Sport: Cubs v. Tigers

The batter, Bill Lee of the Chicago Cubs, swung sharply. The pitcher, Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals, slapped at the hard-hit ball with his bare hand but could not stop it. While it rolled to the outfield, Stanley Hack, who had started from second base with the crack of the bat, crossed the plate with the winning run.

That play, with the score tied, 2-to-2 in the fourth inning at Sportsman’s Park St. Louis, one day last week, was the decisive moment of the 1935 major-league baseball season. It won the game (three runs made later were superfluous) for the Chicago Cubs. The game decided the National League pennant race.

Having clinched the pennant, the Cubs proceeded to beat the Cards once more thus prolonging to 21 games the longest major-league winning streak since the Giants were undefeated for 26 in a row in 1916. Then the Cubs coasted through ie season’s last two games, benching four regulars to rest them for the World Series against Detroit, on which betting opened 4-t05 with Detroit the favorite.

The Cubs. In the polls of expert opinion conducted every year before the baseball season starts, the Cubs last spring were generally picked to finish fourth A team composed of young if not untried players they appeared to lack the batting strength of the world champion Cardinals, the pitching of the New York Giants. While the Giants were getting off to a nine-game lead by the Fourth of July the Cubs lived down to their rating in fourth place. In August the Giants went into a sudden decline for the second year in a row and the Cardinals caught up with them. The Cubs by this time were in third place but still nobody took them seriously as pennant contenders until their winning streak started early in September.

By no means as eccentric as ‘the St. Louis Cardinals, whose rowdy characteristics have earned them the nickname of “Gas House Gang,” the Cubs have at least a half-dozen stars whose names will be household words after this week. Catcher Gabby Hartnett, their heaviest hitter is a huge, red-faced Irishman who has been with the Cubs since 1922. Lon Warneke a lanky, hay-pitching, coon-hunting 26-year-old from Arkansas, is the right-handed ace of the pitching staff (Warneke, French, Root, Lee), which rotated with rhythmic brilliance through their winning streak. At the start of the season, Manager Grimm was the Cubs’ regular first baseman. Nineteen-year-old Phil Cayarretta, one year out of a North Side Chicago high school, played the position so well that Manager Grimm let him keep it. He, Third-Baseman Stanley Hack, Outfielders Augie Galan and Frankie Demaree are playing their first season as regulars.

Manager Charles John Grimm was for years the best fielding first baseman in the league. In July, there were rumors he might lose his job. In August he snapped his team out of a losing streak by forbidding them to play poker. For the past three weeks, he has been superstitiously driving a nail into the heel of his shoe before each game. A capable baritone, banjoist and bagatelle player, nephew of Director George P. Vierheller of the St Louis Zoo, Manager Grimm has worried himself from 195 to 175 lb. since April. Last week, his worries partly over he made the bold announcement which is invariably demanded of the manager of a pennant-winning ball team: “We’ll start another winning streak in Detroit ”

The Tigers. Baseball, even more than most games, gives rise to absurd speculations. Whether the Cubs would arrive at the World Series fatigued and nervous because of their long winning streak or whether this merely indicated that they were “hot,” was one delicate question which experts were trying to settle last week. Another was whether the Detroit Tigers would start comfortably rested or in the throes of a letdown. The Tigers became mathematically certain of winning the American League pennant last fortnight but long before that their victory had been an overwhelming probability. The Cleveland Indians, favorites in the spring, never got started and a change in managers did not help. The Chicago White Sox, leaders in May, slipped in June. The New York Yankees, who were ahead on the Fourth of July, collapsed sooner and even more feebly than the Giants. In the second division until June, the Tigers finally got going with the hot weather, coasted through the last two weeks of the season, winning less than half of their last 15 games.

Pennant winners four times, the Detroit Tigers have never won a World Series Last year they led the Cardinals three games to two, then lost two. In 1907 and 1908 under Hugh Jennings they played the Cubs under Frank Chance. The Cubs won the first Series in four straight games, the second four games to one (in the last of which a Detroit crowd of 6,000 set a World Series record for low attendance). Whether this indicates a long-standing Chicago jinx or whether it is a circumstance calculated to increase the efficiency of the Tigers’ current campaign for revenge was another problem which last week remained unsolved. One of the few known World Series factors was that this year the Tigers are stronger than they were in 1934. The team has gained confidence and cohesion. A new pitcher, Roxie Lawson, bought by Manager Cochrane in August has pitched two successive shutouts. The team’s fielding average is .979 compared to .974 last year. Its batting average is 289, exactly the same as the Cubs . Both the Tigers and the Cubs have topnotch infields. The Tigers have a super-star Hank Greenberg, on first base. Their pitching ace, Schoolboy Rowe a lanky Arkansan like Lon Warneke last year won 16 games in a row. Until Aug 3 this year he won only half his games then took nine out of his next eleven. Furthermore, in Mickey Cochrane the Tigers possess not only the best catcher in either league but one who is apparently on his way to proving himself the ablest major-league manager since the late John McGraw. In keeping with his disbelief minthe baseball taboo against mentioning a pennant before winning it, Cochrane made his speech in August: “Last year we had the jitters because only two of us—Goose Goslin and I … had ever played in a World Series before. This year it will be a different story. …”

Gordon Stanley (“Mickey”) Cochrane was born in 1903 in Bridgewater, Mass. Mickey and his brother Archie (who now plays on a Ford Motor Co semiprofessional team) learned baseball almost as soon as they learned to walk but, partly because Harvard’s Eddie Mahan was a hero to all New England urchins in 1915, football was Mickey Cochrane s first specialty. At Boston University his exploits of a dozen years ago are still legend. His method of practicing was to divide the squad into two sides—eleven men on one, himself on the other—and call for a kickoff. If he failed to run back for a touchdown, he became exasperated, had the ball kicked off again. The Brunswick Hotel, baseball headquarters was near Boston University. Cochrane met the players who stayed there, decided it was a pleasant way to live. He joined the Saranac Lake team in 1923. Dover, in the Eastern Shore League, bought him and got rich by selling him to Portland, Ore. for $15,000. From Portland, Cochrane went to the Athletics. Experts generally considered him the spark plug of the team with which Connie Mack won the pennant three times in a row.

In 1933 Connie Mack was selling players and Detroit needed a new manager. Owner Frank J. Navin called in Sportswriter H. G. Salsinger of the Detroit News and said: “I can get Babe Ruth from the Yankees for practically nothing or Mickey Cochrane for $100,000. Which would you take?”

“I’d take Cochrane.” said Sportswriter Salsinger.

Owner Navin’s first move was to buy Cochrane. his next to insure his life for $100.000. Manager Cochrane’s first move was to buy Outfielder Leon (“Goose”) Goslin from the Washington Senators. The semi-miraculous feat of winning a pennant in his first year as manager he then performed with a team otherwise unchanged from the one that had finished fifth the year before.

A big (180-lb.), florid, square-jawed Irishman, easygoing, stubborn, hot-tempered and prodigiously energetic, Cochrane’s success as a manager is as hard to analyze as it is apparent. He makes no parade of the thinking processes which it takes to run a big-league ball club but if he is never seen like Connie Mack waving intricately scrawled scorecards, it does not mean that the moves of a baseball game are not as definitely outlined in his mind as those of a chess game in the brain of a blindfolded expert. His players like him because he discusses plans, theories and mistakes with them. He leaves training rules entirely to his players, sometimes utilizes an extensive flow of dressing-room profanity. Off the diamond, Cochrane is as affable as he is tense and irritable when professionally busy. He lives in a nine-room English brick house with his wife and children. Gordon Jr., 10, and Joan. 4. He plays the saxophone, on which his favorite tune is “The Lady in Red.” He shares the enthusiasm of most baseballers for hunting, which he expects to do in Wyoming next month. He smokes Camels, has a ping-pong table in his basement, keeps a secretary to answer his fan letters—200 a week.

If Cochrane’s success as a manager is hard to define, his popularity in Detroit is not. Twenty-five years ago, the city proudly adopted “Dynamic Detroit” as a slogan. This ambitious expression of civic pride came to have a somewhat painful sound when the automobile business collapsed in 1932 and when the closing of every bank in town on St. Valentine’s Day, 1933, precipitated a national panic. Mickey Cochrane’s arrival in Detroit coincided roughly with the revival of the automobile industry and the first signs of revived prosperity. His determined, jolly New England-Irish face grinning from front pages soon came to represent, not only to baseball fans but to all civic-minded citizens, the picture of what a dynamic Detroiter ought to look like. Detroit has lately been a baseball-minded city but this summer it passed all bounds in agitation. Eleven reporters traveled with the team. On a rainy day, one paper ran a four-column picture of Schoolboy Rowe glancing out of the window. Season’s attendance at Navin Field has been over 1,000,000 this year, more than twice that of 1933. In the De Soto factory, radios were tuned in on the Tigers’ games every afternoon for inspiration.

A faint idea of what will happen if the Tigers win the World Series was suggested by what occurred in Detroit last week. A crowd of 100,000 gathered to watch Mickey Cochrane’s daughter Joan release a 60 ft. x 90 ft. banner outside a department store. Henry Ford paid $100,000 for radio rights to the World Series. Owner Navin received 500,000 requests for tickets. At a dinner in the Hotel Statler, Chrysler President K. T. Keller, Judge Landis, President James McEvoy of the Board of Commerce and 900 other distinguished Detroiters gathered at a dinner to Mickey Cochrane and the Detroit Baseball Company. Said Editor Malcolm Bingay of the Detroit Free Press: “Other cities cannot understand Detroit’s enthusiasm . . . it’s part of Dynamic Detroit!”