Washington Fans Gave Walter Johnson A Long, Loving Farewell
ALSO: WHY SEVEN WAS NO JACKPOT FOR THE BAD-NEWS BRAVES
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Tough call: if and when MVP contender Francisco Lindor (back) is ready to play shortstop again, do the Mets bench Luisangel Acuna or second baseman Jose Iglesias? . . .
Tarik Skubal (Tigers) and Chris Sale (Braves) both could win 20 this year . . .
The NL wild-card difference: entering play Thursday, the Braves vs. the Reds, Nationals and White Sox in 2024 were 7-14 while the Mets vs. the Reds, Nationals and White Sox were 18-4 . . .
Injured Toronto infielder Will Wagner (knee) is the son of future Hall of Famer Billy Wagner, a former closer likely to be elected to the Class of 2025.
Leading Off
In 1946, a Million Fans in D.C. and a Tribute to a Dying Hero
By Andrew Sharp
The game between the Senators and Red Sox in Washington on Sept. 21, 1946 was memorable for two reasons unrelated to the outcome: it pushed Griffith Stadium’s attendance over one million for the first (and only) time and it turned into a melancholy tribute to the dying Walter Johnson.
Knowing that a Saturday crowd coming to see the team that had clinched the American League pennant would on its own be enough but team owner Clark Griffith had bigger ideas.
He announced more than a week before the game that a lucky fan would be awarded a $1,000 prize (equal to nearly $17,000 today). The winner would be randomly selected from the ticket stubs of all those in attendance. So it would not necessarily be the actual holder of ticket number one million. All the reserve seats for the game quickly sold out.
Aside from the promotion and the planned in-game ceremony to pick the winner, Griffith had another goal in mind: he intended to honor his greatest player by presenting the gravely ill Johnson with a $5,000 donation to help with the Big Train’s medical expenses.
Johnson had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and had been hospitalized since April. In addition to picking a lucky fan and drawing attention to the team’s attendance milestone, Griffith wanted a huge throng on hand to honor Washington’s most beloved sports figure. A capacity crowd of 24,386 was on hand.
“Tom Yawkey, owner of the Red Sox, and I have agreed to donate $5,000 from the receipts of this game to Walter,” Griffith told reporters on Sept. 9. “We want to make it an epochal occasion” in tribute to “the man who had a lot to do with making baseball big-league in Washington.”
To accommodate more fans, the bleachers used for football games were installed in front of the left-field stands, the Evening Star reported, “whacking 30 feet off the distance to home run territory.” A right-hand hitter now could circle the bases with a clout of just over 375 feet, instead of 405, in the stadium that for decades yielded the fewest home runs each season.
Washington’s Bobo Newsom and Boston 25-game winner Dave Ferriss engaged in a pitching duel through the first seven innings, with the Senators up, 2-1. A victory by Ferris would have tied him with Grover Cleveland Alexander’s 47 wins as the most ever in a pitcher’s first two seasons, but it was not to be. The Nats knocked out Ferriss in the eighth, taking a 5-3 lead.
In the ninth, however, the normally sure-handed Mickey Vernon booted a grounder to help the Sox tie the game. Boston won it in the 11th with the help of a homer into the newly-shortened left-field stands. It was the 100th win for the Red Sox.
In the middle of the seventh inning, several boxes of ticket stubs were brought onto the field and dumped into a tarpaulin large enough to hold them. Red Sox slugger Ted Williams was blindfolded and asked to pick one. Fans were hanging on anxiously to their green rain checks as the ticket number was announced.
The winner was a guy who worked in maintenance at the National Gallery of Art, Earl Crain, who was at game with his wife. He had bought the tickets the day before from friends who at the last minute found out they couldn’t attend.
On the field, Crain accepted the $1,000 bond from Griffith as Williams and Nats’ radio voice Arch McDonald looked on. The lucky Mr. Crain was due at work for an overnight shift at midnight.
Later in the same ceremony, Johnson’s son, Eddie, accepted a $5,000 bond on his father’s behalf. Griffith, overcome with emotion discussing Johnson’s illness, handed the microphone to McDonald. The money provided by Griffith and Yawkey was matched with another $5,000 from an anonymous donor.
Henry W. Thomas, Johnson’s grandson and author of the definitive biography of the Big Train, wrote that the donor could have been George M. Weiss, longtime general manager of the Yankees and first GM of the Mets.
Eddie Johnson, Thomas’s uncle, recalled that as the medical bills piled up, he asked the ailing Walter if the family should seek a bank loan. The elder Johnson told Eddie “to contact Weiss, who had never repaid Johnson’s investment many years earlier in the New Haven ball club,” Thomas wrote.
In the early 1920s, Weiss had borrowed $5,000 to purchase the New Haven team in the Eastern League. It seems at least likely some of that loan might have come from Walter Johnson, thus his death-bed request that his son contact Weiss.
Surely, the $10,000 helped, but extended hospital stays in the days before hospice care could be ruinous to all but the wealthiest people.
Griffith himself began to cover the bills “until eventually they were directed to him,” Thomas wrote. Longtime Griffith scout Joe Engel also offered to do what he could to help the Johnson family.
At the end of the between-innings ceremony, the capacity crowd stood to observe a moment of silence for the greatest player ever to wear a Washington uniform.
Griffith, by then 76 years old, continued to visit Johnson daily, always bringing a single red rose. Griffith had taken enough dirt from the mound on which Johnson had pitched to make a garden bed.
“Anything enriched by Walter’s sweat is semi-sacred,” Griffith told the doctor, as recounted by Thomas. “Those roses are from that bed.”
Surrounded by family, Walter Johnson died at age 59 on December 10, 1946, at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington.
Andrew C. Sharp is a retired newspaper journalist and a SABR member who has written and edited Bio and Games project essays and who blogs about D.C. baseball at washingtonbaseballhistory.com
Cleaning Up
Seven Is Not A Lucky Number For 2024 Braves
By Dan Schlossberg
With little more than a week remaining, the Atlanta Braves may spend the winter wondering why the number 7 brought such bad luck this season.
Unlike Las Vegas, where three 7s on a slot machine signifies an imminent jackpot, the number 7 on a scoreboard is only good if posted by your team — not the opponent.
For the Braves, who figure to finish within single digits of the playoffs, allowing two 7-run explosions by rivals will be remembered for years to come.
First came the summer afternoon in Denver (Aug. 11) where Atlanta took an 8-2 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning against the dreadful Rockies.
That’s when Coors Field reared its ugly reputation as a house of horrors for pitchers.
Colorado pushed across seven runs against the over-the-hill Luke Jackson and several equally inept bullpen colleagues. The result was a 9-8 victory that deprived the Braves of a much-needed weekend sweep.
Then came the ninth inning at Truist Park in a nationally televised game last Sunday.
After leading 2-0 and then surrendering a pair of two-out RBI doubles to Shohei Ohtani, the usually-infallible Raisel Iglesias — he of the 1.16 earned run average — coughed up five earned runs. Relievers allowed two more, paving the way for a 9-2 win by the Dodgers, who had been outscored 16-3 in the first two games.
That cost the Braves a game in the wild-card standings, since San Diego and Arizona both won, and left them locked in a third-place tie with the arch-rival Mets.
Atlanta hosts New York for a potentially-decisive three-game series the last week of the season. They’ve split their first 10 meetings this year, so any potential tiebreaker is yet to be determined.
To be honest, the Braves really blew the game before the Los Angeles earthquake hit Windy Hill. With runners on second and third and nobody out in the eighth inning of a 2-2 game, Travis d’Arnaud swung at ball four and lifted a lazy fly ball to left — too shallow for the go-around run to score.
Then Michael Kopech fanned light-hitting shortstop Orlando Arcia, who never saw a strike but never stopped swinging at balls out of the strike zone. Jarred Kelenic fanned too, allowing Kopech to let out a primeval scream that could be heard all the way to California.
It was a strange series: the Braves won the first two, blowing out the Dodgers by a combined score of 16-3 but losing the next two by a combined score of 19-2.
That left Atlanta one game behind New York after the Mets squeaked by the Gnats, 2-1, after trailing 1-0 heading into the home eighth inning.
Things also went sour in Cincinnati the next night, when the Braves turned a 5-1 lead into a 6-5 defeat. That left them with a 14-23 record this season against the Nationals, White Sox, Rockies, Cardinals, Pirates and Reds — six dismal-to-abysmal ballclubs who routinely lose to everyone else.
They went 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position Monday against the Dodgers, then 2-for-9 against the Reds, leaving 14 men on base in the process. Compounding the felony is the fact that first-half hero Marcell Ozuna caught the malaise that has suffocated the club all season. Until he homered in Cincinnati Wednesday night, he had not had a home run or even knocked in a single run since August 20. That’s awful production from someone who had been a Triple Crown and MVP contender less than a month ago.
Unless he and the suddenly-dreadful bullpen wake up in the final week, Chris (Mad Dog) Russa will be right: no playoffs this year for the Braves.
But the Braves still have hope: a three-game series against the Mets in Atlanta next week.
As Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd used to say, the final stretch is going to be Wild & Crazy.
Former AP newsman Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is the author of 41 books, including this year’s Home Run King: the Remarkable Record of Hank Aaron and collaborations with Al Clark, Milo Hamilton, and Ron Blomberg. He also covers the game for forbes.com, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, Memories & Dreams, and other outlets. Contact Dan via ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia: Raisel’s Numbers Were Ridiculous
“We had a really good series other than one inning.”
— Braves manager Brian Snitker after the Dodgers scored 7 with two outs in the 9th
The earned run average of Atlanta closer Raisel Iglesias jumped from 1.16 to 1.88 after he yielded five runs to the Dodgers last Sunday . . .
He had made 30 straight outings (35 1/3 innings) without yielding an earned run . . .
During that span, opponents batted .089 (10-for-112) against him . . .
In 62 previous innings of the 2024 season, the Cuban right-hander had yielded a grand total of eight earned runs . . .
Iglesias was snubbed for the 2024 All-Star Game, though Phillies set-up men Jeff Hoffman and Matt Strahm were both selected . . .
The 34-year-old Atlanta closer, who previously pitched for Cincinnati and the Los Angeles Angels, has never been an All-Star.
Extra Innings
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.