The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

As pointed out after the excerpt ran:

He managed the 1976 team to an American League championship and two World Series victories in a row.

This is incorrect and really badly worded. Elsewhere in the chapter I think the order/secession is clearer. More properly, this should be

He managed the 1976 to team an American League Championship, the 1977 team won the World Series. You might also give him some credit for the 1978 team: Martin was fired mid-season, and the team ended up winning a World Series with Bob Lemon at the helm.

I’d have to hunt through the copies to see where I introduced the error, but in one of the revisions, I was looking at Martin’s managerial summary page while re-writing, and screwed up.

Bart Giamatti is once referred to as the AL President, but was the NL President from 1986-89 (this is correct elsewhere in the book)

The Red Sox didn’t miss going to the World Series, they missed winning the World Series. The caption should read either “haven’t been to the World Series in 18 years” (1986) or say “We have a chance to win our first World Series in…”

I blew that.

Two errors for the day: AJ Pierzynski‘s mentioned as once being with the Athletics. He wasn’t. I have no idea how that got in.

There’s also in the groundskeeping a mistake where the game situation doesn’t match up quite right. I know where this one came in – I re-wrote that short introductory section every time we went through a set of revisions, and when you edit something over and over, eventually you make a mistake and you’re too close to it to see.

I went to the files to pull the cite for my quote on the Babe yelling at Cleveland groundskeeper Emil Bossard which, as Deanna put it, would have to occur before Bossard’s hiring is generally placed (see here for more).

“Emil Bossard: He was an artist in his field,” The Cleveland Press, May 8, 1980, p C1

There was the great Babe Ruth who looked upon Emil like an opposing pitcher at old League Park. “Give us a break,” The Babe bellowed at Emil, who made a quagmire in right field where Ruth played and softened home plate, not allowing him a toe-hold.

League Park opened April 21, 1910, and the Indians played there through 1946. Bossard, on the generally accepted timeline, was hired on or about the 1936 season, which means that he was indeed the groundskeeper there, and also that Ruth would have played there (often, from 1914 until moving to the NL in 1935). The article even later cites 1936 as Bossard’s hire date.

Nothing in that article clears up how Ruth could have been at League Park while Bossard was a groundskeeper, and the 1936 date cited seems to contradict the alternate history where “Bossard moved the fences around in the 1920s and 1930s”. If nothing else, I’ll be reassured that no less a writer than Bob Sudyk, while in Cleveland, bit on this, like I would over a quarter-century later.

Interestingly, in the article, Veeck repeats the story that Bossard moved the fences. But here’s the thing about that — Veeck didn’t buy into the Indians until 1946. And in the rest of the article, while there are many incidents described, they all place Bossard’s antics post-1936. Bossard, for what it’s worth, denied Veeck’s story (“That would be against the rules.”) in other articles I found.

I’m a little disappointed that pulling the original article didn’t offer more specific information on the Ruth incident, but the context of the whole article makes me even more skeptical that it happened at all. If Emil Bossard started in the 1920s and there were an extra ten years of hijinks at least, wouldn’t there be at least one good, verifiable incident that would put him in Cleveland during those years, somewhere. But I haven’t found any yet.

Fun side connection: the author of this article, Bob Sudyk, wrote Gaylord Perry’s autobiography Me and the Spitter, one of the best cheating books ever written (check out the book here).

It took under a day to get the first bug report. Thanks go to Deanna, of Marinerds.

On p.19, Babe Ruth is said to have yelled “Give me a break” at Bossard, who doctored the box and watered down right field for him. But Ruth played in the AL from 1914-1934, and only fielded from 1918 on.

Yet in describing Bossard’s career, I said that from 1911, it was “twenty-five years before he got his break” and took over major league grounds keeping… which puts it past Ruth’s time.

Further, it’s 1935 when Steve O’Neill took over Cleveland in 1935, and in 1936 the new GM, Cy Slapnicka, asked him to recommend a new groundskeeper, and O’Neill, who’d seen Bossard’s work in Toledo, told Slapnicka that Bossard was the best. Slapnicka gave him a two-year contract, and Bossard stayed on forever. That story’s frequently repeated, and given the people involved, it’s easy to pin down the time.

And yet Emil Bossard’s frequently credited as “a grounds keeper for the Indians in the 1920s and 1930s” and said to have moved the fences back when the Yankees visited. See, for instance, this ESPN article.

For Bossard to be there, moving the fences around, he has to have been hired or at least present in Cleveland well ahead of O’Neill/Slapnicka. Plus, reading histories, they generally say that grounds keeping as a profession came to be in the late 1930s, with Emil and his sons.

Right now it looks like there are a couple of choices:
- Bossard got to Cleveland earlier than O’Neill/Slapnicka, and started much earlier moving fences and getting into trouble
- Bossard didn’t get to Cleveland earlier than 1936, the Ruth story’s apocryphal, and I didn’t catch the two-year gap between Ruth’s career in the AL and Bossard’s career as a groundskeeper.
- Ruth, while playing in the outfield as a Yankee, played an exhibition or some other game against a team Bossard worked for

The problem with the last one is that all I have is the Ruth quote: there’s no location or date information to help me track it down.

(I tried to stall Deanna by pointing out that Ruth played for the Providence Grays in 1914 of the American Association and would have faced the Toledo Mud Hens, but Deanna was undeterred, pointing out immediately that at that time, Ruth was still a pitcher.)

And unfortunately, there’s no great Bossard biography I can read to check events against a well-documented timeline.

I’m going to try and look into this some more and provide an update.