Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History

The Hot Stove League

Then it's hats off to Old Mike Donlin
To Wagner, Lajoie, and Cobb . . .
Don't forget Hal Chase and foxy Mr. Chance
Who are always on the job . . .
Good old Cy Young we root for,
And Fielder Jones the same . . .
And we hold first place in our Yankee hearts
For the Stars of the National Game.—performed on vaudeville by
Mabel Hite and Mike Donlin¹

small minds might check the schedule and conclude that the 1908 season begins on Opening Day, April 14. They would be wrong. The 1908 season began the instant that the last Detroit batter popped up for the last out of the 1907 World Series.

Having lost to the mighty Cubs 4-zip (with one tie), the Tigers limped home to lick their wounds. Their poor performance was particularly galling since they had shown true grit down the stretch, beating the Philadelphia Athletics in a pennant race that the New York Times called the "greatest struggle in the history of baseball." Hyberbole was as common as bad poetry on the sports pages in 1907, but the Times just might have had it right—albeit only for a year.

The turning point came in late September. The Tigers had ridden a five-game winning streak to overtake the A's. As they faced a three-game series in Philadelphia—already known for its aggressive fans—Detroit was anything but complacent. The series would go a long way toward settling matters one way or the other. The Tigers won the first game, then a rainout and a Sunday—the city of brotherly love did not allow ball games on the Sabbath—meant the clubs wouldplay a doubleheader on Monday, September 30. In the event, only a single game was played—a seventeen-inning classic.

The A's jumped out to a 7–1 lead after six innings and Rube Waddell, the game's finest left-hander, was cruising. But he lost his fastball, or perhaps his concentration—the Rube was not wonderfully well-endowed mentally—and the Tigers scrapped for four runs in the seventh, then one more in the eighth. In the top of the ninth, they trailed 8–6. Slugger Sam Crawford led off with a single; the next batter was Ty Cobb. The 1907 season was the twenty-year-old's breakout year—as it was, not coincidentally, for the Tigers. Cobb led the league in hits, average, runs batted in, and stolen bases while confirming his reputation as a young man as distasteful off the field as he was wondrous on it. He dug in, took a strike—and cracked a home run over the right field wall. Tie game.

The Tigers scored a run in the top of the tenth; the A's did the same in the bottom. The game went on; the light thickened; the tension built.

In the bottom of the fourteenth, Detroit's Sam Crawford drifted back to catch a fly in an outfield that was packed with fans; Columbia Park had seats for only fifteen thousand, and the grass was roped off to provide standing room for thousands more. As Crawford reached for the ball, a couple of cops crowded him, either to keep the throng back or to help the A's, depending on one's view of human nature. At any rate, Crawford dropped the ball. The A's had a man in scoring position—briefly. Detroit argued that the cops had interfered with Crawford. There ensued a few minutes of civilized colloquy, marked by only a single arrest (of Detroit infielder Claude Rossman) and a trivial riot. Bravely, umpire Silk O'Loughlin decided against Philly, calling the batter out.

What becomes known as the "when-a-cop-took-a-stroll play"² loomed large when the next hitter hit a long single, but, of course, there was no man on second to score. No one else did, either. At the end of seventeen, the umps ended the game on account of darkness. The box score called it a tie, but the Tigers felt as if they had won. The A's were certain that they wuz robbed. Manager Connie Mack, a kindly man, was uncharacteristically bitter: "If there ever was such a thing as crooked baseball, today's game would stand as a good example."³

The controversial tie turned the season. The A's had lost their best chance to track down the Tigers, who promptly ripped off five straight wins on their way to the pennant. Delighted with the team's first championship in twenty years, Detroit's happy multitudes celebrated by lighting bonfires and painting their pooches in tiger stripes.⁴

To flop against the Cubs after all that—well, it hurt.

The Cubs, of course, were exultant. They had gone into 1907 determined to erase the insult of losing the 1906 World Series to the crosstown White Sox, a team they considered—and probably was—inferior. The Cubs played well all year, finishing ahead of the second-place Pirates by seventeen games and twenty-five ahead of the New York Giants, their least-favorite team—a deeply satisfying result to the Cubs, and a mortifying one to the Gothamites. By finishing off 1907 with such élan, the Cubs restored their sense of superiority. They strutted home for the winter, their wallets engorged with their World Series winnings: $2,142.⁵

Just because the games are over, though, does not mean that the game is. Baseball never sleeps; instead, it huddles around the metaphorical hot stove to rehash the past and dicker about the future. Even in the depths of winter, there is always a thrumming pulse of wakefulness—deals to make, rules to refine, lies to swap, mangers to fire. At the February 1908 annual meeting of the National League, the air at the Waldorf-Astoria fairly reeks of smoke and self-congratulation. Baseball is "in a most prosperous and healthy condition," concludes NL president Harry Pulliam in his annual report. "My experience as president of your organization has been a very pleasant one during the last summer."⁶ Given what would happen to Pulliam in 1908–1909, the words are desperately poignant. Sporting Life, a weekly magazine that was a reliable barometer of what the bosses were thinking, is also sunny: "There is not one cloud in sight."⁷