 The
Hundred-Year-Old Ballplayer
--A Memoir-
By Dick Costa
The oldest living major-league baseball player is William
Murray Werber of Charlotte N.C., who will reach the century mark
on June 20th. Born in Berwyn, Md., in 1908, Bill Werber played,
mostly at third base, in the big leagues for 11 years, 1930-42,
including two seasons with the Philadelphia Athletics, 1937-38.
Besides being the oldest living big-leaguer, Bill believes himself
to be the last person alive to have a direct connection with the
legendary 1927 Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig New York Yankees. That spring
Scout Paul Krichell offered Werber, a freshman shortstop on a star-studded
Duke University team, a cash down payment, the cost of his next
three years at Duke, a bonus upon graduation, and a Yankee contract
with a set monthly salary when he reported to the Yankees in 1930.
Bill spent the summer of ‘27 as a non-roster player with Ruth,
Gehrig & Company. Richard Hauer (Dick) Costa, 86, a Philadelphia
native, life-long fan, and author of Safe at Home: A Baseball Wife’s
Story (1989). remembers Bill Werber as the last living link to his
earliest passion for baseball.
Some children of the Great Depression of the 1930s were scarred
forever by that most immediate of deprivations, hunger. Mine were
cumulative. To have grown up fatherless was to play constant host
to self-pity. In the houses of my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood
lived sons who watched their fathers pitch quoits on summer evenings
and fathers who took their sons to major-league baseball games.
But never on Sunday. If it had not been for a relaxation in 1933
of Pennsylvania’s “blue laws,” which since 1794
had regulated drinking and gaming on Sundays and meant neither the
A’s nor the Phillies could play ball on that day, Mr. Kunkel
would not have cancelled Sunday school and driven five of us kids
to Shibe Park in July 1934 for an A’s game with the Babe Ruth/
Lou Gehrig Yankees. The impact of the greenest grass I had ever
seen, sculpted into the rich brown loam of the baselines, has remained
a more vivid memory than the gardens at Versailles.
Even after three quarters of a century I can call up details of
my first game, won by the Yankees like most of the games I would
see between these teams until WW2 stopped my bleeding. From our
vantage in the upper grandstand over the Yankees dugout behind first
base, Mr. Kunkel pointed to the A’s dugout behind third and
an elderly-looking man wearing a dark suit and a collar shirt that
seemed out of place and out of time.
“That’s old Connie Mack,” Mr. Kunkel said. “He’s
the A’s owner and manager too. I haven’t been to a game
since he sold off his championship team a few years ago. We still
have Jimmie Foxx. He’s the last, and Double-X won’t
be here much longer. “
Sunday school teachers didn’t cuss in front of their pupils,
but at that moment, in the house that Mack built, Harold Kunkle
may have wanted to. Sure enough, after the 1935 season, Connie completed
his auction with the sale to the Red Sox of “the right-handed
Babe Ruth”--Jimmie Foxx, of all Mack’s future Hall-of-Famers,
his favorite. In Boston Foxx would rejoin his A’s teammate
Lefty Grove--and Bill Werber, who had hit .321 in ‘34, with
200 hits, only 37 strikeouts in 623 at-bats, and a league-leading
40 stolen bases. But I’m getting ahead....
In 1935, the blue laws were further relaxed to allow play from
1:00 to 7:00. Connie Mack, devout Roman Catholic though he was,
declared that Sunday baseball “would not hurt religion”
and would help “the morale of the cities.” And mine
too. In those days games lasted about two hours, and Sunday double-headers
at both Shibe and the Phillies bandbox called Baker Bowl became
the fashion.
Charley, my favorite uncle who had played semi-pro ball during
the 1920s and whose heroes were Chuck Klein and the perennially
last-place Phillies, nevertheless took me to my first double-header
on the 4th-of-July at Shibe Park. It was to be my fourteenth birthday
present. Our seats in the bleachers behind leftfield cost 57 cents
apiece, not a negligible sum for my uncle whose ice route barely
paid the rent.
I would be less than honest if I were to say that the moment the
p.a. announcer began his line-up litany with the name of the Boston
leadoff man, “Bill Werber, third base,” I felt a chill.
In truth, I barely heard Werber’s name, so busy was Uncle
Charley clueing me in about the Red Sox starter, Robert Moses (Lefty)
Grove, the greatest southpaw ever to pitch for the A’s but
who the season after Mack sold him to Boston for $125,000 “lost
his hummer and is trying to get by on nasty slow stuff.”
And so he did. Lefty Grove pitched fifteen innings of dodge-ball,
barely avoiding one disaster after another. He even hit a homerun
over the new fifty-foot rightfield fence--a grand slam--to give
the Red Sox a four-run lead which was largely dissipated by three
wild throws on bunts by his third baseman. Bill Werber was simply
dreadful, and the A’s pulled out the game, 7-6, when shortstep
Eric (Boob) McNair made the A’s twenty-first hit off Grove,
a double that scored the tying and winning runs in the 15th.
When I next saw Bill Werber he was wearing an A’s uniform.
For the first time since wholesaling his old stars, Mack traded
a new one and received value. He swapped Michael (Pinky) Higgins,
the hard-hitting hot-corner man from Texas who was making A’s
fans forget Jimmy Dykes, for Werber, the Duke All-American--in basketball.
It did not take me long to install the whippet-like Werber as my
favorite Athletic. He hit from a severe crouch--a stance I tried
to copy in sandlot games--and this with his slightly protuberant
front teeth struck me as the epitome of aggression. More importantly,
for someone aspiring to attend college, Bill Werber was that rarity
among ballplayers in the1930s: a university honors graduate, articulate
in interviews with a mellow flow of words that never required “yuh
know. . . yuh know” for punctuation.
In 1937, the A’s held spring training a mile above sea-level
in Mexico City. Buoyed at once by the mild climate, the then clean
air of the Mexican capital, and poor opposition from the local teams,
the A’s came out of spring training full of self-confidence.
For two weeks, they led the American League, and Werber’s
base-running prowess fueled my fancy. In a home game against the
World Champion Yankees, with the score 2-2 in the last of the ninth,
Werber broke for third on a hit-and-run play that so startled catcher
Bill Dickey that he air-mailed his throw to Red Rolfe into left-field
and Werber scored the winning run.
The Athletics played over their heads until the Fourth of July.
Their lack of pitching, which would plague them for a decade, caught
up with them and they plummeted to the more familiar depths of last
place by losing ten of twelve during a homestand. But what lodged
in my memory forever were Werber’s dash against the hated
Yankees and a rare blowout in the first game of a double-header
in Chicago in which my guys scored twelve runs in the first inning.
My next-favorite player, “Indian Bob” Johnson, drove
in seven of them with a grand slam and a base-clearing double.
I was watching a game in Baker Bowl when the A’s 12-run
inning flashed on the scoreboard. I found myself wondering how many
of those runs the A’s lead-off man had scored.
Bill Werber put up good numbers for a 1937 team that lost 100
games and finished last --49 games behind the Yankees and five behind
the seventh-place St. Louis Browns. He hit .292 in 128 games, led
the league in steals for the third--and last--time, tying Ben Chapman
with 35. Bill hoped for a sizable raise but accepted a modest one
without quibbling. His second --1938--would be his last year in
Philadelphia. After a season that almost exactly duplicated the
previous--53-99, 46 games out of first--Connie Mack was in no mood
to grant Werber the $1,500 raise he sought, especially since his
batting average fell 33 points and steals dipped to 19. But I’ll
long remember ‘38 for Bill’s play in the field, especially
a grab of a Jimmie Foxx foul ball deep behind third where at full
speed, his back to the diamond, he made the play while somersaulting
to a standing position.
When his contract for 1939 did not include the $1,500, Bill wrote
an impertinent letter to Connie Mack acknowledging his and the team’s
poor year and too-high payroll while advising Mack to sell the team
and get into a more profitable business. Sixty years later Werber
admitted in print that his insulting response had been “foolish”.
He went to work in his father’s insurance business and, skipping
spring training, seemed ready to retire. But Connie sold him to
Bill McKechnie’s Cincinnati Reds who were peaking at just
the right time. They had finished only six games behind the first-place
Chicago Cubs in ‘38, led by double no-hit Johnny Vander Meer,
Paul Derringer, and Philadelphia’s Bucky Walters. The Reds,
with National League newcomer Bill Werber filling out an infield
of superb veterans, won a pennant in 1939 and in 1940 defeated Detroit
in a seven-game World Series in which Werber hit .370 to lead all
hitters.
"It was a lot more fun playing on a pennant winner than struggling
with Mr. Mack's tail-end clubs," Bill recalled in his 2001
memoir. After he sold Werber to the Reds, Connie Mack called the
trade for Pinky Higgins "the worst deal I ever made."
If those disillusioned fans of Mack's '29-'31 teams --fans like
Harold Kunkel--were to speak from the grave, how could they possibly
agree?
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