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Every member of the Baseball Hall of Fame gets a bronze plaque in Cooperstown. This show tells the rest of the story.
Baseball Hall of Fame Lives is a narrative biography podcast. Each episode covers one Hall of Famer, start to finish: where they came from, how they made it, what it cost them, and what happened after the cheering stopped. It isn't an interview show, and it doesn't debate who deserves a plaque. It tells a life.
You'll hear the names you know, like Roberto Clemente, Harmon Killebrew and Andruw Jones. You'll also hear the ones you don't: Negro Leagues pioneers, nineteenth-century stars, executives, umpires and managers, many of whose stories almost nobody tells anymore. Those are often the best episodes.
Each episode is researched from the historical record, and when a famous story turns out to be wrong, the episode says so.
Baseball history, one Hall of Famer at a time.
Baseball Hall of Fame Lives is an independent production and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
Lawrence: December fourteenth, 1955.
The Sporting News, the national
baseball weekly, gives three full
pages to the death of Hah-nus Wagner.
He died at home in Car-nay-gee,
Pennsylvania, eight days
earlier, in his sleep, at four
minutes to one in the morning.
He was eighty-one.
The main obituary is written by
Fred Lieb, one of the best-known
baseball writers of his time.
About a third of the way through, Lieb
tells a story about the 1909 World Series.
Ty Cobb reaches first base.
He calls down to Wagner at shortstop
that he's coming down on the
next pitch, and he adds a slur
about Wagner's German ancestry.
Wagner calls back that he'll be waiting.
Cobb runs.
The catcher's throw comes in, and
Wagner, in Lieb's words, tagged
Cobb so vigorously in the mouth that
he loosened several of Ty's teeth.
It's a great story, and
it's been retold ever since.
And forty-six years earlier, in
October of 1909, the correspondent The
Sporting News sent to that same World
Series reported what happened between
Wagner and Cobb at the first game.
He reported that Wagner walked over
to Cobb before the game, shook his
hand, and chatted with him for several
minutes while the crowd cheered.
Same paper.
Same two men.
Two stories.
This is Baseball Hall of Fame Lives.
This is the second of two
episodes on Hah-nus Wagner.
Part One took him from the coal
mines outside Pittsburgh to the World
Series of 1903, when a Boston writer
said he had some yellow in him,
and to 1909, when he answered it.
This part is about everything after.
The drinking year.
The most famous baseball card
in the world, and why nobody can
say for certain why it's rare.
Five games as a manager.
The Depression.
And the long second act, when Wagner
became the greatest storyteller in
Pittsburgh, and other people started
telling stories about him, too.
Start with 1910, because it's the
year the record gets uncomfortable.
On paper it was a decent season.
Wagner hit three twenty and tied a
teammate for the league lead in hits.
But it was his lowest average in
more than a decade, and Pittsburgh
was never in the pennant race.
For most of the summer he was well
under three hundred and playing
the field without much interest.
He had run-ins with umpires,
ejections, suspensions, and
ugly scenes with teammates.
The club blamed an injury, then
a lingering cold, then a slump.
According to his SABR biographer, Jan
Finkel, the real cause was an open secret.
Wagner was drinking heavily.
After the season, Fred Clarke, his
manager and his friend of thirteen
years, sat him down for a long talk.
Whatever was said, it
worked, at least for a while.
In 1911 Wagner won his eighth batting
championship, a National League
record that stood until Tony Gwynn
tied it more than eighty years later.
On August twenty-second, 1912,
at thirty-eight years old, he
had seven hits in a doubleheader
against the New York Giants.
In the second game he hit for
the cycle, a single, a double,
a triple, and a home run.
The New York Times wrote that
on the bases, he showed that
Father Time was still a stranger.
Now the card.
Between 1909 and 1911, the American
Tobacco Company put small picture cards
of ballplayers into packs of cigarettes.
Collectors call the set T two oh six.
There are more than five
hundred players in it.
One of them, Hah-nus Wagner, was
pulled from production almost
as soon as it was printed.
By the Hall of Fame's estimate, somewhere
between fifty and a hundred survive.
In 2022, one of them sold for seven
and a quarter million dollars.
Here is the story as it's usually told.
The tobacco company asked
for Wagner's permission.
Wagner refused, because he
didn't want children buying
cigarettes to get his picture.
In one version, the Pirates' club
secretary, John Gruber, had been
promised ten dollars for arranging
the deal, and Wagner sent Gruber a
check for ten dollars out of his own
pocket so that Gruber wouldn't lose it.
It's a lovely story, and
there may be something to it.
But you should know what the Baseball
Hall of Fame itself says about it.
The Hall's own historians write that
Wagner was not opposed to tobacco.
By his biographer's account
he smoked cigars and chewed.
Collectors have also pointed to cigars
sold under his name, and to tobacco
advertising that used his picture.
So there are other explanations.
One is that it was about money, that
Wagner didn't want a company profiting
from his face without paying him properly.
Another is that cigarettes, in particular,
were looked down on in those days as
cheaper and dirtier than cigars and
chewing tobacco, and that his owner,
Barney Dreyfuss, and his manager,
Fred Clarke, both despised them.
As far as this show could find, no one has
produced a document from 1909 or 1910 that
records Wagner's reason in his own words.
The honest answer is that nobody knows.
What's certain is that a decision about
a scrap of cardboard is probably the
thing more people know about him today
than anything he did on a ball field.
Back to the field.
On June ninth, 1914, Wagner doubled
off Erskine Mayer of the Phillies for
the three thousandth hit of his career.
He was the first player of the
twentieth century to reach it.
In 1915, at forty-one, he played
every one of Pittsburgh's games.
But the team was in
decline, and so was he.
Fred Clarke retired after that season.
Wagner had always said he wouldn't
marry as long as he was playing ball.
Late in 1916 his oldest brother, Charley,
the brother whose barbershop he'd swept
out as a young man, died of pneumonia.
A few weeks later, at the end of
December, Wagner married Bessie Baine
Smith, whom he'd been seeing for years.
He was forty-two.
He came back for one more season
in 1917, and it was a bad one.
The club's manager was fired in June,
and Dreyfuss asked Wagner to take over.
By The Sporting News's account,
Wagner told him plainly, I don't
want to manage your club, Mr.
Dreyfuss.
I wasn't cut out to be a manager.
He took the job anyway, on the
condition that he wouldn't have
to deal with the business side.
He won his first game
and lost the next four.
Then he handed in his resignation.
Asked whether it was final, he
said, in one word: Positively.
He played his last game on
September seventeenth, 1917.
Three innings at second base.
He'd started his major league career
in the outfield, twenty-one years
earlier, and he finished it as a second
baseman, having been, in between,
the greatest shortstop of his time.
On January ninth, 1918, Bessie Wagner
gave birth to a daughter, Elva Katrina.
She was stillborn.
Two more daughters followed, Betty
in 1919 and Virginia in 1922.
Wagner took them everywhere.
He taught them to play ball, and he called
them, by the family's account, my boys.
The years after baseball were uneven.
Wagner went into business.
He'd owned a garage in Car-nay-gee even as
a player, where he sold cars and liked to
tinker with the engines, and now he opened
a sporting goods store under his own name.
He wasn't much of a businessman,
and he had some partners who
weren't much help either.
He held political jobs,
including sergeant-at-arms of the
Pennsylvania legislature and a
turn as a state fish commissioner.
In 1925 he ran for sheriff of
Allegheny County and lost badly.
He coached football at the local high
school and basketball and baseball at
the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Then the Depression came.
The store failed.
The Sporting News put it with
unusual bluntness in his obituary.
It said that John Peter had once been a
ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man, and that
things were pretty tough in the Wagner
household in the early nineteen thirties.
Barney Dreyfuss had died in 1932.
His son-in-law, William
Benswanger, now ran the Pirates.
In 1933 Benswanger heard how Wagner was
doing and offered him a job as a coach.
Wagner took it, and stayed
on for nineteen years.
His first assignment was a young
slugger named Arky Vaughan, who
had the bat but not yet the glove.
Wagner helped make a major league
shortstop out of him, and Vaughan
went on to a career that took
him to the Hall of Fame as well.
But mostly Wagner's job, as it
turned out, was to be Hah-nus Wagner.
He worked with the rookies,
chatted with the fans, and became
what The Sporting News called
the club's goodwill ambassador.
As a player he'd been shy.
He had once turned down an invitation
to a league dinner, according to
the paper, because he didn't own
a dinner jacket and knew he'd be
uncomfortable with all those swells.
Now he became a fine after-dinner
speaker and a famous teller of stories.
And the stories were tall.
There was the one about the rabbit.
A ground ball came to him at shortstop
just as a rabbit ran across the infield.
Wagner scooped up the ball, the dirt,
the pebbles, and the rabbit, all at
once, and threw the whole business to
first base, and got the runner by a hare.
There was the horse.
When a new coach joined the Pirates in
1947, Wagner told him, with a perfectly
straight face, that in the old days he
used to ride a horse to the ballpark.
One day the horse wouldn't get
on the ferry, so Wagner rode it
straight into the river and made
it swim across, with him on top.
There was Louisville in the eighteen
nineties, when he hit a long drive
against the Baltimore Orioles,
the roughest team in baseball.
As he told it, the first baseman
gave him the hip at first, the second
baseman nearly killed him rounding
second, the shortstop tripped him,
and John McGraw was waiting for him at
third, in his words, with a shotgun.
He had to settle for a triple.
When he got back to the bench, Fred
Clarke asked him, less politely than
this, what kind of baseball that was, and
told him that if he couldn't do better
he wouldn't be with the club much longer.
The next day Wagner hit a grounder
to McGraw, ran over the first
baseman, and scored while the ball
rolled away into foul territory.
And this time, Wagner said, Clarke
patted him on the back and told
him, That's the way to play ball.
There was Henry Ford.
According to Wagner, he'd met Ford
in New York early in their careers,
and Ford used to take him riding in
Central Park in one of his new machines.
Wagner said Ford had him steer
the car while Ford himself
stood out on the running board,
adjusting the engine as they went.
They'd leave a trail of smoke
a hundred yards long, he said.
And there was the batting title
of 1900, which Wagner said was
the biggest thrill of his life.
He told it to The Sporting News like this.
He was tied with Elmer Flick
of the Phillies going into
the last game of the season.
Wagner got a hit his first time up.
So did Flick.
Both went hitless their second
time up, and got hits the third,
and went hitless the fourth.
Flick made an out in his
fifth and last at-bat.
Wagner doubled in his, and
won the title by two points.
It's a wonderful story.
It isn't what happened.
The record books have Wagner at three
eighty-one that season and Flick at
three sixty-seven, fourteen points apart.
They weren't tied going
into any last game.
It didn't matter, and Wagner
knew it didn't matter.
The obituary tells one more story,
and this one has the ring of truth.
A young player on the Pirates
listened to one of Wagner's yarns
and finally said to him, That's
really a tall tale, Mister Wagner.
Wagner said: Yes, but I never
told you anything you can't
repeat before your mother.
Which brings us back to
the other kind of story.
The ones that were told about him.
The Sporting News's 1955 obituary is
a warm and respectful piece of work.
It also prints a table of Wagner's
year-by-year record, and at the top,
for 1895, it gives him four oh two at
Steubenville in forty-four games, and
three sixty-nine at Warren in sixty-five.
The Warren line is the same one Wagner
gave a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1924.
In Part One, we heard how a SABR
researcher later went through the box
scores and found that Wagner had actually
played seven games at Steubenville,
and about thirty-four at Warren,
where he hit around three twenty-four.
Thirty years after Wagner
first told it, his own version
had become the official one.
On the same page, the paper printed a
correction of another Wagner legend, and
this one came from the man in the story.
A newspaper editor in Topeka,
Kansas, had repeated a famous tale
that Fred Clarke once fined Wagner
twenty-five dollars for hitting a
home run after being ordered to bunt.
Clarke, eighty-two years old by then,
told the paper what actually happened.
He said he'd told Wagner to bunt as
a joke, and Wagner hit a home run.
Next time up, Clarke
told him to bunt again.
Another home run.
They did the same thing a third time.
And Clarke said, But really, I
never fined Honus for disobeying my
orders three times that afternoon.
That's two stories corrected
or undone by the record.
Now the big one.
In the version of the Cobb story
that Lieb printed, Cobb reaches
first and shouts his warning, and
Wagner knocks his teeth loose.
Here's what can be said against it.
First, what was printed at the time.
In Part One we heard from Ralph Davis,
the correspondent The Sporting News
had at the first game at Forbes Field.
The Cobb and Wagner moment he chose
to report was a handshake and a
friendly conversation before the game.
He said nothing about a collision at
second base, a slur, or a bloody mouth.
It's possible for a reporter to miss a
play, or to leave out something ugly.
But a star's teeth being knocked loose in
the World Series is a hard thing to miss.
Second, Cobb.
According to Wagner's SABR biographer,
Cobb denied the story flatly,
and pointed out that deliberately
making Hah-nus Wagner angry would
have been a foolish thing to do.
Cobb also, the same biographer says,
once suggested to Wagner that the two
of them should take it on the vaudeville
stage and act it out, since as long
as people believed it, they might
as well make a few dollars from it.
Third, the calendar.
About a month after the Series, Wagner
accepted Cobb's invitation to come down
to Georgia and go hunting with him.
And fourth, the slur itself.
Wagner's SABR biographer argues that
that particular insult against Germans
didn't come into common use until the
First World War, years after 1909.
The show hasn't been able to
check that independently, so hold
it more loosely than the rest.
So how did the story get told?
This show didn't find the
first place it was printed.
What can be said is that by the
time Wagner died, it was established
enough that the leading baseball
writer in the country put it in his
obituary as plain fact, and the same
paper that had reported a handshake
in 1909 now reported a bloody mouth.
And Wagner, by his biographer's
account, never quite said it happened,
and never quite said it didn't.
He'd wink, and he never discouraged anyone
who claimed to have seen the whole thing.
Which is exactly what you'd expect
of a man who told everybody about the
horse he made swim across the river.
Here's the part that matters.
The stories Wagner told
about himself were jokes.
Nobody was hurt by a rabbit, and
nobody believed in the horse.
The stories told about
him were a different kind.
The Boston writer of 1903 said
he had some yellow in him.
The Cobb story made him a man who answered
an insult with a fist in the mouth.
Neither one is borne out by
the evidence we could find.
And by the evidence, the man they were
told about was a friendly one, who shook
the hand of the rival he was supposed
to hate and then went hunting with him.
In January of 1936, the baseball
writers of America voted for the
first class of the new Hall of Fame.
Two hundred and twenty-six
ballots came in.
Ty Cobb got two hundred
and twenty-two votes.
Babe Ruth got two hundred and fifteen.
So did Hah-nus Wagner.
Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson
made up the rest of the first five.
The coal miner's son from
Car-nay-gee was tied with the most
famous ballplayer who ever lived.
When the Hall of Fame opened
in Cooperstown in June of
1939, Wagner was there.
That afternoon he managed one of
the teams in the exhibition game.
He kept coaching for the
Pirates until 1951, when age and
injuries finally made him stop.
On Opening Day of 1954, the
mayor of Pittsburgh presented a
plaque honoring Wagner's loyalty,
his character, and his play.
Wagner was too sick to come.
His daughter Betty accepted it for him.
On April thirtieth, 1955, the city
unveiled a bronze statue of Wagner in
Schenley Park, just outside Forbes Field.
It shows him finishing his
swing, watching the ball go.
The Sporting News put its cost
at forty thousand dollars.
A message from President
Eisenhower was read.
Wagner's granddaughter,
Leslie, pulled the cord.
Wagner himself was too
weak to get out of the car.
He watched from an open car near
the platform and, according to The
Sporting News, smiled weakly while
one speaker after another praised him.
He left before it was over.
That statue stands today outside PNC Park.
That fall he slipped and fell at home
and never really got out of bed again.
He was in a coma for about ten days.
He died on December sixth, 1955.
Pie Traynor, the great Pirates
third baseman who'd been his
partner in the failed sporting goods
store, was one of his pallbearers.
So was William Benswanger, who'd
given him a job when he needed one.
He was buried on December
ninth, south of Pittsburgh.
A man in Boston once wrote that
Hah-nus Wagner had some yellow in him.
Another writer, at his death, told the
world he'd knocked Ty Cobb's teeth loose.
The record doesn't support either one.
What it shows is a man who was hard
to beat and easy to like, who got up
after 1903 and won six more batting
titles, and who spent the last twenty
years of his life telling young
ballplayers stories about swimming
horses and rabbits at shortstop.
He admitted they were tall tales.
He just made sure you could repeat every
one of them in front of your mother.