Tuesday, September 23, 2008

This Day in Baseball History (“Bonehead” Merkle Becomes Giant Scapegoat)


September 23, 1908—In one of the most contentious plays in the history of the national pastime, 19-year-old New York Giant Fred Merkle failed to touch second base before he left the field, expecting, as custom had it in those days, that the game was over. Instead, after mulling it over in a hotel room later that night, the umpire ruled that he had been tagged out by the Chicago Cubs’ Frank Chance.

The ruling nullified the run, leaving the contest all knotted up. In a subsequent playoff game the Cubs won, on their way to their last World Series—and Merkle would end up earning the nickname “Bonehead” for the rest of his playing days.

Bad luck hounded him, it seemed. Eventually, Merkle would make it to five World Series, as player or coach, but not one would he win. Even the one that looked, in retrospect like a sure thing—his stint as a coach with the 1926 New York Yankees—ended up as a loss.

Merkle was one of the first—but hardly the last—baseball players who could be likened to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in suffering from cruel fate. The following were also cursed, by their own fans as much as misfortune: Ralph Branca, Mark Littell, Calvin Schiraldi, Bill Buckner, and, in a particularly tragic case, California Angels relief pitcher Donnie Moore, who committed suicide three years after failing to gain the third strike that would have given his team the victory over the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 AL Championship Series.


For more details on the Merkle game and its denouement, I recommend the article in today’s New York Times by Kevin Baker (like yours truly, a Columbia College alum and Bergen County, N.J. product) or a social history I’ve already recommended in these pages, Cait Murphy’s Crazy ’08.

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