Almost a century after The Pitch That Killed, remembering the Cleveland Indians' Ray Chapman: Bill Livingston
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Three miles from Lake View Cemetery, the Indians played baseball at League Park in the deadball era and throughout the Roaring ‘20s.
On Friday of this week, August 16, the weather was bright and chilly in the morning, although it warmed in the afternoon. It was a day stolen from Indian summer and not summer itself, with the maple leaves reddening near Raymond Johnson Chapman’s grave. The puffy clouds would have made pop-ups less of a challenge and the temperature would not have made the woolen uniforms of his era such a discomfort.
August 16, 2013 was a day to die for. On August 16, 1920, it was literally the same thing for Ray Chapman.
The regular shortstop for the Indians, and thus the most important defensive player in front of home plate, Chapman was known throughout baseball as “Chappie.” He was a friend to all, even the misanthropic Ty Cobb. On Friday 93 years ago, in a game against the New York Yankees at the Polo Grounds (Yankee Stadium hadn’t been built yet), pitcher Carl Mays -- a “submariner” who threw rising fastballs with a delivery on which his right hand almost scraped the pitcher’s mound -- struck Chapman in the head with a pitch. So loud was the crack when the ball hit Chapman that Mays, thinking it must have struck the bat, fielded the rolling ball and prepared to throw to first.
Chapman collapsed and died overnight, at 4 a.m. on August 17, 1920. He remains the only player in baseball history to die as a result of a play on the field.
"Come to visit Chappie? This is the day," said a Lake View worker, George Malbasa, who led the way to the grave site Friday on a motorized cart
There, a visitor found a variety of objects, including baseballs, bats, gloves, caps and flags, decorating the granite monument at Chapman’s grave.
Twelve baseballs were scattered on the ground before it, with anot her perched atop it and a final ball resting in a glove on a ledge below the inscription of Chapman's name.
Four ping-pong balls with seams painted on them to look like baseballs; three bats, one a toy, two of them badly weathered; two American flags, one on each side of the monument; and one golf ball also lay on the ground.
So did a plastic batting helmet, which decades later became a tardy safety measure.
Six caps with the Chief Wahoo symbol, which was not drawn until 1947 although depictions of Indians decorated the uniforms as early as 1928, had been placed on the ledge below the inscription.
Atop the monument was $1.19 in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies, three pine cones and three stones. Perhaps the latter were in keeping with a Jewish custom. Chapman was a Christian, not Jewish, but he was considered a paragon of clean play and sportsmanship by all.
A plaque, engraved soon after Chapman's death and now on display at Heritage Park in Progressive Field, celebrates those qualities.
In 1920, Chapman’s death led to a convulsion of grief around the American League; threats to boycott games when the widely disliked Mays pitched; and the unlikely rise of a replacement player and future Baseball Hall of Famer, Joe Sewell, who made his big-league debut after Chapman died.
The Indians won the first of their two World Series championships that year, with Sewell playing as if he were Chapman reincarnated. The story is vividly told in “The Pitch That Killed,” an exhaustively researched book by former Tulsa sportswriter and current Oklahoma State faculty member Mike Sowell.
Sowell notes that gambling, not Performance Enhancing Drugs, was the vice that afflicted the game in Chapman's era. The lifetime ban of eight Chicago players for throwing the 1919 World Series occurred late in 1920 when the Sox were still in the race. It certainly contributed to the Indians’ pennant.
As for sportsmanhip, “anything goes” had been the motto from the earliest days of the game. Along with the gambling, the rules were clumsily crafted and filled with loopholes for the clever to exploit. “King” Kelly, a Hall of Fame player from the 19th century, once raced from his seat in the dugout to catch a pop-up a teammate had lost in the sun, shouting to the lone umpire, “Kelly in for O’Shea!” At the time, substitutions were not banned during play.
No less than baseball numbers guru and Sabermetrics pioneer Bill James argues in “The Politics of Glory,” a book about the way Cooperstown really works, that Chapman should be in the Hall of Fame. James wonders why Ross Youngs, an outfielder with less-than-stellar statistics, entered Cooperstown on a vote of sympathy after dying prematurely, and Chapman did not.
“His numbers would be better, but he played only one season with the lively ball,” said Sowell. “In 1917, a kind of pre-All-Star Game contest of baseball skills was held in Boston. Chapman was the fastest man in running around the bases, and Ty Cobb was one of those who competed against him.”
Nearly a century after Chapman’s death, the temptation is to see him as a baseball Galahad, untainted by steroids (they hadn’t been invented yet), unsullied by the vicious, spikes-high, brawling style of Cobb.
Chapman was a national figure, a popular player in a wildly popular sport, a man whose death, like that of Dale Earnhardt Sr. in NASCAR, made his game safer. Doctored pitches that took erratic, uncontrollable paths like the spitball were largely outlawed after the 1920 season. Batting helmets at the plate and in the coaching boxes and screens to protect players sitting in the dugout all eventually resulted from safety concerns raised by Chapman’s death.
At Chapman’s grave, the tattered, mildewed glove and the worn baseball in it had both seen hard use. The ball had been played with until the seams had given way, and the cover had almost come off. It had been used up, just like the fragile leather of the glove that held it.
“We will never forget you, Ray” was written on the unraveling ball.
Nearly a century after a man's death is a long time to be unforgotten. Yet on Friday, a day so lovely Chapman would have wanted to play two, his legacy was as much his unblemished life as his death, as much as his love for the game as his loss.
