Pregame Pepper
Did you know ...
Elton John not only lives in Atlanta but is a huge fan of the Atlanta Braves and Dale Murphy.
Leading Off
Unfairly tainted, still: The 1919 World Champion Cincinnati Reds
By Jeff Kallman
The Cleveland Indians went home for this winter still not having won a World Series since the births of Israel, NASCAR, the Polaroid Land camera, and Scrabble. The Cincinnati Reds, who haven’t won the World Series since Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature and CBS mastermind Bill Paley died, went home from the winter after being shut out by the Atlanta Braves for 22 innings in two games.
A hundred years ago, however, the Indians won a World Series played under a cloud turned thunder cloud thanks to the Series the Reds won the year before. The Series in which the Reds were supposed to have been pushovers for the Chicago White Sox except for, you know, that funny business involving a few White Sox looking to throw the Series for fun and fast profit.
It’s probably too much to ask of baseball’s incumbent, fiddling commissioner to confer upon the 1919 Reds the relief they deserve as bona fide, legitimate World Series champions. Some of us thought they deserved it in 2019, the centenary of that Series. No matter what has been unearthed since about the truth and depth of that scandalized Series, too many people still believe the Reds would have been smothered if the White Sox played it straight, no chaser.
So let’s say it again at long-enough last. If the 1919 World Series was played straight, no chaser, the Reds had at least an even shot at winning the set despite the White Sox being reported 8-5 Series favorites. You read it right. The White Sox weren’t quite the powerhouse they were remembered as being.
The White Sox entered the Series with two top-of-the-line starting pitchers (Eddie Cicotte and fellow Black Soxer Lefty Williams), a Hall of Famer (Red Faber) missing in action because of injuries, and a rookie (Dickey Kerr, a Clean Sox) who looked promising as a starter and a reliever but was seen at the time as something of a wild card who could go either way.
The Reds entered with five solid starting pitchers lacking health issues: Hod Eller, Ray Fisher, Jimmy Ring, Dutch Reuther, and Slim Sallee. White Sox manager Kid Gleason started on the shorter end of the pitching stick, but Reds manager Pat Moran entered in the lap of luxury: he could rotate his not-so-overworked arms reasonably.
I suspect that if people paid closer attention to how the Reds and the White Sox did in the second halves of their seasons, they might have (pardon the expression) put their money on the Reds. They went 47-19 in their second half to the White Sox going 41-26. The Reds won the National League pennant by nine games; the White Sox won the American League pennant by three-and- a-half games.
How about their results against their fellow contenders, you ask? Answers: Four teams were National League contenders and the Reds went 38-22 on the season against them. Four teams likewise were serious American League contenders, and the White Sox went 35-25 against them. In September, the Reds faced fellow contenders 10 times and went 8-2, while the White Sox faced fellow contenders 12 times and went 6-6. Do the Reds look a little less as though they were just destined to be beaten into submission now?
Now hear (well, read) this. The White Sox out-hit the Reds in the regular season but they weren’t that much better than the Reds at scoring—4.8 runs per game averaged by the White Sox, 4.1 runs per game averaged by the Reds. By the way, and yes, you can look it up, the other guys averaged 2.9 runs against the Reds but 3.8 runs against the White Sox.
How could that happen? Easy peasy. The 1919 Reds out-pitched the 1919 White Sox. Going into the World Series, the White Sox staff had a 3.04 earned run average and a 2.88 fielding-independent pitching rate, but the Reds staff had a 2.23 ERA and a 2.81 FIP. The Reds got shut out as often as the White Sox shut the other guys out . . . but the Reds also shut the other guys out 23 times.
It’s okay to acknowledge that, by now, the White Sox don’t look like King Kong and the Reds don’t look like Fay Wray.
The 1919 Reds had something else going for them that matters even in today’s analytics uber alles game. As revealed by Susan Dellinger, Ph.D., granddaughter of the Reds’ Hall of Fame center fielder Edd Roush, in Red Legs & Black Sox: Edd Roush and the Untold Story of the 1919 World Series, those Reds liked their own new manager Moran, liked each other, played hard, and thought of team first. They mentored each other when need be, made a powerful point of making newer players feel at home, and, on the field, as Dellinger wrote, “No one cared who was on third. If he wore the Reds insignia, just get him home.”
The 1919 White Sox had the opposite problem well before first baseman Chick Gandil and shortstop Swede Risberg found the gamblers and the teammates to concoct the World Series fix. Read deep into the canon of the Black Sox scandal and you discover the White Sox riddled with dissension not all of which was provoked by real or imagined frustrations with their owner. They were not always comfortable with Gleason’s managing, and they were battered by tensions between more- and less-educated players.
Just ask Hall of Famer Eddie Collins, one of the Clean Sox. A veteran of Connie Mack’s first Philadelphia Athletics dynasty, Collins once said those Athletics “believed in teamwork and cooperation. I always thought you couldn’t win without those virtues until I joined the White Sox.”
It’s difficult to feel sorry for a franchise who’ve made 15 trips to the postseason, winning 10 pennants and five World Series, and bequeathing one of baseball’s legendary powerhouses in the 1970s Big Red Machine. Seventy years after one gambling scandal de-legitimised their first World Series championship, however, a second gambling scandal cost the Reds a franchise icon and field manager.
Baseball can’t possibly give the Reds a 1919 World Series do-over, unfortunately. But you don’t have to resurrect the Series, the fix, the cover-up, and the final exposure in the last week of the 1920 season to understand that history has mis-interpreted those Reds at least as profoundly as it’s mis-interpreted the truth that the Eight Men Out weren’t exactly victims of an evil owner, evil gamblers, or a freshly-minted commissioner whose rough justice---as George F. Will once observed---was more rough than just.
But the foregoing evidence should obliterate one myth once and for all. Obliterate a myth, and exonerate the 1919 Reds as legitimate champions, who could have beaten an untainted collection of White Sox in an untainted World Series.
Parts of this essay were published in the Society for American Baseball Research’s Black Sox scandal newsletter in 2018.
Cleaning Up
Regular-Season Records Don’t Mean Much in Playoffs
By Dan Schlossberg
Regular season trends don’t always carry over to the postseason.
Atlanta Braves starters posted a 5.51 earned run average that was the worst ever for a playoff team yet held the Cincinnati Reds scoreless over 22 innings in the Wild-Card Series.
After winning the opener, 1-0 in 13 innings, the Braves nursed another 1-0 lead into the eighth inning of Game 2 before Reds closer Raisel Iglesias surrendered two-run homers to both Marcell Ozuna and Adam Duvall – after throwing just one gopher ball all season.
Iglesias tempted fate by throwing a down-the-middle fastball to Ozuna, who had led the major leagues with a .492 batting average against heaters.
The Reds had been favored because of their veteran starting pitching, from Trevor Bauer to Luis Castillo and Sonny Gray. But the Braves prevailed even though Max Fried, making his first postseason start, worked seven scoreless innings and rookie Ian Anderson, called up during the season, fanned nine during his scoreless six-inning stint Thursday. Anderson was pulled only because his pitch count was getting high and the Braves wanted him to be fresh for the next round.
Atlanta got stellar relief work from Will Smith, a lefthanded closer finishing the first year of a three-season, $18 million deal. Of the 11 hits Smith yielded during the shortened season, seven were home runs. Yet he was flawless against the Reds, whose pitching was sabotaged by poor defense and atrocious baserunning.
Bauer, by the way, said he learned how to pitch by watching Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, all now enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, when TBS broadcast Braves games nationally.
Their announcing team of Pete Van Wieren, Skip Caray, and Ernie Johnson Sr. was far superior to any of the so-called “national” broadcast teams supplied by ESPN, ABC, Fox, or MLB Network but failed to follow the footsteps of the star pitchers to Cooperstown – an oversight that needs correction.
Cincinnati has now lost six straight postseason encounters with Atlanta, dating back to a Braves sweep of the 1995 NL Championship Series.
Had the 1-0 score prevailed, the Reds would have become the first team eliminated in a postseason series while allowing three or fewer runs to its opponent.
During the regular season, they were the first team ever to finish a season with more walks than singles. Still, the Reds went 11-3 down the stretch to sneak into the NL’s eight-team playoff field with a record just two games over .500.
No. 2 seed Atlanta, winning a postseason series for the first time since 2001, now moves on to the NL Division Series against the winner of the Miami-Chicago matchup. That series starts Tuesday.
Worth noting:
Dave Dombrowski is the odds-on favorite for the GM job in Anaheim, a team willing to spend to build up its pitching . . .
Amazing that the Indians, with four switch-hitters at the top of the lineup, couldn’t beat the Yankees in either of the two games played at Progressive Field . . .
After hitting just eight homers during the 60-game sprint of a schedule, Yasmani Grandal connected in both of the first two Wild-Card games for the White Sox . . .
The only 2020 playoff teams with World Series MVPs on their rosters are the Houston Astros (George Springer in 2017) and the Atlanta Braves (Pablo Sandoval in 2012).
_____
Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is Weekend Editor of Here’s the Pitch, national baseball writer for forbes.com, and author of 38 baseball books. Reach him at ballauthor@gmail.com.