Baseball History Reader: Page 3
The 1918 World Series
Boston
Red Sox (4) v Chicago Cubs (2)
September 5-11
Comiskey Park (Chicago), Fenway Park (Boston)
Game 1: Boston 1, Chicago 0
Game 2: Chicago 3, Boston 1
Game 3: Boston 2, Chicago 1
Game 4: Boston 3, Chicago 2
Game 5: Chicago 3, Boston 0
Game 6: Boston 2, Chicago 1
BOSTON:
Sam Agnew (c), Joe Bush (p), Jean Dubuc (ph), Harry Hooper (of), Sam Jones (p), Carl Mays (p), Stuffy McInnis (1b), Hack Miller (ph), Babe Ruth (p, of), Wally Schang (of), Everett Scott (ss), Dave Shean (2b), Amos Strunk (of), Fred Thomas (3b), George Whiteman (of). Mgr: Ed Barrow
CHICAGO: Turner Barber (ph), Charlie Deal (3b), Phil Douglas (p), Max Flack (of), Claude Hendrix (p), Charlie Hollocher (ss), Bill Killefer (c), Les Mann (of), Bill McCabe (ph), Fred Merkle (1b), Bob O'Farrell (c), Dode Paskert (of), Charlie Pick (2b), Lefty Tyler (p), Hippo Vaughn (p), Chuck Wortman (2b), Rollie Zeider (3b). Mgr: Fred Mitchell
T]he players began the Series in Chicago, September 5. Ruth faced Vaughn. The Red Sox scored in the fourth ... and that was enough. Ruth won 1-0. Then Bush faced Tyler. The Cubs had a three-run second, with Tyler delivering a two-run single, and Tyler won 3-1. Then Boston won 2-1, with Mays and Vaughn (on one day's rest) allowing seven hits each.
The attendance, at low prices, had been 19,000, 20,000, and 27,000. The Commission announced that the player shares would be cut to $1,200 and $800. On the train back to Boston, the players got together and formed a four-man committee to talk to the Commission. They met the morning of the fourth game, September 9. The players said either postpone the plan for sharing with other first-division teams until after the wart, or give us the originally promised shares .... The Commission pleaded poverty ... and claimed that only the leagues themselves could change rules. Interpreting that as stalling, the players decided to play no more games.
At game time, there were 22,000 people in Fenway Park but no players on the field. American League president Ban Johnson, apparently drunk, appealed to them. With Johnson clearly in no condition to talk seriously, the players decided to go ahead, for the sake of the public and their own feeling for the game, exacting only a promise of no retribution for the brief but undeniable strike action.
Starting an hour ate (which mattered, since there were no lights), Ruth faced Tyler. In the fourth, Ruth knocked in two runs with a triple. In the eighth, his scoreless streak ended at 29 innings plus .... But Boston made it 3-2 in its half. In the ninth, Ruth needed Bush's help to nail it down.
Chicago won the next day 3-0, on Vaughn's five-hitter against Jones. The sixth game followed the same pattern: a three-hitter by Mays, beating Tyler 2-1 on two unearned runs.
The Red Sox had been in five World Series -- 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918 -- and had won them all ....(Leonard Koppett, Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball)
NOTE: Red Faber and Hippo Vaughn both tied Christy Mathewson's 1911 World Series record of 27.0 innings pitched. Lefty Tyler set a World Series record by issuing eleven walks -- a record tied by Lefty Gomez in 1936 and Allie Reynolds in 1951.
Red Sox (4) v Chicago Cubs (2)
September 5-11
Comiskey Park (Chicago), Fenway Park (Boston)
Game 1: Boston 1, Chicago 0
Game 2: Chicago 3, Boston 1
Game 3: Boston 2, Chicago 1
Game 4: Boston 3, Chicago 2
Game 5: Chicago 3, Boston 0
Game 6: Boston 2, Chicago 1
BOSTON:
Sam Agnew (c), Joe Bush (p), Jean Dubuc (ph), Harry Hooper (of), Sam Jones (p), Carl Mays (p), Stuffy McInnis (1b), Hack Miller (ph), Babe Ruth (p, of), Wally Schang (of), Everett Scott (ss), Dave Shean (2b), Amos Strunk (of), Fred Thomas (3b), George Whiteman (of). Mgr: Ed Barrow
CHICAGO: Turner Barber (ph), Charlie Deal (3b), Phil Douglas (p), Max Flack (of), Claude Hendrix (p), Charlie Hollocher (ss), Bill Killefer (c), Les Mann (of), Bill McCabe (ph), Fred Merkle (1b), Bob O'Farrell (c), Dode Paskert (of), Charlie Pick (2b), Lefty Tyler (p), Hippo Vaughn (p), Chuck Wortman (2b), Rollie Zeider (3b). Mgr: Fred Mitchell
T]he players began the Series in Chicago, September 5. Ruth faced Vaughn. The Red Sox scored in the fourth ... and that was enough. Ruth won 1-0. Then Bush faced Tyler. The Cubs had a three-run second, with Tyler delivering a two-run single, and Tyler won 3-1. Then Boston won 2-1, with Mays and Vaughn (on one day's rest) allowing seven hits each.
The attendance, at low prices, had been 19,000, 20,000, and 27,000. The Commission announced that the player shares would be cut to $1,200 and $800. On the train back to Boston, the players got together and formed a four-man committee to talk to the Commission. They met the morning of the fourth game, September 9. The players said either postpone the plan for sharing with other first-division teams until after the wart, or give us the originally promised shares .... The Commission pleaded poverty ... and claimed that only the leagues themselves could change rules. Interpreting that as stalling, the players decided to play no more games.
At game time, there were 22,000 people in Fenway Park but no players on the field. American League president Ban Johnson, apparently drunk, appealed to them. With Johnson clearly in no condition to talk seriously, the players decided to go ahead, for the sake of the public and their own feeling for the game, exacting only a promise of no retribution for the brief but undeniable strike action.
Starting an hour ate (which mattered, since there were no lights), Ruth faced Tyler. In the fourth, Ruth knocked in two runs with a triple. In the eighth, his scoreless streak ended at 29 innings plus .... But Boston made it 3-2 in its half. In the ninth, Ruth needed Bush's help to nail it down.
Chicago won the next day 3-0, on Vaughn's five-hitter against Jones. The sixth game followed the same pattern: a three-hitter by Mays, beating Tyler 2-1 on two unearned runs.
The Red Sox had been in five World Series -- 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918 -- and had won them all ....(Leonard Koppett, Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball)
NOTE: Red Faber and Hippo Vaughn both tied Christy Mathewson's 1911 World Series record of 27.0 innings pitched. Lefty Tyler set a World Series record by issuing eleven walks -- a record tied by Lefty Gomez in 1936 and Allie Reynolds in 1951.
The Last .400 Hitter
Robert W. Creamer, Baseball in '41
[1941] Williams was hot again. Amazingly strong at the plate. He walked frequently -- it was a rare day when he did not receive at least one base on balls -- and frequently he had only one or two official at-bats. Yet he had a hit in practically every game .... Throughout August he stayed close to .410 .... When he had a rare hitless day his average would drop several points, and then he would force it back up again. On August 18 he was down to .405, but in his next three games he had seven hits in twelve at-bats, including five home runs, to lift it to .412, and he was still hitting .410 half a dozen days into September.
Except in Boston, where even his teammates were rooting for him ("He's become positively popular with the other players this year," wrote one newspaperman with obvious surprise)his .400-plus average had not generated a great deal of attention. Attendance in the American League dropped off sharply after the Yankees tore the pennant race apart and DiMaggio stopped hitting .... Didn't Williams' .400 average excite people? Not that much -- at least not until very late in the eason .... [P]eople who were then in their late twenties clearly remembered the spate of .400 averages in the early 1920s, seven of them in six seasons. Bill Terry of the Giants had hit .401 in 1930, only a decade earlier....
So Williams' .410 average in early September was splendid but not earthshaking. What was earthshaking ... was the way he was hitting. He wasn't choking up on the bat and poking safe little singles. He was swinging hard, smashing out doubles, home runs, line drives, long fly balls. He had been well behind in the home-run race earlier in the year, but he hit so many late-season dingers that he moved past the Yankees' Charlie Keller into the league lead.
And he was getting few good pitches to hit. Everybody was walking him. He was given 145 bases on balls that year, almost seventy more than DiMaggio. Slowly the scope of his achievement .. began to be appreciated .... In New York a week into September he wowed a Yankee Stadium crowd by hitting two doubles and a single to lift his average to .413. The Yankee fans even jeered their old favorite, Lefty Gomez, when he walked Ted.
....There were only fifteen games left in the season, but maintaining the blistering pace was becoming increasingly difficult. For a man as sensitive to press coverage and fan comments as Williams was, the pressure must have been excruciating. .... He was in the newspapers every day, and in Boston the press coverage was mothering; there were headlines about him, photographs, cartoons, news stories, features, columns, sidebars, special boxes of statistics on what he had done so far and what he had to do to hit .400.
He went hitless in two successive games (in only four official at-bats) and his average dropped four points to .409. It hovered there for a few more days before another hitless game dropped him to .405, with little more than a week to go. The Red Sox played their last home games of the season on Saturday and Sunday, September 20 and 21, and Williams had three hits in seven at-bats, including his thirty-sixth homer of the year. That splurge lifted his average only a point to .406.
The Red Sox had three games in Washington during the last week of the season and three in Philadelphia. Williams had one hit on the first day in Washington to keep his average at .405 (or precisely .4051, compared to the .4055 it had been the day before; people were beginning to use four decimal points when they discussed Williams' hitting.) But the next day in a doubleheader against the Senators he stumbled badly, getting only one hit in seven at-bats -- and that one an infield single that he barely beat out. One hit in seven at-bats, and his average plummeted all the way down to .401. He had batted only .270 since September 10, and his average had fallen twelve points.
....People began to say that Williams ought to sit out the final three games and not play in Philly. That way he could end the season hitting .401. Joe Cronin, the Red Sox manager, toyed with the idea and mentioned it to Williams, but Williams insisted on playing ....
In Philadelphia on Friday, an off day, Williams went to Shibe Park with a coach and a catcher and took some extra batting practice .... "Hitting here this time of year is a headache," Williams said. "The shadows are bad. You don't get a good look at the ball. But I'm not alibing .... I want to hit over .400, but I'm going to play all three games here even if I don't hit a ball out of the infield. The record's no good unless it's made in all the games."
On Saturday Williams had only one hit in four at-bats and his average fell to .39955. Baseball's long-standing practice was -- and is -- to round off batting averages to the nearest three numbers .... [But if] Ted hadn't played on Sunday his batting average might have been listed in the record books as .400, but no matter how you rounded off the .39955 figure would have echoed and reechoed through baseball history.
....Williams didn't appear confident before the doubleheader on the last day of the season. About all he would say was "I hope I can hit .400" before turning the conversation to a postseason barnstorming trip he and Jimmie Foxx were going on.
Then the first game started. Williams, who was batting fourth, came up for the first time in the second inning. Batting against Dick Fowler ... he took ball one and ball two and then rammed a ground single through the right side of the infield. That lifted his average back over .400 to .401.
He came to bat for the second time in the fifth inning. Fowler missed with his first pitch but came in with the second, and Williams hit it 440 feet over the right-field fence for a long home run. His average was now .402.
The game had become a free-hitting affair, and he batted again the next inning. With the count two balls and no strikes, batting now against a lefthander named Porter Vaughan, he hit another grounder through the hole into right field for his third straight hit.
That raised his average to .404 and practically guaranteed he would finish over .400. He'd have to go hitless in his next five times at bat for his average to fall below that mark. Everyone seemed aware of that and the Red Sox players in the dugout were cheering as vigorously as the crowd was. "His teammates don't consider him a necessary evil anymore," wrote a Boston
sportswriter.
Williams came up again in the seventh inning. This time he cracked a line-drive single over the first baseman's head for his fourth straight hit .... For all the hitting (the Red Sox had sixteen hits, the Athletics fifteen) the game was over in two hours and two minutes. The second game, called after the eighth inning because of the darkness in "the crater that was Shibe Park," as someone described the Philadelphia ballpark, took only an hour and thirty one minutes to play. Williams batted three times. He hit yet another ground-ball single to right in his first at-bat, but in his second time up, facing a rookie righthander named Fred Caligiuri, he hit a tremendous shot on a line to right-center field that hit the loudspeaker horns of the public-address system under the 460-foot sign. One writer said it was the hardest Williams had hit a ball in his three seasons with the Red Sox. The ball punched a clean hole in one of the speaker horns, fell back onto the playing field, and Williams was held to a double.
It was the seventh straight time he'd been on base in the doubleheader. He had one more at-bat and for the first time all day he made out, hitting a fly ball to left field. He had had six hits in his eight at-bats and lifted his average six points on the last day of the season to .406 (or, to be precise, .4057.)
Someone mentioned the Most Valuable Player award to Williams, and the youngster's face grew serious. "Do you think there's a chance I could win it?" he asked. Then, as though dismissing the idea (DiMaggio eventually won it), he smiled again and said, "Even if I don't, I'll be satisfied with this. What a thrill! I wasn't saying much about it before the game, but I never wanted anything harder in my life."
Except in Boston, where even his teammates were rooting for him ("He's become positively popular with the other players this year," wrote one newspaperman with obvious surprise)his .400-plus average had not generated a great deal of attention. Attendance in the American League dropped off sharply after the Yankees tore the pennant race apart and DiMaggio stopped hitting .... Didn't Williams' .400 average excite people? Not that much -- at least not until very late in the eason .... [P]eople who were then in their late twenties clearly remembered the spate of .400 averages in the early 1920s, seven of them in six seasons. Bill Terry of the Giants had hit .401 in 1930, only a decade earlier....
So Williams' .410 average in early September was splendid but not earthshaking. What was earthshaking ... was the way he was hitting. He wasn't choking up on the bat and poking safe little singles. He was swinging hard, smashing out doubles, home runs, line drives, long fly balls. He had been well behind in the home-run race earlier in the year, but he hit so many late-season dingers that he moved past the Yankees' Charlie Keller into the league lead.
And he was getting few good pitches to hit. Everybody was walking him. He was given 145 bases on balls that year, almost seventy more than DiMaggio. Slowly the scope of his achievement .. began to be appreciated .... In New York a week into September he wowed a Yankee Stadium crowd by hitting two doubles and a single to lift his average to .413. The Yankee fans even jeered their old favorite, Lefty Gomez, when he walked Ted.
....There were only fifteen games left in the season, but maintaining the blistering pace was becoming increasingly difficult. For a man as sensitive to press coverage and fan comments as Williams was, the pressure must have been excruciating. .... He was in the newspapers every day, and in Boston the press coverage was mothering; there were headlines about him, photographs, cartoons, news stories, features, columns, sidebars, special boxes of statistics on what he had done so far and what he had to do to hit .400.
He went hitless in two successive games (in only four official at-bats) and his average dropped four points to .409. It hovered there for a few more days before another hitless game dropped him to .405, with little more than a week to go. The Red Sox played their last home games of the season on Saturday and Sunday, September 20 and 21, and Williams had three hits in seven at-bats, including his thirty-sixth homer of the year. That splurge lifted his average only a point to .406.
The Red Sox had three games in Washington during the last week of the season and three in Philadelphia. Williams had one hit on the first day in Washington to keep his average at .405 (or precisely .4051, compared to the .4055 it had been the day before; people were beginning to use four decimal points when they discussed Williams' hitting.) But the next day in a doubleheader against the Senators he stumbled badly, getting only one hit in seven at-bats -- and that one an infield single that he barely beat out. One hit in seven at-bats, and his average plummeted all the way down to .401. He had batted only .270 since September 10, and his average had fallen twelve points.
....People began to say that Williams ought to sit out the final three games and not play in Philly. That way he could end the season hitting .401. Joe Cronin, the Red Sox manager, toyed with the idea and mentioned it to Williams, but Williams insisted on playing ....
In Philadelphia on Friday, an off day, Williams went to Shibe Park with a coach and a catcher and took some extra batting practice .... "Hitting here this time of year is a headache," Williams said. "The shadows are bad. You don't get a good look at the ball. But I'm not alibing .... I want to hit over .400, but I'm going to play all three games here even if I don't hit a ball out of the infield. The record's no good unless it's made in all the games."
On Saturday Williams had only one hit in four at-bats and his average fell to .39955. Baseball's long-standing practice was -- and is -- to round off batting averages to the nearest three numbers .... [But if] Ted hadn't played on Sunday his batting average might have been listed in the record books as .400, but no matter how you rounded off the .39955 figure would have echoed and reechoed through baseball history.
....Williams didn't appear confident before the doubleheader on the last day of the season. About all he would say was "I hope I can hit .400" before turning the conversation to a postseason barnstorming trip he and Jimmie Foxx were going on.
Then the first game started. Williams, who was batting fourth, came up for the first time in the second inning. Batting against Dick Fowler ... he took ball one and ball two and then rammed a ground single through the right side of the infield. That lifted his average back over .400 to .401.
He came to bat for the second time in the fifth inning. Fowler missed with his first pitch but came in with the second, and Williams hit it 440 feet over the right-field fence for a long home run. His average was now .402.
The game had become a free-hitting affair, and he batted again the next inning. With the count two balls and no strikes, batting now against a lefthander named Porter Vaughan, he hit another grounder through the hole into right field for his third straight hit.
That raised his average to .404 and practically guaranteed he would finish over .400. He'd have to go hitless in his next five times at bat for his average to fall below that mark. Everyone seemed aware of that and the Red Sox players in the dugout were cheering as vigorously as the crowd was. "His teammates don't consider him a necessary evil anymore," wrote a Boston
sportswriter.
Williams came up again in the seventh inning. This time he cracked a line-drive single over the first baseman's head for his fourth straight hit .... For all the hitting (the Red Sox had sixteen hits, the Athletics fifteen) the game was over in two hours and two minutes. The second game, called after the eighth inning because of the darkness in "the crater that was Shibe Park," as someone described the Philadelphia ballpark, took only an hour and thirty one minutes to play. Williams batted three times. He hit yet another ground-ball single to right in his first at-bat, but in his second time up, facing a rookie righthander named Fred Caligiuri, he hit a tremendous shot on a line to right-center field that hit the loudspeaker horns of the public-address system under the 460-foot sign. One writer said it was the hardest Williams had hit a ball in his three seasons with the Red Sox. The ball punched a clean hole in one of the speaker horns, fell back onto the playing field, and Williams was held to a double.
It was the seventh straight time he'd been on base in the doubleheader. He had one more at-bat and for the first time all day he made out, hitting a fly ball to left field. He had had six hits in his eight at-bats and lifted his average six points on the last day of the season to .406 (or, to be precise, .4057.)
Someone mentioned the Most Valuable Player award to Williams, and the youngster's face grew serious. "Do you think there's a chance I could win it?" he asked. Then, as though dismissing the idea (DiMaggio eventually won it), he smiled again and said, "Even if I don't, I'll be satisfied with this. What a thrill! I wasn't saying much about it before the game, but I never wanted anything harder in my life."
Men in Blue: The Umpires
George F. Wills, March 29, 1987, Bunts
In 1914, Christy Mathewson, the pitcher, said, "many fans look upon umpires as a sort of necessary evil to the luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile." Such fans should imagine what life would be like without the likes of Richie Garcia and Durwood Merrill, two of the American league's finest.
Umpires' compensation and benefits have markedly improved in recent years. In 1998 [sic], the first-year umpire earns a base salary of $75,000 a year. An umpire in his thirtieth season earns $225,000. Every November 1 every umpire gets a $20,000 annual bonus, paid from baseball's pot of postseason revenues. Umpires get $5,000 for working the All-Star Game, $12,500 for a Division Series, $15,000 for a League Championship Series and $17,500 for the World Series. In addition, each of the fifteen crew chiefs (eight in the American
League, seven in the National) get an extra $7,500 a year. All umpires get thirty-one vacation days during the season -- one week early in the season, two weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day, one week in September, plus three additional days somewhere along the line, and the All-Star break. That is not a lot of time off, considering that for umpires there are no home games.
A senior umpire who does a lot of postseason work can earn maybe half as much as a mediocre uitlity infielder. The infielder's mediocrity is apparent. Umpires aspire to unnoticed excellence.
It is said that umpires are expected to be perfect on opening day and improve all season.
Garcia, forty-four, came to umpiring from Key West and the Marine Corps. The corps was good training for a vocation that an umpire once summarized in seven words: "Call 'em fast and walk away tough." Garcia is a compact man with a spring in his step and baseball on his brain. On off-days, he watches televised baseball games.
Like the best baseball people, if he is awake he is working. He studies box scores to be aware of what hitters are hot, what pitchers are wild, what fielders are making errors. The night before working home plate, he begins thinking about tomorrow's starting pitchers: their moves to first, their tendency to balk, their mix of pitches.
Merrill, forty-seven, a bear of a man from Oklahoma, via Hooks, Texas, was a burned-out high-school football coach at twenty-eight, so he became an umpire. Studies show that umpires endure stress levels not much lower than those of air-traffic controllers, big-city policemen, inner-city teachers, and Texas high-school football coaches ....
The key to excellence, saysMerrill, is "angle and position": being in the best position to make the difficult calls such as swipe tags and trapped balls. There is another ingredient: confidence.
When Babe Ruth was called out on strikes by umpire Babe Pinelli, Ruth made a populist argument, inferring weight from raw numbers: "There's forty thousand people here who know that last one was a ball, tomato head!" Pinelli replied with the assurance of John Marshall: "Maybe so, but mine is the only opinion that counts" ....
Umpires are islands of exemption from the litigiousness of American life. As has been said, if someone gets three strikes on you, the best lawyer can't get you off.
...."Anybody can see high and low," says Merrill. "It is 'in and out' that is umpiring." The saying "Good umpires are pitchers' umpires" means that good umpires are not afraid to call strikes. Their calling borderline pitches strikes makes pitchers more confident and batters more aggressive. That is, good umpiring makes good baseball, a fact from which a large lesson flows.
The business of umpiring is to regulate striving, to turn it from chaos into ordered competition, thereby enabling excellence to prevail over cruder qualities ....
Umpires' compensation and benefits have markedly improved in recent years. In 1998 [sic], the first-year umpire earns a base salary of $75,000 a year. An umpire in his thirtieth season earns $225,000. Every November 1 every umpire gets a $20,000 annual bonus, paid from baseball's pot of postseason revenues. Umpires get $5,000 for working the All-Star Game, $12,500 for a Division Series, $15,000 for a League Championship Series and $17,500 for the World Series. In addition, each of the fifteen crew chiefs (eight in the American
League, seven in the National) get an extra $7,500 a year. All umpires get thirty-one vacation days during the season -- one week early in the season, two weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day, one week in September, plus three additional days somewhere along the line, and the All-Star break. That is not a lot of time off, considering that for umpires there are no home games.
A senior umpire who does a lot of postseason work can earn maybe half as much as a mediocre uitlity infielder. The infielder's mediocrity is apparent. Umpires aspire to unnoticed excellence.
It is said that umpires are expected to be perfect on opening day and improve all season.
Garcia, forty-four, came to umpiring from Key West and the Marine Corps. The corps was good training for a vocation that an umpire once summarized in seven words: "Call 'em fast and walk away tough." Garcia is a compact man with a spring in his step and baseball on his brain. On off-days, he watches televised baseball games.
Like the best baseball people, if he is awake he is working. He studies box scores to be aware of what hitters are hot, what pitchers are wild, what fielders are making errors. The night before working home plate, he begins thinking about tomorrow's starting pitchers: their moves to first, their tendency to balk, their mix of pitches.
Merrill, forty-seven, a bear of a man from Oklahoma, via Hooks, Texas, was a burned-out high-school football coach at twenty-eight, so he became an umpire. Studies show that umpires endure stress levels not much lower than those of air-traffic controllers, big-city policemen, inner-city teachers, and Texas high-school football coaches ....
The key to excellence, saysMerrill, is "angle and position": being in the best position to make the difficult calls such as swipe tags and trapped balls. There is another ingredient: confidence.
When Babe Ruth was called out on strikes by umpire Babe Pinelli, Ruth made a populist argument, inferring weight from raw numbers: "There's forty thousand people here who know that last one was a ball, tomato head!" Pinelli replied with the assurance of John Marshall: "Maybe so, but mine is the only opinion that counts" ....
Umpires are islands of exemption from the litigiousness of American life. As has been said, if someone gets three strikes on you, the best lawyer can't get you off.
...."Anybody can see high and low," says Merrill. "It is 'in and out' that is umpiring." The saying "Good umpires are pitchers' umpires" means that good umpires are not afraid to call strikes. Their calling borderline pitches strikes makes pitchers more confident and batters more aggressive. That is, good umpiring makes good baseball, a fact from which a large lesson flows.
The business of umpiring is to regulate striving, to turn it from chaos into ordered competition, thereby enabling excellence to prevail over cruder qualities ....
The Art of Sliding
Dan Gutman, The Way Baseball Work
The ball and runner are streaking toward third base from different directions and will arrive at virtually the same instant. The third baseman braces himself for the collision and concentrates intensely on catching the ball and slapping down his glove. The runner leaves his feet and swoops down into the dirt to evade the tag, knock the ball loose, or simply kick up a swirl of dust to obscure the umpire's view. The slide can be baseball's most exciting moment.
The hook slide is used if the runner needs to elude a tag on a throw that has beaten him to the base. The runner rolls his upper body out of the way and hooks the bag with a toe, leaving very little to tag.
Takeout slide: When forced out at second, the runner at first is instructed to upend the second baseman or shortstop in order to ruin ("break up") the double play. Usually he will aim for the infielder's legs to disrupt the throw.
[The] Figure-4 slide or "bent leg slide" is the simplest and safest slide. The runner tucks one leg under the other to form a number 4 shape. His hands should be back out of harm's way, his head up watching the base, which he touches with his straight leg. The Figure-4 can be turned into a "pop-up" slide, in which the runner uses the base as a brace and pops immediately to a standing position so he can advance to the next base.
Headfirst slides have become popular thanks to aggressive runners like Pete Rose and Rickey Henderson. The runner dives horizonal and low, with his palms down and fingers up. The hands touch the ground and the base first. Headfirst slides get you there faster, and are safer now that helmets and batting gloves have become standard equipment. But even with protection, very few players attempt to slide into home headfirst, where a well-protected catcher is likely to be waiting.
Mike King Kelly, hero of the Chicago White Stockings in the 1880s, popularized the hook slide. Kelly swiped 84 bases in 1887, and was so famous in his time that he became the subject of a hit song: "Your running's a disgrace / Stay there, hold your base! / If someone doesn't steal you / and your batting doesn't fail you / they'll take you to Australia! / Slide, Kelly, Slide!" Kelly's final words, while falling off a stretcher after catching pneumonia, were, "This is my last
slide."
The hook slide is used if the runner needs to elude a tag on a throw that has beaten him to the base. The runner rolls his upper body out of the way and hooks the bag with a toe, leaving very little to tag.
Takeout slide: When forced out at second, the runner at first is instructed to upend the second baseman or shortstop in order to ruin ("break up") the double play. Usually he will aim for the infielder's legs to disrupt the throw.
[The] Figure-4 slide or "bent leg slide" is the simplest and safest slide. The runner tucks one leg under the other to form a number 4 shape. His hands should be back out of harm's way, his head up watching the base, which he touches with his straight leg. The Figure-4 can be turned into a "pop-up" slide, in which the runner uses the base as a brace and pops immediately to a standing position so he can advance to the next base.
Headfirst slides have become popular thanks to aggressive runners like Pete Rose and Rickey Henderson. The runner dives horizonal and low, with his palms down and fingers up. The hands touch the ground and the base first. Headfirst slides get you there faster, and are safer now that helmets and batting gloves have become standard equipment. But even with protection, very few players attempt to slide into home headfirst, where a well-protected catcher is likely to be waiting.
Mike King Kelly, hero of the Chicago White Stockings in the 1880s, popularized the hook slide. Kelly swiped 84 bases in 1887, and was so famous in his time that he became the subject of a hit song: "Your running's a disgrace / Stay there, hold your base! / If someone doesn't steal you / and your batting doesn't fail you / they'll take you to Australia! / Slide, Kelly, Slide!" Kelly's final words, while falling off a stretcher after catching pneumonia, were, "This is my last
slide."