone about five miles away in Lake View Cemetery (above), where fans still leave baseballs, bats and memorabilia against his tombstone. If you have a chance, you should do the same.

Carl Mays played for the Yankees for only one more season. In 1921 he won 27 games and lost only 9. And he  batted .343, unheard of for a pitcher in any era of the game. Despite that achievement, part way through the 1922 season he was traded to the National League Cincinnati Reds, where he went 20 and 9, making him the first pitcher to win 20 games in both leagues.

Carl Mays spent 15 years in the majors, earning 208 wins and 31 saves against a mere 126 losses, with an amazing 862 strikeouts in 490 games. His lifetime batting average of .268 makes him one of the best hitting pitchers of all time. And yet, despite what are clearly Hall Of Fame statistics Carl Mays has received only 8 votes for that honor. 

Some may believe in the absurd story that he fixed a World Series game in 1922. But the facts deny that. No, what haunted Carl Mays until his death in 1971,  what kept him out of the Hall of Fame, was that one pitch out of the thousands of pitches he threw over his career, the one pitch he threw in the August heat of the 1920 pennant race. It is something to ponder, as the dog days of summer approach once again, and the finality of September hints at the winter which shall soon to envelope us all. 

Quote from Wikipedia article on Batting Helmets: "It was not until December 1970 that Major League Baseball enforced strictly mandatory use of the batting helmet for all batters. Veteran players, however, were allowed to choose to wear a helmet or not, as they were grandfathered into the rule. The last Major League player to bat helmetless was Bob Montgomery, who last played for Boston Red Sox in 1979.

- 30 -

LESSON OF THE SNOW FLAKE

 

I want to share with you the lesson of a snowflake. Individually it is the lightest, most delicate, fragile thing in the world.  It takes over 220,000 snowflakes to make one pound snow. A cubic foot of snow can weigh over 62 pounds. But 10 inches of fluffy snow floating down to cover an acre of ground weighs over a ton. 

And if you keep piling up snowflakes for something over 800,000 years, which has happened in Greenland, you get rivers of ice - 53 glaciers on the world's largest island. Winter after winter, century after century, for perhaps 15,000 years, the gentle, ethereal fresh snow compresses the older snow beneath it, until 50 feet below the surface it becomes solid ice, and 2 miles down it crushes the water molecules so their oxygen-hydrogen bonds lock together in long bands, making glacial ice sharp blue and hard enough to cut steel and drown human lives.

The fastest of Greenland's “tortoise rivers” , the Jacobshaven glacier begins 300 miles from the western coast, at a 50 mile arc of 11,000 foot high snow ridges, 42,471 square miles of compressed snow flakes, fed by 118 inches of new snowflakes in an average year. The base of this 2 mile thick ice machine is lubricated by a thin sheen of melt water against the bedrock, allowing the glacier to be squeezed like toothpaste from a tube, rushing 40 miles to the coast at 70 – 110 feet a day toward the 3 mile wide Jacobshaven Fjord.

As late as 1983 the ice did not stop when it reached the water. Marine biologist Richard Brown could write, “The tongue of ice grows into a long, floating slab, anchored only by the hinge of ice at its landward end. But the hinge becomes more and more precarious as the ice pushes farther out and the tides begin to work on it, up and down, twice a day. The cracks...soon become crevasses....at last... the deepest crevasse breaks through with a roar which echoes off the sides of the fjord like a mountain in labor. 

"The slab crashes off the face of the glacier, scattering seabirds as it goes. A surge of water, three feet high, runs ahead of it and batters its way along the walls of the fjord. The ice berg is launched.”

It is called “calving”, and the 36 mile long fjord is jammed with thousands of newly born bergs, big and small, that scrape against the edges and bottom of the inlet. With the arrival of autumn, the air atop the ice sheet “...comes rushing down the fjord in a hurricane wind....(and) the bergs begin to move...until they are drifting almost as fast as a man can walk....grinding, jostling past the little port of Jackobshaven (above)  and out into the sea at last.”

Each year western Greenland produces 25- 40,000 icebergs, averaging 5-11 million tons each. Sunlight melts the surface, while the colder sea water protects the body of the berg. The berg becomes unbalanced, top heavy and repeatedly rolls over, offering a fresh face for the sun to attack. The bottom of Baffin Bay is coated with gravel and rocks scrapped off the hidden mountains of Greenland and dropped from rolling bergs like pennies slipping through a hole in your pocket. A few of hundred of these islands of fresh water ice in a salted sea make it through the Davis Strait and into the North Atlantic, to be shepherded south by the Labrador current.

The particular berg that is the subject of our story, has battled storms and seas that would have destroyed anything made by humans. But now, on a moonless night, the berg is approaching a border. The ocean has gone calm and placid. The air, at the very center of a high pressure area, has gone still as well, the pressure so high there is no fog. Close to the water surface a faint obscuring mist has gathered, held down by warmer air sent north from the gulf of Mexico.

Approximately 380 miles south-south east of Cape Race, Newfoundland, in a meandering, swirling collision, the cold southbound Labrador water overrides the northbound warmer - up to 68 degrees Fahrenheit warmer – Caribbean air, heated by the approaching Gulf Stream current. And then, out of the still dark, flickering lights appear over the horizon, and quickly grow brighter and steadier. An object is approaching. It is dwarfed by the 2 million tons of the remaining berg, 200 feet long and looming 140 feet above the water line, meaning perhaps 1,000 feet below. 

A human witness, on board the approaching object says it resembles “the Rock of Gibraltar”. The human object was less than a thousand feet long, and sits just over 100 feet above the water. But is moving so quickly, pushing 52,000 tons of sea water aside as it plows through the water at 20 knots – 23 miles an hour -  in a most unnatural straight line, on a collision course with the berg.

Abruptly, the object begins to emit noises, first clanging and then shrieks. The tenor of its thrashing changes. At last it begins to swing away from the ice, slowly, as if distracted by a voice faintly heard. But it is not enough. The berg feels the shudder of contact. But the human forged metal is no match for the glacier ice, compacted over a thousand years by hundreds of millions of tons of compressing snowflakes. The metal bends ever so slightly. A chunk of ice snaps off the surface of the berg, and shatters on to the deck of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic.

“The iceberg rocks a little from the force of the impact, spins a little, and keeps on drifting southward, changed only by a smear of red and black paint along one of its sides.”  The Titanic stops not far from the collision, and begins to make new sounds, and shed small pieces of itself. Then, within four hours, the Titanic is swallowed by the sea.

At dawn the next morning, another, even smaller object, approaches the berg. She is the R.M.S. Carpathia, soon to be joined by other similar objects. And for a few days the berg is surrounded by small human made structures. On one of these is the Russian-East Asiatic Steam Ship Birma, First Officer Alfred Nielsen takes a photograph of the iceberg (above), one of only three confirmed and mutually supportive photographs of the iceberg with a red streak across her flank, and thus blamed for the loss of the R.M.S. Titanic. Then, one by one the ships move away. And for a time the berg and the detritus of the collision float together,  southward in a warming Labrador current.

Eventually, this berg crosses the border, “...a boundary between the cold, gray world of ice and seabirds and the warm blue one of flying fish and Sargasso weed. The sea on the other side is (41 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, in a matter yards.”. Melting and rolling, the mass fades into the ocean itself. As Richard Brown would later write, “The ice berg goes no further south than...300 miles north of Bermuda, and then it is nothing.”

The particular iceberg held responsible for sinking RMS Titanic, and drowning 1,500 human souls, was unusual. Of the 25,000 to 40,000 icebergs calved by the west Greenland glaciers each year, few make it into the North Atlantic. At least 1,000 icebergs crossed through the Davis Strait in 1909 and in 1912. 

That number was equaled again 7 years later - 1929 -  which saw 1,300 North Atlantic icebergs. Not 15 years later - 1945 -  that number was equaled. But 22 year after that - 1972 -  saw 1,500, and just 10 years after that, in 1982,  the glaciers of western Greenland produced 1,300.  Just 2 years later, - in 1984 - there were 2,200 sited, 1,000 again one year later, and 1,900 12 years later - in 1997. 

The very next year - 1998 -  there were 1,300 icebergs. A decade later there were another 1,000 Atlantic icebergs and over 1,200 in 2009.  The glaciers of Greenland have been calving bergs at increasing rates. The iceberg that “sank the Titanic” was an early warning of what humans were doing to the planet we depend upon for our breathable air and drinkable water.

The Jacobshaven glacier has been in full retreat since 1850. And still we have refused to listen to its warnings.  Since 2003, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 10 billion tons of ice - each and every year. The Jacobshaven glacier has lost another 15 feet of thickness every year.

And in the decade since 2010 the ice river has retreated another 3 miles up the fjord.  Once back on land, there will be no more icebergs from the Jacobshaven glacier, only a flood of fresh water. No longer will the ocean have to wait while the icebergs to melt before their salty water is diluted by the influx of fresh. 

It is a tipping point, as if the berg was getting ready to roll over for the last time. After that, things speed up.

It will be a moment even a United States Senator, such as James Inhofe, from the land locked oil rich state of Oklahoma, using a February snowball to deny the power of the snowflake to destroy the dreams of greedy men. 

The lesson of the snowflake is that small things eventually add up to very, very big things.  But, if you wait until the big thing is visible and obvious, it is usually too late to change course, to avoid the fatal collision.  As it is now.

- 30 -

Note: All quotes from "Voyage of the Iceberg", the story of the iceberg that sank the Titanic"

By Richard Brown.  1983. James Lorimer and Company, Toronto, Canada.

SELLING THE TOWER Victor Lustig, Confidence Man

 

I wish I had been invited. The 5 invitations arrived in the late spring of 1925, via special delivery, and were written on stationary of the Ministère de Postes et Télégraphes.  Each letter invited the addressee to a confidential meeting with the Deputy Director General to be held after hours in a suite at the Hotel de Crillon (above), at number ten Champs-Elysees.  Each recipient was warned to discuss the invitation with no one.  Those who received the invitations were surely intrigued. It was not often that scrap metal dealers are invited to meetings in such exclusive places.

The Hotel had been constructed by Louis XV as government offices, before being bought by the Crillon family and converted into a five star hotel. Its interior was adorned throughout with 17th Century tapestries, Louis XVI gilt and brocade furniture, sculptures, paintings and other valuable art works. Government ministries held public and closed door meetings in the hotel every day. Besides, who would reject the opportunity of seeing the room where Marie Antoinette took piano lessons, or where Charlie Chaplin slept? The five 'petit bourgeois' businessmen were suitably impressed. before they even arrived.

The guests were greeted by an officious bureaucrat who identified himself as Msr. Robert Tourbillon, personal secretary to the Deputy Director, Msr Victor Lustig. The ministry, explained Msr Tourbilliuon, was about to offer a valuable business opportunity to these five men. However, he insisted, everything said in this room must remain confidential. If the guests did not agree with this stipulation they should leave at once. None of the businessmen budged from their seats.

A few minutes later Deputy Lustig (above)  bustled into the room, pompous and brusque, as you would expect any good French bureaucrat to be. After reminding his guests of the absolute need for secrecy, he quickly got down to the subject at hand. The men in the room may have read recently, explained Msr. Lustig, that the government was facing a major and expensive renovation of Msr. Eiffle’s Tower.

The tower had been controversial even before it opened on 31 March, 1888. 

Three hundred workers had spent 3 years welding 7,000 tons of iron, fashioned into 18,000 pieces connected by 2,500,000 rivets into the open framework tower.

It was half a proof of concept construction and half a work of art.  Completed, it stood 1,000 feet high, making it the tallest structure in the world; and one of the most despised.

The Paris press referred to it as “…a truly tragic street lamp.”  Three hundred influential artists and politicians publicly protested the “…useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower”.  Author Alexander Dumas called it a "loathsome construction".  Is Paris going to be associated with the grotesque, mercantile imaginings of a constructor of machines?” 

The inventor of the short story, Guy de Maupassant, asked, "What will be thought of our generation if we do not smash this lanky pyramid".  When asked why, despite his hatred, he ate lunch every day in the cafe (above), located on the second level of the tower... 

...de Maupassant explained he ate there because it was the only place in Paris where he did not have digest while looking at the damn thing.

Msr. Eiffel had retained ownership of the “"odious column of bolted metal” for twenty years. In 1909 possession finally passed to city of Paris.  By then the tower was making a profit, as de Maupassant’s angry patronage of the restaurant proved. And to a younger generation which had never known Paris without Msr. Eiffel’s tower, it had become a symbol of France, and a  massive radio broadcast tower.  So the tower stayed put.  But by 1925, years of defrayed maintenance were catching up with the structure.

Every seven years the tower required a year and a half of attention from dozens of workers, applying fifty tons of paint, using 15,000 brushes. That was expensive. 

Worse, rust and decay required replacement of many structural supports. To pay for all of that, the city government was in need of a loan from the national government. Beginning in 1925, the politicians began to prepare the public for a monumental refurbishing bill of the monument. 

Newspapers and magazines were filled with articles detailing the expense and difficulties involved. As expected, resistance surged.  And now, Msr. Lustig explained to the five businessmen , the government had come to the conclusion that the tower was no longer worth the expense. The decision had been secretly made to sell it all for scrap.

The five dealers had been chosen, they were told, because of their professional discretion. And, they were warned, if  word of the tower’s imminent demise were to become public ahead of time,  sentimentality might prevent the sale of seven tons of scrap iron. 

So, Msr. Lustig told the five men in the room, they had four days to present their sealed bids to Msr Tourbillon. The highest bidder would have the privilege of dismantling the Eiffel Tower and selling  the high grade iron in the Tower, which was worth the modern equivalent of $2.8 million. Lustig said the the bids would be expected to be in the half million dollar range.

Each of the dealers left the room with their minds buzzing. There was not much time to budget the project, to figure labor, equipment and insurance costs.  But only one,  that we know of, was desperate enough to ask for a second, private meeting with Msr. Lustig. 

An embarrassed Msr. Andre Poisson sheepishly explained that his wife had expressed concerns about the secrecy and haste.  Msr Lustig smiled and said he understood completely. It was a shame that money concerns were always complicating the lives of decent, honorable people. Why even he, a minor government official, often struggled to make ends meet. 

Msr. Poisson understood immediately. In the language of bureaucrats everywhere, Msr. Lustig had just asked for a bribe. Msr. Poisson breathed a sigh of relief. He now had no doubt that the Eiffel Tower job was perfectly legitimate and that he now had the inside track. Twenty-four hours later Poisson handed over to Msr. Lustig a cashier’s check for $500,000 as his bid, and a suitcase filled with cash - the bribe. And then he returned to his office to await the public announcement of his contract to dismantle the Tower.

The announcement never came. However Msr Poisson's check was cashed. And the bribe disappeared as well. When Msr. Poisson called the Ministry of Post Office and Telegraphs and asked when the winning bid on the Eiffle Tower deconstruction was going to be announced,  he was told no such contract was being considered. In fact, the government was about to announce the refurbishing of the tower,. Worse, there was no Deputy Director General named Lustig. 

Slowly, Msr. Poisson came to the sickening realization that he was going to have explain to his wife that he had handed over a suit case filled with cash to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.....er, the Eiffel Tower. It seems he was so ashamed he told no one. In fact his name is a nom-de-fraud, since in French "Poisson" means "Fish", as one who is hooked - and every April Fools Day it is a French tradition to slap a paper fish on a subject's back and shout "April Poisson"  So quiet were all the marks that six months later Msr Lustig returned to Paris, to run the scam again. 

By then rumors of the scam had bubbled up to the ears of the Paris police, and they quickly identified the con men running the game. Msr. Torbilion was actually an American con man named “Dapper” Dan Collins. But the brains behind the game was none other than the prince of con men, Victor "The Count" Lustig.

Victor was originally a Czech, and he had been stealing suckers' money in poker games on the Atlantic Cruise ships for a decade or more.  He would never be prosecuted for his sale of the Eiffel Tower, but he would be arrested for other scams in America.

And with the publication of his photo, his days as a con man were over. He would end his life in Alcatraz prison, dying of pneumonia in 1947, at just  57 years old.

This year the Eiffel Tower is 137 years old. To the best of Parisian authorities’ knowledge, it is sold about a thousands of times every day.  

- 30 -