Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Pie Traynor A Baseball 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 out 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, hit 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 National League, 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 double 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 Pittsburgh Pirates had just lost three crushing games to the Chicago Cubs 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 run 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 Bill James 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 catcher 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.