Here’s my guess — many of you (certainly not all, but perhaps most) woke up this morning thinking: “Sure hoping to see a good Firpo Marberry essay today.” Well, you’re in luck. Remember: We’re having a little contest for new subscribers! Buy an annual subscription (or gift one … or donate one) and you will be entered in a contest with a chance to win fabulous gifts (or small tokens of affection) related to my upcoming book,
Within the same vein of the relief pitcher and the underhanded free throw is the panenka. That’s how soccer players refer to a penalty kick taken right down the middle. It’s not often done, because the offensive player is worried that if they kick it down the middle and the ball is stopped that they’ll be humiliated. But goalkeepers don’t often defend against it because if they stand in the middle to stop the shot and the shot goes to one side they’ll be humiliated.
Apropos of nothing except the boxer Luis Firpo ... Back in the mid-1980s, when was a young sportswriter, we were tracking a Mike Tyson fight via AP updates on the wire, trying to get it into the next day's paper on deadline. It wasn't being televised and there was no internet. We were dependent on the AP providing updates, and it was agonizingly slow. So slow that one colleague suggested the next update would read: "Dempsey has climbed back into the ring and is battering Firpo." It was so funny and so evocative that this sentence has remained intact in my mind for close to 40 years now.
Maybe someone has mentioned this already, but there was a great episode of Michael Lewis' Against the Rules podcast (or was it Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History) in which Wilt Chamberlain's embarrassment over shooting free throws underhanded outweighed his success shooting that way.
I wonder how much the delay in adoption had to do with access. Prior to TV, you could only read the newspaper and even then, the odds were against seeing day-to-day stuff like this in another market. In the '50s, though, as TV grew and the nightly news became a thing, a novelty like Jim Konstanty could become more well known and by the '90s, with the spread of cable, everyone could see what LaRussa was doing and the success he was having every night on Sportscenter
Great stuff on Marberry. Any talk of that Senators team makes me think of Goose Goslin, the Hall of Famer from tiny Salem, N.J. It was my pleasure to assemble the NJ High School All-Century Team in 2000 for The Star-Ledger. That team included such gems as Ducky Medwick (my Player of the Century), Monte Irvin, Willie Wilson, Al Leiter, Hank Borowy, Larry Doby and Johnny Vander Meer. But the team did not include Goslin, who didn't play high school baseball. He checked out early for low level minor league as far as we could tell. The requirement for the team was you had to play high school ball in NJ. The omission of Goslin has always felt empty to me.
Lots of comments about Marberry, but John McGraw experimented with full-time or almost full-time relief pitchers frequently until actually developing one in Doc Crandall. In Christy Mathewson's book, 𝑃𝑖𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑃𝑖𝑛𝑐ℎ, Mathewson wrote, "I believe that Crandall is the best pitcher in a pinch in the National League and one of the most valuable men to a team."
Because the Giants had a strong offense, they often scored runs after Crandall came into a game so he was credited with many wins rather than saves, though he led the NL in games finished five straight seasons. He was a very good hitter and McGraw would sometimes pinch-hit him then let him finish the game on the hill.
I apologize if someone else already mentioned it, but Malcolm Gladwell did a whole episode on his Revisionist History podcast about Rick Barry shooting free throws underhanded and about why Wilt did it for awhile quite successfully but reverted to being much worse shooting them conventionally and why Shaq never would even try it and the answer was embarrassment. Shaq flat out admitted that missing free throws conventionally was less embarrassing than making them underhanded. Rick Barry on the other hand was a contrarian about everything, universally disliked, and didn’t give a rats ass what anyone else thought about anything including him shooting free throws underhanded (at a 90% clip btw).
After Joe alluded to it in The 100, I read Christy Matthewson’s book. The intro talked about how Matty carried the Giants to a hard fought pennant one year, appearing in some outrageous # of their last 15-20 games. That got me thinking, did he lead the league in saves and complete games that year? And if so, did anyone else ever do that? Turned out he did. I scanned a bunch of other guys I thought might have done so: if I remember right, 3 Finger Brown did it twice, and Eddie Plank 2 or 3 times. Dizzy Dean did it, and Carl Hubbell? I forgot who else. I thought at the time, this might make for a good Joe-piece.
I'm not so sure it's fair to say that Bucky Harris "forgot" about Marberry after Game 3 of the 1925 World Series. For one thing, Marberry pitched the final out of Game 5, which the Senators lost 6-3.
In Game 6 Washington lost 3-2, but that score had held since the 5th inning. Senators starter Alex Ferguson has given up just three runs in 7 and Win Ballou pitched a scoreless 8th, but the Washington batters couldn't get anything going against Bucs' starter Ray Kremer, who went the distance. Perhaps if the Washingtons had been able to eek out a lead, or even a tie, Marberry might have gotten a chance to pitch that day.
Kremer had hardly allowed a baserunner since the second inning, but Washington got a leadoff single and a steal in the top of the eighth to give them some hope of tying it up. After an infield popup, a groundout moved pinch runner Earl McNeely over to third, and then player/manager Bucky Harris pinch hit for himself with Bobby Veach, who grounded out to 2nd to end the threat. I would be surprised if Harris had not asked Marberry to warm up before that, just in case, but it didn't work out. Even if he was warming up, there was an off day between Games 6 and 7, so Marberry should still have been able to pitch if needed.
But that final game was probably Walter Johnson's to lose. He had already beaten the Pirates twice, and had closed out the 1924 World Series with 4 innings of scoreless relief, and I imagine Harris wanted to see him standing on the mound after the last out was recorded in Pittsburgh too. FWIW, the SABR game story about it says Harris wanted to stick with Johnson, despite the crowd's pleas otherwise.
Despite how good he had been that year, Johnson was already 37 and the history of very good pitchers older than that could have been counted on one hand at the time. Harris must have figured Johnson wouldn't have many more good years left in him and didn't want him to miss his chance for a lack of trying. Anyway, the game was nuts, apparently:
Marberry may or may not have made much difference. To hear Gary Sarnoff tell it, the umpires and the weather doomed Washington's chances, not Harris' managerial choices.
I enjoy these little rabbit hole discussions. But, Joe, I think you may have buried the lead. Who is Baby Doll Jacobson? I love that nickname. How about baby doll Posnanski?
And a Ned Yost mention. Do we think that Nets Yost was an important step on the way to openers, etc.? I did have a buddy who is a Royals fan and we used to talk about whether any team would ever take the Royals method to an extreme and just have 9 one inning relief pitchers. What if a team did just have 13 or 15 pitchers who each pitch one inning. That would be a very interesting experiment. If you were friends with him I don’t mean this is an insult, but I have to tell you I look at Ned Yost the way I look at Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. With me playing the role of that English officer – “do you think he does it on purpose? “. For those who aren’t familiar, Johnny Depp is the pirate captain who always squeaks his way out of trouble in some crazy cockeyed way, but you can never tell if he planned it that way or not.
So, the Firpo Marberry stuff is great, but what really got my interest and sent me down a rabbit hole was the made up name the Washington paper gave him, Oliphant. Now, I have seen that name before, but since it is from a work of fiction that wasn't yet written in the 1920s ("The Lord of the Rings"), I was wondering about the origin. Turns out it is kind of a common surname in Scotland.
He was done in 1935 and the American League hired him as an umpire. He worked 50 games ... but only two behind the plate. He simply didn't know how to call balls and strikes, and, to pick up on the theme, embarrassed himself and the league. He was then let go. Jocko Conlan told the story, and said he played when Firpo went behind the plate, and he just couldn't do the job. Jocko then retired and AL President Will Harridge suggested that he become an umpire, but he would have to go to the minors because they would never again start someone as an umpire at the major league level.
Another name to throw in here, since Larussa and Torre got shout-outs: Chuck Tanner. It was Tanner (along, I suppose, with the Pirates’ front office) who took Rich Gossage from being a starter with an ERA+ of 91 to a closer - I don’t think the term existed yet - with an ERA+ of 244. And then, After Steinbrenner had to have Gossage for himself, Tanner turned the role over to the sidearming Kent Tekulve and they won a World Series together.
I don’t know how much Tanner can be can be credited with reinventing the relief pitcher, but the record suggests at least as much as the guys mentioned.
Well Joe, the day I knew would eventually come is finally here… what once was a delightful delivery amongst the deluge of digital dross has become a horror show of mundane horse shit lately. But something interesting has happened on this journey. The worse your posts get the happier I am to read them… it’s like a car crash that you just can’t turn away from. So, I am proud to announce that as of today I am a paid subscriber to JoeBlogs. Keep up the work.
From afar, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to what the Senators did. You write that 1926 was Marberry's last year as a full-time reliever, but in 1927, the Senators really went "all in" on the reliever thing. They were an 85-69 team but completed only 62 games, last in the league. Marberry still pitched 46 games in relief, but the Senators had another featured reliever in Garland Braxton, who started just 2 games but had 155.1 innings, and pitched very, very well. Braxton wasn't trusted as much as Marberry, but he had been a kind of Marberry-lite for the pennant winning '26 Yankees; one has to think they got the idea from the Senators, then traded Braxton there. As good as Braxton was in '27, one has to think Harris really thought starters were more important, because 24 of his 38 appearances in '28 were as a starter, and he led the league in E.R.A. It seems from that that Garland wasn't really doing anything different as a reliver and starter; he was effective in both roles. In '28, Marberry was still the Senators' primary reliever, with more than twice as many relief appearances as anyone on the team. He did not pitch to his previous level, so the phenomenon appears to have been over, or at least on hiatus.
Within the same vein of the relief pitcher and the underhanded free throw is the panenka. That’s how soccer players refer to a penalty kick taken right down the middle. It’s not often done, because the offensive player is worried that if they kick it down the middle and the ball is stopped that they’ll be humiliated. But goalkeepers don’t often defend against it because if they stand in the middle to stop the shot and the shot goes to one side they’ll be humiliated.
And so it goes.
Apropos of nothing except the boxer Luis Firpo ... Back in the mid-1980s, when was a young sportswriter, we were tracking a Mike Tyson fight via AP updates on the wire, trying to get it into the next day's paper on deadline. It wasn't being televised and there was no internet. We were dependent on the AP providing updates, and it was agonizingly slow. So slow that one colleague suggested the next update would read: "Dempsey has climbed back into the ring and is battering Firpo." It was so funny and so evocative that this sentence has remained intact in my mind for close to 40 years now.
Maybe someone has mentioned this already, but there was a great episode of Michael Lewis' Against the Rules podcast (or was it Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History) in which Wilt Chamberlain's embarrassment over shooting free throws underhanded outweighed his success shooting that way.
I wonder how much the delay in adoption had to do with access. Prior to TV, you could only read the newspaper and even then, the odds were against seeing day-to-day stuff like this in another market. In the '50s, though, as TV grew and the nightly news became a thing, a novelty like Jim Konstanty could become more well known and by the '90s, with the spread of cable, everyone could see what LaRussa was doing and the success he was having every night on Sportscenter
Great stuff on Marberry. Any talk of that Senators team makes me think of Goose Goslin, the Hall of Famer from tiny Salem, N.J. It was my pleasure to assemble the NJ High School All-Century Team in 2000 for The Star-Ledger. That team included such gems as Ducky Medwick (my Player of the Century), Monte Irvin, Willie Wilson, Al Leiter, Hank Borowy, Larry Doby and Johnny Vander Meer. But the team did not include Goslin, who didn't play high school baseball. He checked out early for low level minor league as far as we could tell. The requirement for the team was you had to play high school ball in NJ. The omission of Goslin has always felt empty to me.
Lots of comments about Marberry, but John McGraw experimented with full-time or almost full-time relief pitchers frequently until actually developing one in Doc Crandall. In Christy Mathewson's book, 𝑃𝑖𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑃𝑖𝑛𝑐ℎ, Mathewson wrote, "I believe that Crandall is the best pitcher in a pinch in the National League and one of the most valuable men to a team."
Because the Giants had a strong offense, they often scored runs after Crandall came into a game so he was credited with many wins rather than saves, though he led the NL in games finished five straight seasons. He was a very good hitter and McGraw would sometimes pinch-hit him then let him finish the game on the hill.
I apologize if someone else already mentioned it, but Malcolm Gladwell did a whole episode on his Revisionist History podcast about Rick Barry shooting free throws underhanded and about why Wilt did it for awhile quite successfully but reverted to being much worse shooting them conventionally and why Shaq never would even try it and the answer was embarrassment. Shaq flat out admitted that missing free throws conventionally was less embarrassing than making them underhanded. Rick Barry on the other hand was a contrarian about everything, universally disliked, and didn’t give a rats ass what anyone else thought about anything including him shooting free throws underhanded (at a 90% clip btw).
After Joe alluded to it in The 100, I read Christy Matthewson’s book. The intro talked about how Matty carried the Giants to a hard fought pennant one year, appearing in some outrageous # of their last 15-20 games. That got me thinking, did he lead the league in saves and complete games that year? And if so, did anyone else ever do that? Turned out he did. I scanned a bunch of other guys I thought might have done so: if I remember right, 3 Finger Brown did it twice, and Eddie Plank 2 or 3 times. Dizzy Dean did it, and Carl Hubbell? I forgot who else. I thought at the time, this might make for a good Joe-piece.
What a great column—am I the only one who didn’t know any of that?
I'm not so sure it's fair to say that Bucky Harris "forgot" about Marberry after Game 3 of the 1925 World Series. For one thing, Marberry pitched the final out of Game 5, which the Senators lost 6-3.
In Game 6 Washington lost 3-2, but that score had held since the 5th inning. Senators starter Alex Ferguson has given up just three runs in 7 and Win Ballou pitched a scoreless 8th, but the Washington batters couldn't get anything going against Bucs' starter Ray Kremer, who went the distance. Perhaps if the Washingtons had been able to eek out a lead, or even a tie, Marberry might have gotten a chance to pitch that day.
Kremer had hardly allowed a baserunner since the second inning, but Washington got a leadoff single and a steal in the top of the eighth to give them some hope of tying it up. After an infield popup, a groundout moved pinch runner Earl McNeely over to third, and then player/manager Bucky Harris pinch hit for himself with Bobby Veach, who grounded out to 2nd to end the threat. I would be surprised if Harris had not asked Marberry to warm up before that, just in case, but it didn't work out. Even if he was warming up, there was an off day between Games 6 and 7, so Marberry should still have been able to pitch if needed.
But that final game was probably Walter Johnson's to lose. He had already beaten the Pirates twice, and had closed out the 1924 World Series with 4 innings of scoreless relief, and I imagine Harris wanted to see him standing on the mound after the last out was recorded in Pittsburgh too. FWIW, the SABR game story about it says Harris wanted to stick with Johnson, despite the crowd's pleas otherwise.
Despite how good he had been that year, Johnson was already 37 and the history of very good pitchers older than that could have been counted on one hand at the time. Harris must have figured Johnson wouldn't have many more good years left in him and didn't want him to miss his chance for a lack of trying. Anyway, the game was nuts, apparently:
https://sabr.org/journal/article/a-dark-rainy-game-seven-the-pirates-defeat-the-big-train-in-the-1925-world-series/
Marberry may or may not have made much difference. To hear Gary Sarnoff tell it, the umpires and the weather doomed Washington's chances, not Harris' managerial choices.
I enjoy these little rabbit hole discussions. But, Joe, I think you may have buried the lead. Who is Baby Doll Jacobson? I love that nickname. How about baby doll Posnanski?
And a Ned Yost mention. Do we think that Nets Yost was an important step on the way to openers, etc.? I did have a buddy who is a Royals fan and we used to talk about whether any team would ever take the Royals method to an extreme and just have 9 one inning relief pitchers. What if a team did just have 13 or 15 pitchers who each pitch one inning. That would be a very interesting experiment. If you were friends with him I don’t mean this is an insult, but I have to tell you I look at Ned Yost the way I look at Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. With me playing the role of that English officer – “do you think he does it on purpose? “. For those who aren’t familiar, Johnny Depp is the pirate captain who always squeaks his way out of trouble in some crazy cockeyed way, but you can never tell if he planned it that way or not.
So, the Firpo Marberry stuff is great, but what really got my interest and sent me down a rabbit hole was the made up name the Washington paper gave him, Oliphant. Now, I have seen that name before, but since it is from a work of fiction that wasn't yet written in the 1920s ("The Lord of the Rings"), I was wondering about the origin. Turns out it is kind of a common surname in Scotland.
There's another part of the Marberry story.
He was done in 1935 and the American League hired him as an umpire. He worked 50 games ... but only two behind the plate. He simply didn't know how to call balls and strikes, and, to pick up on the theme, embarrassed himself and the league. He was then let go. Jocko Conlan told the story, and said he played when Firpo went behind the plate, and he just couldn't do the job. Jocko then retired and AL President Will Harridge suggested that he become an umpire, but he would have to go to the minors because they would never again start someone as an umpire at the major league level.
Another name to throw in here, since Larussa and Torre got shout-outs: Chuck Tanner. It was Tanner (along, I suppose, with the Pirates’ front office) who took Rich Gossage from being a starter with an ERA+ of 91 to a closer - I don’t think the term existed yet - with an ERA+ of 244. And then, After Steinbrenner had to have Gossage for himself, Tanner turned the role over to the sidearming Kent Tekulve and they won a World Series together.
I don’t know how much Tanner can be can be credited with reinventing the relief pitcher, but the record suggests at least as much as the guys mentioned.
Great stuff about Firpo!
Well Joe, the day I knew would eventually come is finally here… what once was a delightful delivery amongst the deluge of digital dross has become a horror show of mundane horse shit lately. But something interesting has happened on this journey. The worse your posts get the happier I am to read them… it’s like a car crash that you just can’t turn away from. So, I am proud to announce that as of today I am a paid subscriber to JoeBlogs. Keep up the work.
From afar, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to what the Senators did. You write that 1926 was Marberry's last year as a full-time reliever, but in 1927, the Senators really went "all in" on the reliever thing. They were an 85-69 team but completed only 62 games, last in the league. Marberry still pitched 46 games in relief, but the Senators had another featured reliever in Garland Braxton, who started just 2 games but had 155.1 innings, and pitched very, very well. Braxton wasn't trusted as much as Marberry, but he had been a kind of Marberry-lite for the pennant winning '26 Yankees; one has to think they got the idea from the Senators, then traded Braxton there. As good as Braxton was in '27, one has to think Harris really thought starters were more important, because 24 of his 38 appearances in '28 were as a starter, and he led the league in E.R.A. It seems from that that Garland wasn't really doing anything different as a reliver and starter; he was effective in both roles. In '28, Marberry was still the Senators' primary reliever, with more than twice as many relief appearances as anyone on the team. He did not pitch to his previous level, so the phenomenon appears to have been over, or at least on hiatus.