SubscribeWait, Wait, tell me the truth.
In keeping with the policy NPR seems to have about replaying its best bits during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, hosted by Peter Sagal, featured a few prominent guests from the “Not My Job” segment, including Sen. George McGovern, Leonard Nimoy, Garrison Keillor, Jimmy Carter of the singing group The Blind Boys of Alabama, and former baseball great Bill “Moose” Skowron.
Now Skowron (I had always thought his nickname came from his appearance and size, but it was because of his haircut that the appellation was given because of a resemblance to Benito Mussolini) was a good player — an eight time all-star with eight World Series appearances, a fact he took great pains to remind Sagal several times during the conversation.
"Ah yes, I remember it well."
Judging solely from that interview, Skowron, now 78, seems to be one of those old-timers who loves to compare the lack of “sand” in modern players, afraid to pitch inside, afraid to slide. He spoke of an incident in his career that reminded me of Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, The Lies, and Everything Else.
Every time I hear one of these gentlemen relating an anecdote about the good old days, I find I’ve become fairly cynical (damn you, Neyer!). So when Skowron talked about getting hit in the head after htting a home run against the Red Sox and talking it out on second baseman Gene Mauch with a career-ending hard slide, well, I just had to see if that was indeed the case.
"Whachu talkin' 'bout, Willis?"
Skowron’s tale goes like this:
After hitting the homer off of Ike Delock, the pitcher swore revenge, telling Ted Williams that he would hit Skowron right between the eyes in the next at bat, which he did (actually, it was the head Delock hit, but that’s close enough for jazz).
It must not have been a very hard pitch because Skowron was able to stay in the game. As he took first base, he prayed for his roommate Bob Cerv to hit a ground ball to the shortstop so Skowron could break up the double play.
“Gene Mauch was at second at the time,” Skowron told Sagal and his audience. “I broke his leg and he never played another game in the Major Leagues. I didn’t do it on purpose…, we were taught to break up double plays.”
So I went to Baseball Reference to see if I could verify the story.
According to the BR Home Run Long, Delock gave up 141 home runs in his 11-year career, but none of them were hit by Skowron. (Strike one.)
Mauch, who would go on to manage the Phillies, Expos, and Angels, did play his last major league game against the Yankees on Sept. 28, 1957, so one would expect this was the contest to which Skowron referred. He singled as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning, so he couldn’t have played the field. (Strike two. Ooh, I feel like Sherlock Holmes.)
The Yankees beat the Red Sox, 2-0. No home runs were hit that day. That’s okay, because Skowron wasn’t in the game at all; in fact, his last game of the year came on Sept. 13 (strike three and then some). He did hit six homers against the Sox in 1957; four came over a two-day stretch in April.
Skowron was hit by a pitch three times that season. One came in an April 28, 3-2 win over Boston, in which Mauch played second. Gil MacDougal followed the HBP with a strikeout and Billy Martin (not Cerv, who was on the Kansas City Athletics in 1957) grounded to short for the force at second. Perhaps Skowron went in hard, but is no indication of a violent injury; Mauch was lifted for a pinch hitter in the ninth and played another 50+ games before calling it quits at the end of the year.
So what did we learn by this exercise, other than the fact that I have way too much time on my hands? Was Skowron lying or is this just the way he remembers the incident? No one can say for sure, perhaps not even the Moose. Look, I’m considerably younger and according to my wife I completely mistold an anecdote from our honeymoon in Aruba that involved a goat skull, a scorpion, and hotel housekeeping. I wasn’t lying; that’s how I recalled the event. So you have to give Skowron the benefit of the doubt.
Nice sleuthing! My guess is old age has caught up to Moose, and his memory isn’t what it used to be.
For years I told two stories:
The first is that I took my son to his first game in 1972 when he was 4 years old and we sat in the Yankee Stadium bleachers where, prior to the game start, he was knocked off his seat by some rowdies, hitting his head on the concrete. We stayed anyway as the Yankees lost a double header 8-0 and 8-4 to the White Sox with the winning pitchers being Wilbur Wood and Stan Bahnsen, the latter making it even more aggravating as he was the player dealt for Rich McKinney.
The problem is I can find no record of any such double header either in 1972 or in any of 2 years around it.
The second is that on a school night I took my son to a NY-Minn game which went 19 innings so that we left the stadium after 2 am, got home at 3 am to face a rather angry wife who made sure we both got up in time for school and work the next day. As I recalled, the Yankees won when Mickey Rivers tripled over the center fielder’s head with a runner on first to win the game.
At least I got much of this right. Rivers did win it, but with a single that drove in Gamble from 2B. (I can still see the ball clear the center fielder’s reach and rolling to the wall.). Maybe I called it a triple in my head, or maybe Rivers kept running. The game did end after 1:30 which would make our arrival at home about 3 am. The trouble is the game took place on August 25 when there was no school, and probably no camp either, and when I would not have been working. (It was the day before our anniversary. I wonder if that coincidence got mixed up with something in my head.)
Sounds like an episode for a much better show on NPR than the smarmy “Wait, Wait…” — “This American Life.”
It’s amazing how, the longer players are out of the game (any sport), the better they were when they were playing (and, of course, the worse the current players are). But guys like Skowron probably have a right to be bitter considering how little they got paid compared to today. Still, I love hearing about these guys from the 50s and 60s.
Maybe Moose just got the names mixed up. Did he break anyone’s leg? With the passion of the Red Sox/Yankees rivalry those names might just be too prominent.
Geez. I know how Moose and you guys feel. I swear that for years I’ve been remembering a Yankees home opener in which the Yankees started their home half of the inning with Jerry Kenney and Bobby Murcer hitting back to back homers. One of them (according to my memory) was wearing No. 1 on his uniform and the other, No. 2. Dang if I can’t find the game despite searching and my memory of the event must be some figment of my imagination. But it seems so real!
Re Moose, if it was 1957 it didn’t render Mauch permanenly unable to play, even if it did happen. In 1960 Mauch was player – manager of the Minneapolis Millers, which featured 2nd baseman Carl Yastrzemski.
Check out the podcast of Radiolab(http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/), Season 3, “Memory and Forgetting”.
One of the points in the podcast is that the things you remember the most often are the things that change the most and have details added and subtracted. The memory gets “re-recorded” every time you recall it. It is exactly like the game “telephone” in your brain. Memory is profoundly unreliable. It is a very strange to think about.
Thanks, Bill. That was the program I was referring to.
Is Moose Skowron Jewish or is this just an interesting story? I never heard that he was.
Skowron isn’t, but Sagal is, and when it comes to Jewish sports, and as they say, that’s close enough for jazz.
The former years are much different than today. Players are highly paid now because they carry or endorse brands such as Nike and Adidas. Well, if times were the same, we won’t have to worry about that.