The Bad News Bees, Part 2b, Harl Maggert

Caught red-handed taking bribe money

(Part 1 of this series, detailing the involvement of Gene Dale in the 1919 Pacific Coast League gambling scandal, was presented here on June 14-15. An introduction that will help you pick up the story was presented on those days.)

(Continued from yesterday)

Maggert appears in the Zeenuts candy cards of Pacific
Coast League players in 1911, 1913-17 and 1920.

Harl Maggert

Maggert spent the 1913-17 seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, generally playing center field and batting lead-off. He returned to the P.C.L. with a flourish, hitting .316 in 1913, second-best among players in more than 100 games. He either led the league or was tied in games played, runs scored and triples. His 18 home runs and 89 stolen bases were each second-best in the circuit. He was fourth in hits and doubles. His fielding was in the top half of the class. Despite Maggert’s stats, the Seraphs finished fifth in the six-team league.

In 1914 the Angels came in second though Maggert’s personal numbers were down in most categories. He still led the league with 127 runs, and was among the top six in games, hits and three-baggers. Batting .288, he fielded among the top 10.

Maggert rebounded to break the .300 batting barrier in 1915 (.307), leading the league with 14 triples and 147 runs plated. He was tied for third with 55 steals, was fourth-best in games and at-bats, tied for fifth with a dozen home runs and was ninth with 226 hits. Maggert also led the league’s outfielders with 24 errors, his fielding average the worst among outfielders in more than 75 games. The Angels finished third that season.

The 1916 season was again fairly undistinguished for Maggert, though the Angels copped the pennant that year. Batting .274, Maggert cracked the top 10 lists in only two categories. His 42 stolen bases were fourth, and he had the seventh-best fielding average for outfielders in more than 150 games.

The Angels dropped back to second place in 1917, and Maggert’s stats dropped in every category. He hit just .256. Maggert suffered from sore knees much of the season and also from a suspension by manager Frank Chance, who fined him and set him down for beating up the club’s trainer.

By the time the 1918 season rolled around, ballplayers were getting mighty scarce in the P.C.L., as in other pro leagues. Many of the players who were not volunteers or draftees into the armed forces for World War I had taken war-industry jobs either to keep out of Uncle Sam’s uniform or for the high pay, Maggert, at 35, was above draft age. He was sold to San Francisco in early April, just prior to the opening of the season. Los Angeles felt it could afford to let Maggert go as they had just signed 19-year major league veteran and future Hall of Famer Sam Crawford.

Again, The Sporting News was unenthusiastic. “Harl Maggert is not likely to be of much use to San Francisco,” the paper commented. “He has a bad knee, too susceptible to injury and the deal for him was just so much energy and money wasted.”

Maggert had no problems playing out the season with the Seals in 1918, but the season was cut short due to the war, ending in mid-July. His .247 batting average was the lowest in Maggert’s pro career since his debut season, though he did manage to steal 19 bases in 86 games. Fielding records were not released by the league for the war-shortened 1918 season.

With the P.C.L. season on hiatus, Maggert played semi-pro ball. Just prior to the opening of the 1919 season he was traded by San Francisco to Salt Lake City for third baseman Karl Crandall.

The Sporting News finally gave Maggert a positive review. S.L.C. baseball beat writer Walter Bratz said Maggert was “for years one of the best outfielders in the league. He has no superiors at fly chasing, and until last season he always hit well and was a demon on the bases. But an injured leg handicapped him in 1918 and he did not show his old-time class. His leg is bothering him no more and he looks to be as good as of old,” Bratz concluded.

Maggert rebounded in all offensive categories in 1919. He hit .274 and again led the league with 127 runs scored. He was tied for fifth with 37 doubles and fielded in the top half of the league’s outfielders.

While Maggert hit .274 against the league, he batted only .213 for the season against Vernon. When the teams first met in April in Utah, Maggert hit .263 as the Bees took three of the five games in the series.

In an eight-game set at Vernon in early July, Maggert hit just .176, though Salt Lake won five and tied one of the games. It is unlikely that Maggert and the Bees were trying to throw the pennant to Vernon at that point in the season. With more than two months remaining, Vernon was in second place and S.L.C. was still in the race, in fourth.

By mid-September the Bees had moved up to third place, less than 10 games behind Vernon and Los Angeles, who were tied for the league lead. In home-and-home series with Vernon between Sept. 16-28, the Bees had plenty of opportunity to shape their own destiny, especially after winning the first two games in Salt Lake City. 

Whether or not those first two games were on the square will never be known. They may have been intended as losses but won by luck or design. Maggert hit .333 with a triple in those contests. In the remainder of the games at hone against the Tigers, the Bees were 1-4; Maggert hit .227. At some point, however, Maggert and a few teammates decided to take the sure-thing money offered by Borton as opposed to taking a chance on winning the pennant with its attendant bonus pool promised by the local fans.

The series moved to Vernon on Sept. 23 for six games. The Bees won the opener, then lost the next five. Maggert was 4-for-24 (.167) with a double and an error in Vernon.

When the Bees and Tigers concluded their season series, Salt Lake City was 13-1/2 games out, but retained their hold on third place. Vernon and Los Angeles met in a season-ending series with the Tigers down by two and a half games. They put a hurt on the Angels in the final games of the season, however, splitting an Oct 1 doubleheader, then sweeping the final five games to win the pennant and a $10,000 bonus offered by their fans. The Vernon players also split an $8,000 winners’ share for beating St. Paul in the “Little World Series.” For their efforts, Maggert, Dale and Rumler got an under-the-table taste of the winnings.

There is evidence that Borton, abetting Nate Raymond and blackballed major leaguer Hal Chase, continued to fix games in the Pacific Coast League through the 1920 season. Whether or not Maggert was a party to the thrown games is unknown.

The record shows Maggert, at age 37, was having one of the best seasons of his career in 1920 prior to his banishment. Unofficial figures – the official P.C.L. stats were purged of the accomplishments of Maggert and other crooked ballplayers – show Maggert hit .370 in 115 games. Teammate Earl Sheeley led the league that season with a .371 mark.

With Maggert and Rumler removed from the team, Salt Lake City fell from first place on July 18 to fifth by the end of the season.

Little record of Maggert is found after he was banned from Organized Baseball. He went into the coal business in the L.A. area with his father-in-law, for whom he had worked in the off-seasons, and died in Fresno, Calif., just short of his 80^th birthday in 1963.

Second-generation Maggert

also made the major leagues

Eighteen years after his father was blacklisted by Organized Baseball, Harl Warren Maggert, made it briefly to the major leagues.

The younger Maggert spent the 1938 season with Boston in the National League. Coincidentally, during the time when Maggert was with Boston, the team was known as the Bees. He’d earned the promotion after batting .339 with 30 homers in the Piedmont League in 1936 and .344 with 23 home runs in 1937.

Playing a little bit in the outfield and around third base, Maggert led the N.L. that season with 43 at-bats as a pinch-hitter, producing the desired result 10 times (a pinch-hit average of .233). Overall he batted .281 in 66 games. Three of his 25 major league hits were doubles and three were home runs. He had 19 RBIs, walked 10 times and struck out 20 times.

The younger Maggert played five seasons in the minors between 1933-39.

(Editor’s Note: This series on the disgraced Salt Lake City Bees of 1919 will conclude next month with Bill Rumler’s story, which somebody really should make into a movie.)

The Bad News Bees, Part 2a, Harl Maggert

Caught red-handed taking bribe money

(Part 1 of this series, detailing the involvement of Gene Dale in the 1919 Pacific Coast League gambling scandal, was presented here on June 14-15. An introduction that will help you pick up the story was presented on those days.)

Harl Maggert

By midway through the 1920 season, tensions in the Pacific Coast League were running high and nerves were chafing raw. Accusations once whispered in the locker rooms had become louder and spilled over onto the playing field.

The gist of it was that the Los Angeles Angels, who had lost the 1919 P.C.L. pennant to cross-town rival Vernon in the final days of the season, blamed Salt Lake City for laying down in a crucial late-season series with Vernon. When certain S.L.C. players could no longer stand the gaff, team management began to get the drift of the rumors.

On July 27 the Bees blew into L.A. for a series with Vernon. Apparently a tail was placed on one or more of the Salt Lake players. Whether the gumshoes were hired by the team or the league is unknown. The mists of nearly a century of passed time have obscured some of the details.

What is known is that a private detective spotted Salt Lake City center fielder Harl Maggert accepting $300 in cash from Vernon first baseman Babe Borton.

In what may have been a prearranged confrontation designed to get Maggert off the field while the investigation continued, he was thrown out of the July 29 game, fined and suspended for arguing with an umpire.

A bad-ass ballplayer all of his professional life, it was not Maggert’s first set-down – he had once been suspended for fighting with a P.C.L. umpire after accusing him of betting on a ballgame – but it would be his last. He demanded that the fine be lifted, threatening to quit the game. The more he protested, the deeper he dug himself into a hole. Eventually he said too much and Salt Lake City management dismissed him.

Maggert attempted to explain the $300 payoff as settlement of a year-old debt accrued by Borton in a card game. It was a story he would later attempt to peddle to a grand jury. Nobody was buying.

As the weeks wore on an investigation chaired by league president William McCarthy began to piece together the scandal. Borton and Maggert were joined on the suspended list by Salt Lake City right fielder Bill Rumler, effectively ending the team’s contention for the 1920 pennant. Gene Dale, who had pitched for the Bees in 1919, but moved on to Dallas in 1920 was also caught in the net and eventually (apparently unofficially) blackballed.

With his paychecks stopped, Maggert threatened to sue everyone in sight. McCarthy offered him a league hearing or the opportunity to defend himself in a civil action. Maggert never made good on his threats.

That, however, didn’t keep him out of the courtroom.

Among several Pacific Coast League baseball card sets in
which Harl Maggert appeared was the 1910 Bishop & Co.
(E99) candy issue.

In October a grand jury was convened in Los Angeles to determine whether criminal charges were warranted in connection with the baseball scandal. On Oct. 20 Maggert was called before the panel.

In a two-hour grilling he implicated teammates Dale, Rumler and Eddie Mulligan (who was never sanctioned in connection with the mess), along with Vernon’s Borton and second baseman Bobby Fisher (also exonerated).

After months of examination, the grand jury handed down indictments in early December charging Maggert, Borton, Rumler and West Coast gambler Nate Raymond with conspiracy to throw ballgames and bribe ballplayers. Shortly before Christmas a judge quashed the indictments for the very valid reason that fixing games was not illegal under California law. While that effectively ended the prosecution of Maggert, his professional baseball career was also ended.

That career had begun in 1906 when the 23-year-old Maggert split time between Sharon in the Ohio-Pennsylvania League and Ft. Wayne in the Interstate Association, both Class C circuits. Available records show Maggert his .244 for Sharon, the I.A. folded on July 8 without promulgating stats.

Maggert was not a big man. He stood 5'8" and in his prime weighed 155 pounds. He batted left and threw right.

A year later Maggert was in the Big Leagues. After playing most of the season with Wheeling in the Central League (Class B), where he hit .270 and stole 28 bases, Maggert was taken on for a trial with the Pittsburgh Pirates. In half a dozen at-bats over three games with the Bucs, Maggert failed to garner a hit, though he did walk twice and stole a base. He was turned back to Wheeling for the 1908 season.

Hitting .225 at mid-season, Maggert was released to Springfield in the Connecticut State League. In the final two months of the season he hit .312 to help the Ponies capture the pennant.

Maggert sent the first half of 1909 with Springfield, hitting .307. Though he played in only 94 games, his 30 doubles were tied for fourth in the league. With the team headed for a fifth-place finish, Maggert was sold to Oakland for $1,500.

In two months with the Oaks, Maggert hit .265. His fielding average was the worst among Pacific Coast League outfielders in more than 50 games.

While his batting average dropped off slightly, to .254, with Oakland in 1910, the rest of Maggert’s game improved considerably. His 34 doubles were tied for fourth and his nine home runs tied for fifth. With 91 runs scored he was in the top 10 in that category, and his 58 stolen bases were second-best in the circuit. Maggert’s glovework improved to the point that he was 10^th in fielding average among outfielders  in more than 100 games. Oakland finished second in the P.C.L. that season.

Maggert’s 1911 season was limited to about half of the P.C.L.’s traditional 220-game schedule, through a combination of injuries and inability to get along with Oaks manager Harry Wolverton. He hit .314, which was third-best among batters in over 100 games or 300 at-bats, but the bottom again fell out of his fielding. He was third from last among outfielders in more than 100 games.

With only 75 games in the majors, it's not surprising that
all of Maggert's baseball cards depict him as a Pacific
Coast Leaguer. This 1911 Obak T212 cigarette issue
is the most common of Maggert's cards.

In December, Maggert was purchased by the Philadelphia A’s. The Sporting News sent him off to the American League with less than a ringing endorsement that attested to Maggert’s growing reputation as a difficult ballplayer. “Maggert is hard to handle, but withal is a fine sticker, base runner and fielder. He is fast, hits on a line and can cover ground like a lion. Connie Mack will probably have use for him if he behaves.

“This season Maggert batted among the leaders,” the paper continued, “but was banished from the game because he made trouble for Wolverton just as he had every other manager whom he had worked under. As a base runner Maggert is hard to beat. He’s a foxy, wide-awake player, and but for his ill-temper would easily be held as an idol by the public.”

The A’s, coming off consecutive World Series wins in 1910-11 were able to work Maggert into about half their games as a replacement for the regular garden trio of Bris Lord, Rube Oldring and Amos Strunk. Maggert responded by hitting a mediocre .256 and fielding in the bottom 40% of the league’s outfielders. The A’s finished third in the A.L. in 1912.

For 1913 Maggert was returned to the Pacific Coast League. He would never play Organized Baseball in any other circuit for the remainder of his career.

(Continued tomorrow)