MAR:THE BASEBALL GURU ARTICLE
FROM
ONEMOREINNING
The
name wrapped itself around STUFFY
McINNESS and EDDIE COLLINS and JACK BARRY and HOMERUN BAKER. It became enmeshed
in the fabric and ethos of baseball and achieved a larger than life, almost
mythical quality.
$100,000
INFIELD
It whetted the appetite
of baseball fans of that era. The four players who formed the $100,000 infield
wore their name well. They acted out their achievements with almost deistic
certitude for four years, 1911 to 1914. Photographs show their faces. They
look hardfaced, grim, unsmiling, as if aware of the fact that history would
render them as immortal, superhuman.
Baseball had a different
feeling then, a different cast. You played for the one run, you knew had
to lay down a bunt, how to move runners along, how to run the bases, &
use your spikes to good effect. The uniforms showed the results of chewing
tobacco. Your gloves were barely larger than your hand. You were brushed
down often. Players fought each other under the stands. Spitballs, shiners,
emery balls were commonplace pitches. Balls were used that were so scuffed
up that they would not be acceptable in these days. The players were basically
shanty town Irish and there were a large amount of Polish and Slavic players
as well. They drank hard, so did their women, and their careers were short
lived.
The great names then were
Heinie Zimmerman, Rube Marquard, Tris Speaker, Smoky Joe Wood, Nap Lajoie,
Grover Cleveland Alexander, Christy Mathewson, Sam Crawford, & Walter
Johnson. The ball was truly dead & a homerun was a sometime thing. It
was fielding, & strategic hitting that ruled the day & the Philadelphia
Athletics $100,000 infield was the outstanding example of
that.
The man who was the creator
of this was Connie Mack. For fifty years he was the owner and manager of
the Athletics. For those fifty years he
sat ramrod straight on the dugout
bench, dressed in a jacket and vest, a stiff white collar pinching into his
neck, his granite face intently looking out onto the field and taking in
everything.
He is considered to have
been one of the greatest of
baseball tacticians to have been in the game and his assembling together
of the $100,00 infield is an example of his baseball acumen. It stayed together
for four years and then in 19224 Mack was forced to sell Eddie Collins and
Jack Barry in order to raise some much needed money to keep the team afloat.
This would prove to be a typical pattern for Mack.
Through his overriding
genius he would get the best talent around, assemble it for his team, establish
a dynasty for years, and then be forced to sell his best players in order
to keep on going.
I remember watching him
manage those dreadful
