Author: Bill Grimes

I'm from Chicago. I worked in broadcast journalism for much of the 1970's and 80's. In 1990 I became a litigation consultant, retiring in 2017. Around 2005 I recall flipping through the sports section of the newspaper coming across "On this day in baseball history Willie Mays hit his 600th home run." I enjoyed the one-liners, but I wanted more. I wanted a story. I took my news reporting skills and started researching and telling baseball stories, one for every day of the year. TodayinBaseball.com is the result.

July 4th in baseball history – The luckiest man

JULY 4, 1939 | NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A tired, frail, shadow of his former self told 61,808 people in Yankee stadium on the Fourth of July in 1939, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” New York Yankee first-baseman Lou Gehrig was very sick.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qswig8dcEAY

He stopped playing baseball. He was getting weaker by the day and would be gone in less than two years.

The suddenness of Gehrig’s decline was shocking. He was known as the “Iron Horse.” He played every single game for 14 years. When Babe Ruth set the single season home run record in 1927 with 60 home runs, Gehrig hit 47 – more than anyone, other than Ruth, had ever hit up to that time.

Gehrig had 29 home runs, 114 runs batted in and 115 runs scored in his last full season – 1938. It was not his best year, but still quite good. The only stat that appeared to show decline was batting average. He hit .295. He hadn’t hit under .300 in twelve seasons and hit .351 in 1937, .354 the year before that.

Clearly, Gehrig had lost a step, he was 35 years old, so slowing down a bit was not unexpected. But Gehrig’s decline was clear in spring training 1939. His power had faded. He was hitting just .143 with no extra base hits when he took himself out of the lineup after eight games of the regular season. He never got back in.

A few weeks after asking out of the lineup Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with a rare, crippling, fatal disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The sickness would become known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Contributing sources:
Lou Gehrig web site
Baseball-Almanac (Gehrig)

July 2 in baseball history – DiMaggio breaks unbreakable

JULY 2, 1941 | NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Joe DiMaggio hit a 3-run homer on this date in 1941 to break the record for the most consecutive games with at least one hit. ‘Joltin Joe’s’ streak reached 45 games, breaking the 44-game hit streak of Wee Willie Keeler set in 1897.n at least hitting in the most consecutive games within a season.

DiMaggio’s streak captivated the nation once it reached 30 games. It was an exciting and positive distraction to the daily headlines of the Nazi’s overrunning Europe that summer. DiMaggio would eventually hit in what many believed was an insurmountable 56 straight games. No one since has even surpassed Keeler’s mark of 44 games, though Pete Rose tied it in 1978, let alone come close to challenging DiMaggio’s.

DiMaggio’s streak wasn’t without controversy. The official scorer for more than twenty of those games was New York World Telegram sportswriter Dan Daniels, who some believe gave DiMaggio favorable rulings on balls that may have been errors when a streak wasn’t on the line.

Consecutive game hit leaders:
Joe DiMaggio 56
Wee Willie Keeler 44
Pete Rose 44
Bill Dahlen 42
George Sisler 41
Ty Cobb 40
Paul Molitor 39
Jimmy Rollins 38
Tommy Holmes 37
Fred Clarke 35
Ty Cobb 35
Luis Castillo 35
Chase Utley 35

• Joe’s brother Dom DiMaggio had a 34 game hitting streak of his own for the Boston Red Sox in 1949.

Contributing sources:
Fun facts about Joe DiMaggio’s hit streak

June 30 in baseball history – It took balls

JUNE 30, 1959 | CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – On this date in 1959 St. Louis Cardinal slugger Stan Musial was called out on a play that, let’s say, it took balls. When nobody was looking two balls were in play at once during a Cubs-Cardinals contest at Wrigley Field.

According to Edward Prell’s story in the next day’s Chicago Tribune, Cubs’ hurler Bob Anderson walked Musial. Ball four got away from catcher Sammy Taylor. Rather than go after the ball, Taylor argued with home plate umpire Vic Delmore that the ball hit Musial’s bat.

While this was going on Musial, who was already at first, darted for second.

The ball that got away from the catcher was picked up by the batboy who was about to give it to field announcer Pat Pieper, who sat almost directly behind home plate. Piper was also in charge of the stash of extra baseballs.

Before the batboy could give Pieper the ball, Cub third baseman Alvin Dark, who had raced after it, grabbed it.

By now home plate umpire Delmore produced a new baseball and gave it to pitcher Anderson who had the same idea as Dark and fired it to second. Anderson’s ball sailed over the second baseman’s head into centerfield. Dark’s ball was caught by shortstop Ernie Banks on one bounce. Musial and stepped off the bag after seeing the first ball sail into center and was promptly tagged out by Banks.

After much consternation Musial was ruled out because the ball he was tagged out with was the one Bob Anderson threw for ball four and was never out of play. There would have been a protest no matter what the ruling was. As it turned out the call went against the Cardinals but St. Louis won the game. That was the end of it, but it took balls.

CONTRIBUTING SOURCES:
Edward Prell, The Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1959
The Chicago Daily News, July 1, 1959

June 29 IN BASEBALL HISTORY – “Moonlight” Graham: The real story

JUNE 29, 1905 | BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – It’s the stuff of legend, except it’s true. In the late innings on this date in 1905, Archibald Graham made his major league debut in right field for the New York Giants. They were playing the Brooklyn Superbas (today’s Los Angeles Dodgers). The game ended a couple innings later with the Giants winning 11-1. Graham did not come to bat. He never got another chance. “Moonlight” Graham was sent down to the minors after the game, but he decided that at the age of 28 he had spent enough time in the minors. Rather than report to the Giants farm team, again, he called it a career. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham came oh so close to batting in a major league game, but it was not to be, until Hollywood came calling long after his death.

“Moonlight” Graham was a key character in the movie, Field of Dreams. The film was fiction, but the “Moonlight” Graham part, played by Burt Lancaster, was real. Well, most of it was real. Graham really did become a doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota, but the part about a young Archie Graham, played by Frank Whaley, living out his dream by coming to bat against the re-incarnated Black Sox remains a dream.

“Moonlight” Graham had a distinctly short, and let’s be honest, insignificant, stint in the major leagues, until author W. P. Kinsella came across his statistics:

Archibald Moonlight Graham:
Batting record
Year team G AB R H RBI BB SB AVE  OBP  SLG
1905 NYn  1  0 0 0  0  0  0 .000 .000 .000

Kinsella was intrigued about a man who came so close to living out his dream that he put the character in his book of fiction, Shoeless Joe, which the movie, “Field of Dreams” is based on. Unfortunately, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham never found out how well known he became. The Fayetteville, North Carolina native died in Chisholm, Minnesota in 1965.

CONTRIBUTING SOURCES:
Archibald Moonlight Graham stats
Associated Press, June 25, 2005 Read more about Moonlight Graham
USA Today, June 25, 2005

 

June 28 in baseball history – Unusual place to play

JUNE 28, 1911 | NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A new Polo Grounds opened for business on this date in 1911. The “previous” Polo Grounds was severely damaged by fire two and a half months earlier. The Polo Grounds was one of the most unusual stadiums in a sport known for unusual venues. It was described as horseshoe shaped, some say it looked like a bathtub. To put a baseball diamond in such a structure meant the left and right field foul lines were extremely short, less than 280 feet, while center field was a country mile – more than 470 ft.

Another unusual trait was that the left field upper deck extended more than 20 feet over the lower deck, which meant an outfielder could be waiting for the ball to drop in his glove, only for it land in the upper deck for a home run.

So why was the Polo Grounds called “The Polo Grounds”? For the reason you’d expect, the original of four structures to occupy the site was made for polo.

Here are the four New York major league baseball teams that called the Polo Grounds home:
• Metropolitans 1883-1885 member of American Association, dissolved in 1887
• New York (Baseball) Giants 1883-1957 moved to San Francisco in 1958
• New York Yankees 1912-1922 moved to Yankee Stadium in 1923
• New York Mets 1962-1963 moved to Shea Stadium in 1964

The Polo Grounds was also home to a couple National Football League teams; the New York Giants and New York Bulldogs. It also housed the New York Titans (now the Jets) of the American Football League (now the NFL). For baseball, the Polo Grounds was a very unusual place to play.

CONTRIBUTING SOURCES:
Giants history
Mets history
Yankees history
Metropolitans history