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 13 of the 2009 baseball season
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 3 week of March.
March 18
1957 Indian general manager Hank Greenberg turns down the Red Sox million-dollar offer for pitcher Herb Score. The former slugger says the Tribe is building for the future and not into selling its premier players.
Herbert Jude Score was born June 7, 1933 in New York in the borough of Queens.
The Cleveland Indians left-hander, seemed destined for the Hall of Fame, only to have his career ruined when a line drive struck him in the face in one of baseball’s most frightening incidents.
With a catapulting delivery that left him in an awkward fielding position, Score simply overpowered American League hitters for the first two years of his career. In that short time, he joined Whitey Ford and Billy Pierce as the league’s dominant lefthanded pitchers. One can only speculate about the kind of career he might have put together had his fortunes not been irreversibly altered on May 7, 1957.
Score had a history of bad luck. When he was 3, he was struck by a bakery truck, which severely injured his legs. He missed a year of school with rheumatic fever, broke an ankle slipping on a wet locker-room floor and separated his left shoulder slipping on wet outfield grass while in the low minor leagues.
Signed to a $60,000 bonus in 1952 by the same scout who brought the Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller to the Indians, Score seemed a left-handed version of Feller.
As American League champions in 1954, the Indians used a starting rotation comprised exclusively of righthanders, three of whom, Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, and Early Wynn, would become Hall of Famers. Because the three were also in their mid-thirties, Score’s debut in 1955 was well timed. He was the first and best of a young crop of Cleveland pitchers that included Gary Bell, Mudcat Grant, and Jim Perry; he was expected to lead the new staff in replacing the old.
Score was the American League rookie of the year in 1955, when he had a 16-10 record, 2.85 earned run average and 245 strikeouts, tops in the major leagues.
He actually topped himself in 1956, going 20-9 with a 2.53 Earned Run Average and 263 strikeouts, while reducing the number of walks from 154 to 129. Along with the 20 wins, he pitched a league-leading five shutouts and held opposition batters to a .186 average.
In spring training of 1957, the Boston Red Sox offered to buy Score for $1 million, an astronomical sum at a time when entire ball clubs were being sold for $4 million.
Indians General Manager Hank Greenberg had this to say of the offer, “We wouldn’t sell him for $2 million,”
However, it all came apart on that fateful night on May 7, 1957, when Score pitched against the Yankees. He had beaten the world champions three times in a row dating back to the previous season, making them look like helpless beginners, even with Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra in the lineup.
McDougald, the second batter of the game, reached for a low pitch and lined it back at Score. The ball crashed into his face, breaking his nose, cutting his right eyelid and causing swelling and hemorrhaging of the cheekbone and eyebrow.
Third baseman Al Smith picked up the carom and threw McDougald out at first. Score was knocked to the ground, bleeding profusely. He was immediately surrounded by teammates and Yankees players.
Score threw with an uninhibited motion in which his body turned his back to the batter. Sometimes he turned so hard he expected that he might eventually get hit on the back.
He later said “I didn’t see the ball until it was a foot or two from my face.”
He never lost consciousness but had severe hemorrhaging in the eye and a swollen retina as well as a broken nose. He spent three weeks in a hospital. His plight brought 10,000 letters with good wishes. A California man even offered to donate an eye to him.
Score was sidelined for the rest of the season, his vision fuzzy and his depth perception impaired. Although his vision returned, he won only 17 games over the next five years before retiring.
Score eventually recovered his 20/20 vision, though he missed the rest of the season. He returned late in the 1958 season.
Though many believe he feared being hit by another batted ball, and therefore changed his pitching motion; Score himself rejected that theory. He said he tore a tendon in his arm while pitching on a damp night against the Washington Senators.
He sat out the rest of the season but, returning for 1959, he’d shifted his pitching motion in a bid to avoid another, similar injury. He said, “The reason my motion changed was because I hurt my elbow, and I overcompensated for it and ended up with some bad habits.”
Score’s velocity dropped and he became prone to injury as a result of the changed motion. He pitched the full 1959 season, going 9-11 with a 4.71 Earned Run Average and 147 strikeouts.
Score was traded to the Chicago White Sox after the season, and pitched parts of the next three seasons before retiring. He finished with a career record of 55-46 and a 3.36 Earned Run Aveage to go alone with 837 strikeouts over 8 seasons.
After retiring, Score served as an announcer on the Indians television broadcast from 1964-1967, and joined the radio broadcast, serving from 1968-1997.
As an announcer, Score’s assets were his intelligence, good taste and enthusiasm. He would get excited about games and good plays. He said, “I don’t like to make fun of a player or knock a player but if I feel he should have made a catch, I’ll say so.”
To Score, the games were everything. He once said, “I don’t like to talk too much. Fans want to know about the game, not what you did in the afternoon.”
Score liked to joke about himself, recalling that when he first started broadcasting, he took diction lessons to smooth out his New York accent and pronunciation. He was advised to listen to a tape of himself. He did and promptly fell asleep.
He listed Cleveland pitcher Lenny Barker’s perfect game in 1981 as his most memorable broadcast.
On October 8, 1998, while driving to Florida after being inducted into the Broadcasters Hall of Fame, Score was severely injured in a traffic accident when he pulled into the path of a truck. He suffered trauma to his brain, chest and lungs. The orbital bone around one of his eyes was broken as were three ribs and his sternum. He spent over a month in the intensive care unit, and was released from the Hospital in mid-December.
Herb Score died on November 11, 2008 at his home in Rocky River, Ohio, after a lengthy illness.
In addition to the regular sources, parts of this game came from the International Herald Tribune and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
And now for the ninth inning…
Continuing our trip around baseball cities…
This segment comes to you compliments of listener Graham Bagshaw.
A few episodes ago you said you would take book reports in the tour section. Well I was wondering; would you accept a cd review?
I recently came across an album called Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails by the Baseball Project. I purchased a few of the songs on MP3 and was so impressed I quickly purchased the rest of the album.
Apparently the album was an idea in the early 1990s but was finally put together and released last year. The songs are difficult to describe so I’ll have to use the definition iTunes gives which is ” jangly modern folk-pop”.
The songs are very professionally put together both musically and factually. Some people will recognize the name Peter Buck of R.E.M who plays guitar on the album. On hearing these songs I immediately thought of baseball history podcast. In fact most of the characters covered have been covered in BHP at some point.
The only immediate downside of this album is there is some rather colorful language in a few tracks and therefore not suitable for all in its entirety. The album is labeled as explicit but certainly most songs are accessible without any inappropriateness.
An example of the content is the song “Jackie’s Lament “about how Jackie Robinson had to bite his tongue in his first few years in the majors against the torrent of racism. Harvey Haddix as featured in game 33 of 2007 is my favorite track and tells the story of how he threw a perfect game for 12 innings only to end up losing the game.
It also provides excellent factual knowledge too telling of the 17 people who have thrown a perfect game. Very catchy is the chorus which features these guys and the lyric “…Don Larsen, in the Series, in 1956, why don’t we add old Harvey to that list?”
The album covers the whole of the 20th century admirably with a song from the first decade about the death of Ed Delahanty, the middle of the century with “sometimes I dream of Willie Mays” and the end of the century moving into 2000 with “broken man”, highlighting the eventual low of the steroids era.
Other characters featured include such pioneers as Curt Flood and the immortal Satchell Paige. The song “Past time” covers the whole spectrum of some of the memorable moments in the game including such lines as “when Pete rose demolished Ray Fossey he was never the same” instantly bring back visions of that all star game from 1970. This is an excellent song, to incorporate so many of the games key moments and key characters without seeming contrived; a real treat to listen to. I’ll definitely be adding this to my cd that I listen to when going to baseball games. Or at least I will when I return to the US, hopefully this summer.
Thank you Graham, and as promised “You get the credit.”
