"The
Death of the 'dead ball'"
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The outrage was visceral. Within days, teams threatened to boycott games in which Mays pitched. Then, a week later, as Mays was set to pitch against the Detroit Tigers, his first game since the tragedy, he became rattled when he was handed a note from Detroit’s Ty Cobb. It read, “If it was within my power‚ I would have inscribed on Ray Chapman’s tombstone these words: ‘Here lies a victim of arrogance‚ viciousness, and greed.’ ”
As you can imagine, there was a lot of hearsay and emotion surrounding the event. This makes it all the more important to stump for Mays and point out some of the factors that suggest that maybe he wasn’t as barbaric as many liked to believe. First, it is true that the day’s wet field could have contributed to a slippery ball and an ensuing feral pitch. Second, as the overcast day progressed, Chapman and other batters probably had a hard time seeing the ball, which, since umpires rarely replaced game balls during that era, was likely very dirty. And, third, Chapman was among the many batters who stood close to the plate to get a better look at the incoming pitch. This strategy is still cited as a reason why some batters are hit by pitches. But there was no amount of justification or rationalization or stumping that would spare Mays a lifetime of defensiveness. He constantly denied accusations that he irresponsibly lost control of a spitball, a tricky pitch that baseball ruled illegal early in 1920. Worse were the charges that he purposefully “beaned” Chapman. It didn’t help Mays’ case that he was going for his 100th career win that night. Was he more aggressive than normal with that significant benchmark in reach? Yes or no, he lost the game in which Chapman was hit, but reached his 100th win in his next start, the game against Cobb’s Tigers.
And what’s a sad story without an equally moving epilogue? For starters, Stanley Coveleski, Cleveland’s starting pitcher that fateful night, had a career that closely paralleled Mays’. In 1969, the Veterans Committee had kind words for the spitballer and inducted Coveleski into the Hall of Fame. But Mays died two years later without the call from Cooperstown, and the Chapman tragedy is often cited as the reason why. Another Hall of Famer, Joe Sewell, was the stocky rookie tapped to fill Cleveland’s tragically vacant shortstop position. Two months after Chapman’s death, his Indians rallied to win the first of the franchise’s two World Series titles. But making the story even more punishing is that Chapman’s wife and daughter were dead seven years later, the former by suicide, the latter by measles.
The Chapman tragedy was the final blow to the “dead-ball era,”.. . .
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