Free Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets Page A

the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball’s immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooper-stown, taking spoils, like the Third Army busting through Germany. Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.”
    Grover Cleveland Alexander was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1939.
    Ronald Reagan played him as a falling-down drunk in the 1952 movie The Winning Team. After Alexander retired, he became an itinerant barnstormer, chronically broke and occasionally jailed for public drunkenness. There was no big payoff for ex-ballplayers in those days. He barely had the money to make it to Cooperstown for the induction ceremony and remarked acidly that he couldn’t eat the plaque he was awarded. The Hall got the hint and offered him a job—as a security guard. Alexander turned it down and hit the road, drifting until he died.
    Cap Anson was another charter member of the Hall of Fame, chosen by the Veterans Committee in 1939. His plaque reads: “Greatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of 19th century. Started with Chicagos in National League’s first year 1876. Chicago manager from 1879 to 1897, winning 5 pennants. Was .300 class hitter 20 years, batting champion 4 times.”
    Missing from this resume is Anson’s crucial role in keeping orga-nized baseball racially segregated. In 1883, Cap Anson declared that his team would not take the field against the Toledo Blue Stockings if Toledo’s African-American catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker, suited up. (Contrary to pop ular belief, the first known black player in orga nized baseball was Walker, not Jackie Robinson.) Four years later, Anson threatened to cancel a White Stockings exhibition game against the Newark Giants if they used black players. Anson was a man of great influence. In the wake of his boycott, the International League voted to refuse contracts to blacks in the future. (The American Association and National League never took such a vote. They simply used a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep baseball white.) Anson wound up his life managing a pool hall, but he always took pride in his role in preserving the racial purity of the national pastime.
    Cobb, Ruth, Anson, Speaker, and Alexander were all inducted before the Character Clause was formally instituted. So was Rogers Hornsby, elected in 1942. Known as the Rajah, Hornsby was one of the greatest hitters in National League history. His lifetime average, .358, is second only to Cobb’s.
    Like Cobb, Hornsby was widely disliked around the league. He didn’t bother to attend his own mother’s funeral. He brawled with opponents on the field, ignored his own teammates, and, as a manager, was generally hated by his players. Like Tris Speaker, Hornsby was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Bill James ranks him as perhaps the biggest “horse’s ass” in baseball history, ahead even of Cobb.
    Hornsby was famous for never going to the movies with the other guys on the team. A legend developed that he was trying to preserve his batting eye. In fact, he didn’t give a damn about movies or teammates. Asked once what he did in the off-season back in Texas, he said that he sat by the window and waited for the next baseball season to start. His one great diversion was racetrack gambling. Commissioner Landis warned him a number of times that this was unacceptable; baseball couldn’t afford any more gambling scandals. Hornsby ignored the warnings and Landis finally went public, telling the Sporting News that Hornsby’s betting “has gotten him into one scrape after another, cost him a fortune and several jobs, and he still hasn’t got enough sense to stop it.” Hornsby responded by charging that Landis himself had recklessly gambled away baseball’s money in the 1929 stock market crash.
    Not all the early members of the Hall of Fame were