What I’m Reading: The Gashouse Gang

Branch Rickey is most famous for being the part owner, president, and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who integrated baseball in 1947 by bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues. But long before that, he became the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1919. For a few seasons, he was also its field manager. While not especially gifted as an on-field tactician, Rickey had an unparalleled ability to gauge talent, seeing the potential in players even on town or factory teams that everybody else missed.

The Cardinals at that time had traditionally been bottom-dwellers in the National League, and were far less popular and wealthy than their cross-town American League rivals, the St. Louis Browns. Rickey changed all that, in only a few years turning his small-market team into one of the dominating forces in baseball, and so firmly winning the hearts of St. Louisans that the Browns were soon almost forgotten and moved out of the city by the early 1950s (becoming the Baltimore Orioles).

Rickey’s secret weapon was creating the first farm system. Early on, the struggling team received a financial windfall when it sold its dilapidated ballpark to the city of St. Louis and moved to the Browns’ ballpark, Sportsman Field (ironically, it was their rent payments to the Browns that kept that team afloat in its later years). Rickey convinced Cardinals owner Sam Breadon to use the windfall to purchase a minor league team in Syracuse, New York. Now, rather than having to work out a deal with a minor league team every time the Cardinals wanted to bring up a new young player, they could simply negotiate with the players directly and send them to Syracuse while they developed. The system worked so well that the Cardinals, at Rickey’s direction, soon had teams in Houston, Fort Smith, and Sioux City, and they kept on buying after that as well. Before the other major league teams knew what was happening, the Cardinals had locked up a huge proportion of the country’s young baseball talent in minor league teams that the organization directly controlled.

This allowed the Cardinals to operate cheaply–they could bring on young talented players to play in the majors for a few years, and then when the players became well-established, trade them to other teams for a huge profit. The Cardinals could never hope to field a huge payroll of famous players like the New York Yankees or the Chicago Cubs, but they could trade players to those teams and bring up young unknowns who were just as good.

By the mid-1920s, their system was working like magic, and they put together teams that were competing at the top level and frequently going to the World Series–in 1926 (Series win), 1928, 1930, and 1931 (another Series win). But Rickey’s greatest team was the 1934 “Gashouse Gang” team, field managed by veteran second baseman Frankie Frisch, and anchored by pitchers Dizzy Dean at the height of his power and his younger brother Paul. It also included standouts such as surly slugger Joe Medwick and speedster Pepper Martin, a fellow southerner who was often Dizzy’s accomplice in practical jokes.

Now I had heard some Dizzy Dean stories before reading this book. Anyone who reads much about baseball history comes across them. But I didn’t realize there so many! The Gashouse Gang goes on and on. I should point out that John Heidenry is a careful author. These are only the stories that he was able to confirm as true, or at any rate, he mentions if a story might not have happened the exact way it’s come down to us. I think there were likely tons of questionable stories he left out. But the ones he put in are enough to make Dizzy basically the star of the second two-thirds of the book, which could easily have been called Dizzy and the Gashouse Gang.

Jerome “Dizzy” Dean was born in absolute poverty to a sharecropper father in Lucas, Arkansas, in 1910. His brother Paul was three years younger. When they were done working for the season on the farmland they sharecropped in Lucas, the Deans would set out on the road, driving through Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma in search of work. By the time he was ten years old, Dizzy was expected to put in as much work as a full-grown man picking cotton or whatever other work they managed to find. The Deans did not have radio or even electricity, and Dizzy did not learn there was even such a thing as major league baseball where you got paid to pay until he was a teen-ager.

But he knew the game. It was what he and his brother Paul played on the rare days or afternoons they had off, joining whatever teams there were in the neighborhoods where they were staying. Attracted by the prospect of a steady paycheck, Dizzy joined the US Army at age sixteen (his father falsely attested that he was older so he could sign up) and learned after a few months that there were baseball teams in the army. The first game he played in the army was the first time he had shoes to play in or threw an actual baseball (as opposed to a rock or whatever was at hand in the playing fields of rural Arkansas), or encountered any other actual baseball equipment. He soon became the star of his unit’s team at Fort Sam Houston, leading them to the championship of the army’s southern league in 1927.

His sergeant, who gave him the nickname Dizzy because he was so scatter-brained as a recruit, recognized the young man’s talent and agreed to let him play for a minor league team in San Antonio on the weekends. Soon, the Cardinals minor league team in Houston wanted Dizzy, and the sergeant suggested Dizzy buy out his army contract (which you could do for $100 if you had served at least two years) and go play. It wasn’t long at that point until Dizzy was called up to the majors, which happened at the end of the 1930 season.

Dizzy was a good pitcher from the beginning of his major league career, but it took him a couple years to reach his full potential. In 1932 he won twenty games, but lost eighteen, though he did lead the league with 191 strikeouts. The next year he had 199. Paul followed his brother through the Cardinals minor league system and was called to spring training for the 1934 season.

I think my favorite Dizzy story in the book is of a game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1933. Before the game, Dizzy went into the Brooklyn clubhouse, where the manager was going over the strategy for the day. After he was done, Dizzy stood up and said he had something to add. To their amazement, Dizzy described how he intended to pitch to every player in the room, including enough details of their batting styles and weaknesses so that they knew he wasn’t bluffing. Then he went out, pitched exactly what he’d told them ahead of time, and still shut out the Dodgers.

Roughly the second half of the book details the 1934 season. The Giants and the Cubs were expected by most to be the leading teams in the National League, and indeed they did lead most of the season, with the Cardinals bringing up a close third place. But the Cardinals went on an incredible winning streak in late August, and pulled into first place by the end of September. They went on to play a formidable Detroit Tigers team led by catcher Mickey Cochrane, and including other hall of fame players like Hank Greenberg and Charlie Gehringer. It was close, but in the end the Cardinals won the series in seven games, with Dizzy and Paul both accounting for two of the four wins. (Dizzy also pitched a third game in the series, which he lost.)

One thing that appalled me about the era was how overworked Dizzy was, and how misused the pitchers were in general. A description of Dizzy’s pitching schedule from two weeks in the middle of the season describes him pitching a complete game one day, being called in for two innings of relief work the next, and making his next scheduled start two days later. It’s no wonder he complained so often about a sore arm. In 1937, Dizzy suffered a serious foot injury that changed his motion, and between that and the sore arm he was never the same pitcher again. If he hadn’t been so overused, he might have lasted years longer. As it is, Bill James in his Baseball Abstract rating of all-time greatest pitchers only places Dizzy at #25, due to the short length of his career.

The Gashouse Gang is a book that would be of interest to any student of baseball history. It covers one of the most interesting periods of baseball history, at the end of Babe Ruth’s career but before Joe DiMaggio came on the scene, when for a few years other teams besides the Yankees had a chance to flourish. It describes the invention of the farm system, which is still an important part of baseball today. Most of all, it’s thorough but fun to read, with Dizzy’s antics providing entertainment throughout. I highly recommend it.