Welcome to the Baseball History Podcast: Featuring This Week in Baseball History, baseball dictionary and a tour of baseball cities. I’m your game announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 23 of the 2006 baseball season
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 3 week of April.
April 19
1949 Monuments honoring Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Miller Huggins are unveiled in centerfield during Opening Day ceremonies held at Yankee Stadium.
Miller James Huggins was born March 27, 1879 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Nicknamed “Mighty Mite”, he managed the powerhouse New York Yankee teams of the 1920s and won six American League pennants and three World Series championships.
As a player, Huggins joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1904 as a second baseman. Despite being only 5-foot-6-inches tall, or perhaps because of it, Huggins proved very adept at getting on base. Over a 13-year career which shifted to St. Louis in 1910, he led the league in walks four times and regularly posted an on base percentage near .400. He scored 100 or more runs three times and regularly stole 30 or more bases. He finished his career with 324 stolen bases.
He was fast and sure-handed afield; his record is dotted with games in which he handled 15 chances, or figured in three double plays. He led the league in putouts, assists, double plays, and fielding once each. He was the ideal leadoff man, a switch-hitter who coaxed 1,002 career walks and stole some 50 bases a season. Not a long-ball hitter, he did have three triples in a game in 1904.
The Cardinals acquired Huggins in 1910. By 1913 he was player-manager, and by 1917 had retired to the bench. He prodded two third-place finishes out of his nondescript team, and guided a green and awkward Rogers Hornsby through his first Major League seasons. Holder of a law degree, though he never practiced, and a shrewd investor in the stock market, Huggins was businessman enough to think he could buy the St. Louis club. His bid rebuffed, he resigned. Ban Johnson, the opportunistic president of the American League, promptly urged Jacob Ruppert, the Yankees’ principal owner, to grab Huggins. The manager’s record was not distinguished, but he was a sound baseball man, and Johnson was happy to help steal him from the National League.
Together with General Manager, Ed Barrow, Huggins developed the slugging Yankee teams that ended the dead-ball era forever. A mediocre team when he arrived, they were among the all-time greats at his death. They were a bunch of carousers and bad actors until an appalling slump in 1925 and the $5,000 fine and nine-day suspension of Babe Ruth. With Ruppert’s backing, Huggins brought his unruly crew to heel, and established himself as boss, beginning the club’s tradition of Yankee pride.
As the Yankees skipper until his death in 1929, and with one of the finest offenses ever assembled as his disposal, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Bob Meusel, Huggins presided over six American League championships and three World Series championships. He finished his managerial career with a 1413-1134 record. His 1413 wins as a manager ranks 20th all-time.
Huggins died at the age of 50 on September 25, 1929, of blood poisoning brought on by an infection under his right eye. The league cancelled its games for the following day out of respect; the viewing of his casket at Yankee Stadium drew thousands of tearful fans.
On May 30, 1932, the Yankees dedicated a monument to Huggins, and placed it in front of the flagpole in center field at Yankee Stadium. This was the first such honor granted by the team, and was the beginning of what would later become “the monuments” and, after the Stadium reopened in 1976 following a two-year renovation, “Monument Park.” The monument calls Huggins “A splendid character who made priceless contributions to baseball.”
Miller Huggins was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1964.
In this inning we’ll open up the Baseball Dictionary
Under the letter: J
June swoon
The falling apart after Memorial Day of a team that got off to a good start in April and May. The term has been applied to several teams, but it has been most closely associated with the San Francisco Giants since the franchise moved there from New York in 1958. Tom Weir (USA Today, May 29, 1986) noted that since moving to San Francisco the team had a composite record of 373 & 405 in the month of June (not good, not awful); he added: “If the Giants of the Mays-McCovey-Marichal era hadn’t always been so hot in April and May—387-256 from 1958-71—the supposed swoon never would have been coined.”
Etymology. Sportswriter Art Rosenbaum, who popularized the phrase in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Giants seemed destined for an annual fall from the top of the National League standings after quick starts, wrote (San Francisco Chronicle, June 22, 1989): “It just slipped into my typewriter, and it became an annual story. The songs of those days rhymed with June as in swoon, moon, tune—and the Giants were accommodating to the phrase. They would fall dead in that month every year. It’s one of those things you write about and not think about until later.”
Rosenbaum first used “June Swoon” in Summer 1959, but according to researchers at the Tamony Collection at the Univ. of Missouri, the first printed use of the term came in Time magazine (June 17, 1957). A nonbyline story on Nellie Fox and the Chicago White Sox made just a passing reference: “The White Sox get off to a fast start, then fall into a ‘June Swoon.’”
Over the years Rosenbaum has written several articles claiming to have started the Swoon craze, although he acknowledged that Bob Stevens, the Chronicles baseball writer at the time, may have actually coined the term. But Rosenbaum didn’t seem too disappointed to find the phrase had preceded his usage. ”I knew Peter Tamony, and if he said that’s where it began, that’s good enough for me. He would take a phrase, any phrase or jargon, and go back and research it until he found the very origin of it and what it meant.”
And now for the ninth inning…
Continuing our trip around baseball cities…
Candlestick Park, San Francisco, CA
1958 – 2000 as a baseball park
From the opening game to the last game Candlestick Park was always criticized. Talk of building a stadium in the San Francisco area first began in 1954 when mayor George Christopher promised to build a stadium if a major league team moved to the area. Later that year, a $5 million bond was issued to build a stadium.
Two locations for a new stadium in San Francisco were discussed; one in downtown and one at Candlestick Point. The site at Candlestick Point, located near the San Francisco Bay, was chosen because of its low land cost. Construction on the reinforced concrete stadium began in August 1958.
Ground was broken in 1958 as the new home of the National League’s San Francisco Giants, who were moving west from New York. The Giants officially chose the name of Candlestick Park after a name-the-park contest on March 3, 1959. Prior to that, its construction site had been shown on maps as the generic Bay View Stadium..
Candlestick Point is a point of land jutting into the San Francisco Bay. Candlestick Point is itself named for the indigenous “candlestick bird,” once common to the point.
Opening Day came on April 12, 1960 when 45,744 fans filled Candlestick Park. The grandstand consisted of two main seating decks. The lower deck extended from behind homeplate and down the first base line, down the third base line and around the left field foul pole into left centerfield. The upper deck extended from homeplate down both the first and third base lines.
Problems arose after Candlestick Park opened. Although it could be a nice warm sunny day at the ballpark, it could also be very windy. Once the sun set, the temperatures dropped and fog was present sometimes.
After a few years of existence Candlestick Park began to deteriorate. At one point the mayor of San Francisco proposed that a new $50 million stadium be built in the downtown area, but his idea was dropped. However, the city spent $16.1 million after the 1971 season to improve and make the stadium multipurpose, where the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League would also play. Candlestick Park was enclosed, increasing the seating capacity to 59,000 and the grass field was replaced by Astroturf. The enclosure of the stadium helped reduce the wind, but it was still present during games.
On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale, struck San Francisco, minutes before Game 3 of the World Series was to begin. Amazingly, no one within the stadium was injured, but minor structural damage did occur to the stadium. The World Series between the Giants and Oakland Athletics was delayed for ten days as the overall structural soundness of the stadium was checked by engineers and while the area had some time to recover.
As a baseball field, the stadium was best known for the windy conditions that often made life difficult for outfielders trying to catch fly balls. During the 1961 All Star game, played at Candlestick, Giants pitcher Stu Miller was forced into a balk by a gust of wind. Two years later, wind picked up the entire batting cage and dropped it 60 feet away on the pitcher’s mound while the New York Mets were taking batting practice.
The rights to the stadium name were licensed to 3Com Corporation from 1996 until 2002. During that time the park became known as 3Com Park. In 2002 the naming rights deal expired, and the park then became officially known as San Francisco Stadium at Candlestick Point. On September 28, 2004, a new naming rights deal was signed with Monster Cable, a maker of cables for electronic equipment, and the stadium was renamed Monster Park.
In 2000, the Giants moved to the new, Pacific Bell Park, now called AT&T Park, in downtown San Francisco, leaving the 49ers as the lone professional sports team to use the stadium. The final baseball game was played on an unseasonably hot September 30th, 1999 against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com. Transcripts of the game can be found at baseballhistorypodcast.blogspot.com. Well, that’s it for today’s game of Baseball History Podcast. I’ll see you later at the ballpark.
TWIBH- Miller
Huggins,
Baseball Dictionary- June swoon,
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