Fullerton’s Prediction
Seven years before he watched the events of the 1919 World Series unfold from the press box, Hugh Fullerton warned readers of The Chicago Record-Herald:
“Baseball as a great national sport is in greater peril today than ever before. Not until the present week did I realize this fact. The gamblers, bookmakers and handbook men, who ruined horse racing…and who made fighting a noisome scandal, have attached themselves to baseball this year as never before”
Hugh Fullerton
“The King of them all for Superstitiousness”
In 1916, Napoleon Lajoie, then a member of the Philadelphia Athletics, told The Cleveland Press:
“I have known many a ballplayer who collected hairpins, held his breath if he saw a circus horse, but Bill Armour was the king of them all for superstitiousness.
Bill Armour
“If you put a ladder in front of the door to his room Bill would have jumped out of the window sooner than have come under that ladder. I think he would have stayed in there and starved to death rather than let the ‘jinx’ take him overboard because he went under a step-ladder. Me? No, I am not superstitious, it’s all nonsense.
“Going to fetch me a black cat? Don’t bring it up here; we have enough bad luck as it is without any black cat hanging around the clubhouse.”
Napoleon Lajoie
Black cat or not, Lajoie was correct about the Athletics “bad luck.” The team finished in eighth place with a 36-117 record. The forty-one-year-old Lajoie hit just .246; 92 points below his career average. He retired at the end of the season.
“Any old Manager can run a Team of real Baseball Players”
Bill Dinneen pitched in the major leagues for 12 seasons, and a month after his playing career ended he began his 28-year tenure as an American League umpire
Bill Dinneen
In 1910, he told Joseph Samuel “Joe” Jackson, sports editor of The Washington Post, how major league clubs should allocate money:
“’If I were a club owner, I would invest $15,000 in a scout and $5,00 in a manger And old manager can run a team of real baseball players But the best leader in the world can’t make bad material good Every major league team needs a thoroughbred judge of raw material more than a teacher of baseball tricks’’’
Jackson said Dinneen’s observation confirmed what he thought while watching the Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago Cubs four games to one in that year’s World Series
“His remarks come merely to emphasize what the world’s series showed—that a club that is hitting the ball over the lot, and giving its pitchers support, will set at naught all schemes to beat it by carefully thought out plans that might be applicable if the other fellows would stop making so many base hits”
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