Baseball season is in full gear, and the new version of EveryCubEver (6th edition) is now out. Seems like a good week to share a free excerpt from the book. This week I'll highlight birthday boys Hack Wilson (April 26) and Rogers Hornsby (April 27)
Hack Wilson 1900--1948 (Cubs 1926-1931)
Hack is still remembered for his record 1930 season when he drove in 191 runs, but during his Cubs days he was known for more than just slugging the baseball. He was known as a notorious hellraiser. Wilson had several run-ins with the law, his teammates, opposing players, and even fans. He was arrested for violating the Prohibition Act in 1926, but he was just getting started. Hack and his drinking buddy/teammate Pat Malone got into a fistfight in a hotel because they thought somebody was laughing at them. In 1928, he was fined after charging into the stands to fight with a heckler. Gabby Hartnett and Joe Kelly had to physically remove him off the fan — and thousands of fans swarmed the field. Hack once charged into the opposing dugout to punch a Reds pitcher…after Hack hit the ball. He was tagged out in the dugout. That same night he punched another Reds pitcher in the team train. A famous story, which may or may not be a legend, involved Cubs manager Joe McCarthy and Hack...
To show Hack the dangers of drinking, Joe took a worm and dropped it in a glass of whiskey. The worm quickly died. “Now what does that prove?” asked Joe. Wilson thought about it for a while and replied, “It proves that if you drink whiskey, you won’t get worms!”
Through it all, Hack was the most feared hitter in the National League. Hack still holds Cubs career records for best on-base percentage (.492), slugging percentage (.590), and OPS (1.002). He led the league in homers four years in a row, in walks and RBI twice, and led the Cubs to the World Series in 1929. For many years he held the single season home run record (56), and he still has the single season RBI record (191). But in 1931, things started to go south. Hack and player/manager Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby didn’t get along and were constantly at odds. It got so bad that the Cubs traded Hack to the Dodgers for Burleigh Grimes. Hack had one more good year with the Dodgers, but the end was near. He retired after the 1934 season.
Near the end of his Wilson’s life he appeared on a network radio show where he spoke about the effects of “Demon Rum.” This was just a few months before his death on November 23, 1948. He was only 48. His body was unclaimed for three days before National League president Ford Frick paid for the funeral. The veterans committee named Hack to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1979.
~Rogers Hornsby 1897--1963 (Cubs
1929-1932)
It’s hard to imagine that one of the greatest players in history was not
popular in Chicago — but Hornsby clearly was not. Hornsby had one great season
for the Cubs, their World Series year of 1929, and he became the manager at the
very end of the following year. Despite managing a notoriously rowdy team, he
ruled with an iron fist. He didn’t just ban drinking (which, of course, was
illegal at the time), he banned reading, movies, soda pop, smoking, and eating
in the clubhouse. He was so hated by his players that when the 1932 team won
the pennant (after he was fired), the players voted to give him zero cents of a
playoff share, even though he had been with the team for 4 months.
Their
hatred of him went much deeper than his strict rules. He was in deep debt to
many of the players on the team. The Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kennesaw
Mountain Landis, became so alarmed by the reports he was getting about Hornsby,
that he sent letters warning the team and the players about him. He also sent
one to the NL President demanding any and all information he had about
Hornsby’s gambling. Hornsby was defiant about it until the very end:
“Gambling’s legal,” he would say. He never bet on baseball, only the horses.
Probably influenced by Hornsby’s star power, Landis chose not to punish him.
But his letters to the club led to an internal Cubs investigation. Team owner
William Wrigley and team president William Veeck discovered that Hornsby had
borrowed $11,000 from his own players. That’s when they fired him and replaced
him with Charlie Grimm. Grimm led the 1932 team to the World Series. Hornsby
never experienced the playoffs again.
Later
in life he was hired by Wrigley’s son Phillip to become the team’s first minor
league batting instructor. The same prickly personality and inability to
understand why people couldn’t naturally hit as well as he did, however, made
him as lousy at that job as he was as a manager. As a player Rogers Hornsby had
very few peers. His lifetime batting average is .358. He hit .400 three
different times. He narrowly missed it a fourth time (.397). He won two MVP
awards, two triple crowns, and seven batting titles. And he did all that while
gambling away nearly every dime he earned.
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