Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Biography by James Forr Pie Traynor. Pie Traynor was widely considered the top third baseman in the history of baseball prior to the rise of Eddie Mathews. A career .320 hitter, when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1948 he beat Al Simmons, Charlie Gehringer, Jimmie Foxx, and over 25 others later enshrined in Cooperstown. There is a tendency among baseball fans to discount Traynor's accomplishments when comparing him to successors who variously fielded better, with much more power, and or did both better. Traynor, however, was a product of his time, long before third base became a "power" position. Prior to Mathews, Brooks Robinson, Mike Schmidt, George Brett, and Chipper Jones, the good fielding/high average Traynor was generally considered the best the sport produced from 1876-1950. Modern fans would find a more appropriate parallel in Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, a five-time batting champ who however walked much more than Traynor. Traynor apparently acquired his unusual nickname from his love pies as a kid. One of seven siblings, he had a variety of jobs as a youth, the most interesting being a railroad car checker checking cars loaded with explosives. He tried to enlist in the US Army both in 1917 and 1942 but was turned down both times. Prior to reaching the majors he played in the Cape League in 1919 and the Virginia League in 1920. He spent his entire career in , considered the tougher for hitters in his day, all of it in difficult to homer Forbes Field. Ten times in his thirteen full seasons he topped. 300 in batting, peaking at .366 in 1930. An indication of how highly regarded Traynor was among his contemporaries is that even as he was winding down his time as a starter he was still good enough to be selected as an All-Star in baseball's very first Mid-Season Classic in 1933 and again the next year, his last two full campaigns. Six times voters placed him in the top ten in MVP balloting. While he rarely led the league in any offensive category, his .320 career batting average was #36 all-time among 20th Century players when he retired. His 164 triples stand #30 all-time today, and his 1273 RBI #120. Traynor achieved all of this in an era when third base was considered a defensive position and second an offensive one. The emergence of the play and relative decline of bunting as a key baseball strategy in favor of the long ball caused the roles to switch. What stars there were, such as Stan Hack, and Willie Kamm, typically got little respect for their efforts. One example of how different the position was regarded and the game played in Traynor's day were his 35 sacrifices in 1927 and 42 in 1928, at the very peak of his batting prowess. In his entire career future Hall of Famer Chipper Jones sacrificed 3 times. Traynor was a player-manager for the Pirates in 1934-35, managed only in 1936, then gave himself just a token dozen at-bats in 1937 before hanging up his spikes for good. He managed two more years, finishing as high as second in 1938 during his six year stretch at the Buc's helm. He served as a Pittsburgh scout from 1940 until his death. He was an announcer for much of the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with baseball then adding pro wrestling. He never learned to drive, and loved to walk everywhere. Once in New York City to report on the World Series he walked 127 blocks from his hotel to the stadium. He died of emphysema due to smoking, but after being diagnosed continued to live his life normally. Traynor will be the subject of a biography to be published by McFarland & Company in the spring/summer of 2010. Rattled in the Clinches: Manager Pie Traynor and the Epic Collapse of the 1938 Pirates. On the evening of September 29, 1938, inside the funereal visitors’ clubhouse at Wrigley Field, a despondent Pie Traynor leaned back, fired up a cigarette, and prepared to lie through his teeth. His had just lost three crushing games to the thanks to Gabby Hartnett’s famous “Homer in the Gloamin’â€​ and bravura pitching performances from decrepit Dizzy Dean and the ace of the National League, Bill Lee. Four weeks earlier, on September 1, the Bucs had the pennant in the bag. They began selling World Series tickets. President Bill Benswanger sunk $50,000 into a press box addition to accommodate all the writers who would flock to town to see the Pirates take a at the vaunted New York Yankees. But now Pittsburgh’s seven-game lead had crumbled into a 1 ½ game deficit, and there was almost no time left. As his team prepared to head to the train station, Traynor sat dazed, still in his uniform pants and ratty sweatshirt. He took a deep drag, glanced over to coach Jewel Ens, and muttered, “You can never give up.â€​ But he wasn’t fooling Ens or himself. The Bucs were done, and Traynor, a rather insecure man with a long memory, never completely got over it. “I felt as bad as I’ll ever feel, I think, that night we left Chicago.â€​ When things go wrong, it is perversely comforting to have someone to blame. Some historians have fingered Traynor as the culprit in the Pirates’ downfall. The argument, put forth most eloquently by in his Guide to Baseball Managers and Jeff Angus in Management by Baseball , is that Traynor rode his regulars much too hard. By the final month, the Pirates were just plain worn out, too weary to hold off Chicago, an inferior team that had no business winning a pennant. It is true that Traynor wasn’t big on the value of rest. All his starters appeared in at least 143 games except third baseman Lee Handley, who was injured for a while, and Al Todd, who nonetheless got more work than any other backstop in the major leagues. By contrast, no bench player received more than 125 at-bats. Utility man Tommy Thevenow, on the roster all season, played in just 15 games. But Traynor’s critics might be confusing correlation and causation. It’s hard to see evidence of any massive, team-wide collapse. A couple guys got hot in September while a couple others hit the skids – just like in any other month. Although Handley, Arky Vaughan, and Gus Suhr lost a few points off their batting averages in the season’s final weeks, rookie Johnny Rizzo had a very impressive final 29 games while fragile Lloyd Waner, who battled injury and illness throughout his career, hit a robust .365 during that same stretch. As a team, Pittsburgh’s offensive output dropped sharply, from 5.48 runs per game in June and July to 4.44 runs in August, September, and October. On the other hand, they averaged only 4.00 runs per game in April and May, and they certainly weren’t tired then. As much as anything, Pittsburgh probably was the victim of a natural regression to the mean. In June and July, the Bucs played at an otherworldly .741 clip. They were a good team, sure, but nowhere nearly that good. Inevitably, they returned to earth. But even so, until the fateful Chicago series, the Pirates’ record in August and September was 28-26 – not exceptional, but hardly indicative of a team in a fatigue-fueled freefall. It’s not that the Pirates went into a death spiral, just that the Cubs, who won 21 of 26 in September, got extremely hot at precisely the right moment. However, Traynor probably cannot be completely absolved. As manager, he “got rattled in the clinches,â€​ in the damning words of veteran Paul Waner. Even in the best of times, Traynor was a compulsive worrier, but in September 1938, with the Cubs driving relentlessly, he veered completely off the rails. By the end of the season he had lost 20 pounds, was smoking constantly, and generally looked like hell. A particularly tough defeat would send him moping back to his apartment or hotel room, unable to eat or sleep. On September 14, after a doubleheader loss, reporters found Traynor slumped atop a trunk outside the clubhouse “looking…like a fellow upon whom the whole world had tumbled.â€​ Benswanger, who sought refuge from the pressure of the race in two different anti-anxiety medications, stopped by to assure Traynor that he would keep his job even if the Pirates lost the pennant – curiously gloomy talk considering Pittsburgh was still 2 ½ games out in front at the time. It seemed that Traynor and Benswanger almost expected to lose. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette beat man Havey Boyle felt a completely different vibe 11 years earlier, when the Pirates had won their last pennant. “In contrast to the pained looks one receives [today] around nervous Pirate headquarters…there was no jittery feeling then, although the desperate boys of ’27 were staggering and tottering right down to the stretch.â€​ Traynor saw himself and his team as patsies, helpless to stop the Cubs’ march to the title. “Nobody knows what starts a thing like that, and after it starts there’s not a thing in the world you can do about it except just sit and suffer.â€​ Emotions are contagious. Work for neurotic, pessimistic people and eventually you’ll probably become neurotic and pessimistic, too. It is plausible the Pirates unconsciously fed off Traynor’s anxiety, and thus failed to perform up to par in those critical, tense games against Chicago. Perhaps Traynor was the goat, after all. But his biggest failure was not in how he managed his roster, but in how he managed himself. James Forr is the 2005 winner of the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award and co-author of Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography, published in January 2010. How Did Baseball Hall of Famer Pie Traynor Get His Nickname? There are multiple versions of how the MLB legend got his name, but only one was correct according to his father. Harold “Pie” Traynor spent 17 years (1920–1937) in the big leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates. A star third baseman, he was an excellent hitter who handled the hot corner with style and aplomb. His lunch pail style fit right in with the Steel City and although his name has caused debate regarding its origins over the years, his father stepped forward and set the record straight. Traynor grew up in Massachusetts as part of a large family who originally emigrated from Canada. Like many boys at the time, he adored baseball and rapidly progressed in developing into a prospect with designs on a pro career. The right-handed batter could really swing the stick and by the time he was 21 he had broken into the majors with the Pirates. He became a regular by 1922 and went on to a career that ultimately landed him in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In his 17 seasons (1920–35 & 1937), he hit a combined .320 with 58 home runs, 164 triples. 1,273 RBIs and 158 stolen bases. He only made two All-Star teams but received MVP votes in eight separate seasons. From 1934–1939, he also served as Pittsburgh’s manager. How did Traynor come to get his famous nickname? There seem to be several versions of the origin, including multiple stories told by Traynor himself. Perhaps the most well-known was that he simply had a love of eating pie. It’s true he particularly loved apple pie and saved up pennies as a child in order to purchase a slice whenever he was able. James Forr described in the SABR biography of the Hall of Famer that as a youth, he always ordered pie when he and friends would gather at the family store of Ben Nangle, an older boy who occasionally umpired their games and brought them home for a bite and to hang out. In an attempt at needling, he supposedly began calling Harold “Pie Face,” which ultimately stuck in a shortened version. However, according to a March 27, 1932 issue of The Brooklyn Eagle , none other than Traynor’s father Jim attempted to put any debate on the matter to rest for good. The elder Traynor was a type setter for the Boston Transcript . His job was having an fierce attention to detail as he got the press set up for each edition of the paper. As he recalled, his son received the nickname of “Pie” from him and it wasn’t because of pastries but rather because of a very dirty face. One day, when returning home from work, he discovered his young son had been playing vigorously in the garden and as a result had his face covered with grime and mud. He told the boy: “You’re a regular pi and before I kiss you, your mother will have to wash away about a ton of dirt.” For anyone wondering what his father meant by “pi,” should look no further than the world of typesetting. Pi was what printers called the “jumbled mass of type” that started before they organized it and set it up for a print run. In other words, a real mess. The cuteness of this story is another reason why as an adult, Traynor may have preferred telling other versions. After all, how many grizzled star third basemen in the big leagues wanted to tell curious reporters that the reason they had such an unique nickname was because of an affectionate father gently chiding his child before giving him a kiss? Clyde Barnhart World Series Stats. The Clyde Barnhart World Series stats seen below include his World Series year-by-year hitting stats, World Series fielding stats, and World Series pitching stats (where applicable). "But (Clyde) Barnhart reported that spring weighing about 260 or 270 pounds. He was just a butterball. They took him and did everything they could think of to get his weight down. They gave him steam baths, and exercised him, and ran him, and ran him, and ran him. Well, they got the weight off, all right, but as a result the poor fellow was so weak he could hardly lift a bat." - Paul Waner in Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography (James Forr & David Proctor, McFarland Publishing, 01/18/2010, Page 96) Clyde Barnhart. Clyde Barnhart. Clyde Barnhart World Series Pitching Stats. Clyde Barnhart. Clyde Barnhart World Series Hitting Stats. Clyde Barnhart. Clyde Barnhart World Series Fielding Stats. Clyde Barnhart. Clyde Barnhart World Series Miscellaneous Stats. Clyde Barnhart. Clyde Barnhart World Series Miscellaneous Items of Interest. Did you know that in the Clyde Barnhart Miscellaneous World Series Items of Interest section seen above you can click the Stats link under the World Series label and a truly comprehensive history of that World Series will appear on your screen? How comprehensive is our World Series data? We have box scores from every World Series game in history, line scores, Series rosters, composite team stats, trivia, a sample program, and a detailed written account of the actual Fall Classic. The All-Star label/link in the final section only shows whether or not Clyde Barnhart was an All-Star during the season where he appeared in the World Series (Dash=Not an All-Star | Stats=An All-Star and the link leads to the All-Star Game). Visit the main page for Clyde Barnhart for his comprehensive regular season statistics and All-Star data. “The Only Real Sport Out There”: Pie Traynor’s Life in Pro Wrestling. If you want to see someone’s face light up, find a middle-aged man who grew up in Pittsburgh and mention Pie Traynor. When he hears that name, he won’t recall Traynor’s sparkling play at third base or all the clutch hits he delivered for the Pirates. Those are the memories of a different generation. No, if you came of age during the 1960s, the name Pie Traynor is forever linked with Saturday nights and professional wrestling. From the late 1950s through the early ‘70s, Studio Wrestling was the signature program of Pittsburgh’s WIIC, Channel 11. Every Saturday from 6:00-7:30, thousands of people throughout Western Pennsylvania cheered from their living rooms as popular heroes like Bruno Sammartino and Jumpin’ Johnny DeFazio waged war against villainous heels like Gorilla Monsoon and George “The Animalâ€​ Steele. Wrestling was different in those days.  “Guys didn’t have bizarre gimmicks,â€​ recalled Sammartino. “You didn’t see skimpy clothes like today, where women are wearing a g-string and a bra that barely covers their nipples. It was fairly clean entertainment.â€​ Surrounding the ring were a few rows of folding chairs, which accommodated perhaps 200 people. But behind the last row was a backdrop on which images of “fansâ€​ were painted in order to create the illusion of a much larger crowd. To people watching on their fuzzy, black-and- white sets, it appeared that the seats extended endlessly into the darkness. Despite the low-budget production quality, Studio Wrestling was wildly successful.  “When we had wrestling on, we outdrew the Steelers,â€​ boasted longtime host Bill Cardille. Traynor was the spokesman for the show’s sponsor, the American Heating Company, whose enduring slogan, “Who can? Ameri-can!â€​ is etched into the minds of a generation of Pittsburghers.  Founder Max Berger marketed his business to blue-collar working stiffs. They were the kind of people who ordinarily might not be able to afford major home improvement projects – and the kind of people who loved wrestling. “The Heinz family wasn’t calling American Heating,â€​ joked Berger’s son, Jack. “Back in the ‘60s it wasn’t real common to get a loan from a bank to get a roof fixed [but] my dad worked closely with Mellon Bank to let people buy things on credit.â€​ Behind the scenes, Traynor was a magnetic presence, an exceedingly warm man with a puckish sense of humor. The wrestlers instantly treated him like one of the guys. He usually appeared at the studio around 4:30 and held court in WIIC’s massive announcer’s booth that was, in Cardille’s description, “as big as a kitchen.â€​ Soon after Traynor arrived, the wrestlers would stop by to say hello and kill a little time. “Ninety-five percent of the time there were five to seven other people in the announcer’s booth,â€​ recalled Cardille. Sammartino, a native of Italy, found Traynor especially captivating. “When I first came to this country, I didn’t know about baseball. So I was fascinated by all these stories he used to tell. He spoke very highly of Lou Gehrig. He would smile and talk about what a wild man Babe Ruth was. I used to try to get to the studio early just to sit there and talk to him.â€​ Traynor had been a fixture on the Pittsburgh airwaves since 1945, when he agreed to broadcast a daily segment during KQV Radio’s evening news. But as this painful clip suggests, his experience didn’t help him much on TV. The American Heating ads were simply awful, to the point that WIIC newscaster Eleanor Schano felt terrible for the old guy. “Bless his heart, he was such a wonderful storyteller, but as soon as you would get him on camera he would be so stilted.â€​   Cardille thought Traynor was too afraid of making a mistake. “He wouldn’t take his eyes off the TelePrompTer. If they wrote ‘go fly a duck’ on the prompter as a joke, he would have said ‘Who Can? Ameri-can! Go fly a duck!’ It was full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes.â€​ As clumsy as Traynor was, the commercials were astonishingly effective. “Those ads would routinely bring in quite a number of phone calls that would turn into leads,â€​ remembered Jack Berger.  Max Berger’s enduring partnership with Traynor and Studio Wrestling helped him grow his company into one of the largest home improvement companies in the Pittsburgh area. Soon, everywhere Traynor went in Pittsburgh, strangers serenaded him with shouts of “Who can, Pie?â€​ And in return he would good- naturedly holler back, “Ameri-can!â€​ But some took a dim view of Traynor’s new identity. “In a way he became almost a clownish figure because of the American Heating ads,â€​ sniffed his old friend Chuck Reichblum.  “Kids who didn’t know probably wouldn’t have guessed that here was a hall of fame ballplayer.â€​ WIIC’s Don Riggs agreed, offering that Traynor became “a caricature of himself.â€​  But Traynor evidently didn’t see it that way. “I think he was kind of oblivious,â€​ said Reichblum. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. Traynor relished the spotlight. When he lost his job as manager of the Pirates after the 1939 season, he knew that as much as anything he would miss “the glamour of baseball,â€​ as he called it. This was not a man who could have felt fulfilled slaving dutifully behind a desk all day, then settling down to a quiet dinner with the wife every evening.  He thrived on attention; he liked being liked. Those silly commercials sort of made him a star again. To his critics, Traynor replied with wink and a grin. “Wrestling – that’s the only real sport out there.â€​ James Forr is the 2005 winner of the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award and co-author of Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography , released in January 2010.