John McGraw, when reminiscing about his “thirty years in baseball” for a series of articles syndicated by The North American Newspaper Alliance in 1923, called Arthur “Bugs” Raymond, “one of the greatest natural pitchers who ever lived.”
He recalled the first time Chief Myers caught Raymond:
“’Say Mc,’ (he said), ‘that fellow can do more tricks with a baseball than any man in the world.’”
McGraw said, “Raymond’s long suit” was the spit ball and, “He could make that ball do the querist of stunts and never did he hesitate to pull one of these tricks when the team was in a hole.”
McGraw blamed Raymond’s “fondness for companionship” for continually leading him astray, no matter how many times he pledged to stop drinking. Even when McGraw tried to keep people from loaning Raymond money, the pitcher would always find a way to get some and continue drinking.
On one occasion, with his starter struggling on the mound, McGraw sent the bat boy to the bullpen to get Raymond. Not being able to locate him, the team’s trainer then looked and eventually found Raymond drinking in a nearby tavern:
“He had taken the new ball that I had given him for warming up and had sold it to the saloon keeper.”
McGraw told his version of the story of what happened after Raymond took the “Keeley Cure” in Dwight, Illinois in an attempt to quit drinking before the 1911 season:
“Bugs was very proud of his term in the Keeley Institute. He even wore a class button and very proudly exhibited an album with photographs and other souvenirs of his schoolmates.”
As the papers in New York were filled with stories of Raymond’s “wonderful reform “while the club trained in Texas, McGraw was seeing “ominous signs.”
The team stayed in the Oriental Hotel on a trip to Dallas where “they always served cocktails,” with Sunday night dinner service.:
“Knowing the head steward, Bugs decided to visit him. He left the dining room and started to the kitchen. As he stepped through the swinging doors his eye lighted on the long rows of cocktails—hundreds of them all lined in rows. Promptly, Raymond started right down the first row, drinking one after another until he had consumed more than a dozen.”
McGraw had a detective follow Raymond for the next 24 hours—while papers continued to report on his “reform.” The Giants manager questioned the pitcher who denied drinking. McGraw said he faced a “dilemma:”
“I didn’t know whether to denounce him to the newspaper men who had tried so hard to help him, or to make one more attempt to bring about reform.”
McGraw said he never knew a newspaper reporter who would “violate a confidence” and enlisted them to serve as a mock jury in a “trial: of the pitcher:
The jury was a who’s who of legendary New York baseball writers: Sam Crane, Sid Mercer, Boseman Bulger, Damon Runyon, and Charles Van Loan, “and one or two of the younger writers,” whose names the manager could no longer recall:
“Gentlemen, I have called upon you to sit as a jury on this man. He has promised all of you not drink and you have given him every help. You have praised him in the papers. He has violated that faith. He’s a big bum that’s laid down on his friends.”
McGraw presented the evidence and asked the reporters to decide whether to share it with their readers or to give Raymond another chance:
McGraw read the detective report to the assembled jury, in a back room the Turf Exchange bar in Dallas, Raymond “drank seven glasses of beer, ate a handful of pretzels, and two Bermuda onion,” on to the nearby Knight Saloon, Raymond had “drank nine glasses of beer, ate more pretzels, and two or three more onions.”
Raymond called the report “a dammed lie.”
His defense:
“Mac, of course I might’ve had a couple dozen glasses of beer, but I’m telling you it’s a lie—I ain’t eat an onion in seven months.”
In sympathy, the jury unanimously decided to give Raymond one more chance and not report his tumble from the wagon. Raymond, of course, vowed to stop drinking.
McGraw’s ploy bought him a stretch of several weeks when Raymond “partially straightened up,” unfortunately, like every other last chance Raymond was given, he eventually relapsed.
Raymond died less than 18 months after McGraw’s mock trial.
Baseball History Daily 