The Brotherhood's Revolt and Baseball At The Pyramids

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I'm back on Deadspin today, with a bit of forgotten baseball history that I've been digging into for the last few months. It's got it all: moustaches, old-fashioned racism, and a cloak-and-dagger labor war. What more could you want?

The bulletin was posted on the evening of February 8, 1889, in the lobby of Cairo's Hotel d'Orient:

Base-ball at the Pyramids. The Chicago and All-America teams, comprising the Spalding base-ball party, will please report in the hotel office, in uniform, promptly at ten o'clock to-morrow morning. We shall leave for the hotel at that hour, camels having been provided for the All-Americas and donkeys for the Chicago players, with carriages for the balance of the party. The Pyramids will be inspected, the Sphinx visited, and a game played upon the desert near by, beginning at 2 o'clock.

Around the notice huddled 20 travel-weary ballplayers, baseball missionaries brought by Albert Spalding to spread the national pastime around the globe. They had traveled from Hawaii to Australia, from Ceylon to the Suez, exhibiting their game—and Spalding's sporting equipment—whenever they got the chance. In Australia they had played for thousands, but in Cairo they were curiosities who passed their time like all American travelers: shopping in the bazaars, screaming at beggars and complaining about the food. Tomorrow would come an exhibition that nobody asked for, which remains one of the strangest in the history of American sport.

Among them was one whose mind was not on sightseeing. John Montgomery Ward—shortstop, lawyer, and president of the nascent players' union—was transfixed by a short item in the American newspaper, the first he had seen in months, which said that the National League had taken advantage of his absence to enact a salary cap that would cut his income in half. As his teammates prepared to greet the Sphinx, the most remarkable mind in baseball was taking the first steps to a revolution.

The Stadium That Launched The Space Age

Every right-thinking Met fan misses Shea Stadium. Not a lot of good has happened to this franchise in the five years (five years!) since old Shea closed, and the old dump looks rosier with every passing year. For Sports on Earth, I dug into the history of Shea's construction, when New York City sold itself out to build a space age stadium that would be obsolete within a decade—signs of a city suffering stadium fever, a malady that continues to afflict the nation more each year.

“On April 12, 1960, the mayor of New York called a press conference to show off a new $14,000 toy. One hundred reporters crowded around to get a glimpse of the plastic model, as tall as the mayor’s hand, which showed a C-shaped baseball stadium with symmetrical dimensions and an outfield open to the sky. Flashbulbs popped as Mayor Robert Wagner turned to a second model, a complete circle, with a gridiron on the field. Two models, two sports, one stadium: A miracle structure that he promised would cost taxpayers a mere $12 million.

”We are going to see this through,” Wagner announced, with the blind confidence of every mayor who has ever caught stadium fever. “We couldn’t turn back now if we wanted to.”

Four years and five days later, Shea Stadium was open for business. It wasn’t the first multi-use ballpark, but it was the benchmark for those that followed — Three Rivers and the Vet, Oakland Coliseum and Busch II — as sports teams forever lost the habit of paying for their own stadiums. Today, they are remembered as an embarrassment, called cookie cutters or concrete donuts, but in 1960 they were the future. As reporters crowded around, the mayor’s message was clear. There was a new world waiting for us, and this ballpark would take us there. ”

Wasting Time In A Fairytale Corner of Prospect Park

All summer, I've been wasting my Sunday afternoons in the shady bits of Prospect Park. There's nowhere more shady—in every sense of the word—than the peculiar little corner known as the Vale of Cashmere. For Narratively, producer Emily Kwong and I dug into the Vale's history, for a short piece on WNYC.

If you liked it, thank Emily. She's a genius. I just like to talk.

Lee Morgan's Last Night at Slug's

Today at Narratively, I break out of my baseball niche to dig into historical crime of a different sort. Lee Morgan has always been one of my favorite postwar jazz musicians, but until I started reading up on him I had no idea about the heartbreaking story of his life and death.

On an icy night in 1967, one of the world's greatest trumpeters didn't own a trumpet. His horn was in the pawnshop, along with his winter coat, sold to pay for heroin. Three years after releasing one of the most successful jazz albums of the 1960s, Lee Morgan was in the depths of a drug habit that had consumed him for nearly a decade. Even if he'd had a trumpet, he was so out of practice that he could barely play. That was the night he met the woman who would save his life.

A transplant from North Carolina, the woman who would become Helen Morgan was known in jazz circles as "the little hip square." She didn't touch heroin, but her apartment was a refuge for struggling musicians, including many addicts. After the clubs had closed, "Helen's Place" was somewhere to get warm and get fed. On that particular cold night, she says in "The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan," Morgan came by, "raggedy and pitiful…and for some kind of reason, my heart just went out to him.

"I said, 'Child, it's zero degrees out there and all you have is a jacket. Where is your coat?'"

"In hock," he said. She got the coat back for him, along with his trumpet, and like a lost puppy, he followed her home. From then on, she said, "he hung on to me," and in turn she "took over total control" of Lee Morgan, helping the onetime prodigy grow into the musician he was meant to be. Helen would get him well, she would get him working, and five years later, she would end his life.

"She was a sucker for people who were suckers," says Larry Reni Thomas, author of "The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan." "He was a sucker for heroin."

It starts ugly and gets uglier. You'll like it. 

Visitors To Hell

Today, I make my Deadspin debut, with a meaty little story I've been wanting to write for the last few months. This is some of the best reporting I've ever done—the untold stories of Jack Lummus and Joe Pinder, the only two professional baseball players to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II.

The walls were plywood. The ramp was steel. On June 6, 1944, Joe Pinder fought seasickness in a cramped troop carrier, waiting to take his place on Omaha Beach. On March 8, 1945, Jack Lummus grew impatient in an Iwo Jima foxhole, after 36 hours pinned down by sniper fire. Both men had once made a living playing minor league baseball. Both would be dead by night.

Over 4,000 minor leaguers served the American military during World War II. While some major league stars spent the war barnstorming from base to base on service teams, minor league players were regular soldiers, no different from any other men who left behind careers to fight. Of those 4,000, only two were granted the Congressional Medal of Honor. As ballplayers, Jack Lummus and Joe Pinder were ordinary. As soldiers, they were special.

By the time Pinder made landfall at Omaha, less than an hour after the start of the Normandy invasion, the precisely planned assault had slid into chaos. The naval bombardment had failed to destroy the German guns, and the amphibious tanks designed to provide cover for the first wave of infantry had sunk just offshore. The beach was slick with American blood, and every new man who approached it faced a murderous combination of artillery, machine guns, and mines.

"Thousands of bodies were lying there," said Pfc. Buster Hamlett, as quoted in Russell Miller'soral history of the invasion. "You could walk on the bodies, as far as you could see along the beach, without touching the ground. Parts of bodies—heads, legs and arms—floated in the sea."

It doesn't get any more fun from there.

Leo the Lip, Arky Vaughan, And A Holdout Called Frenchy

70 years ago this month, the Brooklyn Dodgers found themselves fantastically inconvenienced by a European tiff known as World War II. Rather than travel south for spring training, they went north, and not very far, to the upstate resort known as Bear Mountain. It was cold, it was stressful, it was baseball.

On March 21, 1944, as the Nazis occupied Hungary, the Japanese pushed into India, and the Allies assaulted the ruined Italian hamlet of Cassino, manager Leo Durocher watched the snow, and dreamed of Florida. In deference to the army's need for trains, the sternly patriotic commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had decreed that no club would travel south for spring training. And so, for the second time, Durocher's Brooklyn Dodgers wintered at the Bear Mountain Inn in New York, where the fires were warm, the steaks were thick and the practice fields were covered in eight inches of fresh powder.

They could work around the snow. While other teams shivered, West Point allowed the Dodgers to use its massive field house whenever the cadets weren't drilling. Durocher's problem was his infield, which had been so savaged by the draft that Branch Rickey had suggested his manager play second base or shortstop. Although ostensibly a player-manager, the Dodgers' skipper hadn't played a full season since 1938. His knees were bad, his bat was slow and he had acorns in his elbow.

If you're asking, "What the hell do you mean, acorns in his elbow?" then you have something in common with the sporting public of 1944. To find out what the hell Leo's talking about, click here, to be taken on to Sports on Earth.

The Killer Named Gyp The Blood

I've spent much of the last few weeks with my head floating around in an imaginary version of New Orleans, editing stories for Narratively's week on the Crescent City. We have some really lovely stories up there, none closer to my heart than the one I spent entirely too long working on, about a Storyville murder that has largely been forgotten. We'll see if I can fix that. 

Ever since the first flatboat sailor came down the Mississippi, loaded with cash and rotgut whiskey, New Orleans has been wary of outsiders. On Easter Sunday, 1913, a trio of New Yorkers learned that lesson well, when they found themselves in the center of a gunfight that forever altered the nation's most famous red light district. Driving the chaos was a man named Charles Harrison, better known as Gyp the Blood.

After the shooting, Harrison got his picture in the paper, under the headline "Harrison Bad Man." The Daily Picayune described him as a cold-blooded killer with a cocaine habit and a sideline in white slavery, but the picture does not match the crimes. About thirty years old at the time, Harrison is shown as soft-featured, with a bulging nose and an awkward smile. In his left hand, this "man of evil days and black surroundings" clutches a small white dog.

"He was spruce," the Daily Picayune would later write, "even dapper in appearance, as far as clothes went, but his pale, smooth-shaven face, bulging at the eyes, caving into sunken cheeks and squaring into a brutal jaw, bore the cold, steely cast of unregenerate impulse to crime."

Gyp the Blood was a hardened criminal of the Lower East Side. Or perhaps he was a fake, a coward who killed a man to prove he wasn't scared. He was a dupe, tricked by his employers into throwing his life away. Or he was a wild man, whose itchy trigger finger caused a bloodbath, and ruined business for hundreds of law-abiding purveyors of vice.

In the photograph, all Harrison seemed to want was to show off his puppy.

If you like that, there's about 5,000 words more. Eat it up—it's juicy.

Radio, Video Games, And A Beloved Doomed Ballpark

I realize I've plugged this piece before, when it first ran in the inestimable Classical Magazine, but last month it ran online in its entirety. Read up!

Two hours before first pitch, Brad Tammen combs his stadium for peanut shells. He sees one wedged into a seat back, and points it out to a staff member, who prises the stubborn, seemingly-fossilized shell out with his fingernail.

"I swear, I thought we had every one of them," says the general manager of the Nashville Sounds. It's peanut-free night at Herschel Greer Stadium, which means no peanuts, Cracker Jacks, or (oddly) Dippin' Dots. Tammen has faith in his grounds crew getting the stadium clean. He's worried about the sky. "I don't need another thunderstorm," he says. "We don't need any more rain."

Not bad stuff, eh? I bet you want to find out what happens next, eh? Well click up there! Click click click!

I've had some other odds and ends run in the Classical this month, all quite heartfelt. The first is an appreciation of the most wonderfully verbose-named video game I've ever played: World Soccer: Winning Eleven 7 International. Just rolls off the tongue, don't it?

It was not a functional relationship. I gave and gave, time and energy and effort, and got nothing back but hurt. But we do not always have a say in such things, and the video game that stole my heart was Winning Eleven, a mid-2000s soccer franchise that was, for all its mastery over me, as awkward as my fifteen year-old self.

Its cover was ugly, its graphics were bland, and its generic team and player names ranged from forgivable (Merseyside Red, for Liverpool) to absurd—meet Ruud Von Nistelroum, star striker for, um, Trad Bricks. Even the name was clumsy, as the European Pro Evolution Soccer 3 was rebranded as World Soccer: Winning Eleven 7 International.

And yet, as with many early-life relationships, I saw something in the object of my affection that was, maybe, not there. It was janky and goofy and unconvincing, but beneath the surface was one of the smartest soccer games of all time. I have found healthier relationships since then, in life and on various gaming platforms, but I still believe that bit to be true.

If so inclined, you can enjoy that beauty here.

And last, out of fear that the Mets ace radio partnership was on its way to being broken up, I wrote a plea for continuity in an organization that has none.

What's the best season to need crutches? Look out your window at the blackening New York slush, and it seems reasonable that, if one absolutely must spend three weeks Rear Windowing inside a walk-up apartment, January would be the ideal time to do it. Why waste summer sweating in your bandages, staring out at clear blue skies and aching to be in a park? Only a fool, you’d think, would prefer crutches in July.

Unless that fool was backed up by Howie Rose.

Crutch-bound for three weeks last summer, I left my apartment only four times. Once was for lunch, when a foolish attempt to crutch my way to a nearby park left me feeling like I'd attacked my arms with a meat tenderizer. The other three excursions were for baseball. I'd slide down the stairs, crutch to the bench in front of my building, and spend three or four hours breathing and smiling, the Mets chirping from my transistor.

A person on crutches wants to vacate the body, head floating off cramped shoulders and away into the blue. Sports, at their best, make that possible—and nothing can deliver us from our blighted physical form quite as well as good sports radio. In the world of good sports radio, I know of no pairing so transporting as Josh Lewin and Howie Rose.

Did You Miss Me? No? That's Fine. No Biggie.

I've returned to you, good people of the Internet, and not a moment too soon, I'm sure. What was I doing while I was away? Well, mostly, thinking about baseball.

In a Mediterranean country, not very long ago, my sunburnt family chugged its way through pasta and a €7 jug of rosé and I banged my head against a foreign wifi connection, struggling to tune in New York’s sports radio station WFAN. This was not a good look, maybe, but Matt Harvey was considering throwing a no-hitter and everyone at the table understood. By the time the connection crackled to life, it was clear from Howie Rose's gutpunched tone that something Metsian had happened, and another near no-no was gone.

So: deep breath, and back to vacation mode. Harvey has carried three no-hitters into the seventh this year, and looks sure to throw one at some point this season. Of course, I thought the same thing last May about R.A. Dickey, before Johan Santana’s duct tape shoulder beat him to it, suggesting that Flushing may yet be due for a Shaun Marcum perfect game. What worried me, as I returned to slurping pink wine and slapping away high-class European mosquitos, was the name of the man on the mound. Not his stuff, which flattens hitters like a boulder does Wile E. Coyote. Not his future, which appears bright enough to confound every pessimistic Mets fan urge imaginable.

No, just: he’s Matt Harvey, alias Matt, alias Harvey. Nothing more. No nickname, nothing for short. Full stop.

How can we solve this great player's nickname drought? Read on, at the Classical.

And now it's Friday, it's four o'clock, it's hot as hell in my apartment—I'm gonna take a nap and then make something yummy to drink. Happy weekend, all! 

At BAM, John Turturro Stars In An Elegant Car Wreck

A couple of years ago, I interviewed John Turturro about his directing.​ Last week, I repeated the trick, this time talking to him about his acting. If you want to read about it, CLICK HERE NOW.

A sample:​

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, once a night, John Turturro has been climbing a steeple. To a quiet drumbeat, he goes hand over hand up the side of a tilting house, and when he reaches the top, he does not beat his chest like King Kong.

“I’m just trying to be careful,” he said last week.

His wife and friends watch from below, panicked and exhilarated, and the audience feels the same, joined together for a few minutes in the timeless tension of wondering whether or not a man is going to fall.

This finale of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which opened May 19 at BAM and plays there through June 9, is not exactly as Ibsen wrote it. In the original, the master builder of the title, Halvard Solness, climbs his tower off-stage, his progress relayed by those below, with thrilling dialogue like, “He climbs and climbs. He will soon be at the top now.” For this stripped-down production, director Andrei Belgrader puts the tower on stage, and keeps the worst of Ibsen’s dialogue off it. Five years ago, in BAM’sEndgame, Mr. Belgrader and Mr. Turturro were praised for finding unexpected humor in Beckett, and here they have worked a similar miracle: wringing life from one of the dreariest playwrights in the canon. This is a Master Builder for the gut, not the mind.