The Machine DVD Extra: Haddix
Posted: May 26th, 2009 | Filed under: Media | 33 Comments »
As the countdown builds to worldwide release of THE MACHINE*, I thought it would be fun to periodically offer up some DVD Extras … that is, stuff that did not make it into the book. Deleted scenes. Director’s commentary. Previews. Stickers. That sort of thing.
*For some reason, people in the publishing business always refer to books in all capital letters like THE MACHINE. This tends to work when talking about, say, THE BIBLE. It’s not quite as effective for THE DIRTY JOKE BOOK or BRITNEY: EVERY STEP OF THE WAY.
Well, today marks the 50th anniversary of Harvey Haddix’s famous perfect-perfect game. The game was played on May 26, 1959. Haddix was pitching for Pittsburgh against a Milwaukee Braves team that had two Hall of Famers in the lineup — Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews — along with several other excellent players including Joe Adcock, Del Crandall, Wes Covington and so on. That Braves team had gone to the World Series in 1958 — lost to the Yankees in seven.
Anyway, Haddix pitched 12 perfect innings against the Braves that day. That’s a 107 Game Score, if you are scoring at home*.
*Though, remarkably, it is not especially close to the greatest Game Score ever achieved. Vern Law rather improbably pitched 18 innings against the Braves in 1955 — that’s a 118 Game Score, the highest achieved since Baseball Reference’s records begin in 1954. Dean Chance threw 14 scoreless innings against the Yankees in 1964 — a 116 game score.
And then, a game that has sadly been forgotten by many: In 1962, Tom Cheney — who won 19 games in his big league career — threw 16 innings at Baltimore, allowed one run, and struck out 21 batters. He won the game when Bud Zipfel hit a solo home run in the top of the 16th, and Cheney finished off the game by striking out Dick Williams. Now THAT game would be worth a book.
You probably know that Haddix lost the game in the 13th. Milwaukee’s Felix Mantilla reached on a throwing error by Don Hoak. After a bunt and an intentional walk, Joe Adcock hit a home run, making the final score 3-0. The next day, the score was changed to 1-0 — apparently Adcock had passed Aaron on the bases and as such was called out. So, in the final version of scoring, Haddix pitched 12 2/3 innings and was charged only with an unearned run.
Years later, when Haddix was coaching for the Cleveland Indians, I remember my father pointing at him and saying: That man pitched the greatest game in baseball history. And he lost it.
Haddix was an Ohio guy … Will McEnaney, the relief pitcher who would finish out both the 1975 and 1976 World Series for the Cincinnati Reds, grew up near his farm. Will was wonderful to talk with for this book — he has lived a full life, to say the least. In this MACHINE EXTRA, I write about the advice Will got from Harvey Haddix.
* * *
Will is saying that his Florida neighborhood is so safe, he does not have to lock the doors. Of course, he does lock the doors, especially at night, but his point is that he does not have to … the neighborhood is that safe. And quiet. It’s a quiet neighborhood. Of course, it used to be quieter.
“We’re moving,” he says. “When the market comes back. To Tennessee.”
Will does not have a job now, but he thinks he has one locked up with Lowe’s Home Improvement. He just has to talk with the manager. He might talk to the guy next week. Will has experience. He used to refinish bathtubs. He made good money doing that, you would not believe how many people needed their bathrooms refinished. Then the housing market crashed. He’s doing OK, though. He gets his Major League pension. His wife has a good job. He’s pretty happy. He has banana trees in his backyard. The three hurricanes that came roaring through his neighborhood did not do too much damage to his house, except the first one ripped the roof off the top. He’s been married to his second wife for twenty-three years. He drinks a lot of water. His wife, a nurse, says water is good for the prostate. The neighbors don’t really know who he was.
“All the bad things that happened to me in baseball were my own doing,” he says. Will doesn’t talk about that hard time in his life. He got lost there for a few years after he got traded away from the Big Red Machine – he was only twenty four then. His first marriage was crumbling. His promising baseball career was fading into the fog. Will was just twenty-seven when he threw his last Major League pitch. Baseball gave up on him. He kicked around in Mexico for a while, pitching for dollars. Once a guy down there put a gun down on the table and threatened to deport him. Will noticed the gun had no bullets, and he reported the guy, watched him get cuffed and dragged from the bar out into the night. Will saw a lot of stuff down in Mexico.
“I was good,” Will is saying.
He was good. He grew up in Springfield, about ninety miles from Cincinnati, and from his youngest days he could throw baseballs past other kids. Will had a twin brother, Mike, who played catcher, and it was all so easy for them, it was just playing catch. Will struck out twenty batters in a seven-inning high school game. Not long after that the coach threw Will off the team because of some crazy stunt. It was always like that for Will. “I was just a kid,” he said. Only, Will admits, he was more kid than most.
Here’s how it was with Will: After the Reds drafted him in the eighth round of the 1970 draft, he went to visit the great old pitcher Harvey Haddix, who lived on a farm nearby. Haddix had once thrown the most perfect game in Major League baseball history; he had thrown twelve perfect innings. He eventually lost the game, which more or less summed up the brilliant but tortured career of Harvey Haddix. Will asked him for advice about being a Major Leaguer.
Haddix said: “Will, don’t get married until after you finish playing ball. It will distract you, and there are too many women out there anyway.”
A couple of years later, Will had a minor league manager in Indianapolis named Vern Rapp, a generous man who had fought in Korea and had never played in the Major Leagues. One day, Rapp caught Will in the elevator with some woman, and it was long past curfew, and Rapp had finally seen enough. “That’s it, I’m fining you 150 bucks,” Rapp said.
“I won’t pay it,” Will said.
“You broke a rule. You had that woman in your room.”
“I did not,” Will said. “She was banging on my door while I was sleeping, what the hell else was I supposed to do? I had to walk her out of the hotel.”
“You’re a liar. You had that woman in your room.”
“No I didn’t. I won’t pay that fine. You can’t fine me for a woman banging on my door in the middle of the night.”
And so on. After a while, Rapp shrugged. “Will,” he said, “I’m not going to fine you, OK? I know you’re lying, but I know you can’t afford the fine anyway. Would you just do me one favor?”
Will listened.
“Get married, already. Settle down. Get married. You want to play in the Big Leagues, right? Just get married.”
All these years later, Will McEnaney sat on his couch, drinking water, while his two dogs attacked each other in the living room. Their howling and barking almost drowned out his words. “I got married,” he said. “And I made it to the big leagues. But I should have listened to Haddix.”
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdJSnqaTNdg
This crowd is probably well aware of this, but The Baseball Project (Steve Wynn of Dream Syndicate, Scott McCaughey of Young Fresh Fellows/the Minus 5, and Peter Buck of R.E.M.) tell the tale of Harvey’s most famous game in a song called, appropriately, “Harvey Haddix.”
Not enough men named “Vern” in the game today. Or “Heine”.
Can’t wait to get this book if this is the stuff that didn’t make the cut.
I second Michael’s recommendation of The Baseball Project. Good stuff.
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I’ve always wondered about Adcock passing Aaron while running out his home run. How does something like that happen? According to Gerald Eskenazi in the NY Times on May 23, Aaron, on first when the ball was hit, didn’t realize it was a homer so he headed straight for the dugout after touching second base. An amazing night.
Love what Lew Burdette reportedly said after the game, when they asked about Haddix’s great effort and the way he lost the game: “Well, an experienced pitcher like Harvey should know better than to bunch his hits….”
I was there! Well sort of. I was 12 years old at the time. Wwe lived in Los Angeles. I can clearly remember Vin Scully recreating plays of the last last few innings of that game while announcing a Dodgers game. It was magic one of my favorite baseball memories.
-Red
Here’s an interesting question that may have made the game even more insane.
The game was played in Milwaukee, so when the Braves scored it was the bottom of the 13th.
Let’s say that the Pirates had scored two runs in the top of the inning, so it was 2-0 with the Braves coming up and Haddix only needing three more outs.
What if the walk-off home run was hit by Adcock in the same manner, and was then overturned the next day, meaning a 3-2 Braves win became a 2-1 Pirates lead with two outs in the bottom of the 13th?
That’s just idle hypothesis though, because if the Braves had been trailing then h\Hank would never have turned and headed to the dugout after touching 2nd, whether he thought it was a HR or not.
Harvey Haddix was also the winning pitcher in Game 7 of the 1960 Series. He and Law were each 2-0 for the Buccos in the Series.
I’d never heard of that Tom Cheney game before … somehow. I feel cheated.
Here’s a thought…maybe Tom Cheney only won 19 games in his big leagues career in part because he once threw 16 innings in a single game. He threw that game at age 27, very late in the ‘62 season. He suffered an essentially career-ending arm injury within a year.
Yeah, that game WOULD be worth a book.
So, Vern Rapp’s damage to the Reds started long before 1984.
It should be noted that the greatest 9-inning game score was Ron Necciai’s game on May 13, 1952 – 113 (Necciai struck out 27 and walked one in a no-hitter)
#16
I presume that was a minor league game? B/c Mr. Necciai only won one ML game (it was in 1952, but August of 1952) and of course, RJ, Clemens and Wood hold the single game record for Ks in a game and that is 20.
I remember a book I had as a boy – my Mom may still have it at her house – a strange-but-true compilation of baseball stories written by Furman Bisher. (Such an awesome name, too – and bless his heart, he’s still with us at age 90.) One piece was about a minor-league catcher whose name escapes me – talented, great arm, liked to spin good-natured yarns. He liked to tell his pitchers that they reminded him of himself when they threw good games, until a pitcher decided to call BS on him. Late in the season, when it could do no harm in the standings, the guy prevailed upon his manager to pitch a game – and he did, awkwardly at first (the opposing pitcher tagged him for a 2-run double), but keeping it up, inning after inning… he threw 16 or 18 (I can’t recall it now) and finally won the thing – after which he confessed sheepishly that it was the first time he’d ever pitched a competitive ball game.
The game wrecked his arm and he never appeared in the majors. Can’t find him on BR. Wish I knew more for others to go on.
(PS – speaking of which, I suddenly remember that he also had a good Musial story in there – he hurt his shoulder making a catch, and after he rehabbed his manager, Dickie Kerr, moved him to the outfield full-time. As a result, we missed a great-hitting pitcher in favor of one of the greatest full-time hitters who ever lived. Thank you, Dickie Kerr.)
Haddix, Vern Law and ElRoy Face were the only 3 Bucco pitchers that could consistently get any Yankees out in the ‘60 Series. The story goes that Law sort of tweaked his right arm during the pennant celebrating a week prior to the Series but his pitching against the Yankees was pretty good despite the arm problem. However, the extra innings of that championship season (He threw 290 innings in ‘60 including the WS.) and the slight injury in late September put “The Deacon” on the DL for much of the ‘61 season. He struggled much of the ‘62 & ‘63 seasons with more DL time but found some consistancy starting in 1964 and through ‘66. By then though he was throwing with much less speed but with excellent control. Here’s a neat quote from the Law: “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first and then the lesson comes afterword.”
Haddix was a wonderful, sweet guy. An old family doc in the Springfield, OH area once joked to a patient that if he ever went broke he could always sell the x-rays of Harvey’s left arm!
Great story. Definitely whets the appetite for the book.
Unrelated: I know there are plenty of die-hard Royals fans that read this site. Can anyone explain why only 16,000 people showed up last night to see the best pitcher in baseball take on the division leader?
The 16k that did show up were loud, but that was a pretty poor showing. Only three games on last night’s schedule drew fewer fans and they all involved last-place teams.
KC is supposed to be this sleeping giant of a baseball town. What gives?
Surely the record for highest game score is held by Joe Oeschger of the Boston Braves, who started — and completed!! — the longest game, by innings, in MLB history: a 1-1 tie with the Brooklyn Robins on May 1, 1920.
I can’t find his K/BB numbers for the game, so let’s assume that he had the same number of each. Based on the rest of the game stats, Oeschger’s game score would be 150. The opposing starter, Leon Cadore, who also started and finished, would be 138.
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1069463/index.htm
For some perspective, a perfect 13-inning game with all batters retired on strikeouts (39 Ks) would result in a game score of 146. There is no way in the world that record will be broken; I’d say it’s even safer than 511 Ws or a 56-game hitting streak.
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I wish I could remember this Tom Cheney story better but about a decade ago some joker was misrepresenting himself as Tom Cheney – maybe at rinky-dink card shows. The real MLB pitcher Tom Cheney died in 2001…Does any else recall this? I read about it in a Texas newspaper so maybe the fraud was living in Texas…???
David in NYC … here’s the box score of that 26-inning game. Too bad they didn’t start it earlier, who knows how long it could have gone:
http://espn.go.com/classic/s/quiz/5/01.html
I have an old baseball with four autographs on it. One signature is from Stan Musial. Another is from Vern Rapp. Crap.
logs: Your autographed ball just goes to show that there is a wide variety of talent in MLB.
The Victorian era thought Vern Rapp was uptight.
Joe,
ALL CAPS for books titles is a pre-computer way of showing they should be italicized since it was a pain to have to back up and underline on a typewriter–even back when people were tougher and used to that sort of thing. You still see this a lot in publishing. When writing e-mails to others in publishing, I’ll often just hit CAPS LOCK instead of CTRL + I when I need to type the title of a book.
Here’s the box for that 26-inning classic from 1920: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1920/B05010BSN1920.htm
(Incidentally, Retrosheet now has all 12,000+ box scores online — every major league game — from the decade of the 1920s. Check out the tour here, then dig in: http://retrosheet.org/Research/RuaneT/tour1920_art.htm)
Joe Oeschger’s game score, by the way, was an astounding 153 that day. He faced 90 batters. His counterpart, Leon Cadore, faced 96.
Incredible.
Spud and Buck Weaver –
Thanks for the links to the box score. I will have to bookmark them.
Spud, re starting/ending times: When I was trying unsuccessfully to find the box score, I came across varying versions of why the game ended after 26. Since it was only 3:50 (can you imagine 26 innings in less than 4 hours? That would put you in roughly the top of the 6th in your average NY/Boston game), and games started around 3PM, it was probably before 7PM when the game was called.
According to the NOAA, sunset on May 1 in Boston is 7:44PM, so it would not be too dark to play in clear conditions. The difference in the accounts is that some say the umpire(s) called the game for mundane reasons like hunger and/or fatigue, others say the weather was cloudy/inclement.
buckweaver: According to Wikipedia, Oeschger’s pitch count was 319, and Cadore’s 345 (not bad for roughly 3 full games). Nowadays, that game would have been called for lack of pitchers because everyone, including position players, would have already been used (kinda like the 2002 All-Star Game).
Hey Nightfly –
Is this the book?
http://www.amazon.com/STRANGE-BUT-TRUE-BASEBALL-STORIES/dp/0394801849
I had it too, and recall some of the other stories were about Pete Gray and Johnny Vander Meer.
According to the great 80s book THE BASEBALL HALL OF SHAME, Will McEnaney’s brother Mike did eventually wear a major league uniform–but for the wrong reason. On a Sunday in September, Will, who hadn’t been used by the Pirates in weeks, decided that instead of sitting in the bullpen during a Pirates game he’d rather watch the Steelers on television in the clubhouse. In order to accomplish this, he persuaded Mike to wear his uniform and take his place in the bullpen. He swore to Mike that the manager wouldn’t call on him, but if for some reason he did, to say he had to use the bathroom and to retrieve Will from his spot in front of the TV. Apparently the ruse worked.
“Can’t wait to get this book if this is the stuff that didn’t make the cut.”
Seconded!
Joe: Any word on a Kindle edition? Pretty please!!