The Pecan Park Eagle

Rogers Hornsby may have missed ever meeting Will Rogers.

Native Texan Rogers Hornsby was one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. His lifetime .358 batting average for 23 seasons  (1915-1937) in the big leagues is still the highest lifetime career mark for all right-handed batters and, even though his seven batting titles speak volumes for themselves, it remains important to remind that two of those were achieved with yearly averages over .400. Hornsby’s .424 mark for the Cardinals in 1924 is till the highest one-season batting championship mark to ever take the championship in either league.

Hornsby continued to fiddle with occasional hitting well into the late 1930s during his frustrating time as manager of the lowly, poorly talented St. Louis Browns, but, when he whacked his last safety in 1937, he was still 70 hits shy of 3,000 career hits. A lot us seriously doubt that getting to the currently revered magic mark was much of a big deal to Hornsby or anyone else back in the days of the Great Depression. Batting Average and Hoe Run totals were the big deal back then. And, in that regard, “The Rajah” didn’t fare too shabby with the long ball. His 301 career HRs fell less than halfway up the hill to Babe Ruth’s record 714 mark, but they were better than most.

I saw Hornsby in person when he managed the Beaumont Roughnecks of the Texas League to the straight season league title with future big leaguers like Gil McDougald and Clint Courtney in 1950. Beaumont then got eliminated in the first round of the Texas League post-season playoffs, falling to the eventual league champion San Antonio Missions, but that fall detracted little from the noise they made around the state under Hornsby that particular season. Hornsby also did pretty well as a playing manager back in 1926 when he led the St. Louis Cardinals to Chapter One in their storied history of 11 World Series titles. The Hornsby ’26 Cards won that dramatic 7-game series comeback win over Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees to get off the championship goose egg.

Most years like 1926 and 1950 were not there for Manager Hornsby. Stories of his rigid, humorless attempts to make others behave as though they were him are legendary – and universally frustrating too. Like a few other great athletes who later tried to manage (Ted Williams comes first to mind), Hornsby expected less talented players to perform far better once he explained and demonstrated his knowledge of hitting. The failed projection of heroic expectations upon lesser lights was compounded as a problem by Hornsby’s tight ideas of what a player should be doing when he wasn’t playing. – Not much to nothing come closer to the truth.

That old saw of Hornsby’s answer to the question, “What do you do in the off-season,” come close to the truth about how Hornsby approached almost all time away from the ballpark. Remember? Hornsby supposedly answered that he killed the off-season time by simply staring out the window and waiting for spring.

That wasn’t true. In spite of the fact that Hornsby did not smoke, drink, chase women, or even go to movies (He felt they were bad for his batting eye.), Hornsby had one obsessive human failing that almost did him in. He love slipping away to bet the horses whenever the team came to near to a track during racing season. As a result, he ran up some heavy gambling debts and came close to getting in fatal career trouble with Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Hornsby may have been saved by his celebrity and record of accomplishment and the fear of Landis that really going after one of the game’s great achievers might be bad public relations for baseball.

In his next-to-last incarnation as a big league manager for the 1952 St. Louis Browns, the players actually conspired to get Hormsby fired. “It was force him out or kill him,” former Brown Ned Garver once jokingly told me, adding, “It isn’t right to stay that mad at one man all the time.”

“We (the ’52 Browns) weren’t all that good when we tried,” Garver added. “Management didn’t need much convincing to see how bad we could be if we didn’t try at all,” he added. Convinced the Browns were serious in their open rebellion against Hornsby, the Browns cut him loose in favor of Marty Marion in mid-season. The Browns also traded the rebel Garver to Detroit.

Hornsby got one final shot as a manager with Cincinnati in 1953, but they fired him too before the season was done, replacing him with Buster Mills. It was Rogers Hornsby’s last big league managerial opportunity. The baseball world was finally convinced: Rogers Hornsby is too unlikeable and he never seems to learn.

In spite of his selection for the Hall of Fame in 1942, eleven years later arrived as the time when Hornsby would finally leave his last really serious job in baseball, although he would continue to hang around the game until the day he died. Rogers Hornsby on a trip to Chicago on January 5, 1963 at the age of 66.

The late Buddy Hancken of Beaumont, a longtime respected baseball man and a former Houston Astros coach tells this quick story that probably summarizes the Hornsby problem best. It was not just a problem with players in particular. It was a problem with people in general. Put Rogers Hornsby in an area filled with other people – and Rogers would rapidly become everyone’s “pain in the area.”

Buddy put it this way:

“Back in 1950, I was managing in West Texas so I rented my house in to Hornsby in Beaumont so he could manage the Roughnecks, When I returned at season’s end, Rogers Hornsby was already gone, but it seems like all my neighbors found the time to drift over and welcome me home. – One of them finally blurted out the whole truth. The neighbors weren’t just glad to see me back. They were really glad to see Hornsby gone. – ‘Hornsby was the unfriendliest man I ever tried to meet,’ the neighbor said, as he added, ‘He was the biggest jerk that ever rolled into Beaumont, Texas.’ ”

Have a nice day, everybody. And stop staring out the windows too. Wet as it is Houston today, spring arrived yesterday.