Pre-Historic World Series Homers; The First Post Season Sluggers
PRE-HISTORIC WORLD SERIES HOMERS
Like baseball itself, home runs have evolved over time. Although some still have trouble imagining the human being evolving out of an ape, I hope that some scientifically objective readers will be able to visualize a time in baseball history where home runs were not central to the game, and were not even well documented. If home run history begins with the famous “Home Run Baker,” these early homers can truly be called “pre-historic.” Fortunately for baseball philosophers, a few years ago, a clay vessel was dug up under a rock inside a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake deep inside a cave in the middle of Idaho. Inside the vessel was a record, lamentably brief, of all the world series home runs hit before Home Run Baker. It was through the inspiration of God that some baseball monk foresaw the importance of World Series homers, and thought to inscribe them onto a sheet for posterity. He (or she) couldn’t have possibly known the importance that such homers would take on years later, especially at Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium.
Yes, human beings were capable of hitting World Series home runs before the famous ones by Home Run Baker; it’s just that no one seemed to pay that much attention. “The ball went over the fence, big deal!” seemed to be the view of most sports writers. Accurate records weren’t even published in some cases, but these forgotten homers were dramatic moments, none-the-less.
Let’s take a nostalgic look back at these forgotten triumphs of a bygone day, when World Series games were afterthoughts, and homers just a ball lost in the stands--Actually, it was called “The World’s Series” in those days.
Here’s a comprehensive list of all of the homers ever hit since the first experimental Series of Nineteen-ought-three, through the first ten “regulation” series as well.
The first World Series (excuse me, Worlds’ Series) homer was hit by the left handed James Dennison Sebring for the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates in that experimental nine-game marathon in 1903. In that year, the upstart “protestant” American League was founded as a challenge to the Holy Mother “catholic” League of the Nationals. The American League claimed its authority from The People rather than Abner Doubleday, and dared to challenge the Nationals to a best of nine contest of skill to prove who had the greatest players, or to see who was the most righteous, baseball-wise.
Perhaps it was also believed that if the Americans had truly blasphemed as it seemed, and was believed by pious NL fans around the globe, that God would smite them and make them to blow the Series match in five.
This was an earlier time in our nation’s history, when an person’s innocence would be acknowledged only if they were flameproof at the stake, and a good starting pitcher could pitch 14 innings without relief and come out unscathed, if he was “right with God.”
In 1903 it was “our best versus your best,” and the National League had some firebrand pitchers at the pulpit. The “one true” National League took up the gauntlet and won that first game 7 to 4. It looked as if this minor heresy would be crushed before it spread.
Unfortunately for the bishops of the National League hierarchy, the first American League World Series homer was hit for the Boston Pilgrims (soon to be once again Red Sox) the next day, October 2nd, by “Patrick Henry” Dougherty, and he hit two, to help the Pilgrims sink the Pirates 3-0.
RBI’s (Runs Batted In) were not to be invented for many years to come, and people didn’t use expressions like “three run homer,” “two run homer,” or “grand slam,” so it’s not clear who knocked in that other run. The thought was, “That batter didn’t put those guys on base, why should he get credit for someone else’s hard work?” (see “grand slam”) Today, baseball scholars use computers to retroactively calculate RBI and ERA stats the way TNT releases “full color” versions of classic old black and white movies.
The plucky Pilgrims not only escaped persecution from the National League, they survived a perditious autumn and won the series in nine games. The Americans were soon established as a major world power.
The following year, the Giants won the National League pennant, but refused to play the once-again victorious Pilgrims (some say Red Sox) in a series because the Americans “were a minor operation.” They didn’t count. They’d just go away sooner or later. That horrendous snub fired up rivalries between New York and Boston teams which continued to this day.
However, the AL and NL came to the table together to sign a peace agreement, the terms were worked out, and a series was played in 1905, between the Philadelphia A’s of the American League and the Giants of the National League, according to the rules invented by the tough guy, John McGraw, the Giants’ owner-manager, who thought that seven games were a good number. But no homers were hit.
The next World Series home run, believe it or not, wasn’t hit until October 11th, 1908 by shortstop Joseph Bert Tinker of literary fame. The poem, “Tinker, to Evers to Chance” was one of my favorite poems as a kid, a salute to the double play. It was the bottom of the 8th inning at Waterfront Stadium (near where Wrigley is now) in a scoreless game. Tinker was 0 for 2 against “Wild Bill” Donovan, who had barely allowed anyone on base the whole game. Tinker hit a homer as the Cubs exploded for 6 runs and held on to beat the Tigers 6-1 in the second game. Chicago won the series.
In 1909, the post-season homer started to play a larger role than before. In the opening game, Fred Clarke hit one for Pittsburgh to help them win the game 4-1. Perhaps by then someone had noticed that the team that hit the home run in a World Series game always won, so on October 13th of that year, Detroit hit two, one by left fielder David “Kangaroo” Jones and one by “Wahoo Sam” Crawford, who went 3 for 4. Unfortunately for them, Fred Clarke came up and hit one more out of the park to help the Pirates win the slug-fest anyway, 8 to 4. It had been three all in the bottom of the seventh, when Pittsburgh scored 4 times to break it open, and went on to win the series.
In 1910, A’s right fielder Dan Murphy hit the only homer of the series, which helped the A’s win the third game of the match-up 12 to 5 over the Cubs. Murphy scored a total of eight runs and the A’s were victorious as usual with the help of Charles “Chief” Bender, the Ojibway who invented the “slider,” by the way.
In 1911, Frank “Home Run” Baker brought the terms “World Series” and “Home Run” together in the minds of the public for the first time, and his timely two-run blast off Giants’ pitcher Rube Marquard in the 6th inning of game two broke a 1-1 tie and gave the A’s a 3-1 victory. That was the first “historic” home run that made everyone want to see one. That was when the nickname was bestowed upon him. That’s when the home run came into its own. It was like Ben Franklin and lightning, like Newton and his apple, like David and his slingshot. It got press.
Even more dramatic was his game-tying ninth inning shot off of Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson in the third game of that same series, making it 1 to 1. Mathewson was the patron saint of the National League, who had won an all-time record 38 games back in 1908. The A’s came back to win 3-2 in the 11th, as Hall of Famer Jack Coombs held the Giants to just 3 hits through 11 innings. You don’t see that any more--a starter going 14 innings! But Coombs was used to that. His mark of 13 complete shutouts in a season still stood as of 1993. Most team pitching staffs (staves?) don’t match that today.
No one remembers the home run hit in the 5th game by the young center fielder Ruben Oldring for the A’s, but it was terribly, terribly historic, if you’re into trivia. It marked the first time a team had hit the only home run in a World Series game and lost, and only the second time that a team had hit any homers at all in a series game and lost.
The 1912 series was the first real meeting between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants, the same October match-up that was canceled in 1904, due to childish bickering between the leagues. Tensions mounted high.
“Laughin’ Larry” Doyle hit a home run in the seventh game of the World Series to give the Giants an 11-7 win. He was called Larry “Laughin’ all the way to the bank” Doyle because he was hired as a rookie for the obscene sum of $4,000, and never produced, but it didn’t help his luck in that series: Although it was the seventh game, it wasn’t the end. It only brought the series to an exciting 3-3-1 tie. In those days, before lighted stadiums and night games, you could actually “tie” in baseball, which makes a mess of all of our statistics. The 3rd game had been called on account of darkness in the 11th inning, tied 6-6, with the indefatigable starter Christy Mathewson still on the mound for New York. (Larry Gardner had hit one for Boston in the same game.)
It was only in the eighth game (sounds funny, doesn’t it?) that the Red Sox finally put the Giants in their place, to end “once and for all” (NOT!) the New York-Boston rivalry that started in 1903 at the birth of modern baseball.
1913’s series saw a homer in the first game by “Home Run” Baker which helped the A’s win 6 to 4. In the third game Shang hit one for the A’s which helped them win again, 8-2. Fred Merkle (of “Merkle’s Boner” fame of 1908) hit one for the Giants, in the 4th game but they lost anyway, 6-5. Merkle was not known for good luck.
In 1914, Home Run Baker led the league again in homers with nine, but didn’t hit any in post season play. The “nobody” Boston Braves won the NL pennant and swept the mighty A’s in four games, one of the greatest upsets of all time. The “Miracle Braves” were the early forerunners of the “Miracle Mets,” coming from nowhere at mid-season to go 68-19 for the last half. Catcher Hank Gowdy went 3 for 4 with one homer to assist Boston in a 5-4 victory in game three.
So that’s it. Only seventeen home runs were hit during the first dozen years of World Series competition between the best two teams in baseball. All that was about to change. By 1928, the New York Yankees were hitting 9 in only four games. In 1956 they hit 12 in a seven game contest, more than were hit by both leagues combined in regulation World Series play before 1913.
And that’s how the Post-Season Home Run evolved. In case you wanted to know.
Like baseball itself, home runs have evolved over time. Although some still have trouble imagining the human being evolving out of an ape, I hope that some scientifically objective readers will be able to visualize a time in baseball history where home runs were not central to the game, and were not even well documented. If home run history begins with the famous “Home Run Baker,” these early homers can truly be called “pre-historic.” Fortunately for baseball philosophers, a few years ago, a clay vessel was dug up under a rock inside a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake deep inside a cave in the middle of Idaho. Inside the vessel was a record, lamentably brief, of all the world series home runs hit before Home Run Baker. It was through the inspiration of God that some baseball monk foresaw the importance of World Series homers, and thought to inscribe them onto a sheet for posterity. He (or she) couldn’t have possibly known the importance that such homers would take on years later, especially at Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium.
Yes, human beings were capable of hitting World Series home runs before the famous ones by Home Run Baker; it’s just that no one seemed to pay that much attention. “The ball went over the fence, big deal!” seemed to be the view of most sports writers. Accurate records weren’t even published in some cases, but these forgotten homers were dramatic moments, none-the-less.
Let’s take a nostalgic look back at these forgotten triumphs of a bygone day, when World Series games were afterthoughts, and homers just a ball lost in the stands--Actually, it was called “The World’s Series” in those days.
Here’s a comprehensive list of all of the homers ever hit since the first experimental Series of Nineteen-ought-three, through the first ten “regulation” series as well.
The first World Series (excuse me, Worlds’ Series) homer was hit by the left handed James Dennison Sebring for the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates in that experimental nine-game marathon in 1903. In that year, the upstart “protestant” American League was founded as a challenge to the Holy Mother “catholic” League of the Nationals. The American League claimed its authority from The People rather than Abner Doubleday, and dared to challenge the Nationals to a best of nine contest of skill to prove who had the greatest players, or to see who was the most righteous, baseball-wise.
Perhaps it was also believed that if the Americans had truly blasphemed as it seemed, and was believed by pious NL fans around the globe, that God would smite them and make them to blow the Series match in five.
This was an earlier time in our nation’s history, when an person’s innocence would be acknowledged only if they were flameproof at the stake, and a good starting pitcher could pitch 14 innings without relief and come out unscathed, if he was “right with God.”
In 1903 it was “our best versus your best,” and the National League had some firebrand pitchers at the pulpit. The “one true” National League took up the gauntlet and won that first game 7 to 4. It looked as if this minor heresy would be crushed before it spread.
Unfortunately for the bishops of the National League hierarchy, the first American League World Series homer was hit for the Boston Pilgrims (soon to be once again Red Sox) the next day, October 2nd, by “Patrick Henry” Dougherty, and he hit two, to help the Pilgrims sink the Pirates 3-0.
RBI’s (Runs Batted In) were not to be invented for many years to come, and people didn’t use expressions like “three run homer,” “two run homer,” or “grand slam,” so it’s not clear who knocked in that other run. The thought was, “That batter didn’t put those guys on base, why should he get credit for someone else’s hard work?” (see “grand slam”) Today, baseball scholars use computers to retroactively calculate RBI and ERA stats the way TNT releases “full color” versions of classic old black and white movies.
The plucky Pilgrims not only escaped persecution from the National League, they survived a perditious autumn and won the series in nine games. The Americans were soon established as a major world power.
The following year, the Giants won the National League pennant, but refused to play the once-again victorious Pilgrims (some say Red Sox) in a series because the Americans “were a minor operation.” They didn’t count. They’d just go away sooner or later. That horrendous snub fired up rivalries between New York and Boston teams which continued to this day.
However, the AL and NL came to the table together to sign a peace agreement, the terms were worked out, and a series was played in 1905, between the Philadelphia A’s of the American League and the Giants of the National League, according to the rules invented by the tough guy, John McGraw, the Giants’ owner-manager, who thought that seven games were a good number. But no homers were hit.
The next World Series home run, believe it or not, wasn’t hit until October 11th, 1908 by shortstop Joseph Bert Tinker of literary fame. The poem, “Tinker, to Evers to Chance” was one of my favorite poems as a kid, a salute to the double play. It was the bottom of the 8th inning at Waterfront Stadium (near where Wrigley is now) in a scoreless game. Tinker was 0 for 2 against “Wild Bill” Donovan, who had barely allowed anyone on base the whole game. Tinker hit a homer as the Cubs exploded for 6 runs and held on to beat the Tigers 6-1 in the second game. Chicago won the series.
In 1909, the post-season homer started to play a larger role than before. In the opening game, Fred Clarke hit one for Pittsburgh to help them win the game 4-1. Perhaps by then someone had noticed that the team that hit the home run in a World Series game always won, so on October 13th of that year, Detroit hit two, one by left fielder David “Kangaroo” Jones and one by “Wahoo Sam” Crawford, who went 3 for 4. Unfortunately for them, Fred Clarke came up and hit one more out of the park to help the Pirates win the slug-fest anyway, 8 to 4. It had been three all in the bottom of the seventh, when Pittsburgh scored 4 times to break it open, and went on to win the series.
In 1910, A’s right fielder Dan Murphy hit the only homer of the series, which helped the A’s win the third game of the match-up 12 to 5 over the Cubs. Murphy scored a total of eight runs and the A’s were victorious as usual with the help of Charles “Chief” Bender, the Ojibway who invented the “slider,” by the way.
In 1911, Frank “Home Run” Baker brought the terms “World Series” and “Home Run” together in the minds of the public for the first time, and his timely two-run blast off Giants’ pitcher Rube Marquard in the 6th inning of game two broke a 1-1 tie and gave the A’s a 3-1 victory. That was the first “historic” home run that made everyone want to see one. That was when the nickname was bestowed upon him. That’s when the home run came into its own. It was like Ben Franklin and lightning, like Newton and his apple, like David and his slingshot. It got press.
Even more dramatic was his game-tying ninth inning shot off of Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson in the third game of that same series, making it 1 to 1. Mathewson was the patron saint of the National League, who had won an all-time record 38 games back in 1908. The A’s came back to win 3-2 in the 11th, as Hall of Famer Jack Coombs held the Giants to just 3 hits through 11 innings. You don’t see that any more--a starter going 14 innings! But Coombs was used to that. His mark of 13 complete shutouts in a season still stood as of 1993. Most team pitching staffs (staves?) don’t match that today.
No one remembers the home run hit in the 5th game by the young center fielder Ruben Oldring for the A’s, but it was terribly, terribly historic, if you’re into trivia. It marked the first time a team had hit the only home run in a World Series game and lost, and only the second time that a team had hit any homers at all in a series game and lost.
The 1912 series was the first real meeting between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants, the same October match-up that was canceled in 1904, due to childish bickering between the leagues. Tensions mounted high.
“Laughin’ Larry” Doyle hit a home run in the seventh game of the World Series to give the Giants an 11-7 win. He was called Larry “Laughin’ all the way to the bank” Doyle because he was hired as a rookie for the obscene sum of $4,000, and never produced, but it didn’t help his luck in that series: Although it was the seventh game, it wasn’t the end. It only brought the series to an exciting 3-3-1 tie. In those days, before lighted stadiums and night games, you could actually “tie” in baseball, which makes a mess of all of our statistics. The 3rd game had been called on account of darkness in the 11th inning, tied 6-6, with the indefatigable starter Christy Mathewson still on the mound for New York. (Larry Gardner had hit one for Boston in the same game.)
It was only in the eighth game (sounds funny, doesn’t it?) that the Red Sox finally put the Giants in their place, to end “once and for all” (NOT!) the New York-Boston rivalry that started in 1903 at the birth of modern baseball.
1913’s series saw a homer in the first game by “Home Run” Baker which helped the A’s win 6 to 4. In the third game Shang hit one for the A’s which helped them win again, 8-2. Fred Merkle (of “Merkle’s Boner” fame of 1908) hit one for the Giants, in the 4th game but they lost anyway, 6-5. Merkle was not known for good luck.
In 1914, Home Run Baker led the league again in homers with nine, but didn’t hit any in post season play. The “nobody” Boston Braves won the NL pennant and swept the mighty A’s in four games, one of the greatest upsets of all time. The “Miracle Braves” were the early forerunners of the “Miracle Mets,” coming from nowhere at mid-season to go 68-19 for the last half. Catcher Hank Gowdy went 3 for 4 with one homer to assist Boston in a 5-4 victory in game three.
So that’s it. Only seventeen home runs were hit during the first dozen years of World Series competition between the best two teams in baseball. All that was about to change. By 1928, the New York Yankees were hitting 9 in only four games. In 1956 they hit 12 in a seven game contest, more than were hit by both leagues combined in regulation World Series play before 1913.
And that’s how the Post-Season Home Run evolved. In case you wanted to know.
posted by evan pritchard | 3:07 PM
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