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)

The Bad News Bees, Part 1b, Gene Dale

Bees' pitcher stung Angels by throwing games

          

In 1919 Salt Lake City had clean air, clean-living people . . . and dirty ballplayers.

While the attention of baseball fans was focused on revelations of the dirty doings of the Black Sox in Chicago, a parallel scandal was unfolding on the West Coast involving several former major leaguers. Three of them were teammates on the Salt Lake City Bees.

The scandal had its genesis in the 1919 Pacific Coast League pennant race. Like the Black Sox thing, it would not become widely known until August of 1920 when one of the Salt Lake players was observed accepting a $300 pay-off. Before the season was over, a Los Angeles grand jury had begun an investigation into the attempts of gambler Nate Raymond to fix the 1919 season for the benefit of the Vernon Tigers.

Using Vernon first baseman Babe Borton to get to players on other teams, Raymond followed the Tigers up and down the Left Coast fixing ballgames. He later bragged that he had made $50,000 on crooked games.
             Vernon won the 1919 PCL pennant, finishing 2-1/2 games ahead of Los Angeles and 18 games in front of third-place Salt Lake City. In winning the championship, the Tigers split a $10,000 bonus pool put up by fans, plus the $8,000 winners’ share of the “Little World Series.” 

            While the Bees as a team missed out on a similar windfall promised for a pennant win, at least three of the team’s key players had collected personal bonus money amounting to something like two weeks’ salary for the average Coast Leaguer. A year later those private pension programs put the players beyond the pale of Organized Baseball; run out of the game by team and league officials with the wisdom and courage to protect the integrity of the Pacific Coast League.

            In this multi-part series we’ll look at the trio of 1919 Salt Lake City Bees who sold out, and the player who corrupted them. This presentation is an updating of a series of articles published in 1993 while I was publisher of Sports Collectors Digest.

Gene Dale

(Continued from yesterday)

Despite playing his entire career

during the tobacco and caramel

card heyday, Dale appears only

on the 1916 Felix Mendelsohn

issue. They're sometimes found

with ads on back for The Sporting

News and other companies.

Back with Indianapolis in 1919, Dale was tagged with two losses in the two games he pitched before being sent to Salt Lake City.

Dale saw his first action for the Bees when he started on May 15. He threw 2.1 innings before the home crowd in an 8-7 loss to Seattle, giving up six hits, five runs and striking out one. He played his next three games for Salt Lake City in the outfield, subbing for injured right fielder (and fellow conspirator) Bill Rumler. In the three games in the garden, Dale hit at a 4-for-14 pace (.286) with a double and a home run.  The Sporting News commented, “Jean Dale hasn’t been a shining light as a pitcher with Salt Lake, but he looked pretty good in the outfield.” Rumler returned to the lineup on May 23, and Dale returned to the mound.

Over 30 games for the Bees, Dale earned a break-even record of 13-13 though he had an unenviable 4.48 ERA. In 217 innings he gave up 243 hits and struck out and walked 85 each.

Naturally, it’s hard to say what Dale’s record might have been if he hadn’t had a side job of helping the Vernon team win. (In games against the Tigers in which he appeared, Dale’s team was 1-4 in 1919.) Interestingly, Dale had one of his better-batting seasons with S.L.C. in 1919, hitting .325 with two home runs; when he played Vernon, he hit .308. Of the six errors charged to Dale in 1919, one-third were in games against Vernon.

It was on the mound, however, that Dale seemingly did his part to throw the pennant Vernon’s way. The two teams met in 13 straight games between Sept. 16-28. When that important series opened, Vernon was in a tie with Los Angeles for first place in the P.C.L.; Salt Lake City was third, 10 games back.

The Bees stung the Tigers in the first two games of the series, then Dale did his dirty work. He started three of the next seven games and lost all of them.

On Sept. 18 he gave up 10 hits and a pair of passes in a 7-4 loss. It cannot be determined from the box score how many of the four hits in the fifth inning were charged to Dale, who was yanked after 4-1/3 frames, but he was responsible for the three runs scattered across the first three innings by Vernon.

Dale came back for the second game of a double-header on the 20^th. He took a complete game loss that afternoon 6-3 walking only one Tiger, but allowing 13 hits and making an error.

In Vernon on Sept. 24, he again pitched – and lost – a complete game by a 6-2 score. He gave up nine hits and eight walks in that effort.

Through the efforts of Dale and his accomplices, Salt Lake City lost nine of the 13 games with Vernon. While Vernon was winning fixed games, Los Angeles was winning (presumably) honestly. When the Sunday double-headers were over on Sept. 28, the Angels had a 2-1/2-game lead over Vernon.

The 1919 Coast League pennant race came down to what should have been an incredibly dramatic finish, Vernon and L.A. playing a seven-game series at Vernon for all the marbles. The teams split a double-header on Oct. 1, then Vernon ran away with the pennant, sweeping the final five contests.

The Vernon team collected its promised $10,000 championship bonus, then split another $8,000 as its share of the gate from the “Junior World Series,” besting St. Paul, champions of the American Association in a best-of-nine series.

On Oct. 18, Dale unwisely accepted a $500 check from Babe Borton, allegedly for services rendered during the season.

The 1920 season, as mentioned, found Gene Dale back in Dallas. Though he had an excellent 2.61 ERA over 39 games, his record was a disappointing 15-18 for the sixth-place Marines.

At least two of Dale’s performances that year were stellar to a degree that earned special mention in The Sporting News. On June 17, Dallas was in the bottom of the 11^th inning at San Antonio when Dale hit his sole season triple to win it for himself. He had allowed only one hit in the game through the first six innings.

Against Wichita Falls on Sept. 5, Dale pitched no-hit ball through nine innings but lost 1-0 when a teammate made two errors behind him in the 12^th.

By the time Dale’s 1920 season was over, the scandal had surfaced on the Coast and a grand jury was soon convened.

Borton was amazingly forthcoming before the panel and consequently Dale’s name came up. The grand jury naturally wished to interrogate the pitcher. P.C.L. president William McCarthy wired Dale at his home in St. Louis to speed to Los Angeles to appear. McCarthy promised Dale his round-trip travel expenses and hotel fare for his time in L.A.

Dale responded that he would need an additional $300 cash payment over and above expenses. McCarthy balked at this, saying that he didn’t consider it proper procedure. At that, Dale declined to make the trip. He excused himself by saying the proximity of the presidential election, “which will demand by presence in St. Louis.” Dale did provide the grand jury with an affidavit in which he averred that the $500 he received from Borton was repayment of a loan made the previous year.

In its efforts to get Dale on the witness stand, the grand jury sought the assistance of President J. Walter Morris of the Texas League. Morris told Coast authorities that he would do his best to get Dale before the panel, and if he did not get a clean bill of health “he need never show his face in Texas again.”

In mid-November, Dale did travel to Kansas City to meet with McCarthy, who then returned with Dale to St. Louis for further investigation.

On Dec. 10, the Los Angeles County grand jury returned indictments against Borton and Raymond, and against Dale’s 1919 Salt Lake City teammates Bill Rumler and Harl Maggert. Dale emerged unscathed. On Dec. 24 a California judge dismissed the indictments. As it turned out, conspiring to throw ballgames was not a criminal offense in the Golden State. Merry Christmas!

While most of ballplayers involved in the 1919 P.C.L. scandal never played another game in Organized Baseball, Gene Dale may have – literally.

On Aug. 13, 1921, a pitcher named Dale appeared in the box score as having pitched four innings of relief for the Newark Bears of the International League against Buffalo. He gave up three hits and a walk and struck out three, but did not participate in the decision. He was 0-for-2 at the plate. There was no fanfare in the sporting press about this Dale’s appearance in the game, or his disappearance thereafter.

It has been written elsewhere that the Dale who pitched for Newark on Aug. 13, 1921, was a collegian, not the then-32-year-old Gene Dale. It was not unusual for minor league teams to give trials to amateur players in that era, especially second-division teams such as Newark in 1921, so the pitcher could have been a college player who never again appeared in an O.B. game.

But it’s not impossible that Gene Dale had taken the mound for Newark that day. He was pitching Sunday ball in a fast semi-pro league in Missouri in 1921. He had not officially banned from Organized Baseball, so Newark may have decided to take a chance on him. It must be assumed that if it was Gene Dale, pressure was brought on the Newark team to return him to the blacklist. Perhaps a study of local newspapers box scores for the Cape Giradeau Capahas around that date would be informative as to Gene Dale’s whereabouts on Aug. 13, 1921. In 1921, August 13 was a Saturday, so if Gene Dale had pitched in Newark that day, he would not have been in southeastern Missouri the next day.

Dale died in 1958 at the age of 68 in St. Louis.

Further reading

There is an excellent biography of Gene Dale in the Society for American Baseball Research biography file. It’s written by Bill Lamb.

http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/69ceccb1 .

Continued next month

Check back here in mid-July for the second installment of The Bad News Bees, detailing the involvement of Har Maggert in the 1919 scandal.

The Bad News Bees, Part 1a, Gene Dale

Bees' pitcher stung Angels by throwing games

          

In 1919 Salt Lake City had clean air, clean-living people . . . and dirty ballplayers.

While the attention of baseball fans was focused on revelations of the dirty doings of the Black Sox in Chicago, a parallel scandal was unfolding on the West Coast involving several former major leaguers. Three of them were teammates on the Salt Lake City Bees.

The scandal had its genesis in the 1919 Pacific Coast League pennant race. Like the Black Sox thing, it would not become widely known until August of 1920 when one of the Salt Lake players was observed accepting a $300 pay-off. Before the season was over, a Los Angeles grand jury had begun an investigation into the attempts of gambler Nate Raymond to fix the 1919 season for the benefit of the Vernon Tigers.

Using Vernon first baseman Babe Borton to get to players on other teams, Raymond followed the Tigers up and down the Left Coast fixing ballgames. He later bragged that he had made $50,000 on crooked games.

Vernon won the 1919 PCL pennant, finishing 2-1/2 games ahead of Los Angeles and 18 games in front of third-place Salt Lake City. In winning the championship, the Tigers split a $10,000 bonus pool put up by fans, plus the $8,000 winners’ share of the “Little World Series.” 
            While the Bees as a team missed out on a similar windfall promised for a pennant win, at least three of the team’s key players had collected personal bonus money amounting to something like two weeks’ salary for the average Coast Leaguer. A year later those private pension programs put the players beyond the pale of Organized Baseball; run out of the game by team and league officials with the wisdom and courage to protect the integrity of the Pacific Coast League.

            In this multi-part series we’ll look at the trio of 1919 Salt Lake City Bees who sold out, and the player who corrupted them. This presentation is an updating of a series of articles published in 1993 while I was publisher of Sports Collectors Digest.

Gene Dale

When the fun hit the fan in the Pacific Coast League, Gene (or Jean, as he sometimes identified himself) Dale may have thought he was out of harm's way. For the 1920 season, Dale had been dealt to Dallas, where he had begun his professional career a decade earlier.

Emmett Eugene Dale was born June 16, 1889 in St. Louis. While his obituary mentions that he had a trial with Sacramento in the P.C.L., available records don’t show the results. His first real experience came with Dallas in the Texas League in 1910.

The tall (6’3”), thin (179 lbs.) right-hander contributed a 10-7 record to a narrow Dallas pennant win that season.

The Cleveland Indians drafted Dale from Dallas after the 1910 season, but turned him over to Providence in the Eastern League prior to the start of the 1911 campaign. Dale appeared in fewer than 10 games with the Grays before he was returned to Dallas.

In 103 innings with Dallas in 1911, Dale compiled an impressive 179 strikeouts on his way to a 12-8 season; the team finished in fourth place. Dale, however, finished in the National League, getting a five-game trial with his home-team Cardinals. In his 15 innings with St. Louis, Dale gave up a bit less than a hit per frame on average, while walking 16 and fanning 13. He ended his first major-league season with an 0-2 record on an ERA of 6.75. On the bright side, he did hit an even .400 – two singles in five at-bats.

Dale never did win a game for the Cardinals. With the team through July of the 1912 season, he appeared in 19 games, all but three in relief. He was 0-5 with a 6.57 ERA when he was sent out to Montreal of the International League in early August.

Dale pitched for the Royals the remainder of 1912 and throughout the following two seasons. Undoubtedly he adopted the Gallic spelling of his first name while among the Quebecois. He may also have acquired a propensity for perfidy there – one of his teammates was Chick Gandil, future ring-leader of the Black Sox.

The team never finished higher than fifth in Dale’s two-plus seasons with Montreal. His only winning season was 1913, when he went 13-10 with two ties. Overall for his time on the Royals, Dale compiled a 27-33 record in 83 appearances on the mound. In 528 innings of work, he gave up 523 hits, 260 runs and 203 walks while striking out 199.

It’s hard to imagine what, with a record like that, the Cincinnati Reds saw to indicate Dale could help their staff. Perhaps it was his hitting. According to available records, Dale had a professional career batting average of something on the order of .251, but he did have occasional flashes of batting brilliance. Three of his four hits for Montreal in 1912, for instance, were doubles. And in 1914 he out-hit and out-slugged another International League pitcher named Babe Ruth. That season, in 99 at-bats, Dale hit .263 with a pair of home runs. Ruth had 121 at-bats in 1914, hitting .231 with a single round-tripper.

Dale’s first season with Cincinnati in 1915 was the best of his pro career. For a seventh-place team he managed an 18-17 record on an ERA of only 2.46. He was also credited (by today’s standards) with three saves in relief. Dale led the Reds’ staff (and was tied for second in the league) with 49 pitching appearances. His 18 wins and 297 innings were also team-bests and his innings worked were fourth-highest in the league. Unfortunately, Dale’s 104 walks were also tops in the Senior Circuit.

Things didn’t work out so well between Dale and manager Buck Herzog in 1916. In early July Dale had a 3-4 record going with a 5.17 ERA The pitcher complained in the press that his teammates were giving him no “encouragement.”

When the team was preparing to leave for St. Louis for a series over the Fourth of July, Dale was ordered to remain in Cincinnati. Aggrieved at missing the road trip to his home town, Dale disobeyed orders and went home to celebrate the Fourth, causing him to be suspended from the team. “Indifferent work” was the reason cited. That same phrase would crop up several times in the coming years when major league teams got rid of players whom they suspected of being on the take. While it obviously cannot be proven at this juncture, Dale’s later record may indicate there was more to his suspension than just poor performance. Either way, Dale never got another chance in the major leagues.

With the Reds Dale also expanded the circle of his teammates who would eventually run afoul of gambling allegations. Teammates Hal Chase and Phil Douglas were run out of baseball altogether in later years, while manager Buck Herzog and mound-mate Rube Benton were unofficially black-balled from the major leagues a few years later. Sent to Indianapolis for the remainder of the season, Dale was 2-2 in six games.

The 1917 season saw Dale dropped back a class in baseball’s hierarchy, to the Western League. With sixth-place Denver, Dale had a sparkling 14-5 season going when he was called back to Indianapolis. In 11 games for the Indians, Dale had a 4-3 winning record and a 3.05 to help the team to the American Association pennant.

Despite playing his entire career

during the tobacco and caramel

card heyday, Dale appears only

on the 1916 Felix Mendelsohn

issue. They're sometimes found

with ads on back for The Sporting

News and other companies.

That year the winners of the A.A. and International League met in a best-of-seven “Junior World Series,” with Toronto representing the I.L. Surprisingly, Dale started the first game in right field. He was 2-for-5 at the plate to help the team to an 8-2 win. He appeared in the second game as a pinch-hitter, but failed to come through in a 4-0 loss. Indianapolis won the next two games to take a 3-1 lead.

A double-header was set for Sunday, Sept. 30. Indianapolis won the first game and the series. The teams played the second game of the twin-bill as an exhibition, with Dale on the mound for Indy. That game was called in a 4-4 tie after six innings.

An interesting side note to Gene Dale’s 1917 season is that he nominally led two minor leagues in hitting that year. Though he didn’t have enough at-bats to qualify for the batting crown, his .367 mark with Denver was tops in the Western League, while his .370 with Indianapolis was the best in the American Association.

Dale set another record with Indianapolis in 1918, though because of the war-shortened nature of the season, which closed on July 21, perhaps it should appear with an asterisk. Over nine games and despite the fact he had a 2.-3 losing record, Dale compi
led a 1.50 ERA, a mark that still stands as a season best in the American Association.

His last pitching assignment at Indy in 1918 was a pair of relief appearances in both ends of a Memorial Day double-header versus Louisville. He threw an inning in each game, but was not part of the decision in either Indianapolis loss. On June 5 , Dale made his final appearance of the season, playing right field and going 2-4 at the plate in a win over Minneapolis.

In mid-June, along with hundreds of other ballplayers, Dale felt the draft. He was assigned to military duty at Jefferson Barracks, near his home town of St. Louis, for the duration.

(Continued tomorrow)