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Home » MLB

Do You Believe in Payback?

Submitted by guyinthecorner on September 24, 2008 – 11:44 am61 Comments
View of the Polo Grounds from Coogans Bluff

View of the Polo Grounds from Coogan's Bluff

The day was September 23rd. I’m not talking about yesterday. I’m talking about September 23rd, 1908. The setting is the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Baseball Giants. Their opponent this afternoon are the Cubs. This series is important as are all series between these two teams in the first decade of the century. The Giants won the NL pennant in 1904 and 1905 while the Cubs had won the pennant in 1906 and 1907. They were again in a dead heat for the NL pennant and even had competition from a 3rd team, Honus Wagner’s Pittsburgh Pirates. It was the bottom of the 9th inning and the score was tied 1-1. Fred Merkle, a 19-year-old rookie from the Midwest was playing 1st base for the Giants that day in place of the regular first baseman. Merkle was huge by the standards of the time. He stood 6″1 and weighed in at 190 pounds. Despite his size, he was known to be quite fast and a great athlete. The Giants had been trying to find time for him all season and this was one of those days.

Outfielder Moose McCormick was the only one of the first three batters who got on base that in the bottom nine. He was on first base with two outs as Merkle strode to the plate. Merkle hit a line drive single into right field that advanced his teammate to 3rd base. The Giants now had the winning run only 90 feet from home. Up came Al Bridwell, the Giants’ light-hitting shortstop. To the surprise of many, Bridwell was able to punch a grounder through the infield to win the game. Or so it seemed anyway.

Joe McGinnity

Joe McGinnity

As McCormick ran to home plate the crowd stormed the field at the Polo Grounds, as was commonplace in that time. Fred Merckle claims that he touched second base before streaking off the field with the rest of the players for their own safety as thousands poured over the railings. Chicago Cubs captain, second baseman, and future hall-of-famer, Johnny Evers, said that Merkle did not touch the base. He alerted his first baseman / manager, Frank Chance who called to the right fielder to throw them the ball to touch second base with. At this point, Giants’ pitcher “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity who was coaching first base saw what was going on. He retrieved the ball from right field and threw it hundreds of feet up into the stands. Evers then signaled to his dugout where they brought in a new ball and gave it to him. He then showed plate umpire Hank O’Day that he had tagged 2nd base and Merkle had not. Here’s where you need to know a few more pieces of information.

Johnny Evers

Johnny Evers

Evers was a known scholar of the game. He spent his spare time reading The Official Rules of Baseball and had found the obscure (now commonly known because of this play) rule about how a run would not be counted if a player was forced out for the 3rd out of an inning even after the run had scored. He had tried to use this rule in the exact same way a few weeks earlier in a game against the Pirates. Ironically enough, the umpire that day had also been Hank O’Day. However O’Day said that he did not see if the runner had touched 2nd base so he could not overturn the run. Hank O’Day was known to be a Cubs fan and was from Chicago where he was taken to task for his decision to not make the call that day in Pittsburgh. He later went on to manage the Cubs. The commissioner at the time was Bill Pulliam. He held a great grudge against the New York Giants because of the 1904 World Series, or lack there of. Giants manager John McGraw refused to play that World Series against the champions of the upstart American League, the Boston Red Sox. He claimed that they were an inferior team from an inferior league despite the fact that the Red Sox had defeated the Pirates the year before in the first ever World Series, five games to three (best of nine).

All these factors game into play that day. O’Day decided to overturn the run despite the fact that it was unlikely that he saw the play at all. The base umpire claimed that he didn’t see the play because he was making sure that the batter touched first base. John McGraw protested the commissioner, Bill Pulliam, even though he said that he didn’t expect to win because of how much the two hated each other. He was right, the call was upheld. Oddly enough, that game was ruled a tie because it could not be continued at the time. At the end of the season the Giants and Cubs sat at the top of the standings with identical records, just one game ahead of the Pirates. They played a one game playoff against the Cubs that the Cubs won behind a fantastic performance from Mordechai “Three Finger” Brown. We all know this because the Cubs went on to win the 1908 World Series and haven’t won one since.

Fred Merkle

Fred Merkle

Many say that enforcing the rule for the first time in baseball history on poor Fred Merkle was unfair. At the very least the circumstances were outrageous. Evers probably didn’t have the real ball, Merkle might have touched, the biased umpire didn’t see, and the protest was held up by a commissioner with a grudge against a team. Without these things happening the Cubs would not have won that world series and Merkle wouldn’t have been tortured for the rest of his life. He had quite a successful playing career but was always haunted by that day. When he retired, he moved to Florida to raise his kids because he didn’t want them to be known. The play was known as “Merkle’s Boner” or “The Merkle Bonehead Play” because of the story in the New York newspapers the next day calling him a “Bonehead”. One day Merkle’s daughter came home from school crying and he asked her why. She said she didn’t understand why the kids were calling her “Bonehead”. Merkle was buried in an unmarked grave because of the fear of vandalism and there is a statue where he was born in honor of his career that doesn’t mention the play at all.

Last night, the Cubs were back in New York on the 100th year anniversary of the play to take on the Mets. There were people who went to the game, hoping that something would happen to the Cubs as payback for what happened to Merkle. In an article on ESPN yesterday, Keith Olberman was quoted as saying…

“I have to be there. I’ve never believed the Cubs didn’t curse themselves by playing that rule on poor Fred. [The Cubs have had] a century of bad luck, meaning something abysmal is likely to happen to the Cubs [on Tuesday], especially since somebody scheduled them to be in New York.”

Did something happen to the Cubs yesterday? I guess that depends on if you think this counts…

Have you ever seen anything like that before? It was 2-0 at the time, the Mets came back to win 6-2. John Kruk took pitcher Sean Marshall to task on Baseball Tonight for effectively giving up on the game after that play. Maybe this is the end of the curse for the Cubs. Maybe this shows the curse is still on. Maybe there is no curse.

But I know that play happened to the Cubs’ second baseman. That’s weird enough for me.

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