Revisiting Greatness, Part II
We’re counting down the Hall of Fame plaques, 270 to 1, based on how well they tell the story of the player and how many emotions they summon from baseball fans, both young and old. When a plaque is marked “ASNC,” that stands for “All Stats, No Cattle,” meaning the plaque has too many boring statistics and not nearly enough about what actually made the player special. We kicked off the project on Monday.
No. 239: Charlie Gehringer
Nickname: None
Defining line: None
ASNC. The plaque will tell you Gehringer hit .321 and was named MVP in 1937 and batted .321 in World Series games. Blah blah blah. I mean, this is the Hall of Fame and everyone in the Hall of Fame hit .321 and everyone in the Hall of Fame won an MVP and everyone in the Hall of Fame had World Series success. I mean, no, not literally everyone did those things, but a whole lot did. We’re talking about the most accomplished players in the history of baseball. When you put them all together, stats will almost never separate a player.
Sometimes, simply including a nickname will go a long way toward telling a player’s story. Gehringer’s nickname was “The Mechanical Man.” “Wind him up in the spring, turn him off in the fall, and in between he hits .340,” Lefty Gomez said of him. Literally, a plaque with his nickname and that Gomez quote would have been infinitely better than the one Gehringer got.*
*Not that Gehringer noticed; he wasn’t even at his induction ceremony. He had gone off to get married.
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No. 238: Rube Waddell
Nickname: “Rube”
Defining line: “Colorful lefthander who was in both leagues.”
No, it ain’t much of a defining line… but at least they got “colorful” in there. Of course, calling Rube Waddell “colorful” is like calling the Beatles “popular” or calling Darth Vader “temperamental.”
Rube Waddell had ambitions of being a circus strongman. He was so infatuated with fighting fires that his manager, Connie Mack, said he always wore a red shirt, just in case. He would sometimes skip games to go fishing. He was the first modern pitcher to strike out the side on nine pitches. He was suspended once after going into the stands to fight a fan who was mercilessly goading him on. He once fought a teammate over a straw hat and Waddell’s eagerness to punch a hole through it. He was the most popular player of his day, and one of the greatest strikeout pitchers of all time. He died at 37.
Colorful? Yeah, I guess you could say that.
No. 237: Joe Tinker
Nickname: None
Defining line: “Famous as a member of one of baseball’s greatest double play combinations—from Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
No. 236: Johnny Evers
Nickname: “The Trojan”
Defining line: “Middle-man of the famous double play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
No. 235: Frank Chance
Nickname: None
Defining line: “Famous leader of Chicago Cubs.”
Give it up to Franklin Pierce Adams, a columnist at the New York Evening Mail, who in 1910 wrote a poem called “That Double Play Again.” It eventually became known as “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon.”
These are the saddest of possible words
”Tinkers to Evers to Chance”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds
”Tinkers to Evers to Chance”
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble
Making a Giant hit into a double
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble
”Tinkers to Evers to Chance.”
A gonfalon, in case you were wondering, is a pennant or flag (usually with streamers)—Adams was saying that the double plays were killing the Giants’ chances at the pennant. Sure enough, the Cubs beat the Giants by 13 games for the pennant in 1910.
And 36 years later, Tinkers and Evers and Chance were all elected to the Hall of Fame, and the poem is mentioned directly on two of their plaques.