Why worry about the first pitch? If it’s no good, you’re ahead of him. If he gets over a good pitch, you can be sure he’ll come back with it and you’re laying for it.
Sam Rice
I apologize for not contributing a few words to last week’s edition.
I actually wrote part of a column, but it turned into an angry rant full of acidic vitriol about that man who lives in the big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
I was furious that the reprehensible liar falsely claimed he been offered an appointment to the Naval Academy 1965. Two things: The leader of the free world had already graduated from the University of Delaware by then, and it is widely known that he was a bad student in high school. The Naval Academy does not hand out appointments to bad students.
CNN completely ignored his stretcher, but I have decided to let Fox News and pundits like Ben Shapiro handle such things from now on. They seem to delight in deriding the former Delaware senator and his equally silly vice president.
Shapiro has even gone so far as calling the former New Castle County Council member President House Plant.
As for me, I have more important things to consider and better stories to tell . . . like the story of baseball player Sam Rice who played for the Washington Senators from 1915 to 1933.
Do you know about Sam? I think his life story would make a fabulous film.
Three years before he joined the Senators, Sam lost his wife and two daughters, his mother, his father and his sister when a tornado swept through parts of Indiana and Illinois in April of 1912, according to the biography of Rice written by Steven Able and published on sabr.org.
Sam was out of town at the time trying to win a job with the Galesburg Pavers baseball club.
After learning of their deaths, a devastated Sam Rice wandered the Midwest for several months before joining the Navy in 1913.
Rice eventually became a member the USS New Hampshire’s baseball team, but he also saw action during the Tampico Affair during the Mexican Border War. He later described the “the sound of bullets humming around and every once in a while spatting near you.”
Three of his shipmates were killed.
Later, the owner of the Petersburg Goobers, Dr. D.H. Leigh, saw Rice play and arranged his discharge from the Navy.
He signed with the Goobers of the Virginia League, and his baseball career resumed.
In July of 1914, Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators, wanted Leigh to pay back some money he had loaned him to make payroll. Unfortunately, he was broke, so Griffith got Rice, the best player the Goobers had, instead of cash.
Up until this point, Sam Rice had been Edgar Charles Rice, but either Clark Griffith forgot and told reporters his name was Sam, or a reporter used Sam as a placeholder in his story until he could find out what his first name was.
Either way, he was known as Sam Rice from then on.
Sam pitched a little during the first two years of his career, but after he hit .299 in his second year, he moved to the outfield for the Senators permanently.
He returned to military service in 1918 and wound up in France by September. Fortunately for Sam, the war ended a little more than a month later, so he did not hear “the sound of bullets humming around” again.
He returned to the outfield in Griffith Stadium the following season and stayed there for the next 15 years.
He finished his career with a .322 batting average and an OBP of .374. He led the league in triples in 1923, hits in 1924 and 1926, stolen bases in 1920 and only struck out 171 times from 1921 to 1934. For the sake of comparison, Dansby Swanson struck out 167 times last season alone.
I realize pitchers didn’t throw as hard back in those days, but the difference shouldn’t be that stark.
Sam played his final season for Cleveland in 1934, but it took almost 30 years for him to get into the MLB Hall of Fame.
He died Oct. 13, 1974 not long after attending the HOF induction ceremonies for Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Cool Papa Bell.
Sam had never talked much about the tragedy that devastated his family in 1912, but the story gradually took shape over the next 20 years following his passing as sportswriters researched Sam’s past.
According to his biography on sabr.org, Sam “had style – not style born of flamboyance or showmanship, but of pride, purpose and professionalism.”
So, it turned out that Clark Griffith’s decision to make Rice a Senator was a sound one that benefited Washington D.C..
Unfortunately, things don’t always work out that way in our nation’s capital.
While Griffith got Rice instead of cash back in 1915, American citizens got a house plant instead of a president 105 years later.
Sorry for ending on a somewhat hateful note. But the price of gas has made me grumpy.
Selah. T. Michael Stone is a former associate editor of the Lake Oconee News. You can reach him at michael@msgrnews.com