Washington DC Baseball

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Player #155C: John T. "Rocky" Stone. Outfielder with the Washington Senators in 1934-1938. 1,391 hits and 77 home runs in 11 MLB seasons. His career OBP was .376. he debuted with the Detroit Tigers in 1928-1933. His most productive season may have been 1932 with Detroit as he posted a .361 OBP with 106 runs scored and 109 RBIs in 643 plate appearances. His best season in Washington was 1936 as he posted a .421 OBP with 95 runs scored and 90 RBIs in 500 plate appearances.

We'll begin the end of Stone's MLB career here and finish it the next time he surfaces in our progression. From his SABR biography: As the Washington Senators’ 1938 spring training got underway in Orlando, Florida, no player was more anxious to get started in the warm air and brilliant sunshine than veteran outfielder John Thomas Stone.

A respected American League veteran, John Stone had enjoyed a successful campaign in 1937, posting a .330 batting average in 139 games for the Senators. But the winter that followed had been an extremely difficult time for Johnny; he spent the off-season fighting a persistent cold, coinciding with mysterious weight loss and what he called a funny feeling of weakness. Despite the hard work and long hours devoted to his usual pre-season regimen, he nonetheless got off to a poor start in 1938 and the steady play rapidly wore him down.

Johnny was hitting an uncharacteristic .192 when the team began a series against Cleveland. On May 5, 1938, facing Indians right-hander Mel Harder, the left-hand hitting Stone painfully fouled a ball off his front right foot. Limping back into the batter’s box, he settled down and drove the next pitch on a wicked line to right-center. Johnny, with his foot throbbing, raced around the bases for an inside-the-park grand slam home run.

Back on the bench, Shirley Povich wrote, “teammates jeered him pleasantly for being out of condition, and some suggested he get in shape, but the kidding stopped when startled teammates realized his desperate gasping for air was not fun and games but something much more serious than just a shortness of breath.” When he collapsed; shaken teammates realized that “Rocky” (as he was nicknamed) was ailing from something far more serious than simply being out of shape. To be continued . . .

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Player #158B: Cecil H. Travis Part 2. Infielder for the Washington Senators in 1933-1941 and 1945-1947. 1,544 hits and 27 home runs over 12 MLB seasons. 3-time All-Star. One of two to get 5 hits in first game. Led American League in hits in 1941 despite DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak and Ted Williams hitting .406. His best season was 1941 as he posted a .410 OBP with 101 RBIs in 663 plate appearances. In the Army during 1942-45, he wound up a frostbite victim in the Battle of the Bulge and a Bronze Star recipient. His return to MLB after the war surgery was not the same.

. . . In 1933, Travis was invited to spring training by the Washington Senators, Chattanooga’s parent club. After nearly making the team that spring, Travis was called up from Chattanooga to fill in for injured third baseman Ossie Bluege on May 16. Arriving at Griffith Stadium just one-half hour before game time, Travis had one of the most remarkable Major League debuts in baseball history, collecting hits in his first four at-bats and finishing the day with five hits. It was the first time since Fred Clarke’s debut in 1894 that anyone had collected five hits in his first game; no other player has since managed this feat. Travis hit .302 in limited duty for the Senators that season, and even though he was on Washington’s World Series roster, his teammates voted him a share of the team’s bonus for winning the American League pennant.

Travis won the starting third base job over Bluege in 1934. He hit his first major league home run on June 23 off the Detroit Tigers’ Vic Sorrell. Travis batted .319 in this first full season in Washington, overcoming a terrifying early season beaning by Chicago’s Thornton Lee that sidelined him for several games. (In his first game back, Travis faced Lee again and tripled on the southpaw’s first offering.)

Travis battled injuries throughout the early stages of his career, and he was dogged by criticisms that he was not the defensive player that Bluege was. The team shuffled Travis from position to position in both the infield and outfield over the next two seasons as it sought to keep his bat in the lineup. He was named the team’s full-time shortstop in 1937 and responded by playing solid defense. In 1938, he earned his first All-Star selection but did not play in the game.

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The 1938 Washington Senators won 75 games, lost 76, and finished in fifth place in the American League. They were managed by Bucky Harris and played home games at Griffith Stadium.

Deveaux puts the 1938 season in context: When Mel Almada, the "California Spaniard," hit only .244 in nearly 200 at bats (to start the 1938 season), Griffith engineered a deal with the Browns which brought Sammy West back to the Senators after a 5 1/2-year separation. This exchange would be the first one in a while to turn heavily in the Nats' favor. West, still a dependable centerfielder at 34, hit .302 in 92 games after coming on board. The trade was consummated on June 15, 1938, an important date on baseball's timeline. On this day, Johnny Vander Meer, a 23-year-old lefthander of the Cincinnati Reds, hurled a second consecutive no-hitter.

Vander Meer's feat remains unique in baseball history. The second of the no-hitters took place in the first night game played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. (Cincinnati's Crosley Field had been the scene of the first night game in the big leagues, back on May 24, 1935.) Clark Griffith had said that there was no chance night baseball would ever catch on in the majors. The game, the Old Fox reasoned, was meant to be played "in the Lord's own sunshine."

It was longer still before baseball began to see another kind of light. On the same day John Vander Meer tossed his second no-hitter, Billy Leo Williams was born in Whistler, Alabama. Williams, a sweet-swinging lefthanded hitter who would make the Hall of Fame, was black. To baseball's eternal shame, it would be nearly ten more years before a black man would be allowed to participate in a major-league game.

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In the 1930s and 40s, Griffith Stadium was home not only to the Senators, but to the Homestead Grays of the Negro National League. Clark Griffith therefore had occasion to reflect prophetically on the future of blacks in baseball. The Grays, who played some home games at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and the rest in Washington, had a catcher who was on his way to winning the home-run and batting titles of Negro baseball in 1938 (and he would win the home-run title again in 1939). His name was Josh Gibson, and Griffith knew darn well that Gibson was hitting more home runs into the distant left-field seats than the entire white American League combined.

In March of this year, Griffith told the Washington Tribune that the time was not far off when black Americans would be playing in the big leagues. He wasn't sure, however, that the time had arrived yet. He did talk about the subject often, but never did anything about it. In 1944, he was polled by sportswriter Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, who wanted to know what Griffith thought of Commissioner Landis's statement that the major leagues were not actively excluding blacks.

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The commissioner had made the pronouncement in reply to the troublesome Leo Durocher, outspoken manager of the Dodgers, who had stated during an interview published in the Communist Daily Worker that he felt it was Landis who was really the one keeping blacks out of the majors. The Old Fox may have come across as somewhat evasive to Wendell Smith. His idea, Griffith told Smith, was that the Negro Leagues needed to continue to develop so that someday, when they were good enough, the best black players might play for a world championship against the best the big leagues could offer.

Once, Clark Griffith had reportedly called Josh Gibson and the Homestead Grays' other great hitter, Buck Leonard into his office to tell them the only reason he wasn't signing them to big-league contracts was because of the hardships they would encounter due to racial tensions. Of Gibson, the great Walter Johnson once said, "There is a catcher that any big-league club would like to buy for $200,000. I've heard of him before. His name is Josh Gibson. He can do everything. He hits that ball a mile. And he catches so easy he might as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle. Bill Dickey isn't as good a catcher. Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow." (Washington Post, April 7, 1939.)

Clark Griffith did predict that the player who would eventually break baseball's unwritten color ban would have to be a martyr, impervious to the taunts and insults contrived to show the black man unworthy of playing with whites. In this Griffith was right, but by the time that chosen man, Jackie Robinson, came along, Josh Gibson was dead. He was just past his 35th birthday when he died of a stroke on January 20, 1947, just 85 days before Jackie Robinson graced the field among white players -- one of the greatest moments in the history of baseball and because of what it symbolized for so many, one of the greatest moments in the history of America. (The Washington Senators by Tom Deveaux.)

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Player #163A: Henry J. "Zeke" Bonura (pronounced like Sonora) -- Part 1. First baseman for the Washington Senators in 1938 and 1940. 1,099 hits and 119 home runs in 7 MLB seasons. He had a career OBP of .380. He debuted with the Chicago White Sox in 1934. His best season was probably 1936 for the White Sox as he posted a .426 OBP with 120 runs scored and 138 RBIs in 688 plate appearances. His indifferent defense on balls hit to his right gave rise to the "Bonura Salute".

We'll let Deveaux explain Washington's 1938 acquisition: On March 18, 1938, Joe Kuhel was traded to the White Sox for the antithesis of Kuhel, a big lummox with the rhyming name of Zeke "What a physique" Bonura. A classic good-hit, no-field first baseman, the muscular Bonura (also affectionately called "Banana Nose" for obvious reasons) was a fan's delight but a manager's nightmare. He held out practically on an annual basis, and Jimmy Dykes, the White Sox pilot, was of the opinion that Bonura was the worst first baseman who had ever lived, and said so publicly.

Bonura, in actual fact a college man, was so slothful a fielder as to often make himself look ridiculous on a ballfield when he didn't have a bat in his hands. When he mysteriously led the league's first basemen in fielding in '36, Dykes was quick to discredit Bonura, pointing out that players don't get errors on balls they don't touch. What's more, Bonura wouldn't just wave at ground balls, he would give them the "Mussolini salute" with his glove. Opposing fans in particular loved this, but it is not hard to imagine what his manager thought of the behavior.

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Player #163A: Henry J. "Zeke" Bonura (pronounced like Sonora) -- Part 2. First baseman for the Washington Senators in 1938 and 1940. 1,099 hits and 119 home runs in 7 MLB seasons. He had a career OBP of .380. He debuted with the Chicago White Sox in 1934. His best season was probably 1936 for the White Sox as he posted a .426 OBP with 120 runs scored and 138 RBIs in 688 plate appearances. His indifferent defense on balls hit to his right gave rise to the "Bonura Salute".

There are several versions of the following apocryphal story. Chisox manager Jimmy Dykes had decided that it would hardly be worth the trouble of changing his signals just because Bonura was now on the opposing team. Dykes told coach Bing Miller that Bonura had never been able to remember the signs when he was with Chicago anyway. As the story goes, the dreadfully slow-footed Bonura had made it to third on behalf of the Senators against his old team. At this point, Dykes began waving his scorecard to shoo away some flies which had been buzzing around him on the bench. Bonura, forgetting which side he was on, took Dykes' motions to be the steal sign, and he took off for the plate. He barged into the catcher, the ball was shaken loose, and he was in there. While this makes one hell of a good story, it indeed could not have happened in a regular-season game -- Bonura stole home only once in his seven-year big-league career, and that happened when he was a member of the White Sox. in the 15th inning of a game against the Yankees.

Zeke Bonura did bring the anticipated bat the Senators had been banking on, however, and slugged 22 homers for them in 1938. Despite a terrible start which had him hitting just .190 in mid-June, Bonura batted .289 and drove in 114 runs, which tied him for sixth best in the league with Lou Gehrig. Once again, his lack of range enabled him to lead all American League first basemen in fielding. Jimmy Dykes may have had a point when he'd said that at Chicago, Bonura let in three runs for every one that he batted in. Coupled with the resurgence of Al Simmons, who banged out 21 dingers in 1938, the Senators nearly doubled their home-run output. (The Washington Senators by Tom Deveaux.)

This thread will now enjoy a pause to enjoy the TEOTS in Dallas.