Mon May 18, 2015 4:17 pm
In his book Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era (that I really wanted to like more than I did -- a great re-telling of the 1930s, but I was hoping for more interconnection with American society), Charles Alexander writes:
As things played out, this year's "fall classic" wouldn't have the drama of last year's, although a person sitting close to the field in the $6.50 boxes could hardly have questioned the players' pugnacity. If for nothing else, the 1935 Series would be remembered for the torrent of really nasty bench jockeying that went on, especially by the Chicago Cubs. As one commentator has written of the Cubs, "They picked on physical features, ethnic background, religion, weight, embarrassing incidents -- anything to get a player flustered or angry."
Early in game one, first-base umpire George Moriarty called time and went over to the nearby visitors' dugout to lecture the Cubs on the need to quell their harassment of Hank Greenberg -- "pants' presser" being one of the milder epithets he'd heard directed at the big slugger. From that point on, the Chicago players also yammered away at Moriarty.
(...)
For game three, the Series moved to Chicago. Again Wrigley Field's capacity had been enlarged by the construction of wooden bleachers above the regular stands in right and left fields. ...It was a ragged game, marked by wobbly pitching shoddy fielding -- and by continual verbal exchanges between Moriarty and the Cubs dugout. After Moriarty ejected manager Grimm for arguing too vigorously over a call at second base, reserve outfielder Tucker Stainback and Woody English, Chicago's bench-riding captain, also got the thumb, with Moriarty standing over the dugout occupants and giving them something of a clinic in profanity. Both commissioner Landis and Ford Frick were sitting close enough to hear most of it; Frick declared that no National league umpire would be allowed to talk that way.
The next morning Landis summoned Grimm, English, Billy Herman, Billy Jurges, and Moriarty to his little Michigan Avenue office. Grimm avowed that he'd "never hard an umpire abuse members of a ball team with the language Moriarty used yesterday to Herman, to Jurges, to English, and to me, and then to the entire bench." Landis asked Herman to repeat what Moriarty had said. "I have always prided myself on a command of lurid expressions," Landis said years later. "I must confess that I learned from these young men some variations of the language even I didn't know existed."
Bill
