I’m working on a new baseball book, and it should be in print within a year, so get your wallets ready for this epochal event. It’s partly made up of the tracers I ran during my stint on Bill James On Line, but augmented by the tracers I’ve run here and will continue to run, as in this column below, but I plan to spend the next year editing them into a smooth narrative, eliminating redundancies, such as redefining what a tracer is, and justifying it to my naysayers on the site, who would chime in regularly asking me questions such as “Isn’t this just nitpicking?” and “Why do you to continue use up oxygen?”
There’s never been a shortage of material to trace. I’d say that the opposite is true: given enough facts to allow me to trace its roots, almost any baseball anecdote, but especially those told years after the fact, will reveal itself to be wall-to-wall bullshit upon close scrutiny. At first, I thought I was running in unusual luck, coming across all of these fundamentally flawed anecdotes, but gradually I realized that, no, they were so commonly flawed because human memory is so prone to errors, often crucial and fundamental errors. Ask any human to narrate an event that happened to him years ago, and it’s far likelier than not that he will not only screw up the fine details but will screw up the basic facts of the event. And why should ballplayers be any different from humans?
The difference between stories told by ballplayers and those told by lesser mortals is that with ballplayers, we have an objective record to check their details against. So I look for stories rich in checkable details—dates, teams, opponents’ and teammates’ names—and I go to town on those details to locate in the record books the game in question.
This one concerns a player no one has heard of, named Red Murray of the New York (baseball) Giants of the 1910s. Born John Joseph Murray in 1884 in Arnot, Pennsylvania (“I am too a Pennsylvanian!” “Arnot!” “Am too!”), he was a big star in his time, a league leader in home runs (with 7), a four-time NL champion. And apparently a feisty and independent thinker as this anecdote will show, though perhaps not quite so dramatically as the story has passed into baseball history.
Like Ted Williams’ quote, this one begins with the fatal words “I never will forget” and it concerns something that never happened. (So there’s really nothing to forget?) It was remembered a long time ago, in 1966, by a guy who claims to have witnessed it well over a century ago, in the 1910s, so perhaps you want to excuse his lapsed memory, but it really is a whopper, and I like it because it contains so many checkable details.
Rube Marquard, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the New York Giants, told the author of The Glory of Their Times in the mid-1960s about a teammate named Red Murray pissing off his manager, the irascible John McGraw, by hitting a game-winning home run.
“I’ll never forget,” Marquard begins his story, “one day we were playing Pittsburgh, and it was Red Murray's turn to bat, with the score tied in the ninth inning. There was a man on second with none out. Murray came over to McGraw -- I was sitting next to McGraw on the bench -- and he said, “What do you want me to do, Mac?”
“What do I want you to do?” McGraw said. “What are you doing in the National League? There's the winning run on second base and no one out. What would you do if you were the manager?”
“I'd sacrifice the man to third,” Murray said.
“Well,” McGraw said, “that's exactly what I want you to do.”
So Murray went up to the plate to bunt. After he got to the batter’s box, though, he backed out and looked over at McGraw again.
McGraw poked his elbow in my ribs. “Look at that so and so,” he said. “He told me what he should do, and I told him what he should do, and now he's undecided. I bet you he forgot from the bench to the plate.”
Now in those days-- and I guess it's the same now --when a man was up there to bunt, the pitcher would try to keep the ball high and tight. Well, it so happened that Red was a high ball hitter. Howie Camnitz was pitching for Pittsburgh. He wound up and in came the ball, shoulder high. Murray took a terrific cut at it, and the ball went over the left field fence. It was a home run and the game was over.
Marquard then goes on to tell the funny part of the story, all about McGraw fining Murray $100 for winning the game by disobeying his orders, but the profusion of game details—Pittsburgh, Howie Camnitz, score tied, 9th inning, man on second, no outs—allows us to narrow down these events: Red Murray, after all, hit only 37 home runs in his eleven-year MLB career, only two of which were off Howie Camnitz, one in 1912, the other in 1913.
(Here’s a link to all 37 of Murray’s home runs, and the pitchers he hit them off: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/event_hr.fcgi?id=murrare01&t=b.)
Thirty-seven home runs might seem paltry to lead a major league nowadays, much less to accumulate in an eleven-year career, but Murray was a legitimate slugger in the Dead Ball Era, his single-season high in HRs, 7, being sufficient to lead the National League in 1909.
Both home runs off Camnitz were inside-the-park jobs, so “over the left field fence” is out, but more significantly, all the dramatic details about the ninth inning and the score tied also go out the window. The 1912 homerun came in the fourth inning, and the 1913 inside-the-park job came in the second, so Murray never hit any home run off Camnitz that came anywhere near ending the game in the ninth inning.
What did happen? Without suggesting that Marquard was psychotic or delusional or lying, he obviously and seriously misremembered something, probably some time when Murray did disobey McGraw’s instruction to bunt and probably did hit a long shot, possibly even facing Camnitz, just without the hyper-dramatic flourishes.
Apparently, this story has been told and re-told, so often that the hyper-drama, which is as far I can tell, completely false, has been deemed truer than true. It has escaped the gravity of legend and has flown off into the outer space of verified fact. Murray’s SABR bio reports it as unchallenged history: “On one home run, according to an oft-reported story, McGraw ordered Murray to lay down a sacrifice bunt but the independent-thinking slugger swung away instead. As the story goes, McGraw became so irate at Murray’s refusal to follow orders that he fined him $50.” Other than the amount of the fine, SABR’s version supports the tale in all of its elements, and I’m sure there are other “oft-reported” versions out there, in flat contradiction of the records.
The records, and certainly the authority of baseball-reference.com, simply didn’t exist during the decades that Marquard was repeating this tall tale, so since he wasn’t being contradicted, people assumed that it was accurate, and repeated Marquard’s version to others, who repeated it ad infinitum. Even now, I’m sure that some of my readers, being exposed to the facts, will offer excuses: “Maybe this happened in a spring training game,” and “Maybe baseball-reference.com is incomplete”—I’ve heard ‘em all, including “So Marquard got a few details wrong—it’s still a great story.”
But in my book (and this is my book) it’s always better to know the truth than it is to believe a falsehood, no matter how oft it is told.