Category Archives: On this day in baseball history

On this day in baseball history: July 5, 1936

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Nothing special happened in major league play 75 years ago today, at least nothing that was especially noteworthy at the time. The Philadelphia Athletics suffered their 12th straight loss, facing the Boston Red Sox and Jimmie Foxx, the final star of Connie Mack’s disassembled dynasty. Wes Ferrell, Mel Harder, and Jimmie DeShong each won their 11th games of the season, on their way to 53 wins collectively, though no man had an ERA under 4.00. Meanwhile in Washington D.C., an old baseball player I doubt many people had heard of died.

I can’t find any record on the death of Phil Wisner, who was not quite 67 when he passed. Nor is there much information on the Web about his career, though what I saw intrigues me. Wisner got in exactly one game, August 30, 1895 for the Washington Senators. Playing shortstop, the 25-year-old had no plate appearances, and of his four chances in the field, he committed three errors. He did manage an assist, but otherwise, that was the end of it for him in baseball, especially bleak considering Washington went 43-85 and seemingly could have used a young, left-handed hitting shortstop.

I love baseball for its history, for the fact that more than 17,000 men have played in the majors in over a century with more than 17,000 stories accordingly. I’m of the belief that everyone has a story, everyone, and I’m curious what it was for Wisner. I wonder what it’s like to make the show at 25, play one game, and live 40 more years. Does it make for an interesting life story, something to tell the dinner party guests or is it an excruciating case of what might have been, something to obsess on? Depends on the person, I suppose.

In the book Shoeless Joe, which became Field of Dreams, there’s the part where Ray Kinsella tracks down Moonlight Graham, who played one game for the New York Giants. “I think I came here because your time was so short,” Kinsella tells Graham in the book. “I wanted to know how it affected your life. But I can see you’ve done well. It would have killed some men to get so close. They’d never do anything else but talk about how close they were.” Graham replies, “If I’d only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy. You have to keep things in perspective. I mean, I love the game, but it’s only that, a game.”

Would if everyone could have such humility. I will say I’ve heard expressions of it talking to baseball folk. I started research about a year and a half ago on a book on Joe Marty, who came up in the Pacific Coast League with Joe DiMaggio and was once thought to be the better prospect. Of course, the rest is history, and the crux of my research is about determining what effect this had on Marty’s life. I interviewed one of his close friends about a year ago, and his take was that Marty never even thought about it.

Maybe some people don’t place too much stock in the times they fall short in life, learning what they can and moving on. Whether Phil Wisner falls into this rank, I don’t know, though if anyone out there has more info, please feel free to email me.

“On this day in baseball history” is an occasional feature here.

On this day in baseball history: May 30, 1911

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With Memorial Day-themed posts abounding elsewhere, I figured I’d do something different here. I’ve had an idea for an occasional post examining a random date in baseball past and finding a story in it. Part of the magic of the Web is that such baseball research is made easy by sites like Retrosheet.org, which offers box scores dating to 1871. I looked at the schedule from May 30, 1911, and something stuck out. One hundred years ago today, a troubled, young pitcher named Bugs Raymond won the last game of his big league career. He’d be dead barely a year later.

Fans who’ve read Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times or watched the Ken Burns Baseball miniseries, may be familiar with Raymond, who pitched six years in the majors between 1904 and 1911, going 45-57 with a 2.49 ERA. Former New York Giants teammate Fred Snodgrass told Ritter, “Bugs drank too much and came to an early tragic end, but when he was sober, and sometimes when he wasn’t, he was one of the greatest spitball pitchers who ever lived.”

At his peak, Raymond went 18-12 with a 2.47 ERA for the Giants in 1909, though he quit the team six weeks before the season ended to tend bar. Such behavior was emblematic of his short, mercurial career. “Bugs drank a lot, you know, and sometimes it seemed the more he drank the better he pitched,” another Giants teammate, Rube Marquard told Ritter. “They used to say he didn’t spit on the ball; he blew his breath on it, and the ball would come up drunk.”

By 1910, as Raymond’s SABR biography notes, his alcoholism had progressed enough that Giants manager John McGraw hired a former New York City policeman to track Raymond. The ex-cop quit after sustaining a black eye from the pitcher. McGraw became reluctant to give Raymond money for fear it would be spent on alcohol, and fellow Giants were forbidden from loaning to Raymond. McGraw refused even to give Raymond unopened packs of cigarettes, as they could be pawned to buy booze.

Nothing could keep Raymond sober long, not a wife, children, or a promising career, as it so often goes with alcoholics. The Giants sent Raymond off for treatment prior to the 1911 season, though he was kicked out for horseplay. He rallied physically and emotionally for a time, with a couple slips in spring training. Still, Raymond would fully relapse by mid-season and be booted in June from the Giants, who’d win the National League pennant in his absence. As Raymond’s career and life was bottoming out came the brilliance and madness of May 30, 1911.

Raymond got the start that day in the second end of a doubleheader against the Brooklyn Superbas, and he had a one-hit shutout going when he was lifted for Red Ames with two outs and no men on in the fifth. The New York Times reported Raymond had to go to the dressing room with stomach pains because he ate a strawberry sundae before the game (“It begins to look as if ice cream is another dish which Bugs will have to cut from his menu,” the Times noted in its writeup of the game.) Ames blanked Brooklyn the final 4-1/3 innings, giving New York a 3-0 win and Raymond his sixth and final victory that year.

Raymond pitched five more times in the next three weeks, with two losses to drop his record to 6-4. In his final appearance on June 16, Raymond went six innings against St. Louis in relief walking six and allowing four earned runs for the loss. McGraw later dismissed Raymond from the Giants after he disappeared from the bullpen during a game against Pittsburgh and turned up at a nearby saloon. It was the last of many clashes between the two men. When Raymond died, McGraw reportedly said, “That man took seven years off my life.”

Like another oft-inebriated ace from those days, Rube Waddell, Raymond didn’t live long after drinking his way out of the majors. By now separated from his wife, Raymond returned to his boyhood home of Chicago. He played some semi-pro and outlaw baseball, worked as a pressman, and on September 7, 1912, he was found dead in a meager hotel room. Raymond died from a cerebral hemorrhage, thought to be the result of two recent brawls. He was 30.

“On this day in baseball history” is a new, occasional feature here. Today marks the first appearance of this column.