At the All-Star break, the Chicago Cubs, despite their recent struggles, were still in a favorable position to win their first National League pennant since 1945 and their first World Series since 1908. But before they ruin their well-earned reputation as baseball’s lovable losers, I’d like to pay tribute to a few of the players who made the Cubs so lovable in the past.
When I was growing up in Pittsburgh in the late 1940s and 1950s, my favorite baseball teams were the Pirates and the Cubs. In those years, baseball’s pennant races were dominated by the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, but the only race that mattered to me was the one between the Pirates and Cubs for the National League cellar.
From 1947 to 1956, the Pirates, with their six last-place finishes, and the Cubs, with their four, reigned unchallenged in the lower depths of the National League. In 1957, as if to celebrate 10 consecutive years of inept play, the Pirates and the Cubs ended up in a tie for last place.
It was difficult to pick a favorite player, but I fixed my attention on Cubs shortstop Roy Smalley. As a struggling Little League pitcher, I had a special affection for 20-game losers, like the Cubs Sad Sam Jones and the Pirates Murry Dickson, but Smalley caught my eye because he couldn’t throw a baseball accurately to first base.
Playing shortstop with a deformed finger on his throwing hand, Smalley was so erratic that frustrated Cub fans, mindful of Frank Adams’ famous “Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance” ditty celebrating the Cubs’ fabled 1908 double-play combination, mockingly chanted “Miksis-to-Smalley-to-the-first-base stands.” Smalley’s deformed finger explains why he made all those bad throws, but it doesn’t explain why the Cubs were playing him at shortstop.
Another of my Cubs favorites was center fielder Frankie Baumholtz. In June 1953, Branch Rickey and the Pirates, desperately in need of money, decided to get rid of high-salaried Ralph Kiner. They offered Kiner to the Cubs, who jumped at the chance to have the National League reigning home-run king in the outfield with their own slugger, Hank Sauer.
Unlike angry Pirates fans, Cubs fans were thrilled with the trade until they discovered Kiner and Sauer had the outfield range of statues. Poor Frankie Baumholtz had to cover so much ground that sportswriters mockingly claimed that his tongue was sunburned from hanging out most of the time. His situation in center field was so desperate that Harley Davidson presented him with a motorcycle to help him patrol the outfield between Kiner and Sauer.
While the Pirates had no one quite like shortstop Roy Smalley, they did have an infield that was so vertically challenged that they were called the Singer Midgets, after the theatrical troupe that provided the actors to play the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz.:” Their shortest infielder, 5-foot, 4-inch Clem Koshorek, appropriately, played shortstop.
The Pirates also had the brothers Freese and the O’Brien twins, though they rarely doubled the pleasure for Pirates fans. Gene Freese did, however, provide fans with the most unique loss in nine consecutive losing seasons by doing his best imitation of the infamous Merkle boner.
In 1908, when New York Giants outfielder Fred Merkle failed to run down and touch second base on what should have been a game-winning hit against the Cubs, it cost the Giants the victory and opened the door for the Cubs to win the pennant and the World Series. In 1955, Gene Freese made the same bonehead play against the Phillies at a Saturday Knothole game. For the Pirates, it was only one of 94 Pirate losses on the bumpy road to a last place finish, but for Pirate fans it was easily the most memorable.
Poor Gene Freese should never have had the opportunity to repeat Merkle’s boner. When he batted in the bottom of the 10th of a 4-4 game, with a runner on first base and two outs, Freese hit a ground ball to short, which should have ended the inning. But the Phillies‘ shortstop that day was Roy Smalley, who’d been traded away by the Cubs after the 1953 season.
Smalley and his fickle finger of baseball fate threw the ball away for an error and gave Freese a chance to blunder his way into Pirates history. When Roman Mejias singled home what should have been the winning run, Freese, instead of running down and touching second base, made a U-turn to congratulate Mejias. The ubiquitous Smalley called for the ball from the outfield and stepped on second base for the force out. Freese was out on appeal and the Pirates went on to lose the game, 8-4, in 11 innings.
It’s going on 71 seasons since the Cubs won the National League pennant and 108 seasons since they won a World Series, so it’s hard to begrudge today’s Cubs if they win it all — but I do miss those lovable losers of my youth. Historians may think that duck-and-cover was a 1950s A-bomb drill, but any old-time Cubs fan knows that duck-and-cover was what you did if you were sitting behind first base at Wrigley Field when Roy Smalley threw the ball in an attempt to complete a double play.
Richard “Pete” Peterson, a Pittsburgh native and retired English professor at Southern Illinois University, is the author of “Growing Up With Clemente” and “Pops: The Willie Stargell Story” and the editor of “The Pirates Reader.”
First Published: July 16, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
